Rain

The pre-classical Thunder-God, the Oak King, came through for Southern California in December of 2021. Following the driest rain year for almost a century, from October 1st 2020, to September 30th 2021, when scarcely 5” fell in the Ojai valley, the local rain gauge at the Summit Fire Station recorded 13 ½” inches in the second half of December, making the season total, thus far, a very respectable 15.62”. Our house, on a south facing foot slope of the Topatopas traditionally receives slightly more rain than measured at the fire station which sits on the broad Upper Ojai valley floor.

My entreaty to the Oak King, embedded in the final paragraphs of the previous post, that, “He rattle his oak-club thunderously in a hollow oak and stir our lightly chlorinated pool with an oak branch” - a mild adaptation of Graves’ description of the rain-making ritual in The White Goddess - was answered on the day after Lorrie and I left to fly to New York. We were away for almost three weeks, but we followed the progress of the storms on Ventura County’s Public Works rainfall map.

Now returned to the property in Upper Ojai, I have seen my first peony flower of the season, an early reminder of the revival of life that occurs in the chaparral with the arrival of winter’s rain. This morning, on a run up Sisar Canyon, I took note of what passes for fall color in Southern California. Sycamore leaves have turned a deep rust red, those of the cottonwoods a brilliant yellow-gold, while the willows are clothed in mottled green and yellow. It is only the deciduous trees of the local riparian plant community that parade the vibrant colors of their leaf decay. In the chaparral, winter is predominantly a season of green, and its characteristically verdant shrubs and dwarfish trees have all been freshened by the season’s rain.

The recent storm represented the first substantial rainfall since the 2018-2019 season, but in that year the moisture fell onto soil blackened by the Thomas Fire of December 4th and 5th 2017. Nevertheless, the spring flowers of 2018 and 2019 were remarkable, highlighted by masses of phacelia grande, whispering bells, and the native antirrhinum, rose snapdragon. These and other fire followers have now retreated to their respective seed banks beneath the chaparral crust to await the next conflagration - in which the newly grown shrub canopy, which customarily shades the shrubland’s floor, is destroyed again to reveal a sun that nurtures the sprouting of the dormant seeds.

The east slopes that rise up beyond the house are covered with a mix of ceanothus, chamise and mountain mahogany. Of these, only ceanothus crassifolius relies on the seed bank to regenerate, rather than stump sprouting, and has thus been the slowest to regenerate. Last spring, I saw that its seedlings were recolonizing the slopes, but many of the new plants perished as the drought took hold. The survivors now have a chance to establish a sufficient root ball in the well-moistened soil to assure their maturation towards drought tolerance.

The La Niña weather pattern, which oscillates with El Niño and a neutral condition, that emerged in October 2021, will be around well into spring 2022, and typically produces a drier than normal winter. The remaining weeks of January are predicted to be dry. Last year, the traditionally wet month of February produced not a drop of rain. All thanks to the Oak King for the December deluge, for it has assured us of a tolerably wet winter in which we have already tripled 2021’s meagre rainfall.

While I was away in New York, I read Gilbert White’s, Natural History of Selbourne, 1789, a book to which my father often referred, and which was a fixture in the lead-lit glass fronted bookcase in our living room in darkest Surrey. It shared shelf space with William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, 1830. Both books represented work by a local author concerned with his environment and who wrote in an episodic or epistolary manner. Both featured fine print and the unmistakable must of ages and were of little interest to me as a youth, yet I now understand that in this blog, Urbanwildland, I have been channeling both writers.

This past year, having eschewed the political and social implications of the Trump years in posts which were recognizably aligned with the work of Cobbett, I reverted to the original goal of simply writing of my local surroundings on Koenigstein Road in Upper Ojai. Writing in England, in the second half of the eighteenth century, White had similarly parochial goals. But his collected writings, in letters to friends, of the flora and fauna of his rural village in Hampshire, not so very far from where I grew up, became, in 1785, one of the very first natural histories that possessed a rigorous, eighteenth-century scientific method. His was the age of Linnaeus, of close observation of the natural world and its classification into types or classes. It was an age that celebrated particularism rather than a holism and was forged in reaction to the magical, mythological, and spiritual tropes which had defined previous centuries.

A quarter of a millennium later, we head, if our survival as a species is to be assured, back toward the pre-modern – toward an epoch in which humankind is humbly reunited with an environment no longer viewed as a resource for its hubristic goals of self-aggrandizement, but as a non-hierarchical element within a swirling cosmos which, as Graves attests, is indeed best understood in terms of myth and magic. In The White Goddess, he describes how the pre-historic, pre-classical, classical, medieval, and pre-modern worlds were rendered in number, shape, color and myth such that the seasons were measured within a richly imagined and symbolic natural world – a world animated by a panoply of Gods that were named, re-named, re-sexed, and doubled, over the millennia.

Up in Bear Canyon there is a single track that continues after the unpaved extension of Koenigstein finally peters out. The path is threaded with tributary streams, which ran dry in November but are now running again, until it reaches the creek.  At the crossing, there is a carpet of gold and white-gold leaves spread around a grove of cotton woods that line the steam. The winds have reduced the trees to fine traceries of branches that stretch beyond their pale, slender trunks. Splashes of gold remain in the trees from leaves too small to be blown away. Each fallen leaf is a brilliant yellow-gold on its upper surface and a creamy white on the underside. Occasional splotches of vestigial chlorophyll remain on some and many are veined brown with decay at their edges. The fallen leaves ruffle softly as I run through them and step over the still drought-diminished creek.