Twilight

In my previous post, Palimpsest, 2010-06-22 I wrote that "working at brush clearance I am made aware that the property is a palimpsest - of faded pasts drawn in paths, fences and rock piles". While I wrote a largely conjectural piece, I gave short shrift to the rock piles - the most concrete evidence of 'faded pasts'.

We are the agents, on our parcel, of the most recent rock piles. The local grading contractor Paul Hofmeister is responsible (following the direction of Jim Exon and David Trudeau developers of the twenty acre +/- home sites) for much of the rest. Before that? We are back in the realm of conjecture.

I have never subscribed to the 'Great Man' theory of history, whereby an individual, through his or her force of will can turn events on a grand scale. However, sometimes personal history can impact public action. Paul's dad owned much of Upper Ojai before the IRS took it away from him in lieu of taxes owed. Paul's particular relationship to this high valley is inevitably colored by his family history. He was to the Manor born, now he is a vassal of it's developers and the new, L.A. real estate-rich owners of boutique parcels.

In an effort, perhaps, to revive the family fortune, he has made a lucrative business of selling rocks, grubbed from home site excavations, road grading and pool digging. These he purchases for the price of their removal and sells to the County, Cal Trans, Landscapers and other home-owners. He has been active on the parcel west of ours, owned by two real estate agents from Los Angeles, who charged him with clearing the site of rocks. This he has pursued diligently and now the few stream-side acres that are the putative home-site are scraped clean and re-graded by Paul as two dirt terraces.

Were it not for the fact that I have been witness to the amazing regenerative powers of coastal sage scrub and chaparral I might be more alarmed. As it is, I expect the scraped dirt to sprout thistles and mustard next season (for he has concluded his program of lithic larceny) and then slowly revert - if not further disturbed - to native scrub.

Paul is also responsible for the very necessary roadside brush clearance along del Osos, west of our neighbor (which splits their twenty acres into the home site and a chaparral acreage west of the drive). The tractor drawn brush-hog which he uses has its place in the arsenal of bio-mass reduction - or, as the fire department thinks of it, minimizing cellulosic material. It is however, undiscriminating in its destruction. These pull-behind devices have a spiral blade-shaft powered through a tractor's PTO (power take-off) and many are capable of chewing through 6" to 10" trees - enough to handle most of the roadside shrubland. Lorenz, Margot's estate manager and myself are perhaps the last holdouts against the use of this kind of equipment in our brush clearance endeavors, both of us preferring the editorial accuracy of light weight weed wackers, pulaskis, loppers, secaturs and occasionally, a chain-saw.

But, back to rock piles: as I have noted in Stoned 2010-05-28, most of the two hundred tons or more of boulders removed after excavation of our building pad were trucked to the west meadow for the duration of construction. Tagged by the County as un-compacted fill, it was necessary to have the rocks removed before we could get their final approval on grading. Spread out on a broad flat area in a pile some 100 feet long, 25 wide and ten high they resembled a fresh drift of moraine that had somehow arrived directly from the spalled face of the Topa Topas.

Their journey had in fact been marked by a hiatus of many thousands and probably millions of years with the rocks sleeping beneath the valley soil crust in millenial cycles of heat and ice. The boulders were sandstone, golden or straw in color, while the smaller fractured rocks, siltstone and claystone, ranged from grey through black to a dark red. All were originally a part of a geological stratum composed of landslide deposits formed, perhaps a few million years ago (late pleistocene) and which has been in a constant process of spalling.

Some seismic event caused the emblematic fracturing of the south face of the Topa Topas and this process, aided by mud and debris flows and roiling, rolling rock canyon streams added to the rubble accretions strewn throughout the alluvial valley floor. It was part of this collection that we (mostly) relocated from the gently sloping uplands of our site to a broad flat meadow to the west.

Some of the larger stones were positioned around the site with an excavator while we also took the opportunity to cover a dell above the newly excavated bowl, which in Paul Hofmeister's time, had been used as a dump for brush grubbed from other potential house sites. Laid on top of slowly decaying shrubbery the stone now appears in the landscape like a rock pond, with oaks struggling to emerge between the boulders and thistles rampant. These rocks remain, like the signature boulders strategically set, as lithic evidence of our recent past - of our crude re-shaping of the land.

The faux moraine drift was disassembled and removed by an excavator feeding a fleet of trucks. Paul Hofmeister was not involved. He prefers long term agreements whereby the property owner warehouses the rocks and Paul removes them as he finds buyers. This, I believe, is the arrangement he maintains with Rick Baxter whose scarp-top home to our west is accessed by a road maintained by Paul extending from Verner Farm Road and which I think of as the Paul Hofmeister Expressway. He has recently brush-hogged the steep track.

The flat area, once liberated from the dead weight of rocks, was for a brief moment, barren. Now, a year later it is full of thistles, mustards and alien grasses. But sprinkled throughout are the vestiges of the old coastal sage scrub - peonies, soap plant, elderberry and deer weed. A brush hog destroys all: I plan the excision of alien material and, by the careful wielding of my weapons of botanic destruction listed above, ensure the survival of the base plants of the coastal sage scrub revival. Brush hogging would enslave me to its perennial use as the razed landscape would encourage only the growth of endless iterations of weeds thriving on annually disturbed soil.

I believe that we are returning the site to something resembling its historically natural state. I am not unaware, however, that these efforts are undertaken within an intellectual construct that privileges the pre-Columbian botanical catalog. As I work at the editorial process in my brush clearance, I sometimes reflect on the fact that I am, ultimately, just another botanical fashion victim. But this fashion, which could be broadly defined as localism is significant. It is the emerging counter trend to the expansionary imperial ethos with which we have been living for at least the last 500 years and has, as its apotheosis, Globalism. This latter trend is sustained by our reserves of stored solar power. We all know where that is headed. Localism is the future, but I recognize that for now, and perhaps for many more decades, it will remain nothing more than a bright filament of hope threaded through the twilight of fossil fuels.

Palimpsest

In Mending Wall, Robert Frost writes,

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.

His neighbor has a fetish for separation and demands an annual ritual of mending the dry stack wall that divides them. Frost darkly intones,

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

Frost is, as they say, cool with that, but the nameless neighbor insists on keeping the wall in good repair despite the poet's contention that

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.

No frozen-ground-swell here in Upper Ojai (although the pipes from water tank to pump froze in early December last year and a couple of years ago a reporting station on Sisar recorded zero degrees farenheit) but oxidation, dry rot, termites, gophers and deer can play havoc with fencing. We have no need of it; but working at brush clearance I am made aware that the property is a palimpsest - of faded pasts drawn in paths, fences and rock piles.

The margins of the plot's chaparral have not been truly wildland for perhaps a hundred years and there was, over time, a fencing in and fencing out. Here time is the something that doesn't love a wall (or fence) and the physical, chemical and animal processes of the environment ensure its eventual demise.

There is for instance, the post and rail fence that, in parts, runs along the northern property line where we abut the Whitman property, Rancho del Osos, which was developed as a guest ranch in the mid 1920's. This fence may date back to that era, but it is now in terminal decay and its useful life -whatever it was keeping in or keeping out - is over. There is a gap even Griffin's 1977 C-10 Chevy can pass through - and occasionally does, for this is a back exit from the property linking up with the last gasp of the Whitman's driveway as it crosses over Bear Creek, and connecting with the nameless spit that branches off Koenigstein (although some locals call it del Osos since the ranch was its original and then only destination).

The oak grove which sits on a broad ledge between the hills to the east and the steep banks of Bear Creek is on our side of the fence and it is a place of dappled shade, monumental lichen splattered rocks and the spreading oaks themselves. This year it is also littered with oak seedlings. I cleared it of thistles and in the process was entangled, more than once, in rusting barbed wire. In places, too, there were old sheets of tin and, a little way down the Creek bank I retrieved a round straight-sided container which was circled with half-inch round perforations. I was reminded of John Meiner running his pigs in oak meadows to the east of Ojai (Mining Gravel, 2010-01-30) and, a world away, of the farmland, replete with the agricultural junk of an earlier age upon which our house stood in England and which we slowly turned into a garden (The Scythians, 2010-06-04).

Cattle still range in the Topa Topa foothills and the original 160 acre ranch from which our parcel and six others were cut almost certainly ran cattle, and the broad meadows either side of the spine which runs from north to south down our property may have provided reasonable grazing. There's barbed wire along a portion of the eastern hills and its purpose, perhaps, was to keep the cattle out of the chaparral thickets and accessible for the occasional round-up.

My only experience of cattle ranching was in Australia at a friend's ranch outside of Canberra and there the favored round-up mount was the motorcycle - which would be hurled around the bush by the rider (my friend Lachie) grazing brush and rock in frenetic attempts to corral beasts that had scant respect for a small Japanese motorcycle buzzing at their hoofs. I rode the bike over the range but never in anger. Enraged by a particularly egregious example of bovine stupidity Lachie would rev up the bike, its back wheel grappling for grip, spewing rock and sandy soil and, as man and machine melded into a pirouetting dust devil, herd the beast away from whatever danger its dull brain had lumbered it into.

Liveried four-wheelers are the round up vehicle of choice at Black Mountain, the impeccable ranch in Upper Ojai's west end but on our parcel, I like to think, as cattle roamed the meadows, man and horse (and a little barbed wire) maintained the integrity of the herd.

More domestic signs of past occupation exist at the southern end of the site where the seasonal stream is now channeled under the wet and dry (or Arizona) crossing which was installed by the developers of the parcels in the early 2000's. Previously this winter stream meandered unfettered on its way down slope to meet Bear Creek just before it passes under Koenigstein and drops down into Margot's property. Perhaps, at this muddy confluence there was once a cattle wallow. Above it and beyond the oak that rises out of the broadened stream to the west of the culvert are pathways lined in rocks now half buried by the shrubland.

To the east of the culvert, as the stream bed climbs sharply into dense chaparral someone placed a cast iron tub and shower from which, in season, a bather would enjoy a view of the stream cascading down a series of small waterfalls. This view, wet or dry, must have made quite an impression because flexible plumbing was rigged a hundred yards or so to the year round waters of Bear Creek. Of what pumped the water up to the tub there is now no evidence. Were the stone lined paths above Bear Creek a part of this appropriated landscape? Margot tells me that there were people living under the bridge on Koenigstein when she first moved to her property some seven years ago.

Our past, on this property where we have built, stretches back to the fall of 2007 when we made the fateful decision to buy it and sell the parcel just over the hill to the East which we had purchased in the Spring of 2004. So here our past is un-faded, the marks of our making still somewhat fresh and surficial. Even so, it's now nearly two years since we began grading and trenching, and this blog has largely been about our attempts to let the natural, native vegetation draw a veil over the recent depredations of back hoe and excavator.

We are encouraging the chaparral to write over those original broad strokes and in the process are creating a new layering of the landscape, a new map on the scarred surface of the old.

Bowls

Last Sunday, we went to the final concert at the Ojai Music Festival and saw the preening George Benjamin conduct his own composition, At First Light, which represented, I thought, a tediously conventional view of the day's dawning: all squawks and squeaks of the avian dawn chorus and thunderous drum rolls announcing the rising of the sun accompanied by the mechanical cacophany of the waking industrial world. As an expert in first light - watching the sun rise most mornings on my run, the creeping luminescence of the dawn is at once profoundly lyrical and prosaic - the sun rarely rises, at least in this part of the world, with tympanic drama but more usually insinuates itself slowly washing away the darkness; the day is almost fully light before the sun bothers to actually drag itself out-of-bed and over the horizon. Its first rays may sometimes be worthy of a trumpet fanfare but usually, in the moist atmosphere of early morning its rising is quietly marked by a yellow cast over the heavy dawn grey. Benjamin I suspect, whose white hair frames a moon face, is a night owl - sleeping through mid-morning. The closing performance of Olivier Messiaen's Oiseaux exotiques was a considerably more successful metaphoric piece, and went some way in salvaging the concert.

Friday, the start of the Festival weekend, we attended a delightful pre-concert party given by Bruce and Marie Botnick. I finally met Pamela Burton, the Landscape Architect whom Lorrie had known a little in Santa Monica when she was our neighbor in the Canyon. We had been promising to visit each others houses in Ojai for six months or more and on Friday evening we agreed that she would visit, with Michael Webb, the architectural journalist, on Saturday morning. Michael checked out the house and pool while Pamela reviewed the natives that surround the house - it was gratifying to show the grounds to someone who fully understood what we were doing. Pamela has just finished her pool although she and Richard have had their weekend house on Grant for 25 years; while I have designed eight pools she, no doubt, has designed dozens and presumably her own, like ours, is a distillation of everything learnt over the years.

The bunch grasses on the tilted plane - the front lawn - are drying out. We have removed the erodium and clover which surrounded them. The sparse stands of needlegrass (Nassella Sp.) can still be provoked to wave in a heavy breeze, but absent wind the field has a bald look with dried plugs of bunch grasses and splotches of green and yellow - deer weed (Lotus scoparius) - looking like some punk dye-job. We still love it, for it is our child, but I do not expect a lot of respect from friends and neighbors - or the Fire Department.

The latter came by Wednesday arriving in a full-sized rig (the pick up truck, apparently, was otherwise engaged). I was in L.A., but Lorrie tells me they would like at least some of the grass clipped. Similarly they want the deer weed on the 'back bowl' to be thinned. We'll leave it all as-is until Lorrie's Birthday Party (the night of the full moon, the 26th) and then set to it. The thinning of the deer weed actually allows for individual plants to spread fountain-like and makes for a beautiful, lacey show. They seemed comfortable with the yellow and green splotches up front. The tarweed (Deinandra fasciculata) is spectacular right now, and is colonizing the edges of the 'lawn', even popping up in the shoulders of the chip-seal driveway. All in all, their suggestions were reasonable and we can accommodate them while retaining the 'big idea' of natural landscape bumping up to the gravel terraces.

This has been a difficult spring for brush clearance and weed control. The El Nino rains continued well into May and mustard, thistles and erodium are still emerging sprightly and green. We did not approach the 50 inches that Ojai received in the record El Nino years of 1997-1998 and 2004-2005; but according to the Ventura County Watershed district tally The Summit received 29 inches against an annual average of a little over 23" and last years abysmal (but ideal for building!) 13.65 inches. My experience of exceptionally wet winters in Ojai covers both the recent big storm years.

In the winter of 2004-2005, Casitas Dam and the city of Ojai received more than 50 inches of rain and Nordhoff Peak drenched in more than 80 inches. My most vivid memory of that winter, the first after we had purchased property on Koenigstein Road, was of driving up the PCH, with the family, including my eldest son Edward down from Vancouver to spend a few days with us between Christmas and New Year's, crossing over the Calleguas Creek bridge at Point Mugu and seeing the water almost level with the road lapping at the curb which supports the guard rail on the eastern edge as it rushed towards Mugu Lagoon and the Pacific Ocean. Onward we drove, despite Lorrie's deep misgivings (levels of testosterone were high in the cramped cockpit of the Audi allroad) up through Santa Paula before we were finally turned around by an Edison Emergency crew at the reservoir just north of Bridge Road who told us that the road had washed out beyond Steckel Park. (That would have been at St Thomas Aquinas where still you can see the tangled wreckage of a car that washed into the creek). That was also the year that I planted 50 acorns on the property - to no apparent effect. Flood damage to the 150 between Santa Paula and Ojai has, just this last month, finally been repaired.

Earlier, in 1998 my last year teaching at Oak Grove, I was driving up to Meiner's Oaks from Santa Monica Canyon three times a week in the Mercury Sable wagon that we had bought at the beginning of the decade to car-pool with. Alone in a seven seater (there was a rearward facing seat at the back of the cargo hold) sunk deeply into a velour seat that was sagging with age I battled the winter storms from January until May. That year the PCH was ravaged by the rain and high surf, crumbling at the edges in that deleriously winding section from County Line to Point Mugu. Sometimes it was closed. One morning I was turned back at Neptunes Net on others I followed Cal Trans as they cleared rock slides in front of me. Over the years since, the road has been serially improved and suffered no damage in the 2004-5 El Nino event.

The correlation of El Nino years to heavy winter rains is not a simple one. But certainly two of the recent strong El Nino's produced record rains. This winter's weak event bumped the average rainfall by 25% and significantly, perhaps, stretched the rainy season to a full seven and a half months. It started with a bang with well over five inches in October (12-15) and ended with a whimper, but by my calculation, still over an inch in May (26-28).

The Music Festival, as far as I know has always enjoyed fair weather. The fate of its re-building efforts however, as of this writing, has hit a stormy patch in the shape of Ojai City Council's intransigence. They are demanding further assurances that the funds are guaranteed despite the Festival Committee having secured pledges sufficient to cover the projected budget. As one of those pledging on a 'five year plan' I feel personally impugned by the council's refusal to OK the planned reconstruction of Ojai's signature Bowl!

Wood Pile

I was weeding down by the wood pile, pulling star thistles and snipping at the doughtier stalks with secaturs when I saw the tail end of a snake. I was, perhaps, 12" or 15" inches away from a pale straw colored almost translucent rattle. When the reality of my predicament dawned, I was not engulfed in fear, but slowly straightened out from my crouch and looked down at the snake curled in the crook of a log that sat on an old 3 x 8 board. Its end was draped on the ground, its body and head curled on the warmth of the wood. It did not move except for a few probing flicks of its forked tongue. I stood admiring it for a few moments and realized that I had been fortunate in stumbling on a very chill member of the rattlesnake family (Crotalus viridis).

Fully adult, its philosophical demeanor suggested that this was Old Man Rattlesnake: not some callow juvenile or hyped up adult that took seriously its National Audubon Society Nature Guide description as "Excitable and agressive". Later in the day I spoke with Ethan Wylie, amateur heptoligist and Zappa fan, who was visiting for the Music Festival. He and Ellary had had a confrontation with a more aggressive rattlesnake the previous weekend in the foothills of the San Gabriels that, at the same sort of close quarters that I had experienced, had rattled (a warning before striking) and essentially barred their way on a narrow single track. They retreated back up the hill.

Perhaps because of the openness of the flat terrain my snake clearly did not feel threatened and having observed me for a few minutes as I worked my way through the thistle patch decided that I was not worth scaring half to death with a shake of its rattle. In the evening we made the pilgrimage to the Libbey Bowl and heard The Ensemble Modern play a selection of Frank Zappa's orchestral pieces along with a few Edward Varese compositions - the latter having been Zappa's symphonic inspiration. The night's music had a portentious nervous energy that seemed in keeping with both these unsettled times and the impending demolition of the venue - and was at odds with the centered gravitas of the rattlesnake who, it seemed, was confident that "God's in His Heaven, All's Right With the World".

Early the next morning as I was scrambling along a dry creek bottom in a canyon west of Bear Creek I disturbed a great horned owl (Bubo virginianus) which took flight from an oak and I watched its wide spread wings and mottled grey brown underside as it flew to a further tree.

It's been a quiet few months for wildlife sightings. No more strolls around the pool from our local bobcat, and very few deer after Peter Jump's coonhounds chased a frightened doe across the property early this spring. But we have been seeing rabbits hopping along the gravel border to the house, and a week ago we met two of the Gopher snakes (Pituophis malanoleucus) that we long knew ruled the rocks beneath the cluster of oaks just above and to the east of the house (New Moon 2010 04-21). I was working on the border to the gravel pool terrace and saw a smallish gopher snake writhing its way under a rock. Lorrie was working above, under the oaks. A few minutes later she saw a much larger, fatter snake, perhaps 6 or 7 feet long and perhaps the parent to the snake below.

On Saturday afternoon we drove down the PCH to L.A. amidst beach traffic and, looking over the beaches and beyond to the 2-3 foot swell I was less than usually mournful that I have lost my connection with the Pacific which made up such a large part of my life for almost forty years. Summers were never my favorite beach time, and yesterday it seemed that the cars, crowds and the murky waters of the Bay rendered dismal the entire enterprise of surfing in L.A. When I lived in Manly at the dawn of the seventies, and later Whale Beach and Narrabeen (beach suburbs of Sydney, Australia) I could walk down to the beach. I chose work that gave me time to surf. In my early days in L.A. I lived in Echo Park and wide open freeways on Sundays meant that Topanga was little more than half an hour away. Later in Venice and then Santa Monica Canyon, Topanga remained 'my beach' but the crowd slowly increased over the years and it was always a trade-off of poor surf enjoyed in comparative isolation or good waves jostling with the multitude. At the beginning of this century, after a couple of winters of mediocre surf and my increasing enjoyment of running, I called it quits. Somewhere in there, when I taught at Oak Grove in Meiners Oaks, I enjoyed a few memorable winters surfing at Emma Woods when I stayed over at Besant House, or County Line on my drive back to L.A.

In Upper Ojai, although a good 40 minutes from the beach we do enjoy the marine layer rolling up the valley and few sights are as majestic as an early morning viewing, at around 2500 feet just above Sisar, of a white blanket of mist laying along the 150 with a slim strip of Sulphur Mountain peaking above it.

Like the walk to the beach, a run at my doorstep is important to me. The mediation of a drive besmirches the primal experience of getting on my toes and trotting into the wild. I keep an eye out for snakes, but with the sun barely up and a chill in the air I suspect most reptiles are curled deep under a rock or lurking in a wood pile - like my store of firewood or the detritus of the self-pruning chaparral thickets.

Apercu

Harry Kreisler suggests in his introduction to Talking To Michael Pollan, CounterPunch, May 1-15, 2010, that Pollan writes "about places where the human and natural worlds intersect: agriculture, gardens, drugs and architecture."

Epiphany has been overworked of late, apercu anyone? This is why we read: for glimmers of discernment. And we never know when they'll strike. When they do (strike, that is) bells chime and fireworks flare. Never mind the drugs, my world is centered precisely on the human interaction with the natural world, gardens and architecture. The Wildland/Urban interface is one facet of this interaction; how we buffer our architecture from the wild or the urban (and the sub- and ex- versions of it) with gardens is another.

As Pollan points out, "traditionally in America, if you wanted to explore your relationship to nature, you'd go to the wilderness, you'd do the Thoreau thing, the Emerson thing, the Melville thing". Pollan did the garden thing, his first book was called Second Nature : A Gardener's Education, Atlantic Monthly, New York, 1991. Now I have the opportunity to do the Wildland/urban interface thing. (Of late Pollan has been exploring our relationship with food - and re-aligning the author with the activity - we could call it the Pollan thing).

Much of my exploration of chaparral has to do with developing an appreciation of it such that I do not need to hold it a distance - so that I can literally welcome it into my front (and back) yards. My relationship with the wild has to do with developing an aesthetic appreciation for the apparent wildland chaos such that it makes sense - and is not somehow lacking because it does not adhere precisely to our western precepts of beauty. Properly understood, Southern California wildland can become both a model and a foil for architecture - such that a chaparral building is fire adapted, is miserly with water and takes all of its energy needs from the sun and is aesthetically enhanced by its setting in the brush.

In the English village in which I grew up, and attended primary (grade) school there were the locals, the local grandees, (mostly farmers) and newcomers like my parents who had come to the country after being evacuated from London during the war or who wanted the country life but one where a main train-line to London ensured a reasonable commute to the 'big smoke'. I lived, as I grew to understand, both in a government mandated 'green belt' and a socially desirable 'stockbroker belt'.

The local parish school that sat next to the nineteenth century gothic revival church (once was not enough for the effete etiolations of that sand drip architecture?) conducted an annual wild flower competition. I won three years on the trot (a threepeat, as it would now be called). Scouring first our garden, then hedgerows and verges I would collect, often with my mother and father, a compendious selection of wildflowers with names like foxglove, ragged robin, bluebell, cowslip and jack-in-the-pulpit.

Lady So-and-so would adjudicate; wife to a local Squire this was perhaps, a part of her outreach to the great 'unwashed'. By and large, we were just that, certainly by American standards of hygiene, but to varying degrees. I am not sure if I stank, but there were several coteries of kids at the school who certainly did, with a deep medieval stink that permeated clothes and flesh and radiated from them in a miasmic cloud of rot. Opportunities to bathe were constrained by limited supplies of hot water, produced solely in our house and many others, by a back-boiler, a tank located behind the firebrick of a coal burning fire-place. We of course, lived in a modern house by the standards of the day - many of my classmate's only source of hot water was the kettle.

It was coal that contributed to the great London Smogs of the 1950's. My aunt who spent her entire working life in the City, died a decade ago from lung-cancer which was probably a result of breathing that noxious atmosphere.Those of less robust constitution succumbed in the streets leading the tabloids to screech, 'Killer Smog!'. It was to London's great book store of the time, Foyle's that I would sometimes repair with my book token - the prize awarded for the best collection (and the most named) wildflowers, and these visits to the City are marked in my memory by the blackness of it all - only in the last two or three decades has a vigorous program of cleaning resulted in the Portland stone of the great eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century facades glowing in the watery sunlight again.

All of this is prelude to the recollection of an amble down Bear Canyon last weekend (after a scramble up Bear Creek) as a peak wildflower experience. After the verdant monochrome of the creek, all mugwort, blackberry, poison oak and berried ceonothus overhanging and above, sycamore, big leaf maples, oak and california bay the parallel path just to the east featured great drifts of chalky blue Yerba Santa (Eriodyctilon crassifolium), Blue Larkspur (Delphinium parryi), Foothill Penstemon (Penstemon heterophyllus), Prickly Phlox (Leptodactylon californicum), Purple Clarkia (Clarkia purperea), mauve Perezia (Acourtia microcephala), creamy Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) and the brilliant yellow of Buck Wheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum). With such a painterly palette underfoot and the vestiges of a path (maintained solely, I think, by my infrequent trampling) it is easy, as one human intersects with the natural world, to fall in love with the California wildland.

The Scythians

I have been weed-wacking in the back 27. The 'weed-wacker' is known in England as a Strimmer, a contraction of String Trimmer. S'truth. If personified, strimmer is a word that would wear a navy blazer with heraldically embossed brass buttons and cavalry twill slacks (trousers). Come the Revolution, this mode of dress will trigger, so to speak, under the newly minted Terms of Engagement, both Section 4 subsection (ii) para.(c) "Shoot at will" and 4,(iv)(f) "Do not attempt to take alive".

In Australia they call the implement a 'whipper snipper' which has a sort of droll charm. I have been wielding the weed wacker (an American locution of startling clarity) through fields of thistles - in an act of atavistic regression - like a scythe. Describing a shallow arc, forward and back, the machine cuts on both strokes unlike the traditional reaper. Our quarter acre in England, farmland until the house was built in 1952, was for many years after we moved in, tall grasses and weeds until the neighbors, busy cultivating their crops, demanded that we limit the blizzard of weed seed that drifted across their carefully tended gardens. My father decided that the scythe was an appropriately bucolic implement with which to tame our prairie.

At some point I was instructed in its use although, vertically challenged by my young age, I was never a match for its steely lethality. This Scythian idyll lasted a few seasons and then in a radical volte-face my father was the first on our street to purchase a power rotary mower. A Villiers two-stroke drove the steel disc with sub-tended free swinging blades at the perimeter which was housed in a cast-metal shroud luridly painted in red and silver. This machine not only cut grass but over the years of its use flattened out bumps, propelled flint and sandstone into the neighbors yard and chewed remnant barbed wire, ancient rusty horse shoes and other agricultural detritus into a fine mulch. I learnt, during my years as its chief operator, everything there is to know about blowing out fuel lines and cleaning fouled spark plugs. I retain a fondness for two-strokes although the little motor that powers the weed-wacker is distinctly lacking in personality (and for that I am grateful).

In an earlier piece (A Note From Joan,  2010 01-18) I noted that,

'In the seclusion of this kind of rural life – where the nearest neighbors are coyotes, rattle snakes, spiders, quail and hawks –the home has a particularly intimate connection to its inhabitants. It is the first and last line of defense against the rigors of the wild environment – there is no sheltering community of similar buildings as in a suburb, no carapace of urban environment as in a town, not even the protection of surrounding yards, fields and out-buildings as in a farm.'

A garden usually represents a zone of civilization around a house. Historically, gardens have functioned as a buffer between the wild and the domestic. We have made the decision to forgo even that transition. We bump up against the wild.

And yet, recently when talking to Lorrie about our plans for the property I surprised myself by saying, "Of course, I want a beautiful garden". What's that all about? I think I have finally internalized the notion that with selective pruning and clearing of the chaparral as it edges towards the house it can have many of the elements of a traditional garden in terms of color, scale, texture and massing. While I have held fast to the intellectual idea of living in a purely native environment it has been Lorrie's insistence that we 'shape and select' that finally has me realizing that the chaparral can be, to some extent, domesticated.

Around the time the scythe was developed by the Scythians (for harvesting hemp), Cyrus the Great was building his palace garden at Pasargadae just north of Shiraz in Iran. The scythe was eventually adopted by the Europeans in the 12th and 13th centuries. Medieval gardens of that time may have been directly influenced by elements in Cyrus' garden which included a geometric plan, stone watercourses, water rills, shade-giving pavilions and groves of cypress, pomegranate and cherry underplanted with lilies and roses. The Persian garden tradition began with Cyrus in 550 B.C. and was born as a retreat from the harsh Persian landscape. This idea of creating a paradisical haven from the encroaching wildlands is an essential aspect of all subsequent garden design.

We have created a built context for our garden: the house, the geometric gravel surround, the gravel pool terrace and the sculptural element of the pool (see New Moon 2010-04-21).The non-native plant material encroaches Triffid-like. We wack at it with swingeing delight.

Class of 2010

On Saturday May 29, 2010 Besant Hill School of Happy Valley held its Commencement. On Memorial Day we attended a barbecue lunch at one of the Pierpoint cottages in the East End that was the home for many years of Guido Ferrando, one of the three founders (along with Krishnamurti and Aldous Huxley) of the school. Our son Griffin is in the class of 2010.

Happy Valley is 500 acres of prime Upper Ojai real estate and was identified in 1927 by Annie Besant as the "setting for the New Civilization in America" quoted in The Story of Happy Valley, Radha Rajagopal Sloss, The Happy Valley Foundation, 1998. This 'New Civilization' was to be founded by a community under the guidance of the World Teacher who she had already identified as Krishnamurti and who was a part of the entourage that made the muddy journey up the grade to the Tucker walnut farm. In the event, K (as he was known to his acolytes) had other ideas.

Annie Besant was what we would now call an activist. Originally a Fabian Socialist and friend of George Bernard Shaw, she came under the influence of H.P. (Madame) Blavatsky a Russian noblewoman who claimed to have infiltrated the secrets of Tibetan Bhuddhism and who in 1878, became the first Russian woman to be granted U.S. citizenship. HPB (as her adepts called her), was a spiritualist, mystic, voyager on the astral plane and the co-founder (along with Colonel Olcott, an American military officer) of the Theosophical Society. Annie joined the Society in 1889 and by 1908 was its leader.

This Society was already well established in Ojai at the Krotona Institute, when Annie Besant arrived to shop real estate. The original purchase of the 300 acre walnut farm was augmented over the next 20 years with a further 200 acres and in 1946, Happy Valley School was opened - as a manifestation of the special purpose with which the land had originally been imbued by Annie Besant, who had died in India in 1933.

This is a heavy legacy for the class of 2010, but a little ignorance goes a long way and it falls lightly on them.

Traditions hung in the air on this Saturday morning and after the Procession of 25 graduates trooped onto the lawn we were treated to a mystical 'Blessing of the Land'. Madame Blavatsky's spirituality drew from an eclectic range of beliefs including Tartar shamanism, Egyptian hermeticism, the kabbalah, Masonry, Rosicrucianism, Christianity, paganism and Tibetan Buddhism. We were treated to a simple pastiche of native American traditions.

These included tobacco in an abalone shell scattered on the lawn, water from a 'sacred' spring (in a plastic bottle) sprinkled from a hand broom made up of rosemary and lavender and a brief whirring of the bull-roarer, a serrated wood paddle swung around the head of the professional chumash elder, Julie Tumamait.

In her blessing she claimed kinship with the Chumash people going back over 13,000 years. Amateur students of archeology in the audience were aghast (for surely I was not the only one). It is generally accepted that the Chumash have been around for about 7,000 years and the flowering of their culture only occurred about 1000 B.C. Before that, the Oak Grove People of the Milling Stone Horizon (an artifact complex dominated by handstones, millingslabs, and crude stone tools most frequently associated with the early Holocene in Southern California) held sway - these were a people who shared a time and a technology with the makers of the skin scrapers, hand axes and arrow heads that we collected in Surrey (see Stoned 2010-05-28).

The opportunities for intellectual angst were not over. Karen Brown gave the Commencement address and it was a wonderfully funny, poignant and wise speech. While the headmaster, Paul Amadio had lost his notes and was unable to regale us, in his introduction, with her curriculum vitae, I was aware that she worked for an outfit dedicated to the 'greening' of schools. It turns out that Karen is the creative director for The Center for Ecoliteracy 'a leader in the green schooling movement'.

As Kermit reminds us, "it's not easy being green". Glomming ecological awareness onto schools fundamentally dedicated to continuing the untenable approaches of re-invention, creativity and enterprise  is, it seems to me,  merely masking this gnawing cancer that infects our education system.

Progress, growth and improvement are the benchmarks of our societal aims for the education of our children. These values are inherently un-green - they run counter to the basic life processes that are in fact recursive, slow to change (or evolve) and conservative of energy, effort and enterprise. Our liberal education model could not have been designed more perfectly to ensure the continued and potentially fatal friction between the planet and its people.

The fact is that traditional societies with deeply conservative values passed on from generation to generation do a lot better job of living in harmony with the planet than those where an education model places an emphasis on creativity, invention and, above all, originality. These characteristics have for the last 600 hundred years, and at an increased pace since the Enlightenment, vastly increased our energy footprint and effectively doomed our co-existence with the earth.

It happened first in that primeval solar energy sink, the forest. Robert Pogue Harrison writes in Forest, University of Chicago, 1992 that Descartes notion of mastery and possession of nature through the scientific method led directly to the "rise of forest management during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...where forests are apprehended in terms of wood volume ..and resource management". In other words a multi-valent wilderness that was sanctuary to some, offered hunting and grazing lands for others and constituted a parallel world of spirits and totems to all was traded for an energy and construction resource that existed as an appendix to the City.

In searching for a time when Americans used energy at a sustainable rate Saul Griffith (see Cosmic Futility 2010-05-24) found that even in 1800, we were burning New England forests at a rate double the energy use of the average global citizen in 2010. That average reflects excessive energy use, broadly, by the North leavened in the South by societies untainted by notions of liberal democracy and where tradition has helped maintain a balance between people and environment.

Notions of originality run directly counter to the values inherent in most traditional societies. There, people have found ways to live in balance by refining a basic societal construct over many hundreds of years or, millennia. New ideas threaten this balance and even when adopted, are required to stand the test of time (which is often thought of as exhibiting a recursive or circular character rather than the cartesian linearity with which we are familiar).

Teaching our children to think creatively is what got us into this mess. We are forever prisoners of our planet. We need to look to life processes to understand the limits of innovation. Organizations such as The Center for Ecoliteracy are enormously adept at applying (green) lipstick to the pig and as such are a hinderance to initiating the essential debate:  what should be the fundamental nature of education in societies that have been spinning out of control for over half a millennium?

Stoned

I grew up with an appreciation for stone. It didn't happen because we lived in a stone house or because there were great rocks scattered on the landscape (as there are in Upper Ojai). It happened because my father would return from digging in the garden on the weekends (for many years we grew almost all our own vegetables) with shards of flint that he told us were stone-age skin scrapers. We lived in a part of the world, southern England, where early man had begun his precarious existence some half a million years ago surrounded by mega-fauna. There was a lot of skin to scrape.

By the time I was a teen, we had quite a collection of scrapers, arrow heads and hand axes most of which, since they were retrieved at spade depth - say 12"-18" - were probably from the Mesolithic period (around 10,000 to 5500 years ago) at the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the Holocene era.

Beyond this subterranean storehouse of stone-age tools, and at quite another scale, Britain has a treasure of megalithic monuments. I was fortunate to visit Stonehenge when it was still surrounded by farm-land and you could stop the car on the A344 and wander down the slope to the derilict monument and leave greasy fingerprints on the stones. Now it seems it has been privatized, and the experience is distinctly less 'hands-on' and more theme park - it has been co-opted by Britain's Heritage Industry where the authentic has given way to the branded. In the mid sixties, you could stop at villages built amidst stone circles, such as Avebury in Wiltshire, and drink at a pub while considering the wonders of neolithic construction.

These circles and henges along with barrows (tumuli or burial mounds), mounds, cairns and standing stone alignments are a part of Europe's shamanic landscape. I have already mentioned something of the Chumash spiritual geography (which includes, at least, Mount Pinos, the Painted Rock in Carrizo Plain, and the Channel Islands off of Ventura). The skein of connections that linked these and (presumably) so many other places in the Chumash world were both prosaic trade routes and spirit paths - something akin perhaps to the European notion, developed by the antiquarian and amateur archeologist Alfred Watkins (1855-1935), of ley lines.

Ley lines are straight lines between spiritual 'hot-spots' marked by stone alignments and many are undoubtedly spurious. However, the standing stones (menhirs) at Carnac in northern France, in a variety of linear alignments stretching thousands of meters, bear material witness to the power of Neolithic geometries. The Chumash paid similar obeisance to the straight line; their trade routes and trails were invariably linear, eschewing the topographical convenience of switch-backs and the like. In this they reflected the Roman roads that marched through Europe with a singular focus on the flight path of the crow, and the supposed preferences of spirits who are universally perceived as traveling in straight lines. In Chinese feng-shui landscape divination, homes and ancestral tombs had to be protected from straight roads or other linear landscape features because troublesome spirits travelled along them and would bring bad luck.

By contrast, the intimate geographies of the entranced Chumash mind laid out in cave paintings - notably at the Painted Cave east of Goleta and the Painted Rocks on the Carrizo Plain - are webbed in sinuous lines resolved into an echo of the shamans's vision.

A contemporary artist referencing both the cairns and alignments of neolithic megaliths is Andy Goldsworth and he, arguably, materializes his own 'intimate geographies' in his smaller works with twigs, bark, grasses and reeds. His fascination with stone is evidenced in his egg-like cairns as well as his work with english wallers who traditionally, have crafted dry-stone walls and folds (or pens) but under Andy's direction juxtapose their native craft with the artist's environmental insertions - tree branches trapped in walls for instance, or a boulder (or cairn) corralled within a stone fold. This art depends on an availability of local stone and craftsmen to stack it. Both are in ample supply in England's northern sheep country.

Martha's Vineyard, that miraculous island of unique climate and bio-diversity, is also home to a dry-stack stone wall tradition and on a recent visit Lorrie and I became captivated by a particular technique called lace walls where holes exist in the fabric of the wall to allow the atlantic gales to blow through and thus reduce the lateral pressure on the structures.

We had over 200 tons of rocks stockpiled on the west meadow after completion of grading for our new house. Most were between refrigerator and microwave size and they were eventually carted away for road building. Left scattered around the building site were the larger car and SUV sized boulders, unearthed but too large to move very far. We spent a day directing the operator of a CAT 320D placing the stones on the ravaged site. His skill was superlative and he manoeuvered his machine and the rocks as though he was sailing a namesake piece of equipment, the Hobie Cat - the excavator up on one track and the rock hanging out as counterbalance in the bucket. Now his work has mostly disappeared under burgeoning chaparral, flush from a wet winter but the largest of the rocks, removed from the swimming pool site was placed under an oak that sits to the south of the house. Morning glory (Calystegia macrostegia) is starting to vine over it but its buttery yellow sandstone is still prominent and it is now a grave marker too, for our dog Derek who was buried in front of it some 6 months ago.

We considered building dry-stack walls, and in one scheme the west meadow was to be divided up into several folds for fruit trees, a vegetable garden and firewood. As we discovered, over our first year, the scale of the project we had already undertaken - the restoration of chaparral and the creation of areas of native meadow over those acres of the site that had been most impacted and disturbed by the grading - it became clear that we did not have the energy (or money) to pursue large scale dry-stack wall building. It may have been, as they say, a missed opportunity but the empty raised bed at the east end of the house is a salutary reminder of our limited resources.

In any case, there are a variety of traditions in the dry stacking of stone. How to choose? There are certainly Mexican and Italian masons locally and almost certainly British or Irish wallers who were the first to bring the craft to the United States. Now we have an amazing example of the Japanese tradition close by in Ventura. The Awatas, father and son, 14th and 15th generation masons were invited, with their Japanese team, to lead in the design and construction of two ramparts set beside a stairway in Serra Cross Park overlooking the Pacific. Along with local support crews they completed the work earlier this year, which used 300 tons of local stone, in nine days.

Garfield Smith kindly forwarded me a video, Stone on Stone (in process) for which his sister Sharon provided the music, that documents the building process. Local wallers customarily select rocks with at least two flat planes and their wall building involves a minimum of cutting and splitting. The Japanese team employ a more sophisticated technique which appears to rely completely on rock splitting and chiseling and yet the finished inclined planes of the ramparts seem like an entirely natural agglomeration of rocks. Those familiar with the culture will recognize this intense investment of effort in mimicking nature as typically Japanese.

Both forward facing walls of the ramparts as they project from the slope are anchored by 'hero stones' - particularly large specimens (refrigerator to small car) that traditionally demonstrate the resources of the community who have built the fortification. We have a few such stones scattered around the site awaiting their call to heroism. Such enoblement requires an availability of disposable resources. We are currently fully invested expressing our braggadocio through brush clearance.

Cosmic Futility

Like some contraption from the steam punk genre the internet runs on coal. It's obvious really, but I had never quite internalized this basic truth with regards to our now ubiquitous interactive media machine. By all accounts the internet consumes more power, globally, than air traffic. As we all know, most electricity is created using coal.

Australia, a land of waving fields of grain and snow white sheep gamboling in grassy fields (discounting, of course, the red desert heart) when I lived there in the 1970's, is now the world's leading exporter of high-sulphur (i.e very dirty) coal. Newcastle, north of Sydney is home to the largest coal exporting facility in the world. The Hunter Valley has been ravaged by strip and pit mining. As I noted in The Planetary Mind, posted 2010-02-04 a new word, Solastalgia, has been coined to describe the psychological trauma of the local population that has seen its neighborhood transformed from verdant valleys to dark satanic mines within the span of a generation.

As Peter Maass suggests in his Crude World - The Violent Twilight of Oil, Knopf, New York, 2009, we are going to keep on grubbing for fossil fuels for as long as they remain the high density/low cost energy source. Google has committed to an initiative called Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal. One way to achieve this is to find a way to include pollution costs in the price of fossil fuels; Carbon Credits anyone?

More likely we will continue to plunder the earth until every last drop of oil, chunk of coal and fart of gas has been extracted from it in the time-honored tradition of the Easter Islanders who, after a thousand years on their island finally cut down the last tree in the early 17th century and then realized that the newly carved giant stone head and torso statues, which were literally the cultural bed-rock of their society, were forever marooned in the quarry at Rano Raraku - for tree trunk rollers were the only means of moving them.

Clive Ponting begins his A Green History of the World, Penguin, New York, 1993 with a chapter headed 'The Lesson of Easter Island'. I used this book beginning in 1996 as a core text for the tenth grade world history class at Oak Grove School in Meiners Oaks. Perhaps my students internalized the lesson, but there is absolutely no indication that current world leaders, captains of industry and the vast majority of consumers consider their fate to be twinned with the Easter Islanders, whose society went into a rapid decline and regressed to profoundly primitive conditions after the total deforestation of their land. Ponting writes,

"Without trees, and so without canoes, the islanders were trapped in their remote home, unable to escape the consequences of their self-inflicted environmental collapse."

(I now volunteer with UCLA's Rock Art Archive which is headed up by Jo Anne Van Tilburg who has, for over twenty years, been documenting the Rano Raraku statues.)

Well, perhaps those in the Transition movement have internalized the message, but they are at our society's ragged fringe and are unlikely to be effective in changing the energy calculus. More promising perhaps, are those like Google, who are attempting to change the paradigm from within the mainstream.

Nomi Morris who reviewed the Gulf Oil Disaster as part of her "Behind the Headlines" series at Theater 150 (May 10, 2010) asked the small audience whether they thought the oil spill signaled the beginning of the end for oil - more likely, it seems to me (as it did to Churchill in different circumstances), "Now this is not the end. ... But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." In any case, the spill has fallen off the news cycle and only a secondary catastrophe can ensure its re-instatement in the public eye. Effectively, we have re-calibrated the bottom line of the disaster meter from the Exxon Valdez' 11,000,000 gallon spill upwards...well who knows...perhaps ten-fold into the 100 million gallon range. The spill itself edged the 29 dead West Virginia coal miners off the front pages so many weeks ago and, more immediately, eclipsed the tragedy of the 11 incinerated oil workers on Transocean's Deepwater Horizon rig.

We have entered the era of deeper, dirtier and more desparate drilling that will forestall Peak Oil and plunge us into the 'violent twilight' of fossil fuels where coal becomes king and reckless mining, open pits, flattened mountains and scarred landscapes are tolerated in the maintenance of our cheap energy addiction. As long as growth is required for economic stability we are doomed to repeat the experience of Rapa Nui.

Alternative energy sources come with their own environmental baggage. Saul Griffith who was born in Sydney in 1974, and is the subject of a New Yorker piece, The Inventor's Dilemma by David Owen, May 17, 2010 estimates that we currently consume electricity at a more or less constant rate of sixteen terrawatts: capping green house gases such that we would limit global warming to a further rise of 2 degrees celsius would require that 13 of those 16 terrawatts be produced by clean, renewable power. Doing that would require the production, Griffith estimates, of:

"100 sq. meters of pv's; 50 sq. meters of solar-thermal reflectors, and one Olympic swimming pool of engineered algae (for biofuels) every second for the next twenty five years; one 300 foot diameter wind turbine every five minutes; one 100 megawatt geothermal plant every eight hours and one three gigawatt nuclear plant every week."

Ain't going to happen. Sierra magazine May/June 2010 reports that there are proposals for 52 solar power plants in the Mojave generating 39,000 megawatts. Each megawatt requires between 5 and 14 acres of cleared desert - say 390,000 acres. Diane Feinstein has already introduced legislation attempting to protect a million Mojave desert acres. Biofuels can use engineered algae, but a more attractive solution for loggers under the long awaited Kerry-Lieberman energy bill known as The America Power Act is to burn wood for commercial biomass electrical generation. I suppose there's a certain symmetry to clear-cutting forests for 'Green' power which can then be used to graze the farm animals required to provide the nitrogen for our organic food production (see Back-Yard Romance posted 2010-05-13).

Wind farms are inherently controversial generating fierce NIMBY reactions from even the most staunch environmentalists. We considered a wind turbine on our property (they're cheaper than PV) but were discouraged by the prospect of avian carnage. Let's not even talk about nuclear.

There really isn't a clean, scalable renewable energy alternative given our massive addiction to electricity fueled by the earth's diminishing underground store of solar energy.

Depressed? You could try sending one less e-mail tomorrow, but the futility of such a gesture is almost cosmic in magnitude.

Wedding Weeds

The weekend was fine and sunny. We were swimming, Margot was swimming and probably the Cornwell's were swimming. But as the week begins, we've had two days of intense fog drip and the occasional shower. There are puddles along the Sisar Trail beneath overhanging oaks that condense the mist.

The chaparral around the house is at its most stunningly beautiful. The bunch grasses are rimed with moisture; the deer weed, now blooming, is bent down with the weight of the dew and the oaks are green-black against the leaden sky. It's a good week for weeding.

My focus has been on mustard (Brassica species) which has re-colonized areas behind the garage and thistles (Cirsium species) which spring up wherever there is disturbed ground.

The Italian thistle (Carduus pyncocephalus), right at the moment is a beautiful thing, tall and slender, it would not be out of place on Ipenema, (but, it must be said, it is a little prickly in disposition). Crowned by a deep purple and silky soft tuft it is the belle of the ball: but die it must and there are a variety of means at one's disposal.

Its primary, and perhaps only flaw is its alien status. I would be willing to forgive its thorny nature - after all we give poison oak a pass - but as a seed stowaway aboard some (probably many) transatlantic clipper(s), secreted in straw bales or in animal feed, in clothing or in baggage it is part of a broad homogenization of the world's plants whereby the hardiest of them build a global empire of weed patches each identical to the other like a chain of vegetal McDonalds. I am committed, on my little acreage, to forstall such an occurance.

I was out weed wacking on Sunday, thistling while I worked - hitting the kill switch on the weed wacker occasionally and venturing forth to eradicate some thistles. Smaller ones can be pulled out of the ground directly with little resistance. Larger specimens require pulaskying - sometimes a series of wacks to the base of the stalk or just beneath the surface of the soil to sever the trunk. The wilier plants take advantage of the moisture that drips down a rock and wedge themselves into a lithic crevice. Here the axe side of the pulasky comes in handy and the adjacent rock becomes the strike against which the stalk is cut. The weed wacker itself is of some use for the more tender thistles. Earlier in the season I tried spraying them in particularly rocky areas with Round Up. It is hard to judge my success because it was not total.There they now are, wedged in amongst the rocks gaining territory in what at first blush seems like the least propitious of circumstances.

I spoke with Lorenz this morning and he views the rain as a beneficence (his word). He told me that he had recently observed a gopher snake backing up into its hole in the ground. Yes, snakes can slither backwards! Reconnoitering before starting work recently, I saw a Wandering Garter snake (Thamnophis elegans vagrans) in the clover meadow, beautiful in its tightly checkered green, yellow and silver skin.

Apart from mentioning our individual neighbors, and Lorenz who is Margot's estate manager, I have yet to post anything specifically about community. I haven't been avoiding that arena but truth to tell we haven't had a barn raisin' in these parts for a while. But what we did have on Saturday, while the weather was more seasonal, was a wedding.

Although not specifically an Upper Ojai event, (it was held at Libbey Bowl with a reception at the beautiful east end estate of Tom and Cathryn Krause) there were significant contributions from the upper valley community most notably Valerie Levett, who was a producer of the event and maid of honor and John Perry who sang at the reception; we were present and made a contribution to the cake, and Kit Stolz was on clean-up duty at the Bowl - a duty I imagine he was allocated in a spirit of reverse nepotism (he's married to Val, the producer).

Now in the normal course of events weddings require planners not producers, but this was no ordinary wedding: it was a full blown semi-autobiographical wedding musical with a theatrically trained Universal-Life minister who sprinkled fairy dust whenever the 'plot' needed a little juice and a talking dog as interlocutor. There were visits too, from Hermes, a mongol horde and dancing jello bowls (don't ask...). In any event the deed was done in hugely entertaining fashion.

It was, as almost all weddings are, an affecting experience; and having my emotions tugged at by the bride and groom (Deb and Chris of Theater 150) and their perilous progress towards true romance, I was perhaps in a vulnerable condition when the minister made the appropriate reference to the Great State of California under whose aegis the marriage was formally sanctioned - in any event, my heart was filled to choking with the pride, joy and thankfulness of living in this remarkable part of the world (thistles notwithstanding).

Back-Yard Romance

If you read Wordsworth's dirge, The Leech Gatherer linked in my last piece, you will know that it is pedestrian drivel enlivened only by the last two lines, which are a tribute to the Leech-Gatherer's stoicism in the face of very limited means (and would seem to apply equally well to my Sage-Gatherer). But it is sometimes salutary to read the Romantics: heaven knows, I'm still mining the vein!

Growing your own food (in 21st. century America) is a Romantic endeavor. The yearning for the simple life is understandable, but it's actually (wouldn't you know) quite complicated.

There's every reason to 'grow your own' in Upper Ojai. I visited a neighbor recently who had reclaimed some bottom land on his property on the flood plain of the Sisar Creek as it wends down the 150 to join the Santa Paula Creek and he had laid out perhaps 1000 square feet of vegetables. It was fully irrigated and clearly very productive. There is a good sized vegetable patch at Happy Valley where some of the produce is provided to the school in lieu of land rent and otherwise is operated as a csa (community supported agriculture). Margot inherited a wonderful orchard on her property where she has oranges, lemons, grapefruit and avocado; these she plans to irrigate with roof run-off via underground storage cisterns. The lay of the land is such that a gravity drip feed is feasible.

We were early adopters of the csa concept, as consumers, signing up in Los Angeles twenty years ago. This was a bio-dynamic csa and we joined because of our association with Highland Hall, a Rudolph Steiner 'Waldorf' school in the San Fernando valley. Steiner's Romanticism was of the German persuasion - he was fundamentally reactionary; his development of the bio-dynamic protocol represented a return to medieval agricultural practices and certainly the wizened rutabagas and wormy parsnips we received from the csa provided a vivid window into the gruelling subsistence of the middle ages.

More successful was and continues to be, the garden at Findhorn where direct communication with the vegetable fairies or devas along with herculean efforts at soil building have resulted in famously prolific crops. I am reminded now that the farmer at Happy Valley uses some elements of the bio-dynamic principles in the gardens at Happy Valley - at least to the point of sprinkling ground stag's horn onto the vegetable beds. The addition of animal products to the soil, in the form of manure or bone meal, gets to the heart of the organic dilemma, whether practiced in your back yard or commercially.

Organic farming, if it were to exclusively feed the world, would require both a massive die-off in the human population and a massive breeding program of farm animals to provide fertilizer. The global population has outstripped the ability of the planet to support organic-only food production.

I grew up in a small village in the south of England that was surrounded, like most of its kind, by farmland or where the soil had historically been poor, by what we called 'common' - it was just that, public land that may have served earlier as rough grazing. Much of the farmland immediately around the heart of the village belonged to a farmer who practiced market gardening - large scale growing of vegetables and flowers which he shipped by train to Covent Garden, the great produce market in London.

He believed that tractors over-compacted the soil so he retained, right through the early 1960's, a stable of shire horses that assisted in the field work; I remember their stately progress through the streets as they moved from one section of the farm to another, towering over me and seeming altogether more interesting than the motley selection of post-war english cars in the traffic parade that they led. When his sons took over, much of the operation was sold as a golf course (on the land where I had picked daffodils for 2 shillings an hour during my school's Easter Holiday) and more was developed for housing. We can all be grateful that by the time I was driving my father's car (an Austin A-40 and later a Morris 1100) through the village at break-neck speeds the streets were no longer encumbered by these elephantine animals.

Removing the internal combustion engine from the farm has a beneficial impact beyond providing ad-hoc fertilizer and retaining a friable soil. Anyone who has dropped down into the central valley from the grapevine will be familiar with the pall of smog that hangs over California's vast 'market garden' - much of it produced by farm machinery. But the efficiencies of GPS guided, auto steer tractors and laser leveled fields (using grading machinery) to prevent irrigation run-off, are a part of what ensures bountiful and cheap food.

Were all of America's croplands to go organic there would need to be a five-fold increase in cattle to provide the current levels of nitrogen fertilizer. Their grazing lands would consume much of the available land in the United States resulting in massive deforestation. In California, the impact would entirely eclipse the introduction of Iberian cattle in the eighteenth century. If Europe tried to feed itself organically most of the remaining forests in north west Europe would disappear. Now, introducing Clydesdales as the prime movers for agricultural machinery would make a small dent in the nitrogen requirements, but they too need pasture or hay.

While Ojai's horse population probably ensures an adequate supply of manure in the short term for those of us who organically grow at least some of our own food, the longer term back-yard solution is to run chickens and perhaps a goat or two to create something resembling a closed system.

An organic garden is a wonderful and Romantic goal. It is not however, going to save the world. As Robert Paarlberg points out in 'Attention Whole Foods Shoppers', Foreign Policy, May/June 2010 "..the mantra that sustainable food....must be organic local and slow...doesn't work. Africa already has such a system....and one person in three is malnourished".

We have got as far as creating a 4' x 16' concrete block raised bed (empty) with a hardware cloth gopher screen at the bottom. I am currently fully engaged in trying to meet the County Fire Department's brush clearance requirements. Once the weed wacking, grubbing and raking abates I will turn my attention to Laurel Sumac control. Then I will begin the soil building exercise....perhaps around early July. Meanwhile, I guess, we'll keep buying the cheap and bountiful food available at our local (not always organic) markets.

The Sage-Gatherer

We spent a few hours at Bates Beach last Saturday afternoon. This is the beach to the north of Rincon Point and the site of the old chumash village Shuku, renamed La Rinconada by the Spanish. Sometime early in the fall of 1775, a group of 240 soldiers, priests and settlers led by Juan Batista de Anza stopped for the night at the bluff overlooking the beach.

Last week on the way back from LA I was settling in for the drive from Trancas home when I saw a hitchhiker sitting by the road with a Peruvian chullo style knitted cap, one arm draped over a sizable pack, and the other, from elbow to thumb in fixed position jutting northward. It was an intriguing tableaux (as I flashed by) and a few seconds of thought later I pulled my Audi down to a speed at which it was plausible to do a 'u' turn (a brief glimpse of Broadbeach below) and returned to the light at Trancas Canyon Road where, with a second 'u' turn I was able to pull up just beyond the crouching form. I exited the car and she ( for it was now apparent that it was a women) stood up and shouldered her pack. She wore a hand-knit sweater and a much patched long dark skirt. Her face beneath the knit cap was deeply weather beaten and she grabbed for a stuffed brown paper grocery bag with the boney, sun-damaged hand of a field worker. Together we got the pack into the trunk and then, still clutching the paper bag she settled into the front seat.

Her name was Kim (yes, I was hoping for something less relentlessly suburban - a trail name perhaps) and she was 50 years old and had been on the road for ten years. At forty she was probably attractive, her ten years on the road had cost her her looks but she had, somewhat prematurely, achieved the clear eyed mien of wisdom that is associated with post-menopausal woman of spiritual disposition.

The setting was hardly a lonely moor but past Trancas development does thin out: thus it was that Wordsworth's quizzing of the old leech gatherer (The Leech-Gatherer or, Resolution and Independence, 1800) came to mind and I uttered some contemporary version of,

'How is it that you live, and what is it you do?'

She, it turned out, was a sage-gatherer and had a number of sage smudge sticks in her paper bag left over from a day's selling along the beaches of Point Dume and Zuma. It had been a good day. She told me that she sold them by donation but that people usually gave her between ten and twenty dollars apiece. She gave me an eloquent description of the benefits of sage smoke which more or less agreed with Jan Timbrook's note that "inhaling the smoke and allowing it to waft over the body....promote spiritual balance and harmony". Kim's take was that the smoke impacted a person's aura tuning it for greater harmonic resonance with the universe.

She had recently returned from Las Cruces - a long hard trip that, she said, involved lots of walking and hunger. She knew people there. The round-trip took over two months. She was headed for County Line where she planned to spend the night. At her request I dropped her off just past Neptune's Net right across from the chumash site on the bluff overlooking the surf break. This is a flat perch above the waves where I often stopped, during my surfing days, to check conditions and I imagined Kim settling down for the night on her bed-roll, lulled to sleep by the rhythm of the surf.

From Las Cruces, on the Camino Real from Mexico City to Sante Fe (established in the late sixteenth century), she may have returned to Los Angeles along interstate ten (begun in 1956) to Tucson and then she will have followed, more or less,the Juan Batista de Anza trail which passes by County Line and Rincon on the way to San Francisco. The de Anza expedition represented the first concerted effort by the Spanish to settle Northern California.

Will, our older son is with us for a week or so from New York and so a beach visit seemed in order. I know the local beaches primarily from a surfing perspective and have an affection for Emma Woods partly because of the winter waves, partly because of the approach (a scramble down the hill from the parking spot perched above the break, across the railway lines and then across the sand) partly because it is flat-out the closest beach to Ojai and partly because the waves at the north end feel as though they are almost underneath the 101 overpass. But it has its limitations as a family beach destination so we drove up the 150 took one exit south on the 101 and ended up at Bates Beach. It was a 50 minute drive and this protracted schlepp is one small price that is paid by those of us who live in Upper Ojai. We returned on the 101 south then ducked onto the 33, took Creek Road to Montgomery and then the 150 home. It was no shorter but 101 south has the virtue of being sometimes thrillingly close to the ocean.

Will and I swam and caught a couple of waves. We saw dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) playing and feeding and brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) dropping out of the sky to dive for fish. We took a run along the beach to warm up after our dip. We had done much the same at Will Rogers Beach in Santa Monica Canyon many many times in the 17 years that we lived three blocks from the beach. But this time the Topa Topas awaited our return.

No News

Small underwater asphalt volcanoes have been discovered in the Santa Barbara Channel. They spew oil and tar not unlike the oil seeps along the 150 perhaps, but more focused in their intensity. They are from 50 - 70 feet high. As of this writing, an uncapped off-shore well continues to blow oil, at a depth of around 5000 feet, into the Gulf of Mexico threatening sea-life, fisheries and the beaches of Louisiana. The blow-out is not expected to be capped for several weeks. Governor Schwarznegger has rescinded his approval of new off-shore drilling along the California coast, but Santa Barbara's beaches will continue to be besmirched with oil - there is no plan at present to cap the asphalt volcanoes or remove current drill rigs.

If we are not at the point documented by Peter Maass in his Crude World - The Violent Twilight of Oil, Knopf, New York, 2010, where in the Niger Delta he reports, "We saw pits of burning oil and we saw flames roaring from flares on the ground; the earth was hissing fire," we are never far in Upper Ojai from oil derricks and gas flares; and if Ojai is not yet Ecuador's "mutant panorama of oil fields and gas flares in which crude oozed and burned", Upper Ojai's machinery of oil extraction, storage and distribution is ubiquitous.

For a few days recently, the skies above Ojai were clear of europe-bound jets that fly, almost unnoticed, high above trailing water vapor, carbon dioxide and droplets of un-burnt kerosene.

On Sunday, the air traffic back to its customary pre-volcano volume, we hiked up to the Sulphur Mountain ridge directly across from the Koenigstein property. An Airbus A330 flew high over the Topa Topas while below us a red tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) surfed the thermals. It was a steady climb, much of it under oaks and past banks of lupine (species), coastal wallflower (Erysimum insulare), indian pink (Silene laciniata), heart leaved penstemon (Keckiella cordifolia), wild sweet pea (Lathyrus vestitus) and the invasives spring vetch (Vicia species), mustard (Brassica species), erodium (species) and trifolium (species) and, at intervals, the nodding heads of grasshopper oil pumps. Sometimes alongside the trail were bundles of oil pipe.

We may have wished that Eyjafjallajökull's mate Hekla would blow, prolonging the hiatus in air traffic, but for now the world is back to normal with the negative space above the earth brimming with globe trotters. Everyone of them is effectively destroying whatever other good works they may undertake to reduce their carbon footprints. Will, my elder son, flew back to California from NYC last week. One piece of data that scrolled across his seat back screen was that passengers flying the friendly skies do so at an average of 55 m.p.g. - which works out at about 55 gallons for the 3000 miles or 110 for the round trip. That amount of gas would fuel the family runabout (an Audi A3) for about 2750 miles or a quarter of its annual mileage.

There are other costs to global travel. We catapult ourselves into alien cultures and potentially threatening eco-systems. The results can be bracing and regenerative, merely discombobulating or flat-out catastrophic. It was the latter that confronted a young friend of ours whose girlfriend was killed just last week by a salt water crocodile (Crocodylus porosus) while they were vacationing in the Andaman and Nicobar islands that lie in the sea between Burma and the east coast of India.

The Andaman Sheekha is the local paper that reported the story but despite a web presence the story remains a local one - in the Andamans, New Jersey where the girl's family lives and Los Angeles, home to our friend. News remains local to an extent that few of us, perhaps realize. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is 'front-page' (so to speak), but similar occurrences in Nigeria and Ecuador go unreported. Despite a spate of shark attack stories just preceding the time that Gary Condit was under suspicion of being involved in Chandra Levy's disappearance and a few months before 9-11 the eight or so deaths a year attributable to sharks go mostly unreported, except locally. Similarly, crocodile attacks are not uncommon; by some reports 2,000 people a year are killed by the reptiles, but we hear nothing of them unless they strike someone we know.

News is scalable. A reasonable definition of 'newsworthiness' would reference events that impact the eco-sphere, continents, countries, communities, families and individuals. The focus on politics, celebrity and sport confuses this simple matrix. Ultimately, I believe that the news events I need to know about will have first impacted me in some direct way.

News from Clarissa is that a wild boar (Sus scrofa) is on the loose on Sulphur Mountain. We hiked past the spot where she was confronted by the snorting beast. Her Kangal (the Turkish hunting dog bred to such emergencies) handled the situation. The wild boar is native to North Africa, Europe, Southern Russia, and most of Asia. They were initially introduced to Monterey County in 1924, for hunting. Several years later more were released into the Los Padres National Forest.

Margot reports bear scat on her driveway. We have seen nothing but quail, contrails and western fence lizards (Sceloporus occidentalis). No news is good news.

Sky Bowl

My life in Ojai is made singular by a number of experiences - of people, places and things - but no experience is as critical to my personal Ojai gestalt than the sensation of driving east over the top of the grade down past Dennison Park over the narrow bridge at the left hand corner at the bottom of the slope, past the new gateway to Black Mountain Ranch on the right and, deep breath, into the open arms of Upper Ojai.

There is a counterpoint to this experience driving west and rounding the first bend on the grade and taking in the view of the valley laid out below and the sheltering mountains beyond. It is a majestic vista but it does not elevate my spirits like the big skies of Upper Ojai. Dropping down into the valley I feel the weight of enclosure. Driving into the upper valley I feel the exhileration of cresting a high plateau. Both experiences have to do with the relative containment of space. In both cases the positive landforms create a base for the firmament or negative space above. It is my interaction with that space that seems to be critical to my sense of well being.

After my friend Lorenz Schaller first visited our property he sent me notes of his impressions. He pronounced the meadow rise where we located the house a 'sky-bowl'. In other words, a container for the void. The landforms do generate a sense of the house (and us within it) being held in a vessel or, of being enfolded in the rills, ridges and declivities of the land. But ultimately this landscape, as Lorenz intuited, addresses the sky - the negative space above. He suggested we create a series of water features, in bowls, pots and urns that would reflect the sky.

The British sculptor Rachel Whiteread has long been the queen of negative space, memorializing it in such epochal works as 'Monument' , 'Ghost' and the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna. She makes unoccupied space manifest by casting it in plaster, concrete or resin. The negative is made substantive. Its an old trick, practiced in the death masks of the 15th century; Nolli's figure ground drawings of Rome, and (as Garfield Smith and others have noted) the space beneath Bruce Nauman's chair. But as Janet Goleas writes, " Ok! She's not a nun. I'll admit the whole idiom may be a little over-cooked, but it hasn't yet fallen off the bone."

Lorrie and I visited the Hammer Museum's show of Whiteread's drawings....and the odd resin cast. Her drawings are perfunctory and she was reportedly wary of an exhibit devoted to them. Her chosen medium exists in three dimensions and interestingly her drawings are not flat - she uses white-out extensively to build a crust or topographic layering on them. The drawing description credits 'correcting fluid' as the medium and she calls it by the trade name 'Typex'. (How delightful it is that american english retains an anglo-saxon freshness and uses the blunt 'white-out', compared to the recursive devolution of the mother tongue that prefers 'correcting fluid'.) There was enough sculpture to get a real feel for her work and for her - for this is an intensely personal show that included, for instance, an artfully curated collection of small objects that inspire her.

She came to the world's attention with 'Ghost', the plaster cast of a room interior in 1990 and later cast an entire, about to be demolished, house. Her fascination with architecture as subject gives her an affinity with Gordon Matta-Clarke but he very clearly worked with the vessel not the implied space; she sees in the curve of the hand reaching for the doorknob, a negative of its intended point of contact, something more fascinating than the leaden doorknob itself - he preferred the chain saw.

Her work is an astringent reminder that form has a partner, it can only exist as an intrusion into space like a rock or, both as an intrusion and a container, like a cave. Ojai is a bowl or in local lore, a nest. Upper Ojai is a broad plain, almost a bolson or flat basin floor. We live at the east end of this plain as Koenigstein winds up towards the Topa Topas. Our property is mildly dished, canted to the west, protected to the east and south. Always aware of the spatial impact of land forms, I now imagine casting the sky.

April Showers

Herbaceous borders became popular in the late nineteenth century partly as a reaction against formal beds of annuals that in various forms, had been in favor since the middle ages. Their apotheosis appears in the work of Gertrude Jekyll who, although half blind, had an intensely painterly approach to these plantings . The appeal of her work has helped ensure that, along with the mixed border (that includes shrubs along with perennials), it has continued as a dominant trope in garden design.

In the Surrey of my youth, herbaceous borders were certainly popular amongst the gentry - set against, perhaps, drifts of exotic rhododendrons and other woodland plantings. Often, another feature of note in these gardens was the rockery. This was an aggregation of rocks (or, at a pinch, broken concrete) inter-planted with succulents, alpine plants or heaths.

These two major thematic elements in the upper-middle class mid-twentieth century English garden canon, along with the more recent trend popularized by Piet Oudolf of the perennial meadow , and a swath of gravel (which arguably has its roots in the french parterre tradition), define the formal composition of our chaparral garden. Much of this has occurred without deliberate intention. At work is the miasmic zeitgeist and the happenstance of the site.

Last weekend we visited the garden of our neighbors Stephen and Clarissa Cornwell. Clarissa is responsible for the perennial borders of irises, lavendars, echium and sages. Here too are gravel terraces, lawn, rock walls and I suspect, somewhere a rockery. There is even a folly - the slab and foundation of a burnt-out house which has been artfully transformed into a terrace. This recent ruin has been imbued with an almost classical grace. Aeonium, kalanchoe, aloe and agave flourish in west facing beds. Beyond the garden to the south a tangle of oaks rises up to Sulphur Mountain ridge. To the north, majestic views of the Topa Topas, the foothills and valley and to the east Santa Paula Peak frame the predominantly blue and blue/grey plantings.

The horticultural conditions of our respective gardens are fundamentally different. The south facing slope of the Upper Ojai valley is drier, vegetated with chaparral and coastal sage brush while oak meadowland flourishes on the damper and cooler north facing slope. Rocks from the pre-historic spalling of the Topa Topas litter the south facing slope but, defeated by gravity, they populate only the lowest reaches of the north slope now splashed with oil seeps.

The siting of our respective houses means that we enjoy views to the south, north and west, with limited vistas to the east; their views are similarly expansive but are restricted to the west. Our houses face one another across the valley more or less at the same elevation and equadistant from the 150 which snakes through the valley floor alongside the creek.

Clarissa has embraced mediterranean and English plantings, along with a broad range of succulents while we have eschewed all non-natives, but both gardens draw from the same well of formal traditions. The structure of our garden has only slowly begun to emerge and it has been in a week of damp weeding afternoons that I have begun to fully appreciate its bones.

There are to my mind, five salient features: the tilted plain or front lawn; the spine to the west that is developing as both a mixed border and a rockery; the bowl to the north; the gravel pool terrace and the rocky clumping of oaks just above the north east corner of the house which was the anchor for the original siting of the house.

All these elements have been shaped by the underlying topography and successive waves of grading that have spanned the last decade. Rocks have been piled at the margins and now the spine that runs north south between the east and west meadows is a tumble of large rocks - and it is on the east facing slope of this feature that we have, by virtue of cutting back the rampant chaparral hard last spring, something resembling a mixed border with perennial flowers like phacelia (Phacelia douglasii?), bush sunflower (Encelia californica), california everlasting (Gnaphalium californicum), great stands of mimulus (sp. brevipes) and perezia (Acourtia microcephala), shrubby trees such as (the usual suspects) holly-leaved cherry (Prunus ilicifolia), walnut (Juglans californica) mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus betuloides), toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia) and laurel sumac (Malosma laurina) and in between the sage brush stalwarts artemesia (sp. californica) and coyote brush (Baccharis pilularis). Smaller dots of color are provided by blue dicks (Dichelostemma capitatum) and purple owl's head clover (Castilleja exserta). Coulters lupine (Lupinus sparsiflorus) is underfoot while tarweed (Hemizonia fasciculata) is preparing to bloom; entwined throughout are wild cucumber (Marah macrocarpus) and morning glory (Calystegia macrostegia).

The spine transitions into the bowl (cut into dry, rocky and sandy soil) where deer weed (Lotus scoparius) predominates despite being hydro-seeded with the same mix that has provided a very different outcome on the front lawn (which is fill from Grimes Canyon). The deer weed provides some color and its massing segues into the chaparral beyond. At the west termination of the bowl three oaks rise out of the rocks with an under-story of holly leaved cherry, walnuts, poison oak and chaparral currants.

One straggly and disassociated oak to the north of this group has been marked as a source for firewood - its absence will open up a view to the 2000' high-point of the site which sits atop a sensual mound that marks the northern termination of the east ridge which, at the southern end, wraps to the west and provides the site with its unique sense of enfoldment.

Those damp afternoons of epiphany were devoted to weeding the mixed border and the bowl. Great drifts of clover have taken over in the spaces between established shrubs and its removal is critical to the survival of the needle grasses that have survived beneath the trifolium canopy. Amidst the clover, particularly in areas of dampness, our old friend erodium was ripe for the plucking. Occasionally, star thistle and italian thistle provide easy targets for annihilation.

On Saturday Lorrie and Griffin joined me in a final assault on the weedy edges of the gravel pool terrace. Work remains to be done and the promise of rain this week will greatly facilitate the task. Griffin is (understandably) an unwilling weeder. He will begin the vast work of weed-wacking along the drive next weekend.

New Moon

April 13, Notes: Next weekend Griffin our about to be graduating high school senior will camp for three days at Coachella for the music festival. In August he leaves for Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. It's been almost a year since we moved into our house in the wildland/urban interface and almost two since we sold our home in Santa Monica Canyon. This evening Lorrie and I strolled down the property, to close the gate and pick up the mail, in the gloaming. Due west, just to the right of a transcendantly bright Venus was the new moon with the old in its arms. Somewhere in this is a new life for us all.

April 19, Notes: A few weekends ago Lorrie saw a five foot gopher snake lolling on a rock at Margot's and just yesterday Griffin tells us he almost stepped on a three footer on Besant Hill campus. I have been dreaming of snakes; Lorrie has been dreaming of snakes - classic dreams of transformation. The chumash and other native American bands saw snakes as metaphors of life, death and rebirth; the shedding of a snake's skin was associated with life and with a new beginning.

While the house was under construction the contractor told us of a big old gopher snake that lived in the rocks under the oak grove close to the house. Early last summer I saw its erstwhile skin draped over the rocks. It gave me quite a start. I have the usual fear of snakes although one of my earliest memories is of playing with a snake on a sandy path at Frensham Ponds in Surrey, England - until my older sister grabbed me away. I saw one young rattle snake last year in the shade of Griffin's 1977 truck almost invisible on the hardpan that is the compacted soil awaiting construction of a guesthouse next to the garage.

As our first year in the wildland/urban interface ticks away we are now able to gauge the flow of the seasons. As of the last week or so we are back in swimming season. It was probably still in March that, for a few days, the pool warmed up to just below 70 degrees and was comfortable for a quick dip. Now, at 72 it is almost ideal for swimming laps. What was a theoretical notion of a shallow pool being more energy efficient - should one choose to heat it - is now confirmed in practice as being more immediately responsive to the warmer days of spring, and thoughts of investing in a solar heating system are receding. The trick is to have the pool cover open on warm days and always closed at night. This is, after all, the most basic solar system with the cover functioning as both insulation and control valve.

A visitor to the house asked recently why we had raised the pool out of the ground so that the coping is 18" above grade - my glib answer was that it was designed to keep snakes out of the pool. We certainly had that in mind, but we also wanted the pool to read as a trough - like those for horses and cattle - so that it had an almost agricultural aspect and became a sculptural element in the minimalist gravel hardscape.

So despite living in a minimalist house and landscape there is room for metaphor. The house is fundamentally a representation of a barn and the pool a cattle trough. I was reminded of the function of metaphor (or is it simile?) in architecture when we all visited Otis College of Art and design for an open house for accepted students.

There are three buildings on the Otis campus in Westchester, a 1960's seven story concrete box raised on angled piloti (which I had always admired on my drives to LAX), a parking garage and Fred Fisher's skewed corrugated tin shed gallery and fine arts building. A few years ago I bumped into Fred at a gallery opening at his building (I knew him from my years teaching at the Macarthur Park campus of what was then Otis/Parsons) and he mentioned that he had long despised the adjacent concrete low-rise tower as representing everything that was wrong with modern architecture. It wasn't until last weekend that I learnt that it is in fact a notable building.

It was designed by Eliot Noyes in the early 1960's and built in 1964. Noyes was part of a group which also included Philip Johnson, Landis Gores, Marcel Breuer and John Johansen -- known as the Harvard Five. He was the house designer for IBM at the time and most famously designed their Selectric typewriter in addition to a number of buildings. The Westchester building housed IBM's aerospace division and utilized pre-stressed concrete panel cladding with small rectangular punched windows which were designed to echo the data input device of the time - the punchcard. I am certainly old enough to recognize the reference and for several years was employed by a company in Australia whose foundational business was the production of punch cards and their data input (think rooms of low-wage young women at punch card machines). It is a delightful, if dated, reference. More importantly it results in a playfully animated facade entirely independent of its hexadecimal origins.

Our long weekend as empty nesters (while Griff was away) has come and gone. The pool filter is clean and we are ready for a complete season of swimming. The snakes are all well and truly awake and together we await the fullness of spring.

Where Native Meadows Come From

It was probably 8 to 10 years ago that we first started looking for land. That's not counting the time, perhaps twenty or more years ago that we noodled around Ojai and Santa Paula - and by chance saw a land for sale sign at the foot of Koenigstein in Upper Ojai and drove up the road. This is a hazy memory but I do know that the then visible oil wells were enough to forestall any further enquiries.

The trip we made, sometime at the beginning of the century, was based on the notion that we needed a weekend getaway that would expand our lives and relieve the pressure from our Santa Monica House and Garden which we were forever remodeling (and worse, re-programming the three buildings that made up the compound). We targeted the areas north of Santa Barbara up to San Luis Obispo and seaward to Cambria. The explosion of grape growing was, by this point, well and truly under way and it was soon apparent that land in these areas was too expensive. After driving up the PCH to the 101 through Santa Barbara, we took the 154 inland and by lunchtime found ourselves in Los Alamos.

We were essentially exploring real estate through AVA's ( American Viticultural Areas) - Santa Barbara County contains the Santa Ynez and Santa Maria Valleys, and San Luis Obispo County Arroyo Grande, Edna Valley and Paso Robles.

Perhaps I should back up. What was this fascination with the wine growing regions? Why didn't we, like our design-head cohort in Los Angeles, go exploring the desert? Why were we not imagining some colorful casita in Joshua Tree or Desert Hot Springs? We had the desert credentials. We regularly visited Two Bunch Palms in Desert Hot Springs in the early eighties and once we had children we visited the more raffish MaHaYa close by the spa that April Greiman and Michael Rotundi would make chic and around the corner from Hope Springs that English designer Mick Haggerty and Steve Samiof designed as a hip minimalist overlay on a 60's googie spa, and which close friends bought with two partners a few years ago.

One reason is that the desert spooks Lorrie, another is that the drive from L.A. is tiresome and a third is that I have watched as the smog creeps over the pass between the San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains and it is like the vaporous spirit of Los Angeles coming to wreak vengeance on those who dare try to leave the valley of the smokes (as the Gabrielenos called it). There is certainly some powerful ju-ju in the desert, perhaps not all of it bad, but it gives one pause. The wind scoured Marmol Radziner Modular Pre-fab house that sits in the Desert Hot Springs bad lands - un-sold, un-tenanted and un-loved is a warning against the hubris of architects who believe they can tame the desert - and its demons. The John Lautner motel suffered a similar fate although his is a more modest building and less offensive, perhaps, to the Shoshonean spirit walkers.

But the most powerful reason for Lorrie's and my fascination with the vinelands is the romantic association with our (comparitive) youth together. Truth be told, we were both in our thirties when under the aegis of UCLA's architecture design program we toured the vineyards of Santa Barbara County to prepare for a studio based on designing a winery in Ojai (Mining Gravel 2010-01-30). It was probably the first time I had ventured north of Point Dume and it was at a time in my life when I was palpably enraptured by California. In a UCLA issue van we drove as far north as Cambria and then wound our way back through San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties, ending up in Ojai. A friend and I spent an evening watching The Great Santini at the Ojai Playhouse and in the morning I drove out to Rincon to surf. Lorrie had already bailed and was on her way back to Los Angeles. But we shared enough on the trip for it to become a touchstone in our relationship. A year or so later, we served Zaca Mesa wine at our wedding because we had both loved their winery in the Santa Ynez valley - of which Adam Tolmach, our putative client for the UCLA design exercise, was an alumnus.

Our search for land echoed this trip and like it, ended in Ojai but not until some years after we had driven through the central coast AVA's and right at the point where we had started two decades previously, on Koenigstein Road.

Last Friday, Lorrie and I found ourselves, by happenstance, back in Los Alamos in the Santa Ynez Valley. We breakfasted with Margot and her brother Craig (who joined us from Morro Bay) at the Quackenbush cafe. We were on our way to S&S Seeds who were holding their annual open house and barbecue. It's located just off the 135 in broad flatlands that rise to the east towards the 101, in the northern most portion of the Santa Ynez Valley. A few miles before Los Alamos, on the 101, we had passed the turn off to Zaca Mesa.

As we drove up to the S&S ranch house we passed fields of needle grass waving softly in the breeze. Here too, were fields of purple owls clover, glistening rows of goldfields, blue lupines and phacelias. We toured fields of native grasses, muhly, saltgrass, fescue, melics and brome all fated to be harvested and threshed and sorted in the seed shaking barn where the often minute seeds are teazed out and packaged. This is where the seed is grown for the state, county, institutional and private campaigns to remediate development scarred lands, create and maintain native landscapes and substitute natives for exotics at all scales of garden design. Rarer natives, or those not amenable to agricultural production, are hand collected in the wild and processed in the seed shakers.

Paradoxically, S&S thrives on the destruction of California' s wildlands: governmental requirements to remediate the disturbed soils have been at the core of their business model. But remediated landscapes are not the equal of undisturbed soil crusts that have supported evolving native ecosystems for 30,000 years and more. In recessionary times of reduced development there is less pressure on our wildland/urban frontier and an icreasing temptation for S&S to sell the land for grape growing. Zaca Mesa perhaps?

Fields of Gasoline

I received an e-mail this week from Wendy All, a colleague at the Rock Art Institute at UCLA, who mentioned that she and her husband Jay had visited the Carrizo Plain over the Easter weekend to look at wild flowers.

Having recently blogged about the Carrizo Plain as the dead heart of contemporary California (Cave and Rock, 2010-03-30) it was encouraging that someone was at least visiting the shriveled organ, brought low, in my estimate, by its isolation from the state's contemporary arteries of communication and trade. Wendy reports that the wild flowers that decorate the grave site are particularly vibrant this year. She referred me to a wild flower website which is replete with startling photos of yellow, blue and purple fields, many taken in the northern end of the plain around Soda Lake.

We should, of course, be thankful that this forgotten prairie exists in something approaching its primordial condition, for here perhaps, is a reminder that much of California was once a flower pasture. But as I indicated in Weed World 2010-03-08, to suggest as much is to enter into a debate about California's ecological heritage. Richard Minnich, in his recent book California’s Fading Wildflowers, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 2009, argues that California's wildflowers are a lost legacy and that,

"The long-believed bunchgrass theory, and its conversion to exotic grassland through overgrazing, encouraged people to take for granted the rapidly fading wildflower heritage......We need to recognize that California was not all grasslands in the past...”

It seems to me that Minnich is setting up something of a grass man here: can't we all agree that California was a botanical mosaic with chaparral, forests, grasslands, desert and forblands? Furthermore, grasslands and forblands co-exist now and, it is reasonable to presume, then.

Minnich also weighs in on the wildfire issue,

“We need to reintroduce fire into ecosystems.. we should work toward a Mexican model, which will become a low-maintenance management system...Land-use policies that permit building in indefensible spaces exacerbate the problem"

and then, echoing bullet point number 4 (chaparral is inimical to human habitation - see Cave and Rock 2010-03-30)

“You can’t live in nature in Southern California...You can save structures in an urban setting because they’re surrounded by pavement and watered lawns. In wildlands, you have solitary structures in the middle of a field that behaves like gasoline. It is indefensible and should not get public support. We’re burning billions of dollars (on fire suppression) in the western United States."

As an ecologist, Minnich indicates a rare show of support for irrigated lawns but seems to believe that solitary wildland/urban interface structures are doomed, awaiting their fate in fields of gasoline. One wonders how the pre-contact population of Native Californians, which by some estimates approached half a million, managed, living in their incendiary homelands with nothing resembling 'pavement and watered lawn' to save them.

We are indeed trying to 'live in nature', and as a part of that intent are developing needlegrass meadows close to the house which then shade to chaparral about 200' out. Immediately adjacent to the front of the house is an eight foot swathe of crushed rock with twenty or more feet of 3/8" gravel at the back - our pool terrace. At the west end is an abbreviated chip seal gravel 'auto court' and to the east is a natural gravel terrace. The house itself is built according to dba's fire-safe protocol .

Fescue is sprinkled within the needlegrasses and between them all is an opportunity for native perennials and annuals such as tarweed (hemizonia fasciculata); common fiddleneck (Amsinckia menziesii); blue eyed grass (Sysrinchium bellum); Lupin (Lupinus bicolor); Coulter's lupin (Lupinus sparsiflorus); purple nightshade (solanum xanti); owl's head clover (Castilleja exserta); wild sweet pea ( Lathyrus vestitus); peonies (Paeonia californica); perezia (Arcourtia microcephala) and the bushy deer weed (Lotus scoparius). All the above have made an appearance with the exception of the blue eyed grass, which although seeded was out-competed, I suspect, by the rampant erodium.

A good year for rain has meant that clover (Trifolium species) has colonized large tracts of our meadow lands and has now superseded erodium as the weed of the moment. I have succeeded in clearing most of it from the so-called tilted plain or 'front lawn' but have yet to tackle the bowl which rises up beyond the pool.

Somehow, a balance needs to be achieved between grasses and (mostly) perennial wildflowers. With our 'fields of gasoline' it's too soon to tell, but I am encouraged that there is developing something approaching a simulacrum of native prairie - at once grassland and forbland.

White-Out

Recently we visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The heavily patterned red brick building was completed in 1995 and designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta. At this point the Botta building is a bit of an embarrassment. A very late example of his post modern work it is a poster child for everything we now hate about that era. The building is replete with the cultural tics of the time - like banded black and white granite and elaborate ziggurat-like stairs that every architecture student of the 1980's attempted to include in their designs. Away from the decorated core of the building, however, the galleries, roof top garden and cafe show a stylistic evolution towards his later, more purely modernist work.

Architects now under consideration for a planned 100,000 sq. ft. addition include Renzo Piano, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Zumthor, David Adjaye, Steven Holl, TEN Arquitectos, Foster and Partners; Norway's Snohetta; and Diller, Scofidio & Renfro. No real outliers here - although I had to remind myself of the work of Snohetta.

After the despicable Broad addition to LACMA Piano should be excluded from any consideration, and having made the mistake of choosing an architect the first time round who epitomised the (fading) zeitgeist of the time, the Museum might be well advised to choose one of the less usual suspects like Adjaye or Snohetta.

The current Galleries work well and we began on the top floor with the Luc Tuymans retrospective. His work combines blurry abstraction with what David Shields' calls 'reality hunger' - he lards his almost monochromatic canvases with images from World War II, the Belgian Congo and contemporary politics and culture. The result is unnerving primarily because of his skill as a painter - Condaleeza Rice (the emblematic image of the exhibit) is entirely subsumed by the subtlety of his brush and color work.

Nazi war criminals are literally neutered when surrounded by Tuyman's neutral palette. He embraces the current zeitgeist - in my experience pioneered by W.G. Sebald in his stunning series of novels in the 90's - characterized by the notion of sampling or pastiching fragments of reality into a work of art, and ironically, since he uses the greys and whites of a printed page, his work almost looks like a page torn from a Sebald novel. Like the novelist's, his technique produced in me a somber, almost elegiac reflection on the nature of our small lives and their connection to the larger historical record of our times.

His limited palette of whites and greys bending seemlessly into the yellow and violet parts of the spectrum produces an effect that is both romantic and naturalistic. It is a palette that can be experienced in nature under certain circumstances. I am reminded of those white-outs on grey days of sitting in the surf line-up at Topanga moving gently with the greasy swell and watching as the yellow sunshine tried to creep under the ghostly mantle. Or, just last Saturday, on a scramble up Bear Creek.

Lorrie's cousin Ellary, partner Ethan and her daughter Odile were visiting and I was in charge of providing a local hike. On a previous occasion I had taken them to the look-out a few miles up Sisar. This time,we all drove up to the Greenburgh's avocado ranch at the top of Koenigstein in Griffin's white 1977 C-10 Chevy truck, and then walked alongside the ranch by the pomegranate hedge past the turn off to Leo Lockwood's avocado farm and then up through the sage and across Bear Creek. The creek was flowing and at its muddy edges we saw bear tracks.

Power lines and mostly broken irrigation pipes accompanied us to a point where the track again crosses the creek and where, reputedly, the Greenburgh's had considered erecting another house for, a half mile or so into the walk, we were still on their in-holding. It is here that the tangle of white 4" abs terminates and the creek widens to a gravelly wash before turning sharply south at the foot of a near vertical cliff face that rises a couple of hundred feet out of the chaparral. The path continues to the north but Griffin was intrigued by the possibilities of following the creek.

Thus it was that despite my dark warnings about poison oak we began bouldering our way up Bear Creek. Heads down, calibrating every step against the lie of the next foothold and the gravitational penalty of achieving it, we were enveloped, as ZZ Top once sang, in 'A World of Swirl'.

The sky was mostly absent. But hints of its blue were provided by overhanging bowers of ceanothus (Ceonothus oliganthus?). Underfoot the yellow, gray and white gravel, mostly yellow to cream sedimentary rocks and the occasional basalt-like black igneous boulder echoed Tuyman's palette.

Where the stream ran there was an orange cast to the iron-rich water. But often the water disappeared - running underground - and then would remerge in its rusty channel higher up the canyon. Everywhere were the bleached trunks and branches of trees up-rooted and hurled down the canyon when the winter rains engorged the creek.

Along the way mugwort (Artemesia douglasiana), lupine and chaparral pea, blackberry and yes, poison oak but entwined by the beautiful native clematis called Virgin's Bower (Clematis lasiantha) its creamy blossoms (fringed with yellow stamens) on long axilliary stems. 

Higher up Bear Canyon the creek becomes more truly a gorge - more pale rock, gravel and to the left as one ascends, dark rust colored shale that lies at its angle of repose and threatens with every footfall to slide into the creek. Here the spring fed water course heads off to the west in a narrow channel while the gorge heads on up and becomes more dramatic in its rock-strewn topography.

On the right there is an opportunity to climb up the bank and re-enter the chaparral above the creek and, with buckwheat beneath our feet and with sage, yerba santa and ceonothus at our side, we returned.

Cave and Rock

We are creatures of the savannah –and where it does not naturally exist we have created it. Sometimes it is achieved by casual or deliberate deforestation; sometimes pasture animals fulfill the role of making the wildlands grasslands; and sometimes fire does the job.

Now: imagine a house that exists under a floating and flat roof (supported on freestanding steel columns)  in a sheltered, topographic universe. There is ‘un-conditioned space’ – that is areas that are shaded but part of the common air (and its disturbances) and enclosures that are glazed or solid as their use requires -   all supported on a structural concrete floor.

This floor responds to the underlying topography of the site and to a topography of utility. A pool impinges on this scheme and is thus partly shaded. There are sit walls, ramps, steps, half walls and full walls. Enclosures are ceilinged, but a space exists between ceiling and roof protected from nesting creatures by stainless woven-wire fabric. Conditioned air is distributed in the space between ceilings and roof by a branching of duct work fed from a mechanical room.

This is an architecture not of object (a rock) but of anthropology (a cave). It is our next house. It is in the savannah.

We live, for the moment, in a box that is rendered translucent to the north and south in three of the six 16’ bays. The conceit is that the landscape flows through it. Grading and fire clearances have assured that we are surrounded to a distance of 100 feet or more by a rock-strewn weed patch. Slowly, we are attempting to turn this area into a pre-1769 grassland. For California is remarkable in once possessing native, prairie-like grasslands that supported herds of artiodactyls and the predators (including humans) that fed on them.

A few weekends ago we watched with friends as a young doe scampered across the tilted plain that is our front lawn and took off up the slope to the east. Jokingly, I said,

"now let's watch for the mountain lion right behind Bambi",

immediately over the ridge came, not a single mountain lion but two coon hounds slavering in pursuit of their supposed supper. I called their owner, Peter Jump, and told him that his dogs were heading east and would shortly be in Santa Paula. His wife Harriet had, sometime previously, showed off pictures of a mauled (and very dead) coyote that was the handiwork of the hounds. They would make short and wet work of the deer. I understand that the doe outlasted them and the dogs returned home exhausted and still hungry. They clearly had not been trained in the art of persistence hunting by which, according to recent theory, our aboriginal ancestors had succeeded in catching faster prey - human 'doggedness' ultimately triumphing over the swifter sprinters. By such episodes are our atavistic memories of the chase reawakened.

Driving north recently, California's deforestation is much in evidence for those aware that the rolling hills of alien grasses, mustard and the occasional oak are not the primeval landscape of the 'golden' state. Nevertheless, they do represent a kind of bastardized nature that stands in opposition to the urban, suburban and exurban development of the last century or so that otherwise lines the 101.

There are the missions, mission bells (those glyphs that line the road and never peal) Taco Bells, military bases, medical facilities and monuments of incarceration; and scattered campuses of tertiary education that feed these various beasts. In between is an industrialized agriculture; at the interstices are the premium outlet malls that represent the cutting edge of bricks and mortar merchandising in the 21st century. Scattered along the arterial roads and off across the plains and up into the hills are housing units.

Driving by: an abandoned military base; housing that seems at first abandoned but signs of life processes - of washing strung along a line or cars and trucks nestled against the wooden walls - suggest inhabitation; farm towns lost in time; farm-workers still inhabiting the world that Dorothea Lange documented but with newer cars; Gilroy's garlic, the cabbagelands of Monterey County; grapes - clinging to trellised armatures and to the drops of moisture borne inland by marine layer mists.

And then, Palo Alto - signs of enterprise, of intellectual activity amidst the gnomic names of applied digital technology companies.

Returning from San Francisco on the 5, we turned off at the 119 and joined the 33 at Taft then drove to Cuyama and down to Maricopa, Ventucopa, through the Los Padres National Forest (skirting Pine Mountain, center of the Chumash world) to an elevation of a little over 4000 feet and then a long and winding descent into Ojai.

To the north of Cuyama is the Carrizzo Plain occupying what in contemporary terms is a dead zone between the 101 and the 5. This is the area west of the Sierras but east of the 101 given over to ranching, oil and parkland after briefly being the breadbasket of the state when large scale mechanized grain farming attempted to take advantage of the prairie-like plateau.

Dryland grain farming and ranching developed in the late 1800's; in 1912 mechanized agriculture brought scale to the endeavor. Rusting harvesting equipment still litters the grasslands and stands as testament to the unreliable rains of California.

Before the arrival of the Spanish, the Chumash, Yokuts, and other Native Americans hunted and traded on the Carrizo Plain and the Chumash memorialized a vulva shaped rock outcropping with richly painted motifs. I visited the site a couple of years ago and found it much vandalized but still a magnificent presence. The graffiti had a history of its own going back at least 100 years. This so-called 'Painted Rock' is at the far north of the plain located between the Caliente Mountains to the west and the Temblor Range to the east with Soda Lake just to the north. The area is now administered by the BLM (U.S. Bureau of Land Management) and, running north-south sits squarely atop the San Andreas fault.

An essential node of pre-Columbian civilization in mid-coast California where gatherings connected the peoples of the coast, inland valleys, desert and forested highlands, the Carrizo Plain is now a wasteland, the empty heart of a State whose arterial system is composed of concrete roads, cell towers and fiber optic cable rather than the ley lines of ancient culture that connected community to community and all to the psychic beacon of the Painted Rock.