Lightning Wolf

We met Whitey at the Grapevine campsite off of New Mexico State Highway 15. He arrived in an early 1980’s F-250 truck. He proceeded to lead our group of two cute-utes and a full-size SUV through three crossings of the East fork of the Gila River. We were headed for a ranch - where Whitey runs a few head of cattle and acts as caretaker - that sits in meadowland described by a lazy oxbow. The river, in geologic time, has carved through the sedimentary rock – leaving horizontally striated canyon walls that rise up and are crowned by an assortment of  mesas, buttes and hoodoos (tall skinny spires of rock).

After we all spent the night in the adobe ranch house, Will, Nicki and I climbed up the north western slope along a steep scree path. Arriving at the narrow mesa that runs along the ridge we looked out to the west just as the sun was threatening to top the eastern canyon wall. While we idly searched for shards of mimbres pottery the sun began to play on the distant Mogollon Mountains and then slowly spread across the Gila Wilderness that lay before us.

This is remote country, but tourists regularly trek to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument located at the end of Highway 15, about seven miles north of the ranch. About mid-morning, this time without an escort, we took Will’s X-Terra back through the looping East Fork and headed up the highway – the last stretch of a route the State has named ‘Trail of the Mountain Spirits Scenic Byway’ that originates in Silver City – gateway to the Gila. The cliff dwellings were built into a series of shallow caves halfway up the south facing wall of a narrow canyon some seven centuries ago and although only inhabited for a generation, they stood intact until the late nineteenth century when local ranchers looted and burnt them in the belief that they were contemporary Apache redoubts. When we arrived they were in full sun and heavily patrolled by loquacious Park Service volunteers.

As late as 1883, a miner named James McKenna visited the caves and found the dwellings complete, with heavy pine beams supporting roofs of twigs and grasses and a layer of adobe plaster. In the cool interiors, stone hammers and war axes, turquoise beads, and mimbres-style pots decorated with images of bear, elk and deer lay undisturbed on the floors. In addition, he found a mummified female child of about two years of age with cottonwood fiber woven around it (James A. McKenna, Black Range Tales, New York, 1936). McKenna goes on to describe the mummy as about eighteen inches long with its knees drawn up and the palms of the hands covering the face, but with its high cheek bones and coarse, dark hair clearly visible. After its discovery, it was displayed in a shop window in Silver City for some months before being purchased by a private collector who had posed as a representative of the Smithsonian.

Their wanton desecration, the intrusion of bright sunlight into the cave rooms, the steady trickle of tourists and the oppressive presence of uniformed personnel combined to remove any magic that once surely inhered in these sensitively sited and painstakingly constructed ancient dwellings. On the way back to the ranch we visited a small canyon that led to a single cave dwelling which, while it had also been looted and its roof destroyed, was out of the sunlight and blessedly devoid of interpretive adjuncts: it resonated with a mournful immanence. A few hundred yards to the south of the cave were rock paintings rendered in a red, hematite pigment.

The novelistic accompaniment that I chose for this New Mexico trip was Edgar Rice Burrough’s greatest work, The Land that Time Forgot, 1918. In this age of Google Earth the plot is preposterous: it suggests that a mini-continent had lain hidden in the frigid mists of the far Southern Ocean, amidst icebergs sourced from Antarctica, until its discovery by Tom Billings, a Southern Californian commanding a captured German U-boat in World War One. Tom goes on to find within the Island, “…glimpses of a world past, a dead world, a world so long dead that even in the lowest Cambrian stratum no trace of it remains.” For in Caspak, the name ERB gives to this lost continent, there exists Cretaceous flora and fauna and a complicated hierarchy of creatures that represent the full range of hominid evolution. Tom and his subsequent would-be rescuers thus have the opportunity to battle dinosaurs, mastodons, cave-bears and sabre tooth tigers as well as a wide assortment of primitive and not-so-primitive tribes. It makes, as they say, for a ripping yarn.

Much of the New Mexican landscape was formed as much as 65 million years ago – at least according to recent Caltech research that dates the creation of the Grand Canyon, a close geological neighbor, to that era – a time when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. It was easy, then, to transpose Caspak to the Gila and imagine Tyrannosauri roaming the high desert plains desperate for the fecund flora of the Cretaceous, now atrophied to juniper, piñon, scrub oaks, mountain mahogany and dwarf grasses in this dehydrated world.

As Brian Aldiss points out in his Modern Library Classics edition introduction, The Land That Time Forgot is a part of the ‘Lost Race’ genre popular at the turn of the century and exemplified by writers like Ryder Haggard (She) and Conan Doyle (The Lost World). James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (Valley of the Blue Moon) is a late addition to the canon. It’s not hard to unearth the ‘lost races’ of New Mexico – evidence of previous inhabitations is all around. The Mogollon, whose culture lasted a scant thirteen hundred years, were responsible for the beautiful Mimbres pots we saw in the Western New Mexico University Museum in Silver City before leaving for the ranch and those left behind at their Gila cliff dwellings – some of which, by repute, are still hoarded by local ranching families.

Earlier that morning Whitey had left the ranch with his beautiful Mexican partner Diana and a trailer hitched to his truck bound for a cattle sale in Las Cruces. He was planning to sell four animals and that night, our last at the ranch, was haunted by the bereft lowing of a cow whose heifer-calf had been taken. Whitey, of indeterminate middle age and whose public appearances are always in a slouched felt Stetson, is an old school cowboy. He fiercely protects his herd until he gauges it is time to sell. A few years back he shot a ‘Mexican’ wolf that had been threatening his new-born calves. These beautiful lupine creature are on the Federal Endangered species list (I saw one recently in captivity at a private home here in Ojai) and thus the killing was a Federal offence.

Burying said animal under an abandoned truck on the Ranch seems like a reasonable strategy in the circumstances and in most cases would have been the end of it. Unfortunately for Whitey, buried within the wolf was a radio chip and the Feds were soon on to him; he fled to Mexico while the ranch owner argued his case and eventually had the charges dropped.

Driving north to Quemado, our next destination, the only billboards along the lonely highway were crudely fashioned rants against the outlawing of Wolf hunting (in contrast to all roads leading to Albuquerque and Santa Fe which are festooned with Indian Casino come-ons). The liberal sensitivities of us six southern Californians were duly pricked. Turns out that the recently re-introduced wolf is not popular with the local ranchers – who comprise the primary source of wealth in these parts. At Quemado, a miserable town where both gas stations, the local fortune teller and all save one restaurant have given up the ghost, we were met, in a derelict two-storey building that announced itself as the local headquarters of the Dia Foundation, by the driver who would ferry us to The Lightning Field – the putative reason for our trip to New Mexico.

Walter De Maria, who was part of a loose confederation of earth artists which included Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty), Robert Heizer (Double Negative), James Turrell (Roden Crater), and Nancy Holt (Sun Tunnels), died this summer. His most famous work sits in a vast high plain rimmed with cinder cones, rugged mountain ranges and, at a distance, the Zuni, Navajo and Acoma Reservations. Our driver knew Walter for her father Robert had helped construct his art piece. During the drive, on washboard gravel roads over which she maintained a steady fifty miles per hour, occasionally letting the rear end of the GMC drift in the lazy corners, she made it clear that her sympathies were not with the wolves and she briefly mentioned the notorious Silver City case in which Whitey had starred: in her world wolf-killers are heroes.

We were dropped off (or abandoned) at a picturesquely restored log cabin that sat like a little house on the high plain. Inside were Stickley and Heywood Wakefield craftsman furniture, three bedrooms and a creaking porch with a view of the grid of twenty foot high stainless steel rods anchored in the ground over an area of one mile by one kilometer. This is what we came to watch – for this matrix becomes an active participant in the passage of time, the changing of light and one’s relationship to the vast landscape.

The echt-Lightning Field experience can only be had in an electrical storm (the raison d’etre of the rods is, of course, to attract lightning). Earlier on our trip, Lorrie and I spent a night in the Murray Hotel in Silver City while other members of our party were driving through the night from Los Angeles. Around midnight we were awoken from our slumbers by the crashing of thunder and momentary day-lighting of the room by lightning. Wrong night, wrong place. Sunday night in the cabin passed uninterrupted by stormy weather.

At dawn I ran two circuits around the grid. Later we packed up and prepared to go our separate ways. Nicki and Will to the Grand Canyon, Julian to Chaco Canyon and Lorrie, Amy and I back to L.A.. Leaving Quemado and driving through the El Malpais National Conservation area to Albuquerque the primal landscapes of western New Mexico, even viewed through a rental-car window, served as an imaginative adjunct to the lost world that still swirled in my consciousness from the moments of reading I had snatched in the cabin, between festive meals spent discussing the finer points of our ‘Field’ experience - and the lost races are forever in my mind as I travel New Mexico (Too Late). The Lightning Field, sans lightning, stands as an effete affectation of modernity in this deeply affecting land: but with nature’s cooperation I imagine it might stir my soul to its primordial roots.

Trunk Show

In California, by the last third of the nineteenth century, Native civilizations had essentially collapsed after the prolonged physical and cultural assault of European religion, disease and colonization. The coup de grace was administered by the inundation of the State by gold seekers around 1850.

But by 1870, Californian Indian culture was ripe for one last revival. A catalyst arrived in the form of the prophecies of a Nevada Paiute named Jack Wilson or Wakova, and the revival achieved its frenzied apotheosis in the Ghost Dance - the practice of which promised not only the return of the dead, but the end of the world and the elimination of all white people.

Despite the widespread embrace of the cult, particularly in northern California, where tribes were less Christianized, none of these goals was achieved: instead, the confused, hybridized values inherent in the Ghost Dance distanced native peoples from their ancestral cultures and in many cases forever removed them from their traditional tribal practices. The belated realization of a common cause amongst discrete tribelets and the development of a pan-Indian identity merely hastened the destruction of their unique cultures.

The practice of the Ghost Dance became a red-flag in the face of Anglo-Americans confident of their hegemony and they redoubled their attempts to extinguish the cultural, economic and, in many cases, the physical lives of Native peoples. The Ghost Dance was revived in Nevada in 1890, but while this recrudescence flourished across the Great Plains to the north and east, Native California cultures had by then disintegrated beyond the point of resurrection. The movement was finally destroyed at the Wounded Knee massacre perpetrated by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry later that same year.

Other Indian cults arose in this brief twenty year interregnum, 1870-1890, and most were marked by an apocalyptic, end-times ethos that promised the elimination of white people. The Earth Lodge Cult stressed the end of the world, while the Bole –Maru abandoned the doctrine of imminent world-catastrophe and stressed the concepts of an after-life and a supreme being (The 1870 Ghost Dance, Cora Du Bois, Univ. Calif., 1951).

In light of this fin de siècle Indian renunciation of the core animism of shaman-centered spiritual traditions, it is no surprise, perhaps, that those who now identify as Native American swell the ranks of the evangelical Christian movement and, as adherents of casino capitalism (often quite literally), reliably vote Republican.

These cults represented both a reaction to what was perceived as a failed animistic magic and the adoption of a last ditch faith in authoritarian prophets or dreamers who promised an end to the long decline of their societies. In the early decades of the twentieth century, as Harry Lawton notes in his introduction to Carobeth Laird’s memoir of her life with John Peabody Harrington (Encounter with an Angry God, 1975), a generation of newly minted, University trained anthropologists (many the students of Franz Boas) were infected with a similar sense of time running out. He writes,

"They fanned out across the North American continent to record everything which could be learned about the dying cultures of the American Indian…they sought out those old people who remembered how life had been before the coming of the white man”.

Foremost amongst these researchers creating a new body of knowledge was the linguist-ethnographer John Peabody Harrington. In 1915, then 31, he met the nineteen year old Laird. She recounts their life together – he collecting information from his ‘informants’, she driving their model T to remote Southern Californian and Arizonan locations and living in isolated and primitive conditions, which he ignored and she came to despise. Harrington obsessively gathered information on moribund languages and half-forgotten ethnobotanical information from aged Indians and these gleanings apparently sustained him in mind, body and spirit. His habitual diet was a mix of boiled grains which he called ‘mush’. He disdained society and only reluctantly visited Washington, D.C. where his employer, the Bureau of American Ethnology occasionally required his presence. For him, field work was everything and he often worked eighteen hour days.

He drove his young wife has hard as he did himself and after six years together she left him for one of his informants, a Chemehuevi of mixed ethnic background who retained connections to his Native culture through his mother. Together this couple scratched a living on twenty acres in eastern San Diego County where she eventually succumbed to Christian Science and he to old age, dying in 1940. Some thirty years later, having revived her truncated career as an anthropologist, she wrote the memoir which had Tom Wolfe acclaim her as ‘an exciting new literary talent bursting forth at the age of 80’. Harrington recovered from Carobeth’s departure, acquired a new assistant and continued his fanatical collection of data until his death in Santa Barbara, from Parkinson’s in 1961.

While Urban Wildland has focused primarily on the spatial contexts of perceived Native spirituality under the category of Etheric Landscape, the relationships among people, place, and power are largely effected through language and it is the mechanics of this process that fascinated Harrington - it was his sometime mentor Franz Boas, who as a pioneer investigator of Native American languages, had established the importance of linguistic analysis and pointed out that language was a fundamental aspect of culture. How ideas are transmitted through the structural shape of language became, in the twentieth century, a decisive tool of social analysis. Harrington worked at the atomic level of this epochal intellectual project.

California supported several diverse culture areas and at least 100 distinct languages. The devastation was so rapid that the synthesis of Native and Spanish structure characteristic of Latin American Indian languages did not take place. As Catherine Callaghan notes in J. P. Harrington - California's Great Linguist, Journal of Californian Archeology, 1975, ‘there was a whole generation of older Indians in the early part of the twentieth century who remembered their language when it was largely in its pre-contact form’.

No piece even tangentially about Harrington would be complete without mention of his notorious habit of stashing material away in boxes, trunks and warehouses that was subsequently lost and then, as the stories usually go, miraculously recovered. Here is one local snippet of loss and re-discovery: in 1981, a trunk was uncovered in the garage of a house in Simi belonging to a Harrington relative. It had been stored there for the previous 40 years, and is believed to be the steamer trunk that young John took with him to Germany in 1905 where he pursued graduate studies at the University of Leipzig, then considered to be one of the finest schools in the world. When opened it was found to contain a mass of papers filling the trunk to a depth of a foot consisting of both ethnographic data and personal mementos, dating from as early as 1894 to the late 1930's (Benson and Edberg, The Road to Goleta, Journal of Great Basin Anthropology, 1982). 

Of particular local interest were the approximately six thousand slip notes (J.P.H.’s version of a note cards) in Ventureño Chumash. Harrington gleaned information from at least two informants, Simplicio Pico and Maria Antonia Tumamait (an ancestor, presumably of Ojai’s Julie Tumamait) concerning vocabulary and grammar, data on place names, ethnobotany, historical events, shrines, sweat houses, and myths - which has since become the source of work by Travis Hudson and the ethnobotanist Jan Timbrook, among others.

Harrington spent a great deal of time working with Ventureño informants in the El Rio area (now Oxnard) and he was sanguine about their chances of survival, on one of the slip notes he scribbled, " Mestizos siempre hay. No se acaban." But while confident that these people would endure, he was under no illusions about the purity of their Chumash ancestry – hence his use of the word mestizo.

Whatever we now know of the Chumash culture is largely a result of Harrington’s monomaniacal data collection. At some very fundamental level he understood that this was his role in the world. He eschewed personal gain and academic reputation (he published only a few short papers) and, most of all, a settled domestic life in the attempt to record fast vanishing Native cultures and languages: his secrecy, paranoia and the intensity of his work ethic were all symptoms of his ‘rage against the dying of the light’, the clouding of the crystalline visions of an animistic world that once had informed a myriad cultures in California.

O

Cumuli were massed over the eastern horizon; spare, drought savaged chaparral stood atop the low mounding hills of the old County Honor Farm silhouetted against the brightening cloud bank - just another dawn tease on Koenigstein – for these clouds did not presage rain.

By light of day, when the full color spectrum is revealed, it is clear that the most severe drought in thirty years is having an impact on the usual stoicism of the sclerophytic natives (Sleepy Oaks). Oaks are dying, their evergreen foliage desiccating into a gingery brown, baccharis is giving up the ghost and the deerweed died months ago. Only the laurel sumac remains, in places, brightly green: elsewhere its foliage has taken on a darker, reddish-purple hue that speaks of its struggle to achieve adequate hydration despite a root system that customarily descends more than twenty feet into the earth.

For a landscape aesthete, the various drought stricken tableaux that are currently on offer have an appeal independent of their meteorological cause. But as hard-hearted as I am in my devotion to the superficial beauty of the natural world, even I occasionally weep a tear for the existential struggles of the chaparral during this testing time when all but the deepest rooted or fortuitously located are showing signs of massive stress or have simply died.

Time to call in the Rain Shaman. In most dialects of the Chumash group of languages, water was simply called O. Its beneficence was conjured by a weather doctor who communicated with the Upper World where the Sky People lived (Real Suspense). Ritualistic intercession was considered necessary to ensure the orderly continuation of the biotic world – rainfall needed to be coaxed out of the sky. The instruments of persuasion were carried in a medicine bag or more simply in a bundle. Such a collection of rain making totems is discussed in the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2012) by the Tulare Lake Archaeological Research Group which includes Alan Garfinkel (Shamanize or Die). Many of the items are of Chumash origin, taken east during the great diaspora spurred by the genocidal proclivities of the Franciscans running the mission system.

Now housed in the Kern Valley Museum, the collection includes several bowls, nine steatite tobacco pipes with broken bird bone stems, river-washed pebbles, geodes, crystals, obsidian flakes, charmstones, a tobacco pouch and a medicine bag fragment. The most rudimentary of magics is sympathetic conjuring – the act of mimicry producing its simulacrum: as in spraying water in the air to produce rain; puffs of tobacco smoke sent heavenward to encourage the formation of clouds or stones struck together to encourage thunder. The Chumash practiced all three. The shaman’s power, however, depended upon more than these mimetic gestures. Quartz crystals were considered to be a powerful physical embodiment of sacred, environmental energies. Their shamanic power derived from their perceived function as intermediaries between the material and the spirit realm. Jay Miller, an anthropologist who specializes in American Indian history, suggests that thought and memory are literally crystallized within their lithic structure and as such can be beamed into the ether. He also notes that crystals were seen as particularly related to water and power.

Dark river rocks were prized, perhaps, for their ability to conjure thunder clouds. Charmstones, which are shaped or pecked rocks often carried for their talismanic protection may also have been instrumental in weather control. Basic to the shaman’s ability to control the elements were songs either passed on to him or dreamed anew. Snatches of these songs survive in the community which today identifies with the moribund Chumash culture. Their efficacy has doubtless been vitiated by the profane circumstances of a people now indebted to the vicious, Neanderthal capitalism manifested by casinos – a grotesque caricature of the cosmic games of chance practiced by these people’s forbears (Bingo).

We may have the kit, but where’s the shaman? The sad reality is that the human spark that might actualize these mystical objects is now entirely missing – the artifacts no longer have power: they are the dead apparatus of an extinct culture. The dominion that once resided in crystal, stone, quartz and smoking paraphernalia now resides in technocratic, military and intelligence organizations. The Special Collection Service (SCS), a mash-up of the NSA and the CIA pursues rendition of enemies, eavesdropping, surveillance and ’black-ops’ – all activities that were once within the purview of Chumash shamans. Inevitably, the SCS also has its own weather forecasting service. I have it at one remove from a deeply embedded apparatchik within this puzzle palace that we can expect, in the local area, fifteen inches of rain over the 2013-2014 season.

The timidity of this shadowy pronouncement is stunning. In an average year Ojai usually sees around twenty inches of rain. On the dry side less than ten and in seasons such as 1997-1998 and 2004-2005, close to fifty. Any shaman worth his datura would serve up not a projection uncomfortably close to the historical average, but a resolution that he and his powerful spirit allies would deliver rainfall precisely according to the needs of his people and the land. Speaking for the oaks, I don’t think fifteen inches will do it.

When Heinrich Harrer arrived in Lhasa after his epic trek across Tibet from North Western India where he was being held in an internment camp during WWII, he found even the sophisticates of the Holy City firm in their belief that certain lamas could control the weather. It was commonly supposed that they could hold up hailstones or call down rain showers as the circumstances demanded (Seven Years in Tibet, 1953). Certain simple monks were also reputed to have skill in managing the weather, blowing on conch shells, for instance, to repel approaching storms. The thirteenth Dalai Lama maintained a court weather-maker whose special charge was to protect the God-King’s summer garden from untoward hail storms.

Here in Ojai no one, at present, is offering up their services to break the drought. Perhaps Julie Tumamait, our local professional Chumash princess (available for weddings, funerals and the blessing of land) could step up to the plate and twirl her bull-roarer (a showy piece of pan-Indian paraphernalia noticeably missing from the Kern River Museum bundle). Perhaps Camille Sears, a local stone fruit orchardist and meteorologist who grew up in Meiners Oaks, can prognosticate more accurately than the SCS, or maybe we should just check the Farmer’s Almanac, by which Margot, our neighbor and chaparral restoration expert, swears. Meanwhile, I am left scouring the land and sky for omens.

We’ve had a few.

A few early mornings ago, the shadowy old moon was cradled in the bright silver sliver of the new as it rose over the eastern ridge – this phenomenon is caused by earthshine flooding the part of the lunarscape un-illuminated by the sun and is traditionally a bad weather omen. The fact that it happens regularly as part of the lunar cycle does not entirely destroy the poetry of the attendant myth, here referenced in an 18th century Scottish ballad,

'Mak haste, mak haste, my mirry men all,
Our guid ship sails the morn.'
'O say na sae, my master dear,
For I fear a deadly storm.'
'Late, late yestre'en I saw the new moon
Wi'the old moon in his arm,
And I fear, I fear, my dear master,
That we will come to ‘arm.'

In the event, Sir Patrick Spens, the ballad’s subject, sets sail despite this celestial omen and he and his crew foundered somewhere off the Isle of Islay in the predicted gale. In Ojai, right on schedule, we are now experiencing a fearsomely desiccating Santa Ana wind storm……

In the absence of coyotes and bobcats grey foxes have taken up residence on our property. We hear them calling to one another across the open meadow below the house in the evening and early mornings…..at night they cry eerily. With the moon still subject to both direct and reflected sun-light, but now higher in the sky, we were preparing to walk down to the garage one recent morning when Lorrie spotted two foxes on a nearby rock. They were juveniles – we had last seen them as kits a year ago – and now bobcat-like they were both standing proud surveying the scene with their long fluffy tails draped over the rock: one looked west and the other east so they presented themselves as heraldic creatures – crossed foxes.

Crossed Foxes. Watery lunascape with silver crescent. Omens? Perhaps, but we can be reasonably sure that at some point in the next three months it will start raining and that old Chumash magic (still imprinted on the landscape?) will kick in and order will be returned to our little corner of the biosphere.

Tsunami

It was the final Cruise Night of the season in Santa Paula, held on the first Friday of each month from April through September. The event begins at 5 p.m. when three blocks of Main Street are closed-off west of the Ojai-Santa Paula Road. Exhibitors begin parking their cars nose-in along both sides of the street well before show-time and turn them around immediately the road is barricaded.

Will Reed and I arrived fashionably late, a little after six p.m. Upon our approach to Main Street, barriers were swiftly removed at the eastern end of the closed section of street and we were ushered into the vehicle display area. One slot was left at the far south east end of the street and Will maneuvered his celadon green, 1968 Jaguar XK-E 2+2 Coupe into place. This beautiful sports car, a recherché symbol of a long ago, dare I say swinging ? England thus took its place among the American muscle cars, classic vehicles, low-riders and antique trucks that make up Cruise Night.

When we had collected our respective wives who had, perforce, parked two blocks away in their decidedly non-classic 2006 vehicle, we four sauntered along the ranks of cars almost all of which were built in the post-WWII era - in a nation that had, as its people understood history, saved the West from the evils of Germany’s National Socialism. Emerging almost entirely untouched by the ravages of war, the U.S. then proceeded to build the mightiest civilian industrial infrastructure the world had ever seen from the core of their military-industrial complex. This became the backbone of a society characterized by the easy availability of a cornucopia of consumer goods and which exhibited a hubris that still, it seemed, shone in the be-chromed vehicles before us.

These consumer goods, the car preeminent among them, were the envy of the rest of the world. The USSR, which lost 20 million men, women and children in defeating Nazi Germany, had no conception of the private car for personal or family use. Britain’s indebtedness to the United States, incurred while it pursued its lonely war against the Nazis between 1939 and 1942, crippled the country and enabled the U.S. to take command of the global capitalist system at Bretton Woods in 1944. For many years after WWII, most Brits were more accustomed to the sweaty confines of bus and train than to the interior of an automobile.

Walking through the promenading crowd of Santa Paula residents, some of whom had poured money, sweat and technical expertise into the restoration of the cars on display, and many more of whom were viscerally connected to this car-culture rooted in an era of American triumphalism, I felt excluded from the general bonhomie that prevailed. As a middle-class culture worker from Upper Ojai, not born in North America, I was at a distance from the white and Latino, predominantly working class folk enjoying the automotive display and the attendant music and food.

Living close to the tipping point where the watershed is gravitationally divided between east (towards the Santa Clara River) and west (towards the Ventura River), we also sit atop a class divide between the equidistant Santa Paula and Ojai. Torn by these territorial and class allegiances, the serendipitous display of the XK-E that evening, amidst the best of American iron, was, I realized, a statement loaded with ironic absurdity – the only reasonable response to lives spent in the limbo of false consciousness.

Retreating from the angst of alienation and oppression which perhaps I alone perceived on Santa Paula’s Main Street, we decide to eat at Familia Diaz, an historic Mexican restaurant at the corner of Harvard and the Santa Paula - Ojai Road. Settling into the red leatherette booth, Will told me that the restaurant had begun as a soup-kitchen serving the survivors of the St. Francis dam disaster.

Early in 1928, Santa Paula was engulfed by a wall of water - a fresh water tsunami. Although the word is usually associated with oceanic tidal waves generated by seismic activity, 'tsunami' can also refer to any large displacement of water resulting in a ‘wave train’. On this occasion, the two hundred foot wall of the dam, located at a pinch in San Francisquito canyon, ten miles north of Santa Clarita, failed disastrously and unleashed 12.4 billion gallons of water.

Built on a fault-ridden geological substrate and inadequately engineered, the St. Francis disaster effectively ended the career of William Mulholland, who had overseen this vast enterprise –designed to store a year’s worth of L.A.’s water safely away from its source, the Owens Valley, where ranchers had become increasingly militant in their efforts to defend their livelihood, culminating in the bombing of the L.A. aqueduct in 1924.

In Water and Power, U.C. Press, 1982, William L. Kahrl notes that “by the time the Owens Valley ranchers blew up the No-Name canyon siphon in 1927, the reservoir was nearly full and withdrawals to replace the lost flows from the aqueduct began immediately”. By early March 1928, the reservoir was again full, and on March 12, Mulholland personally inspected the structure and pronounced it safe. That night, at midnight, the dam collapsed and a one hundred and fifty foot tsunami wave swept down the Santa Clara Valley obliterating Castaic Junction, Bardsdale and Fillmore, before devastating Santa Paula and then emptying its victims and huge chunks of concrete into the Pacific just south of Ventura Harbor at 5:30 a.m.

Now, as you exit the 126, you are funneled onto the 150 and the Familia Diaz restaurant is on the right as you head for Ojai. While it is the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the town, and is on Ventura’s list of Historical Landmarks, it did not open until 1935, seven years after the dam burst. The connection made to the disaster in the restaurant’s literature is thus a tad specious,

“In 1928, José and Josepha Diaz family barely escaped the Saint Francis Dam break flood that destroyed much of the Santa Paula Valley. In 1929 a bakery was built at the corner of 10th Street and Telegraph Road (now Harvard Boulevard) but it lasted only a few years because of the depression. Josepha opened a café in 1935 with farm workers and their families as her main customers. In 1936 the Diaz family bought the abandoned bakery and an adjacent house and lived in a room in the bakery and José operated a cantina in another room.”

The fact is, as shocking as was the loss of life (the official death-toll exceeded 450), almost everyone extant at that time in Santa Paula ‘escaped’. Most of the victims did indeed die in the ‘Santa Paula Valley’ – more usually referred to as the Santa Clara Valley - not the town itself; but I do not know where José and Josepha were that night. Will, apparently, had unconsciously attempted to add narrative muscle to the restaurant's claim to fame.

In my mind, however specious the reference, Familia Diaz still connects me to that dark and tsunami-struck night 85 years ago. Passing through town, past the Union Oil Company building on the corner of Main street and the battling western-wear stores on either side, (Muwu), past the Limoneira building (now the Santa Paula Art Museum), there looms on the right, just before the train tracks, a life-size bronze casting of two motorcyclists and their bikes.

 These erstwhile, gallant knights of the road  (local police officers) were responsible for warning residents in the town to move to higher ground before the tsunami reached their homes and they were, perhaps, the saviors of José and Josepha.The sculpture, appropriately titled ‘The Warning’, by local artist Eric Richards, was erected to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the disaster – which represents the second biggest loss of life In California’s history, after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and fire (Another Day).

Across the Universe

For a moment in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s it seemed that Findhorn was the heart and soul of the New Age – the Aquarian Nazareth; but in 1967 the Beatles met the Maharishi Marash Yogi and, not for the first time, both East and West became entwined in the re-definition of personal and planetary spirituality. Ojai, already established as a center of occultism and Theosophy by the 1920’s, was inevitably impacted by the emergence of these twin focii of spiritual regeneration.

Shortly after I came to live here, I had the opportunity to listen to Dorothy MacLean and David Spangler (two of the four inspirational founders of Findhorn) when they gave talks at Meditation Mount. Their visits were arranged by the then director of the Mount, Roger Collis, who with his wife Katherine have long been involved with what is now the Findhorn Foundation. Roger and Katherine journeyed to Findhorn as young lovers and were married there.

Many in Ojai have the Findhorn experience as part of their resume but I have never gotten closer to the one-time caravan site (now a United Nations sanctioned eco-village) than Inverness when, over the Easter break in 1966, I drove up from Cheltenham to Scotland in an old Austin Somerset with two college friends.

Findhorn sits on its eponymous river which flows into the gaping maw that is the Firth of Moray. Inverness is located at the Firth’s throat, fed by the River Ness which travels east from the famously monstrous loch. We drove into town along the Great Glen on the A-82, tracing the massive geological fault which bisects the Highlands. The fault is evidenced by an almost straight line of prodigiously deep, unfathomable lochs which run west from the Inner Hebrides to Inverness, and here we spent the night at the local Youth Hostel before heading south on the A-9. We thus came within 20 miles of Findhorn - evidently just beyond the limits of its thralldom for we had no inkling of its existence. It was many years later before I became aware of the stories surrounding the place – of Dorothy speaking with vegetable spirits and of the giant plants and prodigious crops produced with the cooperation of these devas in the poor soil and sub-arctic climate of a windswept Moray scrubland.

The Community, begun in 1962 by Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean eventually become a magnet to the spiritually and ecologically inclined youth of the West who saw it as a modern Garden of Eden. We three returned to Cheltenham and continued our Environmental Design studies. A year later, the Beatles met the Maharishi and began their personal and musical transformation into a fey psychedelia, which in turn, helped re-establish an eastern front in the highly fluid space in which post-war generations defined their personal spirituality (Valley of the Blue Moon).

This English upper middle class tradition of tweedy spiritualism (veering on occasion, as with the much-married Peter Caddy, into a goatish occultism) established at Findhorn, and the ethereal asceticism of the Yogic tradition described the limits of the western alternative spirit realm for three decades; within these capacious temporal and intellectual boundaries, other consciousness expanding protocols existed, like Mahayana Buddhism (Lost Horizon), and the ingestion of hallucinogens, but Ojai - 50 years on from the beginnings of the Findhorn community - exists within that same psychic geography; in a spirit-land where still flows a Theosophical stream.

Recent research in Germany suggests that birds navigate during migration using both a genetically inherited sense of direction and magnetic receptors (which support an internalized magnetic map) that enables them to use the Earth's magnetic field lines to establish their location. Paul Hawken, who spent a year at Findhorn in the early 70’s and subsequently wrote The Magic of Findhorn, Harper and Row, 1975, proposes that the earth is also gridded with etheric lines that link places of spiritual resonance or power points. John Mitchell, in View over Atlantis, 1972, may have been the first to overlay this notion on the archaeological explorations of Alfred Watkins (The Old Straight Track, 1925) which reveal a dense network of ley-lines linking ancient mounds, dolmens and shrines across the British Isles, and suggest that these grids are, in fact, one and the same – fields of etheric energy organized into strands of vital energy, or what many cultures (including the Chumash) call spirit paths. Pilgrims, or shamans - in worlds more attuned to these etheric signposts - might journey along these paths between places of particular resonance, where, Hawken suggests, humans may experience other forms of consciousness. Sensitives (seers or clairvoyants), retain the use of ancient receptors and, apparently, see the golden lines that make up these energy fields. (There is not, as yet, a Max Planck Institute to confirm the validity of these visions).

Other authors have taken up this theme, and I last touched on the subject in the series of pieces I did on the mystical landscapes of the Languedoc, RV III, Red Soil and Legend. Findhorn is located on a sandy spit that lies to the south of the roiling delta fed by the River Findhorn and the Burn of Mosset. Its beach undergoes a ceaseless metamorphosis as the North Sea churns the sand swept down the delta. It is a place of sand, sky and water and in the quicksilver northern light it can become, as residents of the community attest, a truly mystical landscape. There are many such places spread across the planet. Southern California has more than its share. Ojai is a place of power and light, while in the Mojave there are places of preternatural natural beauty which possess intense energy fields, such as Joshua Tree.

Death Valley features histrionic landscapes that almost inevitably conjure other worlds and Hari Kunzru sets his 2011 novel, Gods Without Men in just such a setting, a place of power he calls The Pinnacles (Trona Pinnacles). Kunzru layers tales that occur within this landscape over a span of 250 years: there is the Franciscan missionary wandering in the desert; a nineteenth century Mormon outcast who sees The Pinnacles as an eschatological text; a John Harrington-like archaeologist desperately collecting the last snatches of Indian language in the 1920’s and a WWII Air force mechanic who sends messages out into space from a laboratory beneath the sand - and becomes a UFO-cult leader to the lost, meth-addled children of the local, spiritless desert towns. In other words, Kunzru mirrors the real histories of California where, amidst the strange allure of mystical landscapes, good and evil are magnified through an etheric prism.

Peter Caddy (a former Squadron Leader in the Royal Air Force) covered the spectral water front. He had relationships with sensitives that fed him information from the Christic, fairie, elvic, deva and alien worlds. The founders of Findhorn were avowed watchers of the northern skies. Caddy was convinced that aliens were about to arrive on earth and went as far as clearing landing areas for them. In true cult fashion, he assured his followers that the aliens would spirit them (and only them) away, ahead of a confidently predicted nuclear or environmental catastrophe. Caddy left Findhorn in 1979, re-married and died in a car crash in Germany in 1994.

In 1968, John Lennon wrote Across the Universe and it was included on the final Beatles album, Let it Be. He sings,

Images of broken light,
Which dance before me like a million eyes,
They call me on and on across the Universe…

and intones the mantra, Jai Guru Deva, Om

Roaming Charges

The landscape in Southern California has not existed independent of human intention for more than 15,000 years. Over the last two and a half centuries, evidence of that intention has increased exponentially as population levels have increased. Residential, commercial, sports, education, entertainment, industrial, military and agricultural development – and the transportation infrastructure that link these elements – now dominate much of the land. Prior to the Spanish, Mexican and Anglo-American colonization, Indians shaped the landscape to their ends primarily through the use of fire – rendering the land more amenable to their hunting practices and seed gathering (Another Day) - but the scale of this impact was limited by their relatively small population and Neolithic technology.

My interest is in the edge between land that has been obviously intentioned, so to speak, and the acreage that is still contested – wildland upon which a variety of interests, oil, logging, recreation, ranching and mining (for instance) have designs and which are variously privileged by its owners - usually the Federal or State Government. There are thus two tiers of intention, one that impacts the institutionally or privately owned environment and the other that impacts government land, or ‘wilderness’.

Here at the interface, there are sometimes strange adjacencies: instances of public and private land conjoined in awkward entanglement. Take Black Mountain, known to the Chumash as Kahus, or Bear Mountain, which presents an iconic cone shape to us here at the east end of the valley and appears to have a definitive summit. Anyone who has paid attention driving east along the 150 past Soule public golf course knows that the mountain is actually a ridge line that runs parallel to the road before terminating at the top of the grade – the switch back that climbs a thousand feet to the Upper Valley.

Access to the mountain is through Dennison Park, a County car park, picnic, barbeque and camping facility. The park backs up to Black Mountain Ranch, a vast property owned by Richard Gilleland who made a fortune with the Health care supply conglomerates Tyco and Amsco. His ranch, part of the original Fernando Tico Mexican land grant of 1837, was formerly owned by the Dennison family. It is now immaculately ranched and fiercely protected. In order to walk along the ridge-top fire road, which cuts through dense chaparral, it is necessary to hop a six foot oil-pipe fence elaborately bound with rusting barbed wire. The ridge offers stunning north views of the lower valley over the golf course, Lake Casitas is to the west, and to the east, distant vistas to Koenigstein Road are visible with the Santa Paula mountains looming beyond; to the south, the view is of the ranch, where oak meadowland is threaded with pastures grazed by occasional groups of lustrous cattle. The diminutive publicly owned park, at just over 39 acres, offers an enticing gateway to the mountain-top wilderness at the edge of the 6,000 acre ranch but this promise, for most fence-abiding citizens, is cut short by the aggressive barriers to its privately held neighbor.

In hopping fences to access ancient pathways (Kahus was a Chumash sacred mountain) I assume my common law Freedom to Roam - rights which, in many European countries have now been formally legislated. In America, less so. As an individual one is restricted to National, State, County and City parks and some Bureau of Land Management (BLM) territory. In this country, rights of property trump the individual’s freedom to roam, but oil companies, loggers and mining operations play by more liberal rules and often claim prescriptive rights over private land. The Mirada oil company, for instance, is currently suing the Rainwaters, owners of the old County Honor Farm at the top of Koenigstein, for an easement across their land to access wells that, in a recent CUP hearing, they claimed they were abandoning (see CFROG).

In the land of the free we have allowed ourselves to be penned in. Because of the vast system of National parks, a concept pioneered by the U.S.A. and initiated by Teddy Roosevelt, few are complaining – but my purview is strictly local; I am not interested in driving to the Sierras to trudge through wilderness when there is so much right on my doorstep. Indeed, the tangle of wilderness, transportation corridors, residential, industrial, and commercial development, agricultural and ranching acreages and everywhere oil drilling, amidst the rivers, valleys, plains, beaches and mountains of Ventura County is of far more appeal to me than pristine landscapes that, until the last century, have rarely known the footsteps of humankind. There is a reason that much of the Sierras, for instance, were spurned by Native Americans – they are lands where it is wiser to let the tree-sprits and glacier lake sprites well alone.

The etheric skein that lays over these parts is harder to comprehend but when spirits are discerned their mood is likely to have been tempered by long association with the human psyche and its intention. More often, earth’s primeval, animating energy has simply been extirpated by a gross trampling of the land. This was certainly my impression when walking along the crumbling asphalt road that snakes along Black Mountain ridge – recent tire tracks suggested frequent passage of heavy trucks - belonging to either the fire department or the Ranch – or both. Any notion of tracing ancient Chumash or Oak Grove horizon inhabitation was quickly dispelled. Nevertheless, were I to regularly tramp this path I imagine some sense of its past might ultimately make itself felt.

Meanwhile, I am poring over the National Geographic map to the Los Padres National Forest East and seeing blocks of land along the Santa Clara River administered by the Nature Conservancy and marked ‘No Public Access’, some of which extend more than two and a half miles along the river. What barriers, I wonder, have they erected to my freedom to roam? We (freedom-loving-roamers) are assailed on two fronts: by perniciously paranoid private interests and well-intentioned conservationists. Both bring their values (or intentions) to the landscape in ways that are exclusionary. Simon Schama in writing of the Charta de Foresta, the Magna Carta of the woods, established in 1217, suggests that “ it was not a simple matter of greenwood liberty defying sylvan despotism, each wanted to exploit the woods in their own way”.

I certainly have an agenda in the wildland: to mine it for its historic, pre-historic and botanic vibrations – for my personal pleasure, enlightenment and psychic titillation. As well, I have a generalized interest in preserving and observing a particular aesthetic gestalt (comprised of elements referred to above) that privileges decay, industrial process, random adjacencies, edge conditions and native flora and fauna and disadvantages the new, suburban lushness, exotic flora and commonplace juxtapositions. These preferences can be easily accommodated if I can roam where I want – but most often I am corralled within the mundane. The pristine wildernesses carefully curated within our National Parks are one such common place and therefore hold little appeal.

We exist in a fast-changing world where the divide between rich and poor is becoming more entrenched. The rich maintain their wealth by the expansion and elaboration of a financial-technology complex that operates almost independently of ecological concerns while the poor resort to extracting food and water from the land in ways that allow for little consideration of its sustainability. In the diminishing space between the two, scientists, academics, conservationists and artists are left to consider their powerlessness in attempts to preserve the planet. I am one of the powerless, my goal is but to observe and sometimes record: while I have the strength to hop fences I am determined to maintain my freedom to roam.

Sleepy Oaks

In Japanese Kabuki drama, there is a bridge over which the actors enter stage that represents the link between the real and the spirit world. Sometimes, in the urban wildland it’s like that. My walks in the chaparral are effectively forays into the spirit realm from which I return, across the driveway, as it were, to rejoin the connected, 21st. century urban-dominated world that passes, most often, for reality.

There are other passages between the two worlds – like sleeping and waking. Last night I dreamt of a rattle snake. In my dream the snake was lying on my bare back happily absorbing my 98.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Later, in the same dream, I watched the snake in a vertical terrarium: throughout the experience, my heart (and body) was suffused with warmth for the cold-blooded reptile.

At dawn I awoke to tiny puffy clouds drifting in a pink sky over the Topatopas. An errant down-draft had teased long wispy tendrils of water vapor away from each of the miniature clouds so the effect was as though milky jelly fish were floating in a rosy sea. I realized that they looked like box jellies – the world’s most venomous creature.

In northern Queensland, the box jelly (Chironex fleckeri), patrols the coast as a silent, translucent killer - covered with millions of cells which, on contact, release microscopic darts delivering an extremely powerful venom. A sting can result in death within three minutes. Our local rattlesnake (Crotalis viridis) delivers a venom that causes internal hemorrhage, kidney and heart toxicity, muscle-death, breakdown of the nervous system and partial paralysis in about twenty minutes. Death, in untreated cases, may follow within 5 days after the bite. Dreams and metaphoric clouds thus announce the perils of the wild as we blithely navigate through the shallows of the present.

More prosaically, a couple of weeks ago we discovered another merchant of death, a large black widow spider, in the garage. I wrapped it and its web up on the end of a broom, flicked it outside and then stepped on it. Later, Lorrie found several dead spiders from the same family in the garage; a friend speculated that having killed the mother, her children died from starvation. Too late, our hearts softened towards the inky arachnids. Black widow bites may cause severe muscle pain, abdominal cramps, and muscle spasms but are rarely fatal.

Venturing into the natural world (and corners of our garage count as such), we are reminded of death, but while Nature offers graphic explications of senescence and ultimate decay, it may also offer soul-shaping solace and simple friendship. Thoreau thought nothing of walking eight miles to greet an old friend – a remembered tree. I am familiar with most of the oaks here on our Koenigstein land but they are not yet my friends (for I am but an apprentice Green Man). The arborist Jonas Llewellyn MacPhail, who ministers to their old age and dismemberment may have a better claim on their friendship. Three trees have needed his attention recently. One old tree, severely fire damaged in the great Matilija fire of 1932 (Another Day), possessed until recently, a truly fabulous canopy under which sat a rock the size of a small car where, on a hot day, one could sprawl comfortably within the tree’s oaken microclimate.

Two weighty limbs collapsed on its north side and now, with these surgically excised by Jonas, the tree has been exposed as a skeletal, almost two dimensional scarecrow. Fixed in a kabuki-like gesture of extended, but slightly cocked arms, the tree emotes over the landscape in a menacing glower – an expression, perhaps, of the indignity of old age. It survives despite a trunk hollowed out by fire some eighty years ago, seasons of drought and flood and a precarious footing on a rock strewn hillside; its canopy decimated, its green skirt drawn aside, views from the rock now open to a stunning panorama of the distant Nordhoff Ridge – as though it has found, in its final decline, a grotesquely coquettish way to appeal to its human visitors.

Death in drought is all around us.

Recent hot weather and a second year of minimal rain may have been responsible for the collapse of a massive trunk that broke away from a quartet of limbs that supported a fine old oak crown that hovered over a track on the northern boundary of our land. The limb came crashing down – I heard it from the house a quarter mile away – blocking our secondary exit. The sound, only half registered at the time, comprised an initial crack which accompanied the rending of woody tissue and then a secondary crash which signified the breaking of branches as the trunk fell to the ground. When I discovered the fallen trunk on a morning walk, the sound-track of its demise came back to me, recovered from that dead file of unexplained noises that had lodged somewhere in my sensory cortex.

The surviving three-trunked tree remains defiant, rising out of rocks on a precarious ledge perched twenty feet above the dried grasses, thistles and leaf litter below and may well flourish as new light enters into its canopy from the west. It maintains its erect posture, the three remaining trunks capably covering for the missing fourth, but the pretense of continued vigor belies the profound trauma the tree has suffered. The episode reminded me of the old Rolf Harris song, Jake the Peg (with the extra leg),

“I'm Jake the Peg, diddle-iddle-iddle-um
With my extra leg, diddle-iddle-iddle-um……

'Cos I was born with an extra leg, and since that day begun
I had to learn to stand on my own three feet
Believe me that's no fun……”

Three trunks instead of four, believe me that’s a bore….or something.

There is a single oak on the East Meadow, supported by a single trunk. Here, Jonas removed an old snagged limb that had broken away from the trunk many years ago but remained frozen in its fall, caught by another branch. Freed of this decaying limb, the thicket of dead wood at its center removed, its canopy thinned, the tree - leaning slightly to the west - appears rejuvenated. After some discussion it was decided to leave another thicket of dead wood, on a low branch to the south, intact - for it houses a colony of wood rats (Neotoma macrotis) who painstakingly construct apartment complexes of twigs and leaves. These structures usually occur as large unruly piles on the ground; this is a rare example of aerial Neotomic architecture and we deem it worthy, for the time being, of preservation.

Behind the oak on a gently rising slope there are five aged multi-trunked walnuts. The chaparral, even in drought, is no food desert: the rats, whose diet consists of nuts, berries and seeds - nibble acorns and the meat within the tiny native walnuts, which split open within a month or two of falling to the ground.

In my childhood I would sometimes pass a great oak-strewn estate on the road from Elstead to Farnham, in darkest Surrey, called Sleepy Oaks: I was entranced by this name. I realize now that this was my introduction to the notion that trees are sentient beings which, when not asleep are awake and by extension aware. Only later has it occurred to me that sentience implies an embodiment of the sacred – and trees should be valued as partners in the global project for peace, love and enlightenment.

And rattlesnakes, black widows, and box jelly fish? I thought kind thoughts about the rattlesnake in my dreams, am respectful of the awesome lethality of the box-jelly, and resolve not to swim in the waters of Northern Australia - and I spared the rats: my karmic invoice, in this telling, is burdened only with the black-widow spider and her (probable) off-spring.

Oak trees can also kill: John Kaufer, the owner of Matilija Hot Springs, was crushed to death by an oak that collapsed on top of him - two years after it had been severely fire damaged in the Wheeler Fire of 1985. With my karmic debt in mind I will be wary beneath these not-yet-friends as I duck beneath their canopies seeking the coolth of their vascular respiration.

Another Day

Notwithstanding my assurance in Mission Statement that I was going to get out more, sometimes the story comes to you; it doesn’t take much: just a little smoke and rain during one weekend in July.

Friday. Fire in the desert’s forest fringe has darkened the valley; the smoke haze reached Upper Ojai at about 6:30 am this morning and it was as though someone had pulled down a shade screen. The sun rose an orange orb in a sky smeared with soot; later, as its rays were no longer angling horizontally through the low blanket of smoke, the day brightened and regained some sense of normalcy.

But come evening, the sun set as a fiery red disc over the Nordhoff Ridge. Filtered through the brown haze that now lay on the western horizon, the reactive processes of our expanding, nucleo-synthetic star were lent a brilliant, Kodachrome 64 cast.

For five days, the so called Mountain Fire has raged across 25,000 acres of dry chaparral and forest in the rugged San Jacinto range about 150 miles southeast of Ojai. The mountains rise steeply out of the surrounding desert floor and provide habitat for a relict forest of mixed conifers.

Growing at the southwestern margins of their range, these trees date back 50 MYA to the warm humid climate of the Tertiary period. The uplifting of the Rocky Mountains and the Cascade ranges isolated them from the rest of the continent and they spread southward, ideally adapted to survive cold, heat and drought. Low intensity fires occurred frequently, perhaps as often as every ten or twenty years, but the rich mix of species limited their intensity. Now, more homogeneous forests and a forest service history of fire suppression have resulted in high intensity conflagrations like the Mountain Fire.

Although fire has become intrinsic to the planet, conditions for its existence did not exist before about 400 MYA – by then oxygen was sufficiently dense to support combustion and land plants sufficiently fibrous to supply fuel: the earliest charcoal finds date back to that era. The beginning of man-made fire has now been pushed back to over a million years ago. Paul Goldberg and Francesco Berna report finding animal bones and charcoal in the earliest occupation floor of Wonderwerk Cave, in South Africa, dating to 1.2 MYA. (National Academy of Sciences, 2013)

 Our development as a species is intricately entwined in the story of fire. As M. Kat Anderson points out in Tending the Wild, Southern California Indians set deliberate fires to manage the natural build-up of fuels and provide advantageous conditions for hunting and gathering. Their settlements were protected by fire-breaks – the lands upon which they hunted and harvested and regularly burnt. In Fire: A Short History, Stephen J. Pyne, explains our co-evolution thus:

 “What began as a chemical event evolved, in humanity’s restless hands, into a device for remaking whole landscapes. No human society has lacked fire, and none has failed to alter the fire-regimes of the lands it encountered. Equipped with fire, people colonized the earth. Carried by humans, so did fire.”

 In the historic period, California has been plagued with the regular occurrence of firestorms in both urban and wildland environments. Today, fire suppression and species homogenization have created ideal conditions for high intensity fires in the forests, but in many areas of chaparral high intensity fires have always been the norm because the rugged back country has never known any permanent human settlement thus neither Indian burning nor fire suppression have been factors. The frequency and intensity of these fires are exacerbated only by the usual suspects of extreme drought, heat and wind (the severity of which anthropogenic climate change may now be worsening). In addition, the development of housing in the wildland-urban interface has both expanded the scope of ignition sources and increased the human costs of wild fire.

Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo arrived in Southern California in fire-season in 1542, and promptly named what is now the Los Angeles basin, Bahia de los Fumos or ‘Bay of Smokes’. Given the density of Indian settlement at the time, It may have been nothing more than the bay’s notorious inversion layer preventing smoke from their cooking fires escaping into the upper atmosphere (as it now traps smog) that prompted his descriptive naming, but it is also likely that he saw one or more chaparral fires, either deliberately set or ignited by lightning.

George Vancouver, the English explorer, was more explicit. When he arrived off of Bahia Todos Los Santos – just south of present-day Ensenada - in 1793, he describes seeing “immense columns of smoke arise from the shore… these clouds of smoke, containing ashes and dust, soon enveloped the whole coast”. Less than a hundred years later, the California State database (CALFIRE) provides details of the Tujunga Canyon Fire in the western end of the San Gabriel Mountains in Los Angeles in 1878, which consumed 60,000 acres. In 1889, the Santiago Canyon fire in Orange County may have been the largest wildfire in California’s history. It burnt between 300,000 and 500,000 acres and spread across over 30 miles of the Santa Ana Mountains.

The twentieth century opens its account in April 1906 with the earthquake induced urban firestorm that burnt 2,600 acres of San Francisco and utterly destroyed 490 city blocks of what was then the west coast’s greatest city (Simon Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World). The combination of highly flammable wooden buildings, multiple ignition sources post-earthquake, a fresh westerly wind and the broken pipes which caused a complete absence of fire-fighting water, left the city helpless before the inferno.

Closer to home, the 1932 Matilija fire consumed 220,000 acres of chaparral and oak woodland north of the Ojai area and in Upper Ojai burnt across Koenigstein Road towards Sulphur Mountain. There are oaks on our property that almost certainly bear the scars. The local live-oaks have a life span of a hundred years or more and we are now bumping up against that limit – in the last couple of years we have had three fire-damaged old trees lose one or more of their multiple trunks. In the remote, steep areas of the site there remain dead oak hulks that presumably date back to the nineteenth century, surviving fire in life and maintaining a soulful, sculptural presence in their slow decay in death.

Major Ventura County fires in 1970 and the Wheeler Fire in 1985 may also have touched Upper Ojai. The December 1999 Ranch Fire began on Koenigstein Road and threatened Ojai’s East End, but prompt VCFD response limited it to less than 5,000 acres. Fire storms in 2003 and 2007, when multiple fires raged over the shrublands of Southern California, were each driven by hot, Santa Ana winds, but Ojai was spared. Santa Barbara, however, has experienced multiple major fires from 2007 through 2009 with the devastating Zaca, Gap, Tea and Jesusita fires.

In the early hours of Monday morning it began raining and at first light a blanket of white cloud lay in the valley. Above, there was a yellow cast to the lowering monsoonal clouds. Around six, when small patches of blue sky appeared in the east, a rainbow rose above Sulphur Mountain ridge, arced over the valley – still shrouded in mist – and grounded itself, to the northwest, somewhere beyond Nordhoff ridge.

Over the weekend, it had rained in the San Jacinto Wilderness.

Thunderstorms brought one and a half inches of rain to the Mountain Fire's active north and northwest edges and by early Sunday fire crews achieved the upper hand. A fire-regime incident had been contained by human and meteorological intervention: un-burnt forest remains on its San Jacinto perch to ignite another day.

Mission Statement

There are signs everywhere that I am well and truly infected with the zeitgeist - blogging in the main-stream of what is arguably a major tributary to our shared, contemporary world culture. I am concerned with the particularities of place, my place – its landscape, its wildlife and its relevance within its broader bio-region. It is these concerns and my self-characterization as an independent historian, natural historian and speculative environmentalist (who shares his thoughts in essay form) that position me squarely in an increasingly popular genre. I have been reading Robert Macfarlane, a well-known British nature writer and a leading practitioner of said literary niche: I feel affirmed and only a little chagrined that everything I have ever said he has said better.

I suppose it was my father who first introduced me to some of the rituals pertaining to this particular form of creative non-fiction (Knowledge Scrublands). He would quote George Borrow’s minor nineteenth century classic, Lavengro (which I dimly recall sitting within the glass-cased bookshelf) and talk of those, ‘wind on the heath, brother’ types. I knew whom he meant, they wore shorts and carried khaki canvas knapsacks and strode across the Surrey downs. He was secretly one of them, although he wore a tweed suit, swung a cherry walking stick and spurned a back-pack  - often with me, in grey-flannel shorts, in-tow. It is only now, with the help of Mr. Google that I can connect this derisive characterization with a book he loved in which a character declaims that even in sickness and blindness he would cling to life, for when,

"There's the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that, I would gladly live forever”.

Sitting in our back yard this evening, I had a similar thought: will I ever tire of this view? And then, as Lorrie and I enjoyed the deepening colors of the evening - highlighted by the puce clouds in a still bright sky – a tremulous breeze wafted down the canyon and I realized that perhaps this haptic caress was, indeed, all I needed to remain connected to the wildland that surrounds us (well, that and the nocturnal mewling of the bobcats and the hysterical eventide caterwauling of the coyotes).

My father, who I sometimes characterize as the last of the Edwardians (born three years after the end of that brief reign, 1901-1910) was, it now seems, ahead of his time. Robert Macfarlane calls Borrow ‘the most charismatic of modern walker-writers’ who ‘set images loose in the nineteenth century imagination’. He certainly stirred something in my father who in turn, contrived to focus my aesthetic fetishism on the natural world,

“There’s night and day brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?”

Sweet.

Although Macfarlane’s new book, The Old Ways, A Journey on Foot, explores paths in Tibet, Palestine and Spain his home territory is the British Isles - what he calls the archipelago - and thus however intimidated I may be by his being, by Pico Iyer’s account, ‘the most accomplished (and erudite) writer on place to have come along in years’, as long as he stays well clear of the chaparral I can continue in my endeavors with some sense of purpose.

Meanwhile, not a chapter of his goes by without turning my head into a veritable carillon of ringing bells. Take ‘Grave’ in The Wild Places, for instance, where he writes of Burren on the west coast of Ireland, ‘Walking its grey reaches, you find memorials to the dead everywhere: stone circles, dolmens, wedge-tombs, headstones, crosses, burial grounds consecrated and unconsecrated’. And later, ‘At certain times and in certain places….one could see through the present land, the land of the living, backwards into another time, to a ghost landscape, the land of the dead.’

Walking the land this morning I propped up a rusted skeleton of a truck door from the 40’s or 50’s on a rock beneath the canopy of a fire-scarred live-oak, a makeshift memorial to the time when this was still a working ranch. At my childhood home in Surrey, built on land that had been farmed for millennia, and before that, grubbed and hunted across by early man, the earth offered up its past in artifacts like the hubs of old cart wheels, rusted scythe blades, hand forged nails, once, a Roman coin, and much Neolithic detritus such as skin scrapers and hand axes.

Here, across the road, where Bear Creek widens just east of Margot’s house, Scott Titus, who grew up at the Koenigstein/150 junction (in the house where fellow blogger Kit Stolz (A Change in the Wind) and his wife Val now live), tells me that he and his friends would unearth stone tools and debitage (lithic flakes from their manufacture) along its banks. Where once was an Indian village now frolic fuzzy coyote pups who venture forth to gambol along road’s edge and occasionally poke their collective noses up our driveway. These physical manifestations of erstwhile spirit helpers and Datura givers are now multiplying in the wake of a decimating parvo epidemic and preparing to put a serious check on our burgeoning rabbit population.

While the only known grave site in Upper Ojai is adjacent to the Awha’y village, just west and south of here, where lie buried the bones and artifacts of the departed Chumash, every Indian village contained its own burial area with bodies interned alongside tomol planks to enable their voyage to Shimilaqsha, beyond the western shore; their sky-journey marked with feathered and painted spirit poles placed on prominent hilltops. From the eastern reaches of Upper Ojai, perhaps the first such marker was erected on Kahus (Bear Mountain, now called Black Mountain).

No stone circles, dolmens, wedge-tombs, headstones, and crosses, but still this land is memorious (a favorite Macfarlane word!) of its human past - occasionally, hereabouts, rock art; sometimes cave shelters where carbon traces, bones, seeds and fiber betray a long-ago life; or depressions in the land revealed after a fire, that mark a village site - and paths.

Now is the time to explore the Indian spirit, summit and trading trails that start from Point Mugu and head off into the Boney Mountain State Wilderness through blackened land burnt in The Springs Fire which began on May 2, this year. Officially designated number 344, it has 343 predecessors – major fires in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area (which more or less overlays the Chumash heartland) dating back to 1925. Despite the lack of Indian burnings over the last couple of centuries, our smoking, barbequing and often just plain malicious society has contrived to replicate the intensity, if not the finesse, of their pyro-activity, and in this case may have again revealed the Chumash way over the mountains towards their inland trading partners and their vision-quest sites in the Simi Valley.

Northwest over the mountains, down through Thousand Oaks, across the 101, onward towards Bell Canyon and then into Santa Susana State Historical Park where Rocketdyne’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory now awaits radio-nuclide clean up and ultimate inclusion in the park, (complete with one of the finest remaining Chumash painted caves): here is an urban wildland path waiting to be discovered.

This is not easy country. Vestigial signs of its past are not easily given up. The frenetic human imprint of the last one hundred and fifty years has all but obliterated the previous 10,000 years of human presence. Mature chaparral is almost impenetrable; the trails – where they exist - can be steep and rocky; the suburban sprawl and the Amazonian freeways that service their off-ramp populations obdurately resistant to anything but vehicular passage, yet I have a feeling that George Borrow might have found a way.

If I have learnt anything from Robert Macfarlane it is that arm-chair research only goes so far. The wildland demands a physical engagement and in that effort may be revealed a glimmer of understanding.  On Wordsworthian reflection, that little knowledge may then be expanded in the act of writing.

Delta

Seat Guru advises that, on the Canadair Regional Jet 200 operated by United out of Albuquerque, “Seat 14 A is in the last row of the plane and may not recline. Proximity to the bathroom may be bothersome”. On the other hand, situated aft of the wing, seat 14 A offers a ripping view of the desert landscape below on an afternoon flight to Los Angeles. There was cloud cover as we flew over the forestlands of the Zuni mountain foothills but as we approached the dead desert heart of Arizona, north of Phoenix, the skies cleared and I dreamily tracked our progress over the trackless land.

We had left fire-ringed Santa Fe (Too Late) and driven to Albuquerque – well north of the 44,000 acre Silver City blaze in the Gila Wilderness and took off, our departure delayed a mere three hours, in this little 50 seat aircraft to fly home to the western fringe of the continent where charred battle lines were being drawn northeast of Banning and north of the Morongo Indian Reservation in the Hathaway Fire. Between the mountain pine beetle ravaged forests of New Mexico and Arizona and the San Bernardino National Forest (where the Dendroctonus ponderosae thrives in elevations above 2,000 feet) there’s mostly sand, rock and cinder cones.

In his book The Wild Places, British writer Robert Macfarlane writes of Rannoch Moor in the Scottish Highlands:

 “There was too the motif of the delta: in the antlers of deer, in the branching forms of the pale green lichen that cloaked the trees and boulders, in the shape of Loch Laidon, in the crevasses and fissures in the peat, and in the forms of the few stag-headed old Scots pines.”

In the Sonoran and Mojave deserts there are deltas written in the sand. No need for metaphor - the rippled land is stamped with the once-upon-a-time ravages of flood water. Everywhere, as I looked down over the brown land from my imperious (non-reclinable) sky-chair, I saw etchings of the hydrologic cycle. The resolution of these watery scribblings became evident as we flew over the California border where the Parker dam holds back the Colorado and forms Lake Havasu.

This reservoir feeds the Colorado River aqueduct, operated by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern  California, which supplies water to almost all the cities in the greater Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego areas (Wickipedia). Beyond the dam, the Colorado flows south, much diminished, and is further vitiated by its irrigation of fields of lettuce, cauliflower, cotton, cantaloupe and tomatoes; it then suffers the twin indignities of the Imperial and Laguna dams. As it approaches Yuma it is but a “dull brown glint…in the rushes”, as William T. Vollman writes in his opus, Imperial, and it serves as nothing much more than the main drain of the Quechan Indian Reservation.

A little further south, in the Sonoran border town of San Luis Rio Colorado, Vollman looks askance at the offerings of a taco shop: “three bowls of salsa: blood-red with a hint of orange, carrot orange and deep green. Their liquid content derives from Colorado River water…..” The withered Colorado River then makes its way through a narrow strip of Mexico and eventually dribbles into the Gulf of California across a fetid delta that Aldo Leopold, the great naturalist (A Sand County Almanac) proclaimed, in the early 1920’s, as “a land of milk and honey” amidst “a hundred green lagoons”.

Airborne, approaching Los Angles over Riverside County and then the Inland Empire, the quietude of the wide brown lands give way to an urban mosaic sinuously threaded with freeways – a built gestalt halted only by the implacable Pacific. Travelling north on the PCH to the 101, the 126 and finally the 150 to Koenigstein Road affords ample time to consider our fragile hold on life at the irrigated edge of the westward creeping desiccation. Earthbound, car-bound, constrained by asphalt and lane markings, I cannot shake the somber sky-message of the desert – drought lands between burning forests.

At home, we are cosseted in that broad swathe of chaparral that runs through the northern half of Ventura County, east to west, totaling over 325,000 acres. West of desert and forest, undeveloped tracts of Upper Ojai wildland are cloaked in shrubland, oak meadowland or riparian woodland; coastal sage scrub and vestigial wetlands then run on to the ocean – all lands that are both drought and fire-adapted and where, not incidentally, Native Americans achieved their highest population densities on the continent.

Yes, its dry. Yes, its crispy (CAP’N CRUNCH). But there is a pleasure to be found in the plant community’s phlegmatic survival and, even now, its floristic delights: the coy Acourtia where, amidst mostly drab white blossoms or fuzzy gone-to seed clusters, there are fringes of Day-Glo pink; white sage is ghost-like in a sea of rusty black sage; Laurel sumac is in creamy bloom and sometimes in fruit –tight pyramids of tiny red berries, the caviar of the chaparral.

Elsewhere, the California everlasting continues to be just that while the buckwheat blossoms, white muddled with pink, have now begun to oxidize and begun their metamorphosis towards a dark tannic brown. In these first days of summer the poison oak leaves have already begun to turn – from withered green to pink and deep carmine. Aloft, amidst whatever armature its tendrils grasped in spring (but often poison oak or laurel sumac) the seed heads of clematis, the size of Ping-Pong balls, add a white, fuzzy syncopation to the dry, entwined brush. Mountain mahogany is covered with its wispy beard of seeds while the florets dropped from the pendulous bracts of chaparral yucca blossoms are decoratively impaled on its spikey base.

Today a dense mist hangs over the hills. There is moisture in the air and the chaparral will soak up the fog-drip. It’s the time of June Gloom, when the marine layer grants soft light and moderate temperatures. The full heat of summer will soon be upon us and the pleasures of the chaparral will become primarily olfactory rather than visual. The sizzle of summer awaits us, but this afternoon I expect the cool winds to kick up and send the bunch grasses into a graceful dance - I revel in this season. Thoughts of fire, desert and drought recede and, if I look at the brilliantly yellow tar weed panicles I can see in the tracery a delta – harbinger, perhaps of a coming season of heavy rains, this year or the next, when the chaparral’s impassive stoicism will be vindicated.

Stillness

As penance for flying to Europe and thus bloating what had hitherto been a fairly trim carbon footprint, I chose to read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden on the flight. I consumed it from cover to cover, including the introduction by Walter Harding and his 65 pages of notes. It was the Variorum edition, which claims to be the only one “based directly on the author’s own copy of the first edition” (Boston, 1854). This was a volume I had acquired a few weeks previously from the ‘Free Books’ cart at Santa Monica library. Its pages are deeply yellowed and crumbling at the edges; the once glossy cover is begrimed from fretting against other discarded volumes. The acidic wood pulp pages have that characteristic smell of old paperbacks - somewhere between urine and vinegar. Its purchase price at its publication in 1963 was sixty cents: one can thus hypothesize that it has declined in monetary value at precisely 1.2 cents a year for fifty years before flat-lining at zero in the spring of 2013. Thoreau’s wisdom contained therein, however, remains priceless.

Closeted in the pressurized fuselage of either a 777 (shortly to be replaced by the 787 Dreamliner) (east) or a brand new 747-8 (the last gasp of Boeing’s Jumbo) (west) I enjoyed every word but I felt chastened by Thoreau’s trenchant critique of the profligate life styles he observed in Concord – what would he make of the debt peonage I and my fellow passengers had undertaken for the privilege of crossing continents at an altitude of 30,000 feet?

His was an age newly introduced to high-speed travel and Thoreau considered himself to be living amongst the ‘sons of Tell’. “Men are advertised that at a certain hour and minute these bolts (steam trains) will be shot toward particular points of the compass…The air is full of invisible bolts.” In Upper Ojai we have a similar impression: our bolts being the airliners plying the skies above the Topatopas (Red Smudge).

Thoreau lived between two worlds: the vanishing agrarian economy of small-holdings which Jefferson understood to be the basis for an American democratic civilization and the emerging plutocracy powered by an industrial revolution that had come late to America but here would reach its apotheosis. Thoreau advocates, by his example, a third way: lives lived in isolation and self-sufficiency nourished by the delights of the wilderness – a lifestyle made possible, however, only by his living in the shadow of both flourishing agricultural and industrial economies, in the urban wildland.

During his era, it was the steam train that was the most visible (or, by its lonesome whistle, aural) evidence of the stitching together of industry and agriculture into what, even in the 1850’s was a nascent global economy. When a freight train rattles past Thoreau he notes the “Manila hemp and cocoa-nut husks…reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe”. His ‘Economy’ is dependent upon living in the hinterlands of this mid-century mash-up of land wealth and capital. Both his frugality and his adjacency to the mid nineteenth century Maine economy (he lived only a mile away from the town of Concord) assured him of a lifestyle where there was little need to work and plentiful opportunities to bask in reveries inspired by his wild environment.

Thoreau bought his nails, screws, lathe and lime in Concord and while he cut his own framing lumber from the local woods, the boards for the house siding and the recycled windows came from town – as either products or cast-offs of an industrialized rural economy. Any truly individual or family based, self-sufficient material culture must look to models (often deep in the past) that do not depend on industrial technologies such as those necessary for the manufacture of metal and glass – materials that became the pre-eminent trade goods during the European conquest of the stone-age peoples of the Americas.

Glass and iron are thus emblematic of the transition from pre-history to the pre-modern era: but although the Iron Age, from an archeological perspective, arose in the Middle East around four thousand years ago, it was not until the Romans that it became the sine qua non of Empire. The Conquistadors are lineal descendants of the Roman legionnaires not least because of their iron studded boots.

Some of those boots (Roman’s not Conquistador’s) strode across the flatlands of Norfolk in their customary linear fashion early in the first century. Opposition to these iron-clad marchers and everything they represented came from Celtic outlanders – Britons of the Iceni tribe, led by Queen Boudica (Victory). In terms of ousting the Romans she failed to live up to her name but her spirit was later co-opted by Queen Victoria as an avatar of the British Empire – which explains the grand nineteenth statue of the warrior queen on the north side of Westminster Bridge, remembered from my childhood.

The main artery across East Anglia was carved out by the Romans from the ancient path known as the Ickneild way. It now serves as one of Britain’s long-distance walking paths: few who walk it now pay much heed to those long ago Iceni enslaved by the Romans to build the road it follows. Lorrie and I stayed with my cousin Robert whose house is on a portion of this historic route known as Peddars Way. While in Norfolk, we also visited Hugh Lupton who has created a story and song cycle inspired by the layering of history along Peddars Way (A Norfolk Songline, Walking the Peddars Way, Hugh Lupton and Liz McGowan).

Earlier on our trip, we made a brief foray along Offa’s Dyke Path, another of Britain’s long distance walking routes, which was developed to follow a defensive ditch dug by order of the King of Mercia to protect his lands from the depredations of the Celts to the west (now Wales). After a couple of days of desultory searching (by car) we failed to find much evidence of this massive earthwork now reduced by time and circumstance.

Both routes are latter-day reconstructions that do not necessarily reflect the full historical realities of either the Welsh borderlands or of Norfolk’s ancient pathways. They are devices to satisfy the demand of growing numbers of walkers - offshoots of Britain’s Heritage Industry which attempts to add value to the natural world through the overlaying of sometimes spurious historical associations along particular routes.

There is a great deal to be said for Thoreau‘s approach which suggests that paying close attention to your immediate surroundings results in the creation of a sympathy between you as observer and the plants, animals and landforms observed. Out of this, Thoreau developed an almost Franciscan way with chipmunks, squirrels and the birds that surrounded his house. A walk in his woods, a circumnavigation of his pond or a stroll into Concord was all the travel he needed.

The coarsening of our sensory receptors has resulted in our seeking out more and more exotic travel experiences. One of the great gifts of living in the urban wildland for these past four years (twice as long as Thoreau spent at Walden) has been a greater appreciation of the subtleties of the everlasting yet ever-changing chaparral. Having fallen off the travel-abstinence wagon, I look forward to lengthy periods of stillness in emulation of Thoreau who was on a kind of long distance path that could be fully experienced within the confines of his hut, his pond and his woods. While planetary, global and personal time races on, our last refuge is spatial stasis - the ability to stay in one place and open ourselves to the unfolding of the infinite.

Ruination

The thing about architecture is that it is mostly immobile. There are a few moving parts (like doors and windows) but buildings are designed to just sit there and their change over time is usually discouraged through a program of maintenance. That’s not to say that when this attempt to halt entropy – the slow collapse of buildings into their constituent parts – fails over time, the results are not charming. But by the time the rain starts to get in and there are structural failures, the building in question is effectively on its way to being subsumed by the surrounding landscape – absorbed by the vegetal world in ways that begin to deny its status as architecture. Ruins, it could be argued, are part of the natural world. Architecture is only architecture when it stands apart from both nature and the natural processes of decay.

Given that they are currently incapable of self-regeneration, buildings are characterized by a finite life span: they are created, maintained and then, if that maintenance is not rigorously upheld, they decay and die. Their death, in urban environments, is effected through a dismembering and recycling or, in rural situations perhaps, through a change of state in which they become a kind of artificial reef upon which all kinds of creatures find a home and in which plants, fungus and mold colonize.

Mostly, these days, we see buildings that a few years ago seemed quite serviceable and well-maintained suddenly (it seems) change in status and become redundant – boarded up, surrounded by chain link fencing and awaiting demolition as soon as the permits come through. Still, in rural situations like Ojai, a building’s redundancy sometime plays out more elegantly - peeling paint and broken windows slowly giving way to signs of structural collapse and ultimately a reabsorption of the building’s organic and inorganic materials into the earth’s mantle. This latter attenuated denouement, given the economics of real estate, is now regrettably rare. Sometimes, just when you think that process is underway, a rescue operation is mounted and the patient is miraculously revived, re-roofed, stabilized and returned to active service. I have been involved in such rescue attempts both for clients and on my own behalf.

There is, of course, no greener building than the one that is already built. Whatever intrinsic inefficiencies may exist within it, the mere fact of extending the period of amortization of the embedded energy in an existing structure guarantees its viridic bona fides. In the last thirty odd years I have had the good fortune to live in two ancient buildings in Los Angeles. Given that city’s short life, ancient can be credibly applied to anything built before, say, 1920. The murdered out mule barn in Echo Park dated back to the first decade of the twentieth century (Black Magic) while, when it came time to decamp to the west-side, the single-wall beach cottage in Santa Monica Canyon, built just before the First World War, served our family for almost two decades.

Professionally, my architectural career has touched on landmark modernist buildings such as the H.H. Harris Birtcher residence in Mount Washington (famously photographed by Man Ray, 1942), as well as several Spanish colonial revival, Greek revival, Craftsman and Italianate buildings from the boom years of the mid-nineteen twenties. In all these cases, the life of the building was extended well into the twentieth-first century with every prospect of the building’s useful life-span stretching to over a hundred years. Now, in a new house in Ojai, we are about to be confronted with our first five-year maintenance cycle.

Given the building’s location in the chaparral its life span is conditional on both such periodic maintenance and its ability to withstand the natural hazards that exist at the wildland urban interface. We have just witnessed 30,000 acres of coastal scrub going up in smoke between the 101 and the PCH south of Point Mugu where, for about eight miles, the land has been blackened clear to the edge of the ocean (The Camarillo Springs Fire, 2013). Our house has been designed to withstand such fast moving moderate intensity fires and we are reassured by our ability to close off all the buildings openings with the wide steel fire-doors which are an integral part of the design.

Situated on a bluff created between a sloped front lawn and a steeply raked bowl at the back, the house exists in a canyon and is vulnerable to the hazards of such landforms which channel fire, water, mud, rain and wind. After the second dry winter in a row, memories of rain and flood have receded – it has been eight years since the vast flooding of the Sisar and Santa Paula creeks on our side of the great divide (aka the Summit) where water sheds to the Santa Clara River and thence, across the Oxnard plain to the ocean (Wild and Free). Local creeks and rivers are now mostly dry and Bear creek, which threads through our property on its western edge, has fallen quiet, although a thin silver thread still winds along under overhanging cottonwoods, sycamores and willows. The seasonal stream to the east of the house, which poses a more adjacent threat, has been bone dry for twenty four months.

The plan for maintaining our sanctuary in the chaparral thus involves surviving natural calamities and preserving the steel and stucco envelope of the wood-free structure against the predations of time, wind, weather and opportunistic plant and animal life.

Strange echoes of this protocol reverberated in my mind as I visited the 13th century Tintern Abbey in south east Wales recently. While the church stood steadfast for about 250 years amidst periodic Welsh uprisings, Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 began its fairly rapid transition towards celebrity ruin – a style in which it is currently maintained. The processes of decay are now largely halted and the remains preserved for the edification and titillation of tourists. The abbey has been stripped of the clamorous vines which, entwined amidst the sacred lithic pile, so entranced the early Romantics and later Victorian visitors, and it now rises out of a closely mown green sward, its structure left to silhouette nakedly against the dense hard wood forest of the escarpment that rises a little way behind it or, depending on the angle of the viewer’s neck, the sky above.

Tintern Abbey now endures as a petrified relic. Wordsworth celebrated the surrounding landscape in his Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey without actually mentioning the church ruin. Absent too, is any reference of the pall of smoke that habitually hung about the Wye, from about 1700 on, when intense industrialization came to the valley which, in turn, rang with the sounds of foundries and mills drawing power from his ‘sylvan Wye’ and its tributaries. Similarly neglected, in his evocation of the ’ the deep and gloomy wood', was the ring of the woodman’s axe, for the local industries, which were at the very forefront of the Industrial revolution, were massive consumers of timber. Blinded by his romanticism, the poet blundered over the landscape unaware of the terrifying forces of environmental degradation all around him. Ginsberg, in his remembrance Wales Visitation, briefly cuts to the chase (amidst much chemically induced obtuseness) when he takes note of ‘clouds passing through skeleton arches of Tintern Abbey’.

The valley is now quiet, save for the rumble of traffic along its narrow roads, and the occasional jolly whoop from Oxford students down for the day. The broader landscape is largely restored while the ruin itself, the economic locus of the town, is celebrated for its apparently artful deconstruction rendered by ancient politics, and the elements.

There is an example of more recent ruination in central Europe, where the historical and natural forces at work are similarly capable of being, to some extent, untangled. In Vienna, the economic boom fueled by a potent monarchial combination in the nineteenth century is evidenced by endless streets of baroque apartment buildings restored in dazzling, as new, condition. Radiating out in avenues from the center of the city towards the Ringstrasse their construction was originally enabled by the total destruction of the old medieval quarter, save for the great cathedral which still manages to dominate the skyline - despite the best efforts of generations of Hapsburgs who vied with one another in the creation of elaborately confected palaces. The dual monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which existed between 1867 and 1918, established itself as one of the great European powers – behind just Russia in size and second only to the USA, Germany and the U.K in machine-building, industrial might. Its wealth created two great cities: Vienna and Budapest.

In the Hungarian capital, the explosion of speculative four and five story tenements rendered in florid Renaissance styles built during the last quarter of the nineteenth century is still evident on many of the major boulevards in the City center, but their condition varies widely from the recently renovated to those that remain as the crumbling hulks that they became during the forty years of Soviet misrule (1949 – 1989). When the elaborately molded plaster work that originally mimicked the carved stone, cornices, corbels and statuary of their sixteenth and seventeenth century French and Italian models falls away their hasty brick construction is exhibited in lesions across their facades - sores wrought by weather and neglect.

Begrimed in over a century of industrial and domestic coal-fire soot, crumbling at their exaggerated rusticated bases, many with boarded up widows and heavily lichened mansard roofs, these are text-book examples of ruination. As such they have a romantic appeal that suggests a gravitas entirely missing in the restored models which once again reveal their original, fin de siècle, venal, facile, fashion-backward facades.

In Ojai, we stand on-guard against such romantic ruination and are sedulously planning our five year maintenance protocol, naively determined to keep our building forever young……

Cave Woman

Earlier this winter I spent a weekend at Zzyzx. (There’s a strange, almost illicit pleasure in typing that improbable sequence of letters). The name is the invention of Curtis Howe Springer who squatted in an area of the Californian desert then known as Soda Springs, about seven miles south of Baker on the old Mojave road. In 1944 he filed 12,000 acres worth of mining claims under a moniker he felt confident would reside at the very foot of an alphabetic list of place names. Some would suggest that his choice was supremely apposite: many view this corner of California as the end of the world.

But it is redeemed, for others, by the natural spring which renders it an oasis - a gathering place for the people of the region. Close by is a prehistoric quarry site where Indians fashioned projectile points used to hunt the game that gathered at the spring. Curtis attempted to leverage the allure of the oasis by bottling the water and building a health spa with an apparently natural hot-spring but which, in fact, featured water heated by a large oil burning boiler discreetly located at some distance from the bathing facilities.

The enterprise was a modest success and he built a substantial establishment of guest rooms, a dining hall and meeting facilities on these public lands. His presumption was finally curtailed in 1974, when he was arrested by the United States Marshals for misuse of the land as well as alleged violations of food and drug laws. The property was reclaimed by the government and the village compound bequeathed to a consortium of Cal State Universities who use the buildings as their ‘Desert Studies Center’. It was here that I stayed, for three days at the end of January, to attend the seventeenth Mojave Rock Art Workshop (MORAW).

The participants, mostly male and grizzled, were educators, academics, park administrators and amateur rock art aficionados who were gathered together to give and listen to informal presentations of research, newly discovered rock art sites and the tribulations of site-stewardship. I attended with Doug Brotherton and was accepted as a participant on the basis of my association with Doug, the recent publication of Rock Art at Little Lake (2012) to which I had made small contributions (Little Lake) and, perhaps, because of this blog’s sometime focus on the Chumash.

I was on the lookout for great stories – and the tale of Zzyzx was going to be hard to top. Each morning at dawn I ventured forth in 24 degree F. weather to run along the dry salt beds and try to fathom this strange, anomalous place in the vast desert-scape of the Mojave. By mid-morning, I was immersed in the minutiae of rock art recordation and the presumed archeological import of the data.

Late Saturday afternoon I listened to the archeologist Steve Schwartz tell his tale of  Lone Woman Cave, San Nicolas Island: Sifting fact from Fiction. Here was a story with a true dramatic arc that glittered with historic and pre-historic insights; a tale capable of competing with the origination myth of Zzyzx and possessing an allure sufficient to eclipse, as the day’s peak experience, the beauty of the dawn’s impossibly low sun grazing the salt lake and sending the long shadow of my frozen body bouncing into infinity.

In 1814, the Russian Fur Company dispatched Aleut otter hunters to San Nicolas Island, the furthest west and most remote of the Southern Channel Islands, to secure some of the many thousands of pelts required to satisfy the booming Chinese market. While a desultory trade had existed for years between the native hunters on the Channel Islands and itinerant European trappers this represented a new and threatening expansion of the fur trade and there was a violent confrontation between the Aleuts and the locals resulting in the death of many of the already marginalized Islanders. (When Viscaino landed on San Nicholas on December 6, 1602, he had reported it densely populated).

Reduced to an unsustainable population, the remnant Nicoleños were removed from the island some twenty years later. One woman remained, however, to search for her missing child, or, as told by Scott O’Dell in his fictionalized version of the story, The Island of the Blue Dolphins, having dived overboard from the evacuation ship after sighting her young brother left behind on the beach. In 1853, George Nidever arrived on the Island with a hunting party and caught sight of the woman, who had survived alone for eighteen years (the brother is killed by wild dogs early on in Scott O’Dell’s narrative), and she was gathered up and taken to his estate in Santa Barbara. On the mainland, she shared few words with the local Ventureños but with the use of sign-language indicated that her lost child was never found. Shortly after being baptized as Juana Maria by the Padres of Santa Barbara Mission, she succumbed to dysentery. This story became a staple of popular magazines in the late 1800’s and was revived by Scott O’Dell in 1960 with his hugely popular children’s novel.

Artifacts related to Juana Maria’s lonely sojourn on the island were recently recovered from a sheer cliff on the leeward side of San Nicolas by the noted archeologist Jon Erlandson. It had long been established that the Lone Woman lived, for the most part, in a cave, and objects she had used in her daily life were recovered from her island home in the 1880’s but were subsequently destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. The cave’s location was lost for the entirety of the twentieth century and  Erlandson’s find was the first, twenty-first century indication that the cave's wherabouts might be recovered. Scott Bryan from U.C. Berkeley subsequently discovered an 1879 coastal survey that pin-pointed its location.

Steve Schwartz - seconded to Naval Air Systems Command which administers the Island and from which it fires test rockets – had attempted to locate the cave for over twenty years. Now, using Scott Bryan’s information he had the confidence to organize a major dig. Eighteen days and 40,000 buckets of material later, with the help of a team of volunteers, the cave was revealed in a sandstone outcrop that had held its secret for well over a century, in twenty feet of accumulated sand.

Steve reached the occupation floor of the cave and followed it 75 feet back into the cliff. At that point the Navy stepped in and halted his excavation. A cave of this magnitude almost certainly possesses artifacts from the beginning of human habitation on the Channel Islands. As Jon Erlandson has demonstrated at the much smaller Daisy Cave on San Miguel, evidence can be traced  back 15,000 years to what he calls kelp culture: the artifactual and nutritional basis of pioneer Asian Pacific voyagers - perhaps the first North Americans. (An Island on the Land and Ancient Isle).

While we can deplore the decision by the Navy to prohibit further archeological research in the cave, we can also be profoundly grateful that the island still exists. In 1945, San Nicolas was one of eight short-listed sites for the Trinity Atomic test, the dubious honor of which eventually fell to the White Sands testing range in New Mexico. The island thus missed its appointment with the apocalypse: but its place in history may yet arrive when proven to be the confirmatory site of the unique culture which came to the Channel Islands with the first peoples of North America.

On the brink of potentially major discoveries, thwarted by labyrinthine Naval bureaucracy, Steve Schwartz has chosen to retire.

Knowledge Scrublands

A little over two thousand years ago an event occurred that precipitated the marking of time in a uniform manner over much of the planet. This synchronization, which occurred in hindsight some 525 years after the event, was not widely adopted until the end of the ninth century when it received the imprimatur of the Venerable Bede. For more than a thousand years thenceforth, years were dated in the form of Anno Domini (the year of our Lord) or simply A.D.. Years prior to His birth were designated as Before Christ or B.C.. In our politically correct era this has been amended to Common Era and Before Common Era, and since this dating system is virtually universal it can be said that humanity exists, temporally, in a Time Commons. We all share in this fundamental database which clicks over, to much celebration, at each completion of the earth's orbit around the sun.

'The Time' is not proprietary knowledge. It is freely available and awareness of it does not confer special privileges. Neither is there a societal requirement to credit the source of this calendric information. This is the nature of commons. It was not always so. In primitive cultures awareness of the astronomical time was a source of power. The 'Antap, the intellectual elite who presided over the fragmented tribelets between Malibu and Paso Robles, controlled these wilfully independent peoples by virtue of accessing astronomical information and mandating the ritual calendar by which the awesome powers of the cosmos might be propitiated (Real Suspense).

Today, our sources of knowledge, once carefully guarded by both intellectual elites and those with a more demotic understanding of natural magic, are being democratized on the internet. We are moving towards a Knowledge Commons. Google tried to digitize all the books in the world, but were defeated by copyright laws and lawsuits. Nevertheless, the shell of the Google attempt remains as a ghost ship sailing the world wide web. I have often jumped aboard these creaking hulks, shot through with lacunae, and ransacked them for plunder in patching together my tattered blog pieces.

Now comes the Digital Public Library of America which promises to aggregate digital collections from public and private libraries across the land. One of its founders, Robert Darnton writes in the New York Review of Books, "the DPLA harkens back to the eighteenth century - what could be more utopian than a project to make the cultural heritage of humanity available to all humans?" All humans, that is, with a working command of English and access to the Web. Meanwhile, Europeana coordinates and links collections in twenty seven European countries to which DPLA will, in turn, link. Within a decade, perhaps, there will be web access to most of the world's storehouses of knowledge from a single portal - a digital Alexandria.

Already the ease of access to information on the web has created an explosion of fact based writing on and off-line. Creative non-fiction is arguably the fastest growing literary genre in America and is enabled, to a great extent, by the ease of access to facts on-line. Facticicity has become the glue of much writing (not least here) where arcane information gleaned from the web can laminate elaborate musings that would otherwise congeal into a puddle of solipsism.

Whilst your Urban Wildland scribe endeavors to give credit where credit's due and affects a veneer of academic rectitude, others are less punctilious. Jane Goodall has recently been exposed as a common-place plagiarist: her new book relies on un-credited gleanings from such prosaic sources as Wikipedia and the website of Choice Organic Teas. She quotes interviews with scientists with whom she has never met. The book, Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants, 2013, has been pulled from the shelves and will be replaced with a revised second printing.

Somewhere along the line, this erstwhile primatologist became a brand. Now her name on a book guarantees hard-cover sales in the mid seven figures. In this she resembles Jared Diamond, who has parlayed an academic career studying birds in Papua New Guinea into a series of popular cross-disciplinary books that have a devoted middle-brow following (WEIRD). Now, it is my dearest wish to become a brand, either in my own name or that of my blog, but as Jane's recent fall from grace illustrates, there are dangers.

Seeds of Hope credits a co-author - Gail Hudson - and it is reasonable to assume that it was she who was largely responsible for both the plagiarized and un-plagiarized portions of the text. Jane has relied upon Gail for her previous two books and, as a brand, the sometime primatologist has less and less time for writing: Brand's outline - they ensure conformity to the brand - but write? hell no! Be assured, at this prepupal stage in the development my brand identity, every stolen word, lifted passage and un-credited apercu on this blog is uniquely the work of yours truly.

I first became conscious of the word common as a descriptor of those open lands that were neither populated nor farmed in the parts of 'Darkest Surrey' where I grew up. Our local common was called Heaven's Gate - named perhaps, for its elevational prominence, for it rose slightly above the riverine flatlands that bordered the River Wey, a southern tributary of the Thames, that shaped the string of villages and towns that were studded between these empty, vaguely louche lands that we called commons. Here were smoked our first cigarettes, and if sufficiently precocious, undertook our first romantic trysts.

I now realize that the Common's characteristic scrubland vegetation of bracken, gorse and heather indicated their unsuitability for agriculture. These sandy wastelands were spared from the grasping local gentry who would otherwise have acquired them, had they been worth fencing, through the Enclosure Acts of the early nineteenth century. Happily these lands remained wild and free through the year's of my 'growing-up'; today, Heaven's Gate is riven by the A-3, a major vehicular artery between London and Portsmouth.

In her first book about the vegetal, as opposed to the animal world, Jane Goodall relies on the words of un-credited experts, largely culled from the web by her indefatigable Gail-Friday; but a simple walk through the wilds (or commons) can establish connections with Nature's freely accessible data bases. Sentient beings, as the Transcendentalists understood, can acquire truths in tramping the land that require no crediting - but demand a very un-academic willingness to embrace the non-empirical, to open oneself to the swirling power of the etheric landscape. This should be common knowledge.

Meanwhile, we await the arrival of the DPLA, an unfenced knowledge commons which promises to nourish us toilers in the vineyard of creative non-fiction. However, we should all be mighty afeared of the Gentry - the media barons and their political lackeys in Washington - who, if they see value in these digital collections will endeavor to pay-wall them in (as is currently the case with many academic papers). Perhaps, like gypsies tramps and thieves, we can then retreat to obscure corners of the web where will survive pockets of freely available arcana in the virtual knowledge-scrublands. Or, take a walk in the real woods. Here in the urban wildland I plan to continue doing both.

Night and Day

As the planet turns on its axis and captive humanity experiences a turning towards or away from our distant sun, night engulfs day and day rolls back the night. These diurnal ecotones of dawn and dusk allow for particular moments of reflection uninflected by either the full presence or absence of light - opportunities perhaps, to investigate grey areas of an otherwise manichean life. At other times they simply provide rich aesthetic experiences or space in which to prepare for the flicking of the solar switch. Often, at these moments of luminary flux, great beauty is pierced by pedestrian reality.

In the gloaming, color leaches out of the landscape turning oaks an inky black and shades of grey are all that's left to describe the land. Above, there is a monotone firmament, except to the west where, at the end of an almost infinite layering of dissolving ink washes - sfumato - there are the pinks and apricots of an early evening sky lightly bruised with clouds. Walking down Koenigstein, entranced by this blurred edge between light and dark, two flickering lights semaphored the arrival of the night - natural gas flares in the Arco Oil field half way up the the Sulphur Mountain escarpment across from the Summit.

My mind has been on the development of the local oil-fields recently. First, Marianne Ratcliff alerted her neighbors that Mirada Oil, a small operator with a number of wells between Koenigstein and Thomas Aquinas, has applied to ammend their County Conditional Use Permit. They are requesting that the document be modified to allow a further five wells (from 6 to 11) on their Harth lease which is located in the hills north of Arco's Silver Thread facility above the Painted Pony petting zoo on the 150. Then, Alasdair Coyne, in his invaluable newsletter for the Keep The Sespe Wild and Free Committee (which he co-founded and now spearheads), wrote a piece titled Fracking in The Sespe in the Winter 2012-2013 issue.

Maryanne and I attended the County Hearing on March 21 which focused on the Planning Director's Staff Report which had set Mirada's application on a glide path towards approval by Kim Prillheart, the County's Planning Director. Key to facilitating approval of this expansion of drilling activity was the staff decision not to require either a new Mitigated Negative Declaration or an Environmental Impact Report - a decision predicated on the notion that this was a minor modification to the original CUP granted in 1985, that there will be no significant additional impacts to the environment, and that no new information of substantial importance on the project's environmental effect has been uncovered since 1985.

The gallery of some 15 local residents expressed their disdain for these Pollyanna assumptions. History, is perhaps, on their side. Our immediate neighbor on Koenigstein, John Whitman, successfully challenged the granting of a CUP to Phoenix Corporation who planned to drill a single exploratory well within a quarter mile of his home (the old dude ranch Rancho del Oso) back in 1975. Four years later he won on appeal to Ventura's Supreme Court.

I called John the day before the hearing and offered to drive him to the County offices. He did not return my call but the next day his son Andrew, a lawyer, was there to represent the family's interests. His call to his father had also been unreturned, but he referenced John's erstwhile activism and expressed alarm that the County was again ignoring cumulative environmental impacts - the very issue that prompted the Appeals Court to overturn the C.U.P. granted to Phoenix by Ventura County.

I suspect that nowadays no public hearing which has as its focus the activities of the oil and gas industry avoids the hysteria surrounding the practice of hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Mirada's proposed extraction program does not include fracking, but we nevertheless listened to an Ojai resident who drove twenty miles to the meeting to deliver an emotional tirade based on the film Gasland, an alarmist and largely discredited account of the horrors of fracking documented by Josh Fox. Alasdair, in his analysis of the activity in the Sespe, makes the sensible point that this potentially hazardous technology requires firm State regulation. Several bills are making their way through the California legislature promising just such control.

California's Monterey Shale formation was the elephant in the Hearing Room, but the palavering pachyderm was eventually called out by Marianne. While having nothing to do with the case at hand, this geological formation looms large over the energy future of both California and the United States; it is estimated that it contains some 400 billion barrels of oil - although less than five percent of it is accessible through today's drilling technologies. Even so, this 15 billion bbl. represents ten years of Saudi Arabia's output and could radically impact both our dependence on foreign oil and the local economy.

Because hydraulic fracturing is effective in extracting oil and gas from shale it will be the preferred technology as this resource comes on-line. Marianne expressed a generalized unease that Ventura's part in this bonanza would generate deleterious environmental impacts. Alasdair points out that part of the Monterey shale sits under the Los Padres National Park which will require stringent review by the National Forest Service, but that other areas under private ownership, outside of the park or as in-holdings, will potentially allow for faster development.

These great reservoirs of oil that lie beneath the land represent the solar energy beamed down to the Earth between 300 and  360 million years ago in strict accord with the diurnal patterns that continue to govern the circadian rhythms of all animals, plants, fungi and bacteria. That energy now enables us to turn night into day, traverse great and small distances at extraordinary speeds; heat our built environments independently of the exterior weather, grow vast amounts of food and cook it at will. The word transformational barely begins to cover it. As I point out in Moai, it has enabled the Modern World.

In the Hearing Room, under the faint buzz of fluorescent lights fueled by a long ago sun, we argued about the form and propriety of sucking more oil out of the bowels of the earth. Our mostly pasty faces were by turns amused, annoyed and fiercely attentive to the process of our County administration and the extemporizations of its punctilious representatives and our querulous neighbors.

Perhaps I alone harbored memories of that morning's dawn in the chaparral - somewhere above the Ojai Oil Field, the marine layer still settled densely over Ojai, the sun half an hour away from splashing the dark Nordhoff ridge off in the distance, with thoughts only of choosing my next step over the still, grey land.

Worlds Apart

There are creamy yellow blossoms of mountain mahogany, blossoms of California bay, the passion-flower-like virgin’s bower (the cream-white native clematis) and the rest of the cream meme – star florets of wild cucumber, flat-top elderberry blossoms, pendulous poison oak flowers and the miniature grape-like flower clusters of its close relative, squaw bush - cream on grey skeletal twigs. The tiny fuzz balls on the mule fat (baccharis salicifolia) are the color of a tea-stained linen napkin while the local morning glory is whiter, but replete with red wine streaks on the exterior of its trumpet.

There are the blues of lupine, the nightshades, fiesta flowers, blue eyed grass and blue dicks and now sage; white popcorn flower, white California everlasting and the black to carmine of the California peony blossoms.

Most of the white ceanothus flowers were lost to the winds of late February and early March but there is still the blue. Owl’s head clover, tending deep pink, has pushed up in drifts amidst grasses, invasive erodium and clover; pink prickly phlox is set in sandstone cliffs and at the damp base, coral Indian paintbrush. The bush poppies and bush sunflowers provide splashes of yellow (along with the tiny punctuation of fiddlenecks) amidst the chaparral’s mostly blue, white, cream and pink flowers.

This efflorescence is a tiny slice of the local botanical diversity. As Lightfoot and Parrish point out in their California Natural History Guide, California Indians and their Environment, 2009,

"California is home to more endemic species of plants...than any other equivalent sized area in North America. 3,423 species are considered to be native and another 1,416 are classified as endemic, i.e. they are found only in habitats within the state. Nearly 25% of all known plant species in the United States are found in California. These include the world's tallest trees, the coast redwood (sequoia sempiverens), the world's largest trees, the giant sequoia (sequoiadendron giganteum); the worlds oldest trees, the western bristlecone pine (pinus longeava); and some of the smallest and unique plants known to mankind."

By contrast, as my friend Will Reed reminded me the other morning, Britain possesses only 32 (or maybe 35) native trees and 32 native shrubs, of which only one, an obscure hornbeam, is endemic. Yes, there are some 1,500 grasses and forbs native to the Old Dart, but Britain was wiped clean of flora during the massive glaciations which began around 100,000 years ago and has half the biotic diversity of its cross-channel neighbor France (quelle dommage!).

After the end of the last Ice Age, plants slowly re-colonized Britain in their general drift towards the northwest as the climate improved and the range of species was extended. However, about 8,000 years ago, with continued ice-melt, the rift between Britain and France was submerged in a cataclysmic megaflood fed by the rising waters of a vast freshwater lake formed over many thousands of years in what is now the southern north sea. This devastating surge of water pounded and gouged the land, creating a giant channel between the two land masses. This newly formed English Channel then halted terrestrial migration of plants from the rest of Europe, forever limiting Britain's native biotic diversity. (Sanjeev Gupta et al. in Nature 448, 2007)

It is interesting to note the comparative ages of human inhabitation in California and Britain. As I have detailed in Ancient Isle, the first humans arrived in California, perhaps via the Kelp Road (and if so, perhaps on the Northern Channel Islands) about 15,000 years ago during the last groans of the mega fauna.

Some 700,000 years before, early humans were mixing it up with hippos, rhinos and elephants along the banks of a vast meandering river that drained central and eastern England and flowed sluggishly into the North sea. This, of course, was millennia before Britain separated from Europe and the warm interglacial period afforded opportunities for settlement in the continent's northern reaches - what today is Suffolk and Norfolk. (Simon Parfitt et al. in Nature 438, 2005)

It is tempting to view the protracted isolation from the uber-predator as the reason for California's biotic fecundity. But, as I mention in WEIRD, human populations can sometimes foster biotic diversity and certainly the absence of pre-historic agriculture went some way towards preserving California's variety of plant-life - many of whose species native peoples incorporated into their food, medicine, craft and buildings. There are more profound, climatic and geological reasons why this 'Floristic Province' is now designated by Conservation International as a Global Biodiversity Hotspot.

Over the last 2 1/2 million years, California largely avoided the ravages of the Ice Ages. Instead, the coastal areas were characterized by grassy plains with rich sediments deposited by rivers meandering their way to the ocean. Seismic activity has bounced some of these old beaches inland and old sea floors now form our mountain tops. Old wave-cut ocean terraces step down towards the present-day coastline. Streams have cut through the up-lifted land mass and created deep valleys. As the climate warmed and sea levels rose these valleys were flooded to form estuaries rich in the deposition of soft sediments, which have eroded and spread their riches down stream as sea levels have dropped again (viz. the Oxnard Plain). Over time, these processes have shaped California’s unique habitats and produced a rich mosaic of life. Now, the cold ocean currents to the west and high mountains to the east have formed, in Carey McWilliams' phrase, an island on the land, where California's dizzying diversity is nurtured in its short wet winters and long dry summers.

The other evening on the pool terrace, drinking a Page tangerine cocktail (equal parts juice, Campari, and soda), with Jim Churchill, the drink's originator, he looked across at the east hill and asked, what is that pink bush mid-slope? It was at that hour when the world is suffused with an apricot blush (resonating with the color of our drinks) when the low sun, filtered through the planet's dust, casts its glow across the spalled cliff face of the Topatopas. I had no answer, but assured him that I would investigate the following morning.

Walking through the east meadow past the oaks and walnuts, I pushed through the chamise up the slope until I had a clear view of Jim's pink bush. In the morning light it was a more prosaic beige and it was apparent that the color belonged to a frost damaged bough of laurel sumac. In this floristic paradise, it is easy to imagine flowers where none exist.

WEIRD

Last night, I attended an Ojai Music Festival event at a house on Mulholland Drive. Expansive glazing allowed for panoramic views of Los Angeles to the south and of the valley to the north. The dense grids of lights in both directions seemed to represent a sort of neural tracery – the synaptic pathways of our fluorescing civilization. The house itself occupied its ridge top location surrounded by dense pools of darkness, the perquisite, in Los Angeles, of the very wealthy.

This morning, walking along freshly cleared paths in the chaparral that surrounds our house in the foothills of the Topatopas, suggests another societal analogy: the birds, insects, and scurrying mammals, the sounds and the scents, the light and shade, the arabesques of leaf and twig and the shimmy of grass or forbs underfoot create a sensory, integrative web in which one becomes blunderingly complicit.

The adoption of agriculture is often considered to be the dividing line between ‘primitive’ and ‘advanced’ civilizations. The latter, it is presumed, only developed where environmental conditions allowed for the farming of domesticated plants and animals; the disposition of the resultant food surplus was then organized through social stratification and a hierarchical command structure. One further result, as evidenced last night, is a myriad of twinkling lights in the hinterlands below the redoubts of the rich and famous.

Philip Slater, in The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture, 2008, calls the arrangements necessary to generate ‘advanced’ civilizations a ‘Control Culture’ which he identifies with “authoritarianism, militarism, misogyny, proliferating walls, mental constriction and rigid dualism”.

For California’s Indians, agriculture represents the road not taken. In eschewing farming they had no need for ‘Control Cultures’ - their political units were often no larger than one extended family, or what Lévi-Strauss calls 'House Societies'. Slater identifies such arrangements as ‘Integrative culture’, characterized by an order that derives from spontaneous interactions, and that function, like the Natural world, through a system of self correction and cybernetic feedback. Some faint simulacrum of this can be experienced in a walk through the Elfin Forest.

The current muse through whom we connect to traditional cultures and gain some sense of how modern culture figures in the civilizational continuum is Jared Diamond. I don’t know him, but there is only one degree of separation. He’s a colleague of Jo Anne van Tilburg with whom I have worked, off and on, for the last five years at UCLA’s Rock Art Archive. Several years before that I read his classic Guns, Germs and Steel which attempts to answer a Papua New Guinean tribesman’s simple question: How come you, indicating Jared as a representative of the West, have all the stuff?

Diamond’s answer is announced in the title of his book. Critical to the West’s ability to develop beyond the Mesopotamian agricultural watershed and truly modernize (for want of a better term) was the invention of gunpowder, the relative lack of virulent diseases in the cool temperate North and the ready availability of iron ore from which to forge its tools. Thus the West (but more accurately the North of Asia, Europe and the Americas) developed the ability to create the kind of wealth that is expressed in ‘stuff’ (and twinkling lights) – infrastructure, machines and electronics of every scale and purpose as well as endless supplies of food.

 In four books, The Third Chimpanzee, 1991 (how we evolved as a species capable of dominating and ultimately threatening our environment); Guns, Germs and Steel, 1997 (why the West has the most toys); Collapse, 2005 (why do some civilizations fail?) and now, The World Until Yesterday, 2012 (what we can learn from ‘traditional’ societies), Jared Diamond has engaged a broad public in questions of how societies are. He has also introduced us to a wonderful acronym: WEIRD - Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic - the characteristics, he suggests, instrumental in our domination of the planet.

 As a committed conservationist, Diamond realizes that this is not altogether a good thing, and his work is full of reminders of the values (and warnings) that inhere in traditional societies. Looking back from a twenty first century perspective one can celebrate the fact that in all their myriad manifestations over the millennia, none of these cultures came close to destroying the planet: this may yet prove to be the unique distinction of those societies Diamond lumps under the WEIRD rubric.

How Californian Indians threaded the needle, navigating between the needs of an assured food supply and ensuring sufficient flexibility to survive vast swings in climate and dramatically rising sea levels and the smaller scale, chronic disturbances of drought, flood, earthquakes, and fire is the subject of M. Kat Anderson’s, Tending the Wild, 2005.

She writes, “California Indians did not distinguish between managed land and wild land as we do today”. Tribal languages lack words for both ‘wilderness’ and ‘civilization’. Overgrown, dense wilderness was not conducive to hunting, the nurturing edible plants village sites or to creating the web of spirit, summit and trading paths that threaded through the land. In managing the wild the indigenous peoples of California contrived to create a system of linked prairies, open woodlands and coppices that resembled what we might conceive of today as parkland.

Vestiges of this vast enterprise, nurtured over fifteen millennia, survive. More often, the food-lands that have not been engulfed in industrial, suburban and transportation infrastructure, have reverted, in our highly fire averse culture, to impenetrably tangled forests and shrub-lands. The mosaic of meadowlands, managed woods, tended marshlands and open rivers and streams which, in cooperation with the sprit world, the aboriginal population both harvested and replenished, has mostly vanished.

Of the colonization of the state she writes, “When the first Europeans visited California….they did not…find a pristine, virtually uninhabited wilderness but rather a carefully tended garden that was the result of thousands of years of selective harvesting, tilling, burning, pruning, sowing, weeding, and transplanting.”

Our rigid dualisms - wild or tamed, barbarous or civilized, natural or man-made, have hindered our comprehension of this great experiment in integrative culture where, in a complex matrix of connectivity, humankind fully cooperated and co-existed with the natural world. This Edenic past is not an altogether hidden layer of California’s landscape. We could do worse, amidst the tumult of secular materialism, to unveil its history and enact its lessons.

Real Suspense

The 'antap were complicit in the creation and maintenance of a cosmology in which the Chumash people existed in a planar universe - the middle world - reflected above by the celestial bodies of the heavens and below by an underworld of malevolent beings. It was given to the 'antap, an inter-tribelet intellectual elite, to interpret this layered universe and render prognostications based on their close observance of it.

The middle world was quartered and then quartered again. To the east was Kakunupmawa, home of the sun, to the west was both the land of the dead and the ceremonial alignment of Hutash, the earth. From south to north was considered to be the path of the ancient ones searching for pinyon, mirrored above by the Milky Way. These Before People, journeying towards the land of spirits, traveled a ghost's road in a spectral bisection of the earthly plain. The winds blew across this world in each direction and then, in their fickleness, blew again between each of the cardinal alignments.

At the center of it all was the 'Antap plain - playground of all the powers of the Chumash universe: a fearful place riven by the San Andreas fault and still today, largely uninhabited. The Cuddy Valley, as it is now known, occupies that dead zone between Frazier mountain and Mount Pinos. Here, in the lonely urban wildland enclave of Pinon Pines Estates, an unlikely exurb of Santa Clarita, houses have fallen into foreclosure as high gas prices have destroyed its viability as a commuter hub and real estate values continue to drop after the collapse of the bubble in 2008. As one of Harrington's informants reports, "The wind blows strong there and the earth shakes. If you get in there, you never get out". Another informant, Maria Solares, claimed that it was the most sacred place in Chumash country and that spirits danced at night in the flickering light of their fires. Spanish soldiers from Fort Tejon who went there to fell lumber quickly retreated: these spirits may still spook visitors who mistakenly wander into, or build houses within this ectoplasmic maelstrom.

The 'antap governed the ritual life of native American society as it existed north from Malibu, south from Paso Robles and west of the Central Valley. The 'alchuklash, astronomer priests of the 'antap followed the the sun, moon, stars, constellations and planets and saw them as personified supernatural beings whose behaviors, games and relationships must be swayed by the appropriate ritualistic intercessions otherwise, as Hudson and Underhay note in Crystals in the Sky: An Intellectual Odyssey Involving Chumash Astronomy, Cosmology and Rock Art, 1978,"cosmic equilibrium would be lost and disaster for the entire biotic world would surely follow". This was a heavy responsibility and never more onerous when only the correct observance of Chumash ritual could coax the sun, after its three days of apparent paralysis at the winter solstice, to turn to the north and bring the world back to the warmth and light of spring in its annual re-birth.

Celestial beings mediated Chumash reality from above but they were also twinned with creatures that inhabited the terrestrial plain. The deer was associated with the Milky Way while the spirit of Mars was mirrored in the condor. Wolves, bears, antelope and rabbits all had their astral associations, while the essence of Polaris, the north star, inhered in the coyote and it was thus known as Shnilemun, Sky Coyote. (Today, after a long absence, two of these animals were roaming the meadow below the house: come nightfall their star will appear somewhere above the implacable shadows of the Topatopa ridge-line).

Chumash knowledge and practice were woven in a complex framework within which the local indians conducted their daily lives. Of modern-day America, Jean Beaudrillard wrote,

"Astral America...the direct star-blast from vectors and signals, from the vertical and the spatial...Sideration. Star-blasted, horizontally by the car, altitudinally by the plane, electronically by television, geologically by deserts, stereolyptically by the megolopoloi, transpolitically by the powergame, the power museum that America has become for the whole world".

Never mind what exactly he means, and perhaps it reads better in French, but what he expresses here is his foundational premise that we experience the world through a simulacrum of our own construction. Elsewhere in America, his 1986 ode to the anomie of the United States he writes,

"Everything is destined to reappear as simulation. Landscapes as photography, women as sexual scenario, thoughts as writing, terrorism as fashion and the media, events as television."

The Chumash experienced their world largely as it was reflected in the phenomena of celestial bodies, the agency of spirits that inhabited the flora and fauna of the chaparral and the coastal scrub and the ritual activities orchestrated by the 'antap. Their world, like ours, was mediated. Their points of connection with the physical universe became touchstones in an elaborate liturgy that attempted to neutralize the dark forces of the underworld. Misunderstandings and misconstructions of the universe as it was explicated in the Chumash cosmology could only be rectified by the intercession of a shaman who had the ability to travel directly to, and deal with, elemental, unmediated, sources of power. The Shaman, (like the nuclear physicist and, perhaps, the neurosurgeon), was able to eschew metaphor: the uninitiated could grasp the world's cosmic energy only if it was insulated by mythical elaboration. As T.S. Eliot noted in another context, "Humankind cannot stand very much reality".

The asceticism of the Zen monk enables him to grapple with the nature of being (and becoming) that elude most of us star-blasted souls living within close range of our culture's toxic radiation. The 'antap, too, necessarily stood apart. The priest astronomers, the 'alchuklash, and the shaman magicians within the 'antap were further removed - their direct observation and intercession shaped the rituals scheduled, performed and interpreted by their cult  - which ameliorated other lives lived in this penumbra of tales, association and omen.

Living in nature is no guarantee of enlightenment. Most Chumash and their predecessors, the Before People, (who existed in a world before the acorn was the Indian's food) lived in a simulacrum constructed for them by priests and magicians. Their ability to break through what we might call the fourth wall was highly proscribed. We face similar challenges in accessing unmediated reality. The occasional sighting of a coyote or bobcat, a walk through the heavy scents of the chaparral, the surveying of a reasonably unblemished night sky or awakening to a rosy fingered dawn can sometimes seem to offer special dispensation, a glimpse beyond culture's veil, but we are soon clawed back into Beaudrillard's America, where "the fact of living is not really well attested, but the paradox of this society is that you even cannot die....since you are already dead. This is real suspense".

Moai

Watching lace edged clouds between Sulpher Mountain and the ridge that wraps around the property to the east and south drift slowly over the chaparral - itself dotted now with cloudlets of Ceanothus in heavily perfumed bloom - it is easy to imagine that all's right with the world. Except that apocalyptic millennialism, expressed in terms of environmental destruction, now resides as a permanent back-beat in our collective consciousness and even here, in the relatively pristine urban wildland, I have not quite separated myself from this shared, cerebral mother-ship.

And so it is that I find it entirely plausible that the burning, over the last two centuries or so, of the stored carbon energy laid down between 300 and 360 million years ago, and dating back to well before the age of the dinosaurs, may have some small impact on the Earth's climate. And, that we will shortly learn the precise climatic tolerances within which our industrial and post-industrial societies can survive.

This energy, upon which was laid the foundations of the modern world, has enabled the sheltering of a population density, previously unimaginable, within a sprawling infrastructure of a steel, wood, concrete and glass and its feeding via endless tracts of irrigated industrial agriculture. Thus the cost to our habitat of its extraction and burning extend far beyond the impact on our weather.

Chaparral and coastal sage scrubland cover nearly ten percent of California, deserts another 25% and forests perhaps another third. Much of the biomass that these areas support remains native, while Jared Diamond reports in his recent jeremiad, Collapse, that, for instance, fully 90% of Australia's native vegetation has been cleared - primarily for agriculture. Our state has preserved, for a variety of geo-historical reasons and recently, a comparatively benign state government, much of its natural capital despite devastating losses of wetlands, old growth red-wood forests, fisheries and wild rivers.

In Brazil, by contrast, the blight of habitat destruction is ominously close to metastasizing - where the anticipated 20% destruction of the rain forest in the next two decades, on top of the twenty percent already lost, could cause the entire ecology to unravel in a downward spiral of lowered rainfall (arboreal transpiration of moisture into the atmosphere is reduced in a direct relationship to the number of trees felled) and the desiccation and death of the remaining forest. While no such immediate calamity threatens the chaparral or other signature ecosystem of California, Brazil, where the slash and burn agriculture in its frontier states of Pará, Mato Grosso, Acre, and Rondônia, make it one of the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases, indirectly threatens our natural systems.

Set against the carbon dioxide production of Brazil and its fellow BRIC nations, Russia, India and China, the mass adoption of the Prius and other hybrid automobiles by the California public, net zero-energy houses such as ours, and the development of vast wind farms (potentially destroying, in the process, the Mojave desert) are all but irrelevant in terms of ameliorating the global climate change. This change in the weather threatens our way of life and the earth's ecologies. It is not a death sentence, however, except for certain species of plants and animals who have highly specialized ecological niches that cannot be replicated say, a few hundred miles to the north, or can conveniently move in concert with an encroaching tide line. The native peoples of California, after all, demonstrated an ability to survive startling changes in climate, flora and fauna over 15,000 years of inhabitation that also saw the ocean rise some two hundred feet or more (Ancient Isle).

The global destruction of habitat for urban, suburban and exurban development and the land-based transportation systems that link them; the poisoning of the land and water through industrial processes, salinization of the soil through over irrigation and the ravages of drought-induced fires over landscapes drastically reduced in species diversity presents a more existential threat to the planet. Amidst such "extraordinary examples of the wanton destruction of immense natural resources by the blind force of unregulated capitalist greed" as Paul Craig Roberts writes in a recent opinion piece (Counterpunch) there have emerged, over the last decade or so, a series of extraordinary architectural monuments to precisely that capitalist ethos.

Until the end of the nineteenth century the tallest buildings in the world were all churches (Ulm Minster in Germany topped out at 530'). It was not until 1909 that a secular pile, Manhattan's Singer Building at 621', exceeded it. A series of commercial towers in New York then held the crown until 1931 when the Empire State (1250') put the record out of reach for over four decades. It was to this beacon of capitalist greed that I inevitably gravitated on first arriving in New York in 1967 (Waterland). The title of 'the world's tallest building' was wrested from it by another American monument to Mammon, Chicago's Sears tower, completed in 1973, that reached 1450'.

The demise of the American century was heralded by the Petronas Towers, in Malaysia, which rose to 1483' above the streets of Kuala Lumpur in 1998. These twin towers were eclipsed, by more than a thousand feet, by the arrival of the Burj Kalifa at 2717' in Dubai in 2010. But within five years it will be China that houses most of the tallest buildings in the world and, by March, it will have the tallest in the vertiginous form of Sky City, besting the Burj by some thirty feet. Several behemoths, cresting 2000', will quickly follow it. The embedded energy in the form of steel, glass and concrete contained in these towers is almost beyond calculation but in any case entirely dwarfs the efforts made in terms of energy efficiency through enhanced insulation, quadruple glazing, day-lighting and solar offsets.

The building of icons of unprecedented scale that memorialize a system while simultaneously helping to destroy it is, of course, eerily reminiscent of the classic case of environmental suicide practiced by the people of Rapanui (Easter Island). Isolated in the Pacific Ocean, Rapanui's environmental meltdown did not impact the overall health of the planet. Today, we all share the same bank account of natural capital: our fates are conjoined. My patch of chaparral, California, and the entire west coast are vulnerable to the ecological depredations across the planet inevitably transmitted through the medium of our shared climate and surrounding oceans. Smoke clouds from the dirty coal that powers China's steel mills are born aloft on the jet stream and the black dust settles in the chaparral (and announces itself on the white porcelain in our bathroom).

The cutting down of the last tree on Easter Island to transport a memorial stone statue (Moai) from the quarry to its resting place sealed the island's fate: there was no competing ideology to question the ruler's hubris. What will now stop the next steel I-beam from being bolted in place high above the swirling inversion layer of Beijing's pea-soup smog?

Strictly Analog

Last night it snowed on Koenigstein.

Lorrie and I had driven down to Ojai in the evening after a mostly clear day to find, as we descended the grade, the north mountains wreathed in a dense fog of cloud slowly being sucked south and east, towards the Topatopas, in the trail of the weather front that had passed earlier in the day. We arrived home about 10 pm and the headlights of the car caught the errant flakes, just marginally less assiduous than rain drops in their quest to hit planet earth. These were not those dreamy, fish tailing flakes, light as air, that are downright reluctant to alight. This was barely snow. But this morning, the evidence was in: white patches on bare earth and the ipe decks sparkling with snow crust.

That morning (now a few days ago), approaching the gorge that splits the old county property (mostly used as a cattle pasture) I was followed by the sound of wind machines thrumming lower down in upper Ojai, but by the time I was on t'other side, it was the Santa Paula wind mills that I heard. This deep ravine, which this morning was a sound barrier between east and west, carries a piddling stream to which the cattle, and I suppose deer, track. I know, because I have followed their trail, at the northern, less steep part of the gorge. Above, on the mesa, there were patches of snow to the west but none to the east.

Having arrived at its lower reaches and passing beneath Koenigstein Road, nearby Bear Creek is not as geographically emphatic as the gorge. Its drama in the landscape derives primarily from its establishment of a riparian habitat. Without it, we would not have the willows, sycamores and cottonwoods that have just concluded their fall show of oranges and yellows. The next Santa Ana will strip them of their foliage and leave them briefly naked before they re-leaf. Such is the subtlety of our seasons. This year, just before Christmas, the crown of one cottonwood made a particularly effulgent golden ball, floating aflame, it seemed, on a sea of sage and chamise, to the west of our west meadow where snakes Bear Creek.

Once, I fancy, the gorge carried the creek: the amplitude of the geographical gesture matched by significance of the year round watercourse - fed by a spring beneath the eastern-most face of the Topatopas and the seasonal rains that wash down it.

If you detect notes of heightened reality in this piece, and flaming orbs floating on the dull grey green swells of the chaparral may count as such, then it has to do with the lacuna implicated in the first paragraph. Between evening and 10pm, the night it snowed on Koenigstein, we were in Ojai, first bumping into friends Julie and John in the still fire-damaged post office, then having an early dinner at Monte Grappa, where the main room is finally working (after a couple of expensive lessons in becoming a restaurateur bequeathed to the previous two owners of the space), and then: watching Ang Lee's The Life of Pi at the Ojai Playhouse (on its new digital projection system).

Understand that the aggrandizement of nature in the movie, while not, in my opinion adding to the pathos of the story, has inevitably colored my view of the world. Ang's over-the-top, CGI representation of the splendors of the Pacific (not a few flying fish, but a veritable pescatorial blizzard; not a pod of dolphin but a thousand leaping mammals; enough meerkats to sink a carnivorous mangrove island; and, not a few fluorescent jelly fish but a Scyphozoan milky way) has upped the stakes - I never thought I was one to hold back, but my scant smattering of snow would, in Ang Lee's hands, have become an impenetrable Arctic wasteland of bottomless drifts blanketing topography in frozen white waves.

Certainly he would have located a raging torrent at the foot of the gorge (until the water spasmed into chunks of ice and the canyon was buried in snow); and I too have felt, for the past day or two, that the local terrain could use some re-arranging - for dramatic effect. The relocation of creek to gorge is an obvious first step.

But what this really means is a temporal realignment. Once upon a time, we can presume, Bear Creek forged its way through the terrain and created the gorge as it spewed its way towards Sisar Creek. Once upon a time, to take another example, there was a seismic event that caused the massive spalling of the Topatopa face and a great scree of sandstone shards and boulders was deposited across the north side of the valley. Now, for full dramatic impact, Ang Lee style, we would have the boulders and an engorged Bear Creek hurtling down the slope contemporaneously; and since we are conflating time, enraged grizzlies would be dodging the lithic onslaught and perhaps surfing the waters of the creek.

Instead, we have a misplaced creek and apparent stasis. Change happens over vast aeons of time and, as we look at the landscape, it appears unchanging and even dull. We stand, as Frances Cornford wrote of Rupert Brooke, like golden haired Apollos,

.... dreaming on the verge of strife,
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.

Perhaps, in our lifetimes, a tree falls and dams a stream diverting it from its ancient course. Perhaps something of the sort happened locally in the great rains of 1968-69. The next wet years were 1977-78, and I know that it was then that Bear Creek flooded over our neighbor's property. Charred oaks record the history of fires that, from time to time, have both ravaged and revived the land. These are brief moments of drama in long periods of quietude when the landscape is disrupted by nothing more than the slow turn of the seasons.

Our lives are fleeting even by the standards of hydrological and fire cycles - how many El-nino years will each of us experience; how many fires? On a geologic scale the insignificance of our planetary inhabitation, even as a species rather than as individuals, is truly profound. We are left to seek meaning, not in the extraordinary, but in the incremental changes of the hours, of the weather, and in the acuity of our attention. 

Two hours in the company of Pi, his young life embroidered with remarkable scenes of nature at its most awe-inspiring (as imagined by Ang Lee and his army of designers and computer artists) momentarily distorted my appreciation for the chaparral. One recent frosty morning, the sage and squaw bush really were like the milky way, sparkling in the dry creek bottom; the patchy snow on Koenigstein a revelation; the golden ball of the cotton wood a vision of quiet splendor - these are moments that lack bombast, have no soundtrack and are strictly analog: they are, quite simply, beguiling.