Burn Notice

The Missions in California represented one side of a distinctly asymmetrical culture war with the native peoples of the region - the Chumash world was changed forever while the interaction left barely a mark on the Church.

Little has changed in this equation. Despite being built on the site of the ancient Chumash village of Sisa, the architecture of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel, Thomas Aquinas College (Woman of the Apocalypse) primarily reflects the classical past of the old world. While it makes an almost imperceptible nod to the Mission tradition there is no gesture whatsoever to the form or symbol-making traditions of the people who were its first Californian converts.

While hybrid religions have proliferated throughout the world blending traditions from Asia, Africa, New World and Old, Roman Catholicism has remained largely immutable since its own hybridized development out of an ancient Middle Eastern monotheism (viz. The Old Testament) via the pagan traditions that flourished throughout the Roman Empire. Vatican II, 1962-65, however, opened the way for the inculturation of the Roman Catholic liturgy. Pope John Paul II explains in his encyclical #52, (1990) that "By inculturation, the Church makes the Gospel incarnate in different cultures and at the same time introduces peoples, together with their cultures, into her own community".

In the eighteenth century, the number of baptisms performed on the Chumash people was the measure of the Missions' success (and is one of the few records against which the size of the native population can be gauged) but it was achieved not by making concessions to the local culture but by Franciscan zeal and Spanish military hegemony.

Only the original adobe bell tower and Mission bell survived from the St. Bartholomew’s Chapel on the Luiseño Rincon reservation after the Poomacha Fire in North San Diego County in 2007, but remarkably, a new Chapel has been built on the site of the old that incorporates both Native American and Catholic symbols and metaphors.

Fires pose a near constant threat to Southern California's wildlands. Rick Halsey points out that their frequency has undergone a dramatic increase over the past century and that nearly all fires in the region are caused by human activity (Fire, Chaparral and Survival In Southern California, Sunbelt Publications, San Diego, 2008). The Poomacha fire started as an anthropogenic structure fire on the La Jolla Indian Reservation and spread, over the next days, throughout the Pauma valley on the edge of the Cleveland National Forest fueled by 100 mile per hour Santa Ana winds.

The Luiseño did not have contact with the Spanish until the expedition of Gaspar De Portola in 1769. Three decades later, their culture was terminally impacted by the establishment of the San Luis Rey Mission in what is now Oceanside. As head of the Franciscan Mission, Fr. Peyri allowed the Luiseño to remain in their traditional villages visiting them in situ to perform baptisms, mass and marriages. Times were harder after the secularization of the Missions in 1834, but they were not finally displaced from their lands until 1848 at the conclusion of the Mexican American War and the transfer of California to the United States. In 1875, however, the Luiseño La Jolla Reservation was established by executive order of Ulysses S. Grant.

There are now twin Luiseño reservations, La Jolla and Rincon. Both were ravaged by the fire but their ability to recover has been fundamentally shaped by their gambling interests. The Rincon reservation is funded by royalty payments from Harrah's Casino and Hotel built on reservation land. To the east, The San Diego Union-Tribune (November 5, 2007) reported that the La Jolla reservation must rely on state, federal, and insurance funds to effect renewal. The reservation's chairman is quoted as saying, "We are a non-gaming tribe". Not for the want of trying.

The North County Times reported on August 26, 2010 that the La Jolla Band of Mission Indians is proposing to build a casino and hotel on its Palomar Mountain reservation with a projected completion date of 2012. This comes after an aborted attempt in 2004, to build a 35,000-square-foot casino with 500 slot machines, a restaurant and 150-room hotel. In 2002, the band successfully opened, but later closed, a 30-machine slot arcade in a convenience store next to Highway 76. The new proposal calls for a 480,000-square-foot gambling and hotel facility with 200 rooms with six separate villa suites and a parking structure. Nice.

In the metaphorical shadow of their casino (undamaged in the fire), and without apparent concern for irony, the Rincon Luiseño ordered up a new chapel that would reconnect with the spirit of traditional Indian culture: of living lightly on the land. The Chapel utilizes a significant amount of site harvested building materials; the signature element being the massive rammed earth walls that flank the sanctuary, each nearly 60 feet long, 18 feet tall, and two feet thick. Symbolically important, these walls are built of 120 tons of sacred reservation soil. A local three ton boulder was crafted into the baptismal font and slabs of wood hewn from reservation oaks are used in furniture pieces. A thin film Solar PV system, high thermal mass construction, carefully oriented glazing and deep overhangs contribute to the Chapel's sustainable credibility. It is expected to earn LEED gold certification.

Using the notion of inculturation, the architect Kevin De Freitas incorporates a specific element of Luiseño iconology, the Wamkish, into the plan.  Wamkish were the traditional ceremonial enclosures of the Luiseño built in the form of semi-circular enclosures woven from thicket. The distinction between being inside or outside the enclosure was a key feature of the ceremonies. In St Bartholomew, an abstracted Wamkish in white stone forms the north and south (liturgical east and west) walls of the church. These wall sections define two significant moments of the church: the entrance moving from convex to concave, relating to the traditional ritual use of the Wamkish, and the concave enclosure of the sanctuary on which hangs the corpus, or representation of the crucified body of Christ. (Locus Iste)

In Luiseño culture the Wamkish was used for the most critical rites of passage, in particular, boys' and girls' puberty ceremonies. In The Religion of the Luiseño Indians of Southern California, 1908, the anthropologist, Constance Goddard DuBois, describes it thus,

"In the main place the sacred enclosure of brush, the wamkish, is built in a circle to about the height of a man. On the ground inside are placed the sacred ceremonial objects: the tamyush or sacred stone, toloache (jimson-weed, Datura meteloides), bowls, feather head-dresses and eagle-feather skirts; and the paviut, the sacred sticks (wands) with flint (crystals) in the end."

Typically, after several weeks of drug-fueled ceremonies the Wamkish, made of willow twigs and other chaparral brush, was ritually burned.

The old St Bartholomew's Chapel was un-ceremoniously burnt to the ground during the Poomacha chaparral fire of 2007. A new chapel has arisen on the site of the old: but by invoking the spirit of the Wamkish in its design it is inviting its sacred destruction by fire - an act to be initiated not by a Luiseño shaman but by the next cycle of chaparral fires that swirl through the Pauma valley - an inculturation not wholly anticipated, perhaps, by the Councils of Vatican II and Pope John Paul II.

Woman of the Apocalypse

Situated just a little west of the confluence of the Sisar and Little Santa Paula Creeks, Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel, Thomas Aquinas College, Santa Paula, rises up out of the campus but viewed from the road (as it most often is) appears to be set deep in chaparral. It offers a remarkable vision.

The site, as I noted in Mining Gravel, has a storied past. In 1929, oil baron Edward Doheny' s wife commissioned a 9,000 square foot mission-style hacienda designed by Wallace Neff. It was reputedly built in six weeks as a country retreat for her husband who was reeling from his involvement in the lawsuits surrounding the Teapot Dome scandal and the murder of his only son in 1928 at the Greystone estate in Beverly Hills. The college purchased the site - where once sat the Chumash village, Sisa - in 1975 and the adobe house now serves as the president's residence. 

The college and the chapel represent a contemporary manifestation of Catholicism - as did the missions following the expansion of Spanish influence in Alta California in 1769. The linkage between these two expressions of the Church is made more explicit by the intentions of the founding fathers of the college who wanted it to return to "the kind of academic excellence that flourished in ancient Greece or in the great medieval universities in Europe. Simply put, they wanted to return not to the 1950s, but to the 1350s". (Thomas Aquinas College)

Similarly, the chapel represents a conservative ethos: drawing upon two millennia of Catholic architecture, Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel embraces the Church's Early Christian, Renaissance, and Spanish Mission heritage. But it is a high-style mash-up; with none of the primal primitivism that enlivens the missions and that is spectacularly in evidence at Santa Barbara and La Purisma. Instead, there is the curious, ahistorical combination of a cruciform building, a dome over the crossing, columns and arches - like some kind of mutant basilica frozen in the moment of transformation. Ultimately it represents a discontinuity with the indigenous Mission tradition and a misunderstanding of classical antecedents: as such, for all its bravura formalism this $25 million pile is profoundly provincial.

More important, perhaps, than its architectural provenance, the chapel's 135-foot-high bell tower reliably rings out the Angelus three times each day, evoking California's Mission history and tolling, in part, for the ghosts of the departed California Natives.

The Chumash were essentially animists - they understood themselves to be part of the natural world in a way that we can barely comprehend. The Missions were established by Franciscans who professed a similarly inclusivist attitude to the sentience of other creatures - animals are brothers and sisters - and all things are considered symbols and bearers of Christ, the firstborn brother of every creature. In this pantheist spirit, Francis might well have found the Chumash to be soul brothers and sisters. His purported followers, not so much.

Francis treated objects as beings endowed with reason and spoke to them as if he were speaking to human beings. His outlook is diametrically opposed to the idea of humanity's absolute dominion over the physical world and to its thoughtless exploitation. He was an animist and a biophiliac first and a Christian mystic second (or third). 

However, the structure of the Church is such that its mysteries are conventionally revealed not in the natural world but within the liturgy of the mass - consecrated within the physical container of a church rather than, as Francis might have preferred, in the wildlands. Thus it is that the Missions, like the churches of medieval Europe had to compete with the natural world in capturing the spiritual imaginations of their audience.

I visited the chapel for a midnight mass on Christmas eve, in part, to remind myself of how they achieved this unlikely feat. I had, for weeks, been listening to A Choir of Angels II: California Mission Music, performed by Zephry with Paul Gibson, conducting, a haunting, otherworldly collection of early California music. The CD was given to me by Richard Lyons, who with his wife Laurie, lives above Thomas Aquinas College and whose company Civic Classics Records recorded and released the music. The 24 tracks became part of our Christmas mix this year along with Bob Dylan's gravelly voiced renditions of seasonal songs and Annie Lennox's new album, Christmas Cornucopia. The live choral and organ music that emanated from the chapel's choir balcony and floated over the congregation in the nave below was beautifully performed but it failed to raise the kind of goose bumps that the recorded Mission music regularly induced.

We (Lorrie, Griffin and I) gazed at the bronze solomonic columned baldochinno while the music played on. This altar canopy is a rendition of the tent that Yahweh commanded the Israelites to erect over the Ark of the Covenant (Ex. 25-27) and arrives here, in this chapel in Sulphur Springs deep in the California chaparral, via the baroque stylings of Bernini's St. Peter's Basilica. The Ark itself is either long gone or, according to the 1981 Spielberg movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, is sitting in some C.I.A. depository in the north east corridor never again to clear the path of the righteous by spewing burning snakes, scorpions, and thorns via jets of flame that reputedly shot from its underside (T. VaYakhel, 7).

The canopy's effulgence and the slatherings of marble on the nave columns and floor conjured, even to my jaded eyes, visions of heavenly opulence. My spiritual imagination had been tempted by both sight and sound but when the priest finally arrived in procession with his acolytes, one of whom wielded a censor, the burning tree resins frankincense and myrrh failed to waft through the space. Perhaps on this chilly evening the incense had stopped burning. I reflected that the scents of the chaparral are more reliably up-lifting.

The builders of the chapel were explicit in their goals: their vision incorporated four distinguishing marks - beauty, grandeur, permanence and tradition; these qualities are linked with truth, transcendence, the eternal and wisdom. Their captive audience of Catholic students and locals who come to the faith through family affiliation undoubtedly are susceptible to this symbolism and find it faith affirming. As an interloper intent on the casual frisson afforded by spiritually inflected music and the bravura caperings of an ecclesiastical architect (Duncan G. Stroik) and whose vision of Christmas owes more to Charles Dickens than to Thomas Aquinas, it is unreasonable to expect transcendence. 

We can only guess what proportions of gilded beauty, edificial grandeur, transcendent music, moral suasion and brute force were required to Christianize the Chumash. They arrived at the Missions as a devastated population wrenched wholesale from their own universe of affirmation: the complex fabric of a society tightly woven into the rhythms of the natural world. Missionized they were but it was, as they say, a Pyrrhic victory.

While the Chumash barely survive as a relict community the Church still fishes for souls using its medieval trappings - Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel being a particularly elaborate piece of this religious schtick. Sitting in its dell on the old Fernwood Ranch, with Wallace Neff's gate house still standing as the campus entry and the chapel's bell tower and dome floating over the chaparral that rises up and over Santa Paula Peak (oil derricks scattered along its flanks) Thomas Aquinas College stands as a living reminder of California's heartrending history - more potent than the dead shells of Missions strung along the 101 and infinitely more edifying than the living remnant of Chumash culture, the Santa Ynez Chumash Casino and Resort (Bingo).

Wild and Free

Friday: I drove home yesterday in the twilight with the Topa Topas wreathed in cloud. There had been patchy cloud in the morning, but as I left the property around ten the sun briefly made an appearance. That was it for the day. No rain, just low, soft clouds drifting through the landscape or occasionally swirling around hill tops or submerging the crowns of oaks. In short, a cloudy day.

This morning I awoke to light rain falling on the roof - barely audible, and its shedding, in soft drips, from eave to gravel. It cleared briefly around daybreak, enough to tempt me into taking my morning run but by the time I was on Sisar Road the rain returned. Now, mid morning, it continues.

The big aesthetic pay-off on a rainy day, for me at least, comes in the darkening of tree trunks. Close by, the green of the oaks is shinier, made more intense by the rain; beyond, the grey undertones and the sage grey-greens recede into a smudged chaparral monochrome; but it is the chaparral tree trunks and their filigreed branches - that the wet turns to charcoal - that give the chaparral its rainy-day oomph, its graphic amplification.

A flock of yellow rumped warblers (Dendroica coronata) are fluttering, close to the ground, swooping and jinking and providing low level animation to the scene. Flashes of white at their grey-black wings and breasts are like ice-shards fallen from the sky while puffs of yellow at their throats and rumps punctuate their plumage (their common name is Butter butt).

 The luminosity of the sky, such as it is on this grey day, is reflected on the horizontal faceting of the newly unearthed yellow-wet sandstone rocks that scatter the site: absent new back-hoe turmoil these will slowly patinate with rock varnish (the fusion of eons of dust onto the rock surface) and be embroidered with lichen. Over time their color palette will slowly recede into somber chaparral tones.

Meanwhile, under a ledge of exposed rock, still mostly yellow and brown, in the slope below the cluster of oaks near the house, a bobcat has settled in for the morning sheltered from the worst of the rain. Almost motionless, it is magnificently camouflaged. It stares intently at Lorrie and me, then when Lorrie checks on it later in the morning, its eye-lids are heavy and it is nodding off for a snooze. Around lunchtime it leaves, sauntering up-slope through the deer weed (Lotus scoparius) where Lorrie catches glimpses of it until it is over the crest of the hill.

I left for Los Angeles mid-morning in light rain and my thoughts turned from the sphinx-like bobcat to the watershed upon which our house is perched. We are a part of the Santa Paula Creek watershed, at its western edge. Somewhere a little west of the Summit, perhaps around Hall's apricot ranch, the land tips away and surface drainage contributes to the Ventura River. Sisar Creek is on the cusp and at one time contributed to the westerly river. Now it receives tribute from Bear Creek then, at St. Thomas Aquinas, it links up with Little Santa Paula and they together become Santa Paula Creek which joins the mighty Santa Clara River just east and south of Santa Paula Airport.

Wild and free, the river continues west towards the ocean and disgorges south of the Ventura Harbor. Predictably, Juan Batista de Anza (The Sage Gatherer) and his expedition camped on its banks in February 1776 on their way north and observed 'geese, ducks, cranes, and other fowl'; in this detail at least, not much has changed. I followed its course for a while on the 126 before heading south on the 118 to Saticoy and then jumped on the 101 to Las Posas. This maneuver takes you from the northern edge of the Oxnard plane to its southern termination against the tail end of the Santa Monica Mountains where their north face and the flatlands drain into Calleguas Creek (Camarillo Brio).

On Las Posas, where it seems, room for the road is only reluctantly given up by farmers who plant almost to its edge and where, in the wet, mud quickly migrates from edge to road, the rain, mud, road and sky merge into a leaden scrim. It's a bleak scene: farm-worker's cars parked on the verge are painted brown by waves of muddy spray from passing traffic; off in a field there is a fuzz of white thrown off by sprinklers ironically adding to the sodden mess. The water will find its way to the creek, slip beneath the P.C.H., flow on to Mugu lagoon and then inject a brown plume into the ocean.

To the south and running all the way to the Seebees' rifle range, north of Mugu Rock, is a wetland: part of a classic ocean, beach, dune and wetland succession running a half mile or more to the west flanks of the Santa Monica mountains and disturbed only by the ribbon of road. On this day, as on many others over the years, I pull off the highway and take a pee next to the barbed wire fence which protects the wetland, and watch the muddy rivulets twine amidst the sedges and saltbrush.

For nearly twenty years I lived on a street named for a prodigous pouring of concrete by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930's. The naming of West Channel Road memorialized the encapsulation of the creek that runs out of Will Roger's State Historical Park and into the ocean at the northern tip of Santa Monica. Our house was built on an erstwhile delta - the point at which the creek would have widened during winter into a tangle of rivulets meandering over the flat bottom of the canyon, each finding its way to the ocean, digging through the low dunes in concert and then depositing their silt, rocks and debris a few hundred yards out into the ocean creating, over the ages, a beautiful fish reef and surf break.

All that ended with the WPA channel project - putting bread on the table for some but finally destroying a beautiful canyon, the fish reef and surf. All that is left of its pristine past are the fine gravel soil (Mining Gravel) a few sycamores and the watercress which still grows in the concrete creek bottom.

Sunday: Now, on a property that this wet weekend is contributing inches of rain (about 6 so far) over its twenty seven acres, to the Santa Clara River - via Bear Creek and its eastern tributary (which, when I checked this morning is flowing lustily for the first time this year) I am happy to contemplate the water's unhindered voyage to the ocean in creeks and river, mostly, still, wild and free.

Oil and Trouble

Double, double toil and trouble
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

Shakespeare: Macbeth Act 4, scene 1, 10-11

We are under siege. The machines of war surround us. Guy wires support the hundred feet high scaffolding necessary to re-drill old wells - their leases expiring in 2018, and primary production a thing of the past, the oil reservoirs have begun to lose pressure and perhaps the injection of water or steam, or a deeper well can revive productivity. These oil derricks have sprung up like mushrooms on both sides of our high valley. Some stay for weeks and run 24-7 (Bad Dreams) others disappear, work complete, after a few days. Some are lit at night, others are stark silhouettes by day and then melt away into the darkness.

There is talk that the oil companies may have found a way to access the vast off-shore reserves from high on Sulphur Mountain where, on a clear day you can see down to the channel between Ventura and Santa Cruz where lie the Santa Clara and Sockeye off-shore oil fields. A decade or so ago slant drilling was a new development in oil well technology, now horizontal drilling is commonplace.

Steam injection is also being used to squeeze ever more oil from the rock in which it resides. According to the Ventura County Star (06-26-2010),

"Bakersfield-based Tri-Valley Corp. has drilled seven horizontal wells in its Oxnard fields to get at the heavy oil there. These wells are drilled down vertically and over horizontally. It then pumps steam into those wells and pumps oil out. The steam reduces the viscosity of the oil so it becomes thinner and moves into the lower well. The heated oil and water is then pumped to the surface and separated, with the water being cleaned and reused for new steam generation. These types of wells can get up to 60 percent of oil from a deposit."

Schwarzenegger's moratorium on further offshore drilling in California, along with the rising price of oil, is putting greater pressure on the oil fields of Ventura County where 63 idle wells were returned to production in 2009.

It's a dirty business but it is also a staple of the County's economy. I am reminded of the old British, north country saying, 'where there's muck there's brass (money)'; but the wells, the pumps, the pipes and now the drill derricks are, in Upper Ojai, affronts to its residents' mostly lyrical sensibility.

They threaten our cocoon of domesticity: we privilege the aesthetic qualities of the land over its worth to farmers and oil companies. This is at the heart of the practice of land-use zoning: different constituents require distinct guarantees of their rights to use the land in different ways. Oil well infrastructure has few aesthetic champions (although I enjoy my runs through the post-apocalyptical landscape of the Silver Thread oil leases that cover the hills to the west of St. Thomas Aquinas and continue to Osborne Road off the 150).

There is a ranch to the east of Koenigstein on the high plain that is mostly used as cattle grazing that has a gas flare pipe at the entry to its driveway that I covet; and in Saturday Night Special I mention the oil well as lawn ornament in front of the old stone house on the bend below the Summit; but no one is seriously suggesting that oil wells can offer amenity to residential development in the way that citrus groves, golf courses, trout streams and of course, chaparral can.

Some kinds of farming have greater aesthetic value than others. Ojai benefits, a couple of times a year, from the great drifts of orange blossom perfume that rise up from the East End's groves (The Citrus Belt). Citrus can be reasonably well integrated into sporadic residential development, and the fields of lavendar, olives and pixie tangerines at the Evendon's Upper Ojai New Oak Ranch are a delightful complement to the rough charm of the chaparral above them and their neighbor's newly planted vines strike deeply mellifluous old-world notes. More generally however, economic imperatives cut across such fairy tale notions of mixed-use.

Words establish seams of meaning that run through time: each generation transects the seam mostly oblivious to the reservoirs of implication that lie deep in the past. The oil derrick was named after a type of gallows used in the 16th century, which were named for an English executioner, Thomas Derrick. (Wikipedia). On a field near Godalming in Surrey, close by where I grew up, winter rains would manifest a circle of perhaps 100 feet at its interior diameter and 40' wide that appeared as a moat. The depression had been caused by centuries of trampling by townspeople gathered to watch unfortunates hanging from the local gibbet. In Upper Ojai, we are the less than willing spectators to the last rites of a dying industry, watching helplessly as it frantically sucks the last barrels of fossil fuel from the land beneath our feet.

Sinology

Apercu, epiphany or simply a realization long-past-due, the un-lived last third of my life offers up an opportunity: God willing, to continue in the process of opening up to the universe (and maybe figuring out what the hell that means); establishing my place in the tribe and preparing for a good death. This braided journey requires psychic and physical space; both can benefit from an anchoring: a sense of place.

When we were bringing up the two boys in Santa Monica Canyon, their mother and I would sometimes talk about how important it was for them to feel grounded, possess a rootedness, belong.

Very few of us get to go back to the places of our childhood and make a living in them. One such is Adam Tolmach, the local winemaker who after studying at U.C. Davis returned to his mother's Ojai estate to make wine (Where Native Meadows Come From). Many more of us fail, through frequent moves or finding ourselves in desultory environments, to even make an initial connection that might hold out the lure of return.

While I spent the ages of five to eighteen in one spot in a corner of Surrey, England my attachment was to our garden rather than the wider environment (The Scythians). The Heritage Industry had already made our local villages into death masks - preserving a hideous rictus grin on the presumed glories of their medieval past while the bodies rotted away within. Young people left. Local families were priced out of the housing market and wealthy young urban professionals, with half-an-eye on London, moved in to their 'places-in-the-country'.

A sense of place is not a given where economic opportunity rarely coincides with either birth-place or geographic predilection: gone are the days when local knowledge, learnt from family or won by dint of observation could be routinely leveraged into a livelihood. Instead, we cast around for environmental attachment wherever we can find it. Some of us, like those Londoners long ago who moved (and today still move) to quaint Surrey villages and retain economic ties to the 'big smoke' be it London or Los Angeles, cultivate hastily made traditions in their adopted 'places' - such as Upper Ojai.

Griffin, our younger son, has returned to Los Angeles to attend Otis College of Art and Design - while Will, our older boy remains in New York three and a half years after finishing college there. What we taught them, perhaps, was not attachment to a particular place, but the means to establish a relationship to both the built and natural worlds so that wherever they are there is a chance for a connection, a conversation with the physical environment along side of the media chatter that threatens to engulf us all.

We are oriented in the world in ways that depend on our lived experience of it and our imaginative conjuring of those places we have never visited. Within this constructed world of the real and the imagined, places can be transformed. They can become. Take China. I visited the other day. Or felt that I had.

While Lorrie and I walked across the parking lot in Oxnard towards the front door of Bed Bath and Beyond that hitherto I had only seen from the backside, as an illuminated sign stuck on the back of a big (stucco) box as I whizzed along the 101, she regaled me with the story of the time our friend Andy Dintenfass, erstwhile cinematographer, now art-dealer and a man of exquisite aesthetic sensitivities, had been lured into BB&B's Manhattan store by his wife Ann to buy towels. Andy was pole-axed. He consequently had to lie, like a concussion victim, in a dark room for several days while he nursed the massive hematoma to the right side of his brain - seat of his artistic sensibility - inflicted by the seemingly endless displays of razzle-dazzle end-of-days tawdriness - the chromed plastic, plush, crystal and glitter that lined the store's shelves.

I am made from coarser stuff, and I made it into the store without fainting away. I was however, transported out of my accustomed world: a stranger in a strange land (Exodus 2: 21-22 via Heinlein). Strange it may have been, but not entirely unrecognizable; I had the strongest sense that I was in a depository, a storehouse from Cathay, filled not with cultural treasures from the Orient (Wolf Oak) but with the outpourings of countless first, second and third-world, back-yard, high-tech or sweated labor shops from China, this latter-day 'land of a thousand trades'. This moniker was first appended (like a piece of the cheap jewelry that was one of its signature manufactures) to Birmingham which, in 1791, Arthur Young had described as “the first manufacturing town in the world.” By the mid-nineteenth century it was commonly known as 'the workshop to the world'.

But here and now, I was confronted with an epiphany: the Beyond in BB & B was the long sought after passage to the East. Through the plate glass curtain wall entry there was an enfilade straight into the belly of the manufacturing beast, to the treasures (or trinkets) of the orient, to the raison d'etre for this continent's subversion by Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. We left the store with half a dozen small purchases and sure enough all had been manufactured in China except for the taper candles which were made in that ancient Chinese dependency, Thailand.

Now, we see China in everything. Our imaginations have been subsumed by the Middle Kingdom. One recent Friday I spent a few hours with an old friend, Dennis Whelan, a planner for UCSB, touring the campus. Although our focus was on the many buildings created during Dennis's twenty year tenure, the subtext, for me, was provided by the walking experience along the broad paseos which reach through the campus in search of the views beyond: mountains to the north and ocean to the south. Like the fabled terminus of the central north-south axis of the Forbidden City, it is not hard to imagine in the soft Santa Barbara light and warm breezes, that Xanadu lies just beyond.

Of the fourteen thousand students, faculty and staff that bicycle to the UCSB campus everyday most, it seems, use their bikes during the day to navigate the campus. Jostling fixies, ancient ten-speeds, cruisers, mountain bikes, single speeds and sit-up-and-begs streamed by and alongside, there was the antic weaving of skateboarders who wove along on a parallel path. For decades, China was known as the 'bicycle kingdom'. There was a time when Beijing had four million bicycles - now there are four million cars and their numbers are expanding at a dizzying rate. As China adopts the car, on this campus at least, California adopts the bicycle. Cars are restricted to a ring road and the only viable way to navigate the sprawling campus is on a bike or board.

We still walk our property: the loop takes us down the drive, turning past the wood piles, along the trail to the west meadow, past the compost, past the walnuts, elderberries, oaks and laurel sumac, through the sage; skirting the oak grove at the top of the meadow we make a sharp turn up the shoulder of the spine that runs between the meadows then down the path, past the rock pond, past toyon, ceonothus and chamise then into the deerweed and down to the house. Each loop taken embeds memories of seasons, scents, of sun and shadow. Each loop taken makes surer this sense of place.

Nocturne

Quinn and Keeley, in their Introduction to California Chaparral, U.C. Press, Berkeley, 2006, blithely note that wood rats (Neotoma macrotis) are the signature animal of mature chaparral. Who knew?

Certainly not the casual observers of chaparral from car windows, or even day-hikers; I ran on trails in the Will Rogers State Historical park which backs up to the Topanga State Park for ten years, often in the early morning dark, and never saw a wood rat. I also never knowingly came across a wood rat nest - which can be five feet high and and ten feet in diameter.

Now I live amongst them in my metal stud, stucco and sheetrock box, they in their elaborately woven twig-stacks. They're everywhere. Morbidly afraid of the light (they even shy away from moonlight) they hide behind the fire-doors and live under our ipe hardwood entry deck. They live in the pool cover vault and gnaw at the deck framing above it. They carouse in the pool equipment corral and eat the the brooms, brushes and the plastic netting on our pool leaf rake. Or did. Until we got two feral cats.

They built nests in our cars. They ate the hosing of the air suspension system in our Land Rover LR3 (causing the air-compressor to burn out and the suspension to fail catastrophically). They made a nest in the heater hose of the car, where they died and the smell of dead rats suffused the champagne cow-hide, brushed aluminum and wilton-carpeted interior.

They are ubiquitous and highly industrious. One night, after having the car repaired from its latest evisceration by the rats, we forgot to garage it. The next morning we popped the hood to find the beginnings of a nest sitting on top of the engine. In the night they had eaten the wiring harness - eaten, digested and disappeared the wiring harness. That's when we called our local feral cat procurer.

Caroline, a writer, owns an equestrian estate low on the north slope of Sulphur Mountain (Wild Thing). Rats are a problem in stables where they share the horses' bedding, shelter and food and are not above nibbling on their hooves. Although there are a number of dogs who are 'ratters', of which perhaps the Jack Russell Terrier is the best known, Caroline has solved her problem with serial populations of feral cats. They are lower maintenance than dogs but also more transitory, at least in these urbanwildland parts, where they can quickly be caught up in the food chain. She imports them in bulk - mostly from the vacant lots of the Los Angeles netherworld - where a lawyer and wild cat fancier captures them, has them neutered and innoculated and sends them to rustic homesteads in the shrublands where they will have their fill of rats as long as they can evade the jaws of bobcats and coyotes.

The City of Los Angeles has dealt with urban feral cat populations using a policy of Trap, Neuter and Return - the theory being that these sterile communities will eventually die out of their own accord, but researchers have shown that 70–90% of cats must be sterilized before cat populations decline thus the theory depends on the thoroughness of the plan's execution. Late last year, six conservation groups won a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles and its Department of Animal Services to stop the practice of encouraging feral cat colonies until the legally required environmental impact reviews are performed. (Ammoland)

Ted Williams, in the Audobon Magazine Blog, writes that

"The American Bird Conservancy estimates that 150 million free-ranging cats kill 500 million birds a year in the United States. And according to a peer-reviewed study published February 24, 2009, in Conservation Biology, TNR causes “hyperpredation,” in which well-fed cats continue to prey on bird, mammal, reptile, and amphibian populations so depressed they can no longer sustain native predators".

Margot, our biologist neighbor warned us darkly that we should be prepared for our own silent spring by introducing feral cats which would decimate the surrounding bird and lizard populations. She sits on the Los Angeles Audubon board and is thus a party to the lawsuit restraining Los Angeles from its TNR policy. She has threatened to shoot our cats should they encroach on her property and I am in complete sympathy with her right to do so. But thus far, the score for the indigenous wild life (excluding rats) versus the exotic, introduced species, is one-zip.

There has been no evidence of bird kills and our friendly, local front-door lizard has lost a section of its tail but no more. The other day I watched it take advantage of a spall in the concrete slab and retreat inside the aluminum base window molding - entirely safe from predators.

However, walking with Lorrie up the trail towards the west meadow the other morning I saw a slim white eyeless mask with curved needle teeth sitting on the laurel sumac mulch which defines the path. I picked it up and saw it was a cat jaw that had been severed from the skull very recently: there was still the pink of the rough sandpaper palate and flesh wedged in the nose cavity. There was no sign of other cat parts, no fur to indicate whether it was the black or calico cat which had succumbed. We have seen no coyotes recently but this morning, Lorrie saw three bobcats, two juveniles and an adult, skulking around the wood pile which is about 40 yards from where we had seen the cat jaw. Bobcats tend to calmly appraise human presence before slinking off into the bush, such was the case this morning: Lorrie thinks she saw the droop shouldered demeanor of a guilty conscience as the adult ambled off.

The Big-eared Wood Rat has, as Quinn and Keeley report, "large ears, bright eyes and a pleasantly intelligent look about the face". In the normal course of events I am reasonably well disposed towards them and wish them no harm. One of my early experiences on the property was of retrieving a cardboard box which had blown off the building site during construction and lodged in a mountain mahogany on the far side of the seasonal stream.

I pulled the box out of the tree and clambered up the bank back towards the garage; when I reached level ground I realized that there was leaf litter at the bottom and I up-ended it over the ground to shake it out - the leaf litter fell to the earth followed by two rats. One scooted quickly off into the brush while the other followed more slowly dragging, as I thought, another rat along behind her. I then realized that I had disturbed the family in the process of giving birth to a baby rat. In a spasm of guilt, I gathered up the leaf litter and arranged it in a pile close to where the first rat had disappeared in the undergrowth with the thought that perhaps they could reconstitute their nest and the female, attended by her mate, could complete the birthing process.

The fate of junior has haunted me on and off ever since. At the same time, I viewed with equanimity the two baby drowned rats I fished out of the pool that were, I figured, new members of the family that had decided to nest in the pool cover vault. Furthermore, I set a trap outside the vault and eventually snagged the parents. But the sight of mother rat disturbed in her labor brought out all my instinctive love for the poor and downtrodden - I was, in a sense, the rats' landlord and had literally tipped them out of their cardboard shanty.

We are not clear at this point whether the second cat has survived or not. The last couple of days the cat bowl has remained suspiciously full of kibble. By tomorrow, if the food remains untouched, I think we can chalk up the off-ing of two exotic, feral cats to the natives. Some out there will be enormously relieved.

Cold Comfort

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

On the 18th November, I was still swimming in our un-heated pool where the water temperature hovered just below 70 degrees. Tonight, a couple of days after Thanksgiving I read that,

"Accumulating snow of up to 3 to 6 inches will be possible on the North Mountain slopes above 4000 feet from tonight through sun evening. The snow combined with gusty winds up to 60 miles per hour expected over the L.A./Ventura mountains has prompted the issuance of a Winter Storm Warning for the North Mountain slopes including the I-5 corridor above 3500 feet and the Grapevine." (Southwest California area forecast discussion, National Weather Service Los Angeles/Oxnard California 345 PM PST Sat Nov 27 2010)

My point being: I'm regretting the summer palace on the slope. Today was briefly warm - somewhere between this morning's cloud cover that rolled back to reveal blue skies mid-morning, and around two this afternoon when the first clouds marbled the sky ahead of a cold front that now, a little before five, has greyed our valley. Tonight will be cold like last night, and it will be colder still tomorrow and Monday; in the east end they will probably crank-up the smudge pots and wind-machines (The Citrus Belt ).

I know, I know, we are not talking east coast cold or heaven help us, Edmonton (Latitude 53° North), Canada cold (tonight's low, 4 degrees farenheit). Actually, New York is relatively balmy right at the moment, their night's low of 36° warmer than Ojai's 34° (29° tomorrow night); London's low (51° North) is 24°, Tokyo's low (the same latitude as Ojai, at 35° North) is a toasty (the heat island effect?) 44° and Vancouver's (49° North) is 33°. So enough already, it is cold - globally, or at least hemispherically cold (Sydney's low, 34° South, is 64°).

Psychologically, because we live in Southern California, it is very cold - a couple of weeks ago the high was 85° and two weeks before that, at the beginning of November we broke 100° on Koenigstein with the low around 60°. The truth is that that sort of weather could return anytime; 85° days in winter are not unusual. Which is why we are freezing now and not running around on a toasty radiantly heated slab. We made the call, relying on passive solar heating of the slab rather than active water or electrical coil heating and for a few days a year we suffer for it. The alternative is to have a heating system with a notorious lag time potentially overheating the house during the day just because you want a shot of warmth, say, between 7 am and 10 am.

OK, we are not freezing: last night we cranked up the Rais stove for the first time this season with beautifully seasoned oak of which we now have probably a two years supply. The oven temperature (the stove has a pizza oven at the top of the drum shaped fire chamber) reached around 150° Celsius quite quickly but that's a little shy of the 300-400° you need for actually baking a pizza in a traditional wood fired oven. But it warmed the dining room pleasantly enough and we turned the fan to a lazy whirr to bat the warmth down from the vault of the ceiling where it is wont to go.

It is now raining, and perhaps snowing on the Topa Topa peaks, and I am congratulating myself on having brought in enough fire-wood out of the weather to last us through to Christmas. Oh, and our dark secret is that in this all-electric house we use an electric heat pump to take the edge off the morning's chill.

it was my father who would intone the first line of T.S. Eliot's 1927 poem, Journey of the Magi, when we were out walking and there was the slightest nip in the air. He was mostly steeped in the great English poets of the nineteenth century but occasionally read work by writers of his own century. The wonder of it is that he read poetry at all. He rarely attributed his "lines" - they were embedded into his everyday syntax and thus, as a boy I did not recognize that his tastes also ran to at least one modernist; only that a sparkle of frost triggered "A cold coming we had of it".

The coldest night I have spent in California was in the high desert of the Mojave. Edmund C. Jaeger sensibly notes in his The California Deserts, Stanford University Press, 1933, "on the high Mojave Desert one may reasonably expect to experience a light fall of snow after the middle of November and as late as mid April.". Such was the case when my son Will and I camped along the Mojave road at around 5,000 feet in sight of the snow capped peaks of Pinto and Table Top Mountain, both well over six thousand feet. It was very early January and the evening was spent huddling around the camp fire, leaning well into it, ignoring the wood smoke and the smell of burning rubber as my feet got a little too intimate with the flames. We survived the night and the next day when we descended down towards Soda Lake the air warmed, we left the alpine vegetation behind and brilliant sunshine played over the desert vastness, punctuated only by the occasional creosote and burrobush.

In Southern California we are never far from this paradigm of the desert climate - warm days and cold nights. Sure, it is moderated at the beach: less warm days and less cold nights - but here in Ojai, we are firmly in the zone. Temperatures crash at sundown.

We live, as I have mentioned before, in prime passive-solar territory (Are We Green Yet? ). Baruch Givoni, father of modern passive solar design is an Israeli - he grew up in the desert, where the temperature conveniently trips from warm to cold at nightfall. By-pass this diode and you can achieve 365-24-7 thermal comfort: harvest the daytime warmth and dissipate it at night. Unfortunately, this only works well when you live in a place under the thrall of the desert climate paradigm - like So Cal and other desert regions of the south west.

Although in 2003, about 35,000 people died in Europe during a two-week heat wave, W. R. Keatinge, G. C. Donaldson, two British researchers note that,

"Cold-related deaths are far more numerous than heat-related deaths in the United States, Europe, and almost all countries outside the tropics, and almost all of them are due to common illnesses that are increased by cold. Coronary and cerebral thrombosis account for about half of the cold-related deaths and respiratory disease for about half the rest ".

Either way, thermal comfort is essential to good health. Here in Southern California we have the means to assure equitable temperatures year-round with minimal energy inputs: we aim to make of our simple barn in winter a summer palace; but if we occasionally miss the mark we will zip into a Patagonia fleece and think of Jimmy Carter.

Yuccapedia

W.S. Head writes in his slim and profoundly quirky volume, The California Chaparral, An Elfin Forest, Naturegraph, Happy Camp CA, 1972 that,

"The Yucca is known to most all Californians and especially to travelers who have passed through the Chaparral area during the blossoming period"

and,

"Even after the Yucca has completed its cycle of life; blooming, bearing fruit, and maturing seed, lifeless flower stalks continue to stand, blackened by the elements, as though resentful of relinquishing the over-seeing position held through an eventful life."

This last weekend, Lorrie and I, along with Margot Griswold our neighbor, found a way to revive both this awareness of the chaparral yucca (yucca whipplei) and to preserve something of its pre-eminence, even after death, amongst the chaparral flora. Plucked from a south facing slope along Koenigstein Road, the twelve foot bleached-blond carcass of a yucca was carefully balanced on its spiney base on our living room floor, the tip of the stalk brushing the lower reaches of the sloping ceiling. It looked, for all the world as though it had lived and died in situ, having burst through the concrete slab in all its spring-green glory just about a year ago, bloomed and then, through the late summer months, dessicated by the sun and stripped of its color it emerged - an ashen, straw-complexioned armature, its seed pods hanging like bronzed ornaments - as our Christmas Tree.

It was in this festive guise, topped with a glittering golden (plastic) star-burst that it was presented to upwards of 500 Holiday Home Look-In visitors who trouped through the house as part of the annual Ojai Music Festival fund-raiser.

The yucca anchored our (to readers of Urbanwildland, perhaps predictable) decorative theme: A Chaparral Christmas. We three were captivated by the cleverness of the conceit - our guests perhaps less so - but the opportunity to display the riches of the local ecology and indulge in a little education (both Margot and I are hopelessly addicted to didacticism) was irresistible. At the same time it was an interesting exercise in isolating the beauty of several chaparral species of dried seed heads, fresh foliage and live plants and using them as floral decoration. We provided ethno-botanical notes on all species along with a diagram illustrating their location in the house.

Margot produced an assemblage on a limestone slab (our kitchen island) which drew on her extensive knowledge of native plants, her years of collecting seed-pods, galls, leaves, stones, feathers, snakeskins, nuts and berries - and her great artistic sense. The centerpiece was a crow's nest collected after it had blown out of an oak and within which was placed a dark ceramic egg glazed with Hawaiian volcanic ash that served as the omphalos, or center of the world, for this profoundly resonant piece.

While the arrangements through the house were celebrations of the bounty of the surrounding landscape and were both aesthetically pleasing and evocative in a seasonally approriate way (the caterpillar phacelia, for instance referenced the snow laden boughs of skeletal winter trees and lent the living room a winter-wonderland aspect) the kitchen assemblage struck a deeper chord - resonating with the sustained timbre of 30,000 years of chaparral fauna and flora upon which we humans have latterly stumbled.

The ethno-botanical cheat sheet we provided for the docents of The Music Festival Women's Committee was based on Harrington's work in the early twentieth century. John Peabody Harrington (b.1884 d.1961) was a scholar of wildly taxonomic persuasion: he grew up in Santa Barbara, graduated in linguistics from Stanford and spent his life recording the nearly lost languages of the Western United States. Along the way, he collected botanical and zoological specimens. He was the most significant ethnographer and linguist working in America in the twentieth century. His research materials are still being catalogued and are housed in several major institutions throughout the United States and many more anonymous warehouses. His field notes cover more than a million pages. Copious doesn't quite capture the logorrheic nature of his work, but he could also be extremely concise: his notes on Californian botanical specimens were often attached to small, manila cardboard luggage tags.

While these contained the local Native American names (there were for instance, in Harrington's time, still six Chumashan languages) and the Spanish names it was usually left to botanist associates of the great man to provide the scientific descriptions - this work was incomplete, however, and ethno-botanists such as Jan Timbrook continue the identification of the Chumashan "voucher specimens" stored at the National Anthropological Archives located in the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Support Center in Suitland, MD. This collection forms the principal source of information for her Chumash Ethnobotany, Heyday Books, Berkeley, 2007 (as well as our cheat sheet).

While the yucca was billed as our Christmas tree and festively wrapped packages were scattered under its spiney leaves - the plant itself presented the Chumash with a variety of gifts: they roasted the basal portion of the plant (with leaves removed) and would also scoop out the white pith from the stalk (which reputedly tastes like banana); it was useful in the production of cordage, sandals and dried, the stalk made fine kindling.

When dead and skeletal, the yucca's seeds fall in a radius around the base of its spine-tipped leaves when shaken by the fall Santa Ana winds. In a wet year they will germinate and with relentless optimism continue their genetic tradition. We usurped this process to make a minimalist gesture that references a latter-day symbol of Christmas that dates back no further than nineteenth century England, when Prince Albert presented his bride Victoria with a lit tree.

Come Twelfth Night I will take the yucca down and shake it vigorously over our front bunch-grass lawn. With any luck, we will harvest our next yucca about a year from now from that slope and continue the tradition of a Chaparral Christmas. By then, the shrubland lily will be firmly established (in our minds, at least) in its new role as a yuletide symbol and thus join with its many, more traditional uses  that reach back to the Oak Grove people of the Milling Stone horizon- first settlers in the local Chaparral.

The Democratic Republic of Chaparral

While the indigenous people of California eked a living from the flora and fauna of the chaparral, we immigrants have yet to find economic value in the plants and animals of the shrublands. For this we should be eternally grateful. In the northern reaches of the state, circumstances were different.

It was a bear-hunter, Augustus Dowd, while tracking a wounded Grizzly who would be the first European to come face to face with the arboreal jackpot of Caldeveras Grove. The discovery of the giant trees (Sequoiadendron giganteum) became major news on both sides of the Atlantic and by 1855 they had become a kind of botanical freak show. Their great age prompted the notion that they were contemporaries of Christ.

But although hugely charismatic as the largest living things on the planet (and for a long while, before their cumuppance by the Bristlecone pine, considered to be the most ancient) these big trees were but the guardians of a coastal strip of far greater riches, a swathe, rarely more than 25 miles wide from south of Monterey to Southern Oregon where moderate temperatures, heavy winter rains and fog drip nourished the coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) - a vestigial or relict stand of the tree family Taxodiaceae that established itself throughout the northern hemisphere from the very beginnings of the Jurassic period on (200 MYA).

The giant (drive-thru!) trees became synonymous with both the scenic grandeur and the unique historical destiny of the United States (at a time when that destiny was most in peril); their smaller girthed cousins with the prodigious natural bounty of the land. The United States have survived, the redwood forests of California, barely. Fully 96 % of the old growth forests that existed in 1850 have been clear cut. Our old single wall house in Santa Monica Canyon which dated to the very early years of the 20th century was entirely crafted of this old growth wood and was impervious to termites and dry-rot. The mud sills were like iron and had endured their almost 100 years of service in much batter shape than the concrete foundations on which they sat. Our house was an exception: very little of that bonanza of millennial timber remains in service locally - most has long ago been sent to landfills across the western United States and beyond, but in the 1960's through the early 80's vast amounts of old growth timber were exported to Japan and there, I like to think, at least some of it has been used in their exquisite craft traditions and will become a part of their national cultural storehouse (Wolf Oak )

The aggressive harvesting of old growth wood through the first three quarters of the twentieth century opened up space for commercial stands of redwood and Douglas fir: but the young growth redwood available at your local lumber yard, looking something like slabs of streaky bacon with sections of sap wood set against coarse grained rapid growth heartwood is a parody of the deep red, tight-grained wood of times past.

The Pacific Northwest timberlands represent a cash crop rivaled only by the illicit growing of marijuana which competes for space amidst the remnants of old growth forests. In Central and Southern California, the dominant ecosystem has been cleared, burnt and invaded by exotic species but never harvested on a commercial basis. It is the light in which this ecosystem is bathed that is the key to the development of the region.

If endless dry days with azure skies were good for making motion pictures they also were attractive to those seeking a healthy environment in the dark days of consumption and other bronchial infections exacerbated by damp, cold and occluded environments. San Diego, Pasadena, Palm Springs, Ojai and Santa Barbara are all erstwhile resort towns that depended, in the late nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, on their healthful climate.

Charles Nordhoff was an influential journalist who promoted California in his 1873 book, California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence. He wrote glowingly about his trip across the country (less than four years after the completion of the transcontinental railroad), and settling in Ojai went on to become California’s (and Ojai's) biggest fan.

That this land oozed black-gold was a bonus and has proven a more long-lasting economic bonanza than the real thing that initially prompted San Francisco's meteroic rise. Redistribution of water on a scale not attempted since the Roman Empire has resulted in vast agricultural acreages and population densities undreamt of by the land's original, indigenous peoples.

All of this exists in a dominant ecology that, unlike the giant redwoods of the north, goes largely unnoticed. I first saw it rendered on TV's MASH - the chaparral covered hills of Malibu back-country doubling for Korea and set to the thrumming of chopper rotors and Johnny Mandel's theme song, Suicide is Painless.

There is one plant however, in the mostly democratic republic of chaparral that tends to lord it over all others. One of its common names is, in fact, Our Lord's candle; another is Spanish bayonet. These two names perfectly reflect the yin and yang of the Spanish occupation: the seraphic beauty of the mission churches gilded with heavenly voices reverberating from the old-growth redwood rafters and the blood curdling ferocity of the de facto genocide of their native subjects. The names also reflect the nature of the plant at either end: at the ground is a dense basal rosette of bayonet leaves with needle like points (and used as such by the Chumash to inscribe their flesh with crude tattoos) while atop the long, single stalk there is, in season, a cloud-like inflorescence of creamy white flowers. The flowers can be seen sticking up above the surrounding chaparral like the proverbial tall poppies of Australia, which in this reflexively democratic society suggests that such preening attention-getting be rewarded with the first cut of the scythe.

The Chumash called it pokh, the Spanish meguey, mescal or quiote. Amidst the pervasive self-effacement of the low woody plants that make the thorny entanglements of the shrublands, stands this showy, etiolated member of the lily family: the chaparral yucca (Yucca whipplei).

Bad Dreams

Something begins to stir along the north coast of California, reaches inward across the west facing Sierras and moves northward to Alaska: it may be the flapping of Raven’s wings, the beating heart of Gaia (Scrim of Mist) or, quite simply, the metastasis of biomass.

Malignant or not, this metastasis results in an explosion of cellulose upon which the Timber Industry feeds. As David Lynch's Radio announcer says at the start of Blue Velvet: "It's a sunny, woodsy day in Lumberton, so get those chainsaws out...."

In the early nineties, we looked to buy, with friends, a few hundred acres of timber-land about ten miles east of Yachats on the Oregon coast. When we were trying to put an offer together I stayed at a motel along the Yachats River estuary and one evening watched an episode of Twin Peaks. David Lynch created that TV series to reflect the same vision of reality that is at the core of all his work: in everyday life there are things happening beneath the surface that swim into your awareness but escape your understanding.

Such was the case with our appreciation of the Timber property. We loved its apparent wildness, its forest. What we did not understand was that the land, although for sale, was firmly in the maw of Timber interests and it would take more than its imminent sale for the industry to disgorge it. Thus it was that when we returned to view the property with another potential partner we found great swathes of hillside had been clearcut. The long cycle of timber contracts held on the land existed on a parallel legal plane to its freehold, and like the mineral rights to our property in Upper Ojai do not change ownership with the sale of the land. Although one of our partners had grown up in Oregon, we were naive: our romantic vision of the land as virgin forest was hopelessly at odds with its commercial reality.

A few years earlier we looked seriously at a property in the Wainiha Valley, on Kauai, HI. It was off of Wainiha Powerhouse Road that winds into the foothills alongside of the Wainiha River which flows down from the Central Highlands. The valley is patchworked with taro fields and streams, and is home to families that have been in the area for hundreds of years. The property we looked at was being subdivided from an estate owned by an American surfer whose tin-roofed home sparked visions of building a pole house that would reverberate with the sound of rain on corrugated steel while the river coursed beneath the open-planked floor - because (of course) the entire property was both in the flood plain and vulnerable to tsunamis.

What were described as Hawaiian walking trail easements ran across the access to the property. This turned out to be local code for the fact that the ancient Hawaiian families in the neighborhood still considered the land to be theirs and probably maintained rights to grow taro up to the haole's front door. Then there was the question of who owned the bridge over the Wainiha River. Here the undercurrents of Hawaiian custom and latent hostility to newcomers quickly submerged our conventional understanding of real-estate and we retreated, chastened by the realization that in the remoter parts of Kauai, at least, Hawaii is a foreign land.

It probably didn't help that our real estate agent was Dick Brewer, the legendary big wave surfer and shaper of a series of revolutionary surfboards in the 1960's that essentially defined the modern sport. While he has maintained his relevance into this century by working with the new generation of tow-in surfers such as Laird Hamilton, he continues to dabble in Real Estate and the property he tried to sell us is, I believe, still available!

When Lorrie and I first drove up Koenigstein Road in the mid 1980's we were very aware of the oil drilling activity in the area and although there was land for sale - perhaps the 160 acres that Jim Exxon ended up purchasing and developing - I recall being spooked by this overlay of mineral extraction on otherwise pristine land. Years later, with the oil industry by now more discreet in its activities, we purchase our property.

Yet there continues to be an undercurrent of oil industry activity that occasionally barges into our consciousness with gas flares (Flare-up) or drilling to freshen existing wells. The commercial calculus of oil drilling is entirely alien to us refugees from the west side of Los Angeles who have found value instead, in the natural beauty of the canyons, hills and streams of the Topa Topa foothills.

On the ridge-line of Sulphur Mountain directly across from us I noticed drill scaffolding a couple of weeks ago. Usually they do their work and are gone in a few days. And such was the case, but Stephen and Clarissa, whose property backs up to the Arco oil lease, have been noticed that they will be back - with scaffolding twice as high and lights to enable drilling 24/7 - right through the holiday season. This threatens to turn our vague awareness of an energy industry undercurrent into an in-your-face affront to our sensibilities, haunting us like a grotesquely phallic Lynchian dream sequence in which our wildland is ravaged by Arco. Merry Christmas.

This is a price we pay for laissez faire County Planning where the rights of corporations and wild-catters transcend those of residential property owners. An alternative is the highly controlled environment maintained by, for instance, The Sea Ranch Corporation. In our quest for a homestead outside of the City we looked long and hard at buying property on this piece of the Sonoma coast.

In 1963 Castle and Cooke, the Hawaiian based developers, purchased Rancho del Mar (the future Sea Ranch) which since the original Mexican Land Grant (one of the last in California) was deeded to Ernesto Rufus in 1846 had been a cattle ranch, a timber property and finally a sheep ranch. The 5200 acres included the coastal meadows and the second growth red woods that forested the west face of the inland ridge.

The Pomo, the indigenous Native American inhabitants of the area, had elected to live behind this ridge where they were protected from the ocean winds; they made seasonal treks to the coast to gather kelp, seaweed, and shell fish. The meadows are an ecological adaptation to the salt winds that lash the gently rising bluffs but grazing has eliminated most of the native grasses. The wind-bent dwarfed trees that almost certainly established themselves have long been cleared away leaving the romantically wind-blown grasses often swathed in fog-drip or drenched in coastal showers that are now, along with the myrtle hedges introduced by Lawrence Halprin the landscape architect, the signature Sea Ranch vegetation.

As noted in Scrim of Mist , the architectural firm MLTW (Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull, and Richard Whitaker) developed the design guidelines for the community of homes. We were entranced. I had been familiar with the project while an architecture student in Sydney and later had an opportunity to study with Charles Moore at UCLA. All that was left was to pick the right lot.

Many a Northern California vacation was devoted to just that until we understood that the undercurrent that flowed through our Sonoma dreams was the nagging concern that while still firmly entrenched in Los Angeles, with children in school and busy professional lives, a second home six and a half hours away made little sense.

The desirability of vacation homes was part of the larger fantasy that was the real estate bubble: a fantasy that we have now seen transmogrified into a nightmare beyond even David Lynch's lurid imagination.

Scrim of Mist

In my previous piece, Gaia Nation, I mentioned that

"Northwestern California, ... the coastal strip, valleys and mountains from Petrolia northward and east to Mount Shasta, stand apart from the rest of the state. Here, the intense rainfall and dense coniferous forests generated cultural patterns more in common with the Native traditions of the Pacific Northwest."

What we are talking about here is another confluence of bioregion and Native American cultural area: called the North Coast by the California Biodiversity council, it is no respecter of states or nations and sprawls across the coasts of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. As David M. Buerge writes in Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest: An Introduction,

"This is the world of Raven, powerful and immense, resplendent in sunlight, but more often hidden in mist and shadowed by gigantic forests".

A couple of weeks ago, while spending a weekend with my eldest son Edward in East Vancover, I tromped over the second growth forests of Bowen Island, in Howe sound: I was in the land of potlatches, totem poles and Raven at the southern terminus of the Inside Passage between Vancouver Island and the mainland, in the Salish Sea.

The skeletal stumps of the old growth cedars - pock marked with spring board notches from which loggers could get above the snow or to a point where the trunk emerges from its basal swelling and is thus easier to fell - lay amongst the lush new growth. Lorrie and I were on the island to visit Jeffray, Daphne and Kamile (Saturday Night Special) who live in one of the original cottages built by George H. Cowan as a summer community on the southeastern part of Bowen Island in the early twentieth century.

Wealthy Vancouver families who summered on the island in Cowan's cottages were fed from his garden, dairy, herd of sheep and chickens while his wife organized bucolic entertainments such as moonlight bathing, picnics and nature-walks amidst the towering coniferous forest and along the rocky shore.

The land at Cowan Point is now mostly in the hands of developers whose bucolic vision goes no further then golf courses; amidst serial bankruptcies, the land has been a hard sell - the middle class, its intended market, having vanished in the interim (Thinking MYA ). Jeffray's place, which he has owned since the 1980's is an oasis that harks back to those earlier halcyon days. He has artfully re-modeled the original log cabin and built decks to take advantage of ocean views. Daphne has created gardens around the house but they are under constant siege from deer. Cultivated land (and a trout pond) quickly give way to the enveloping trees.

On the south west corner of the island a new sub-division of raw land, The Cape on Bowen, is firmly targeted at the super-rich and it was here that we tromped with the selling agent, a friend of Jeffray's.

Featuring fourteen ocean front properties with a public trail cutting through the 10 acre lots, each has a narrow beach or sea-cliff frontage and stretches back into the second growth forest of alder, coast douglas-fir, western hemlock, pine, wester red cedar and sitka spruce with an under story of arbutus, ferns and lichens. It was wet, muddy and slippery. The developer (a consortium backed with Chinese money) has done an exemplary job of building infrastructure - beautifully executed roads, drainage channels, culverts and hydro-seeded grass verges and their intention is to bring underground electricity to each lot. The soil is intensely rocky; the rocks unearthed through the road grading process are all crushed on site into gravel for road base. Such attention to detail marks it as a model for the creation of wildland-urban interface property and puts the low-budget development of the seven lots along Koenigstein Road in Upper Ojai to shame. But this is a development of real scale and vast potential financial reward. At The Cape on Bowen, lots are are projected to sell in the low seven figures, and the entire development, of which the sea-front property is but the first stage, is two-thirds the size of Stanley Park and approaches the size of Sea Ranch, in Sonoma County.

It was the development of Sea Ranch that led, after protests from concerned locals wishing to maintain access to the beach along the miles of Sonoma coastline over which it spreads, to the establishment of the California Coastal Commission. Here landscaping is regulated by a design manual which prohibits perimeter fences and limits non-indigenous plants to screened courtyards. A herd of sheep is used to keep grass cut low to the ground to reduce the threat of fire during the summer months. Architecture is similarly regulated which has resulted in congeries of greying, shed-roofed, cedar shingled wood framed houses that appear to have been shaped by the fierce ocean winds and rise up out of the wind-blown meadows like ancient stelae. It was originally designed by Charles Moore, William Turnbull and the landscape architect Joseph Halprin and it continues to set the standard for sensitive landscape and architectural development in areas of high scenic value. Primal wildland it is not: a century or more of grazing has pushed the red wood forest to the north of Pacific Coast Highway where logging has stripped the woods of their old growth timbers.

Logging began on Bowen Island in the 1890's and now a cemetery of old growth stumps memorializes the aboriginal forest. At The Cape, second and third growth passes for wilderness, and for the moment, it is reasonably convincing. Unlike Sea Ranch, however, no architectural or landscape regulations are planned and with development of up to 16,000 feet of building per lot the development is unlikely to retain intimations of the wildland once the coastal lots are built out.

The Coast Salish did not colonize Bowen: they used it as summer hunting grounds for deer and salmon. On the mainland they built split-plank redwood longhouses that in some cases exceeded the square footage allowed at The Cape on Bowen lots, measuring up to 30,000 square feet. These were not, however, single family dwellings but contained many families allied with a chief, along with their slaves.

Something beats in the dark green world of the Pacific Northwest that is perhaps the heart of Gaia - mother earth - and prompted the native people to respond with imagery that is eerily unique in the strength and fluidity of its line whether carved or painted on redwood. There appears to be absolutely no room for human hesitation or doubt in this graphic communication of spiritual impetus and even when reduced to the size of a smoked salmon box-top has an other-worldly aspect. The people of the mist spread along this 2,000 mile long swathe of dripping forest and rock jumbled ocean's edge were very close to the originating power of the universe. Confronting their art or getting some sense of the natural environment in which they lived, is, for me, a profoundly disturbing experience and marks this bioregion as a kind of area 51, a black site where knowledge beyond the bounds of customary human sentience was transmitted.

Salish longhouses were symbolic representations of this universe - their corner posts serving as the cardinal directions of the world and their rich interior depiction of totemic animals filled that world with stories of its creation, warnings of its dangers and celebrations of its benificence. Rained out for days or weeks at at time the Salish and others along the bioregion found a world of light within their longhouses, darkened though they were by the somber hue of the split sequoia patinated by errant wood smoke.

Theirs was an interior life - spooked by the powerful presence of the giant trees but having ample salmon, bear and deer to hunt as well as plentiful berries and nuts at forest edge - they channelled their art through the thumping rhythms of the universe: for Gaia here is covered by the merest scrim of mist.

Gaia Nation

If you allow that environmentalism may be the new nationalism then bioregions are the new nations.

Nationalism - the invented histories and myths that go to support the notion of a particular chosen people - is the essential precurser to the making of nations. We tend to forget how recent was the invention of these 'old' nations: the United States was an early adopter of the concept in the late 1700's but most countries embraced the idea of nationhood in the nineteenth century. Germany, a late adopter, delayed until the waning years of the 1800's before embracing this new organizing principle and used the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 to solidify its newfound sense of national unity much as the United States had done with the War of 1812 (1812-1815).

As soon as one is freed from the idea that nations are somehow a natural god-given way of classifying societies their fragility becomes apparent. Towards the end of the last century we saw how easy it is for erstwhile nations to fracture and re-assemble along revised ethnic, language, religious or geographic fault lines and this process continues today.

I identify as a Californian and a chaparralian. As a Californian I live, according to the California Biodiversity Council, in the far south of the Central Coast bioregion that stretches north to Santa Cruz and which sits atop the South Coast bioregion that extends to the Mexican Border. As a chapparalian, I have a wider ambit. Chaparral exists in every county in California (Sacramento has the least, San Diego the most) and snakes beyond the borders into Baja and north into Oregon.

Regional identity (arguably bioregional identity) handily pre-dates national allegiance. Throughout the world, historic regions tended to generate unique traditions, crafts and farming practices that were relevant to the bioregion in which they were situated and today we celebrate their drinks, cooking and produce as expressions of the essence of localism; in this country, this is the ethos that has driven Edible Ojai  to become a country-wide collection of magazines celebrating the local - but these are limited, solipsistic views of the power of region focused on human appetites and consumption.

In the past, in England, allegiance was owed to the dales, the downs, the fens or the moors - as much as to County or Country: a sense of belonging to the environmental and physiographic characteristics of place was twinned with a connection to it as a source of food and shelter. The unique spirit of place (or genius loci) can transcend its prosaic function of nurture.

The ancient mosaic of Native American bands, languages and customs reflects the broader pattern of ecosystems and terrain as they type-shift over the landscape. The accepted anthropological regions of California echo those of the State Biodiversity Council: Ojai exists at the southern edge of Central California which is the largest cultural zone running from the north of the Central Valley south to the northern fringes of Los Angeles and east to the crest of the Sierra Nevada. The Chumash represented the apogee of California culture, for this was the resource-richest area of the state, generated largely by the teeming fisheries of the Santa Barbara Channel. The center of their cosmos, however, was located not along the coast or islands of their world but in the looming land form of Mount Pinos.

The Great Basin region is dominated by the Mojave and Colorado Deserts, some of the harshest environments on the planet and their Numic speaking inhabitants roamed more widely than the relatively sedentary bands to the north and west. But as is indicated in the rock art of the Painted Rock (a metaphoric land form) on the Carrizo Plain, there was social and trade interaction between the Chumash and Yokuts of the Central California region and the Shoshone of the Great Basin area (Cave and Rock). Northwestern California, however,  the coastal strip, valleys and mountains from Petrolia northward and east to Mount Shasta, stands apart from the rest of the state. Here, the intense rainfall and dense coniferous forests generated cultural patterns more in common with the Native traditions of the Pacific Northwest.

As a chaparralian then, my roots are in the Central and South Coast bioregions promulgated by the State and which coincide, broadly, with the westerly portions of the Great Basin and Central California Native American cultural areas - a land of valleys, basins and coastal ranges where chaparral predominates.

The environmental concerns that I have are typical of the times and several have been expressed in this deeply local and bioregional blog; they include preservation of the existing wildlands, enhancing the connectivity between wildland islands to extend wild animal rangelands, preserving the ocean shore line,  dunes and wetlands and reducing the levels of pollution in our air and water while using solar energy (wind and sun) to substantially power the region.

At a more broadly conceptual level I favor urban 'intensification' and wildland 'sanctification' - the anthem, if you like, of a brand of environmentalism that seeks greater urban density, dramatic reduction in commuter traffic, the establishment of city wide car-free zones and the gradual reduction of the suburban and exurban footprint along side of a greater protection for expanding swathes of wildland preserved for their own sake rather than for our recreational pursuits.

These are the themes of an interest in the environment that does not necessarily rise to the level of my being an 'environmentalist' but have guided me to an emphatic post-nationalist position: to identify with a particular bioregion and the planet rather than the nation.

I share in a growing holistic awareness of the universe that incorporates the local and the global and attempts to reach beyond the narrow interests of humankind. The first institutional evidence of the existence of such a global, or gaia consciousness can be observed in the attempts to forge international environmental agreements including, most conspicuously, those on climate change.

The timidity of these agreements and their sometimes outright failure, along with this country's unconscionable foot-dragging should not conceal the significance of the effort. They are the pale reflection beamed back at the world by the 'old' nations of a vibrant, bright and shining environmentalism that seems, increasingly to be a core value of young and old.

We are hearing the strains of a new hymn to the glory of the universe: it will, I believe, eventually result in a radical rethinking of the way we organize societies and my guess is that this will have a lot more to do with bioregions than with the false agglomerations of coerced affiliation that we currently call nations.

Data Streams

One of the reasons to live at the wildland-urban interface is to exchange, or at least augment the urban information stream with the wildland one. We are mostly comfortable with the urban data stream but our ability to decode the messages of the wild has atrophied: we stare unseeing, listen un-hearing and the scents of the chaparral elude our understanding; we are aware only of the grossest disturbances to the natural environment rather than the complex nuances that provide the context for decision making where the wild things are.

This evening, at dusk, Lorrie alerted me to the shaking branches of a toyon to which a cooper's hawk had retreated after a failed attempt to snag a rabbit in the deer weed beyond the pool. We watched, noses pressed up against the window waiting for a repeat performance. Didn't happen. Darkness began to animate the window glass not with wildland glimpses but looming reflections of our house interiors - dinner fixings and a vase of sunflowers on the limestone counter floating in the blackness.

Closer to the glass again, and with a cupped hand to shield the room's light, the silhouette of the ridgeline was still visible. The sky, less dark than the land, is flecked with grey but in moments is fully dark, and our thoughts turn inward, away from the enveloping wildland and we seek stimulus from within, where the bright light from T-5 fluorescents and the MR-16 halogens bounce off whitewalls creating our peripersonal space - space within our grasp and containing the controls to our media lives.

Since January 17, 1994, when our bootlegged cable connection snapped in the Northridge earthquake, I have watched no television; (I am one of the few people on the planet who has not seen the 9/11 Twin Towers footage). But the withdrawal from TV began even before then. Will, our older son, started Kindergarten at a Waldorf School in Northridge in 1989. He stayed through third grade and one of the tenets of this system of education is that you should kill your TV. We tried. Then Nature intervened.

In our Rural Loft in Upper Ojai, we have no need of television, having lost the habit. For sometime, in Los Angeles, during the Blockbuster years we would watch movies with the children, occasionally Lorrie and I together and now here, the kids gone, in this the age of Netflix, Lorrie mostly watches alone. The evenings for me are short. For most of the year I'm up at 5 and since I like to get eight hours sleep bedtime is around 9. I do not have the patience for the freneticism of most movies.

The sensory areas of my cerebral cortex enjoy the quiet laying down of information line by line, word by word in a slow accretion. And it was ever thus. Having finally learnt to read a little after my ninth birthday (which in my village school in sleepy Surrey, England, marked me as precocious) I was for the rest of my school days rarely without a paper-back novel stuck in my blazer pocket.

By the time I was sixteen or seventeen I was ready to tackle what is perhaps the most epic of the various eighteenth century contenders for the title of the first English novel, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, London, 1749. I toted a hard-bound edition around for six months or more and can still remember its heft in my hands: thus began a fat-book fetish that continues to this day. It weighed in at well over a thousand pages. My recent, summer conquest was David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Little Brown, New York, 1996, packing 1079 pages and I am currently reading William T. Vollman's Fathers and Crows, Viking, New York, 1992 - whose pagination clocks in a tick under four figures at 988. Next up? Perhaps the same author's Imperial (1296 pages) Viking, New York, 2009. This work, about California's Imperial Valley is blurbed as follows:

"Known for his penetrating meditations on poverty and violence, Vollmann has spent ten years doggedly investigating every facet of this binational locus, raiding archives, exploring polluted rivers, guarded factories, and Chinese tunnels, talking with everyone from farmers to border patrolmen in his search for the fading American dream and its Mexican equivalent."

I find deep satisfaction in scaling these mountains of words, of living on their slopes for weeks at a time, getting successively dizzier as I ascend the page ladder towards the peak. There is, quite simply, a physical as well as cerebral joy in the process; and the controls are deeply familiar: the simple flip of the page.

A couple of weeks ago, the gnats mercifully absent, we sat outside at dusk looking across the pool and up-slope with the Topa Topas rising (majestically) beyond and two bobcats - barely more than bobkittens - emerged from behind a rock perhaps 25 yards away from us and proceeded to frolic on a warm ledge of sandstone, occasionally pausing to cast a fixed stare in our direction. Beautiful creatures, their feral presentness was an astringent antidote to the mediated experiences that awaited us that evening -whether by the turn of a page or the click of a mouse.

When darkness descends the wildland views fall away replaced by the soft scrim of linen curtains or the jet hard reflections of the window glass. Through the un-curtained kitchen windows a few lights are visible across on Sulphur Mountain and the glow of Santa Paula and beyond suffuses the night sky. It is not truly dark. The urban part of the urbanwildland is ever present. But so too is the constant buzz of cicadas and deep in the night often the mewling of coyotes. Early mornings are sometimes punctuated by the fog drip that runs off the un-guttered eaves into the gravel surround. The squeak of ground squirrels and the three-noted calls of quail fill out the orchestration of our mornings.

The windows are opened after the warmth of the day passes and later the cool night air flows over our bed. The creaking of metal studs and air movement across our faces echoes the diurnal arc of shifting temperatures and in the early morning chill around 4 a.m. the HVAC compressor sometimes kicks on in reverse-cycle to push warm air into the room - a signal to close the windows and shut off the heat.

But despite this data from the world beyond, we are essentially cloistered - we live on the edge of the wildland but within a container that is designed to filter out the wildness and the weather - purposed to maintain our access to the urban information stream and allow only edited, sanitized access to the wildland.

It's a fine line: I would spend less time with the urban media if I could more fully engage our surroundings - day and night. It seems to me that the wildland is a book with pages beyond number - it may be the ultimate read.

Brand 'X'

The meadow which runs along the driveway in front of the house slopes towards the confluence of Bear creek and the nameless seasonal stream that runs to the east of the property. Closest to the house is a flat area where the septic leach field is installed and the rocks that were excavated during its construction are tumbled down below it except around the meadow's lone tree: a wolf oak.

Wolf trees are unusual in nature. It stands to reason: where one specimen succeeds other trees might reasonably follow, generated most likely, by the seed of the first. Loneliness is a condition nature abhors and attempts mightily to mitigate. Thus when we come across a singular tree it is reasonable to implicate the hand of man.

When I first met our neighbor Margot and visited her house across the street I marveled at the way it had been sited with an oak at each of its corners. It took a little while for the Duh..... moment to arrive (and I mean several weeks) when I understood that these four oaks were all that remained of a grove which had been unceremoniously destroyed to build the house.

The coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia), is not truly a part of the chaparral plant community. At a dinner the other night, someone visiting from Baltimore asked me what the word chaparral meant. I burbled on about it being a plant community adapted to the mediterranean climate zone which is characterized by long dry summers and wet winters - and how summer is really winter for the chaparral - and that things were starting to green up right now in what is Fall for the east coast - but I fear she is returning to Maryland with no clear picture of what this plant community is all about. I need a sound-bite for such occasions. But the oak, which is really a part of the southern oak woodland, is an example of how sound-bite-resistant this ecology is.

We look across at the north facing slopes of Sulphur Mountain, and there southern oak woodland predominates. It's comparatively damp across the way and the oaks need moisture; but while usually out-competed in riparian woodlands by sycamores, bays, willows, alders and cottonwoods they also thrive in areas of seasonal streams, even on south facing meadow slopes like ours.

The oak of the chaparral is the scrub oak (Quercus dumosa) and in this tree lies the origin of the name for Southern California's signature plant community or, as Rick Halsey proposes "California's State Ecosystem". In Mexican Spanish, chapparo, literally means short or squat, but also refers to a grove of scrub oaks, or more generally to the dry scrub of Baja. A small step, then, to the American word chaparral. (The Spanish quickly realized that specialized clothing was required while riding through these nigh-on impenetrable thickets: hence chaparejos or chaparreras and their American diminutive, chaps.)

All of that is way too verbose for dinner conversation - you have to eat after all - and would rightly be dismissed as TMI (too much information). A short plant list might include, chamise, ceonothus, mountain mahogany, holly leaved cherry, laurel sumac, toyon (with a brief nod to the fact that Hollywood is named for this bush whose berries resemble those of English holly) and scrub oak (segue to etymology).

I remember that I did mention holly-leaved cherry and actually recalled the latin name Prunus ilicifolia when she quizzed me as to whether it was a truly a holly or a cherry (both old world species). This was apparently familiar territory, but ceonothus stopped her in her tracks although various varieties have long been sold around the world as decorative shrubs.

Rick Halsey produced a Public TV show about chaparral and a little while later Huell Howser called him up and gushed (cue Texas accent) "I've been all over this state filming our show the last few months and you know what I've seen? Chaparral! I had no idea. It's everywhere!"(Fire, Chapparal and Survival in Southern California, Richard Halsey, Sunbelt Publications, San Diego, 2005).

We were eating at Monte Grappa, on Signal - had it been light I probably could have skipped the exposition and been more effective by pointing in the general direction of the hills above; the chaparral starts directly beyond Shelf Road. In Ojai, it truly is everywhere above the irrigated valley floor (Citrus Belt ).

I like Rick's notion that we should re-name the Los Padres National Forest (and So Cal's three other National Forests) National Shrublands (good luck with that); but I believe much effort and expense could be saved by inserting the word Elfin on existing signage, with a caret perhaps, so that we get 'National Elfin Forest'. This is a nod, of course, to W.S.Head (Chaparral - Got to go through it) , and could be attempted as a guerilla stencil campaign (the results of which might last for a few hours or days at least).

The U.S. Department of Agriculture notes that, "Coast live oak occurs in a mediterranean climate characterized by mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers" - which while true, does not separate them from chaparral, or riparian habitats. Our meadow wolf oak is a single-trunked specimen and thus less romantically spreading than the multi-trunked oaks that result from the root crown sprouting after a fire. The trees around Margot's house are multi-trunk and they all exhibit fire scarring subsequent to this re-sprouting. Our property too, has many such examples, but along the spine between east and west meadows there are several young single trunk oaks. The meadow specimen is older, but not old. Sited below the leach field it has grown perceptibly since we purchased the property almost three years ago.

Fire is not the only threat an oak faces: as seedlings and young trees they are susceptible to drought and browsing herbivores (primarily deer). Of the many oak seedlings that sprouted after our wet winter, few survived the summer. Those that did are often shaded by rocks (and rocks too, can deter deer) or nurse crops amongst which the USDA lists California chamise, coyote bush (Baccharis pilularis), purple sage (Salvia leucophylla), bush monkeyflower (Mimulus brevipes), bush lupine (Lupinus logifolius), California sagebrush (Artemisia californica) and poison-oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) - a mix of coastal sage scrub and chaparral species all to be commonly found on our property.

There's a healthy 24" tall oak (shaded by deer weed and artemesia) within spitting distance of the wolf tree. Once grown, the new oak's canopy will link one with the other and then beyond to the sentry oaks along the spine as a resurgent grove.

The meadow will then be restored in part as (if anyone asks) southern oak woodland, verging on coastal sage scrub and then tending, as you move east, to chaparral. Yes, it's everywhere: but look closely and it is ever-changing: elevation, directional exposure, latitude, soil type, available moisture and fire history all impact the mix and type of plant communities.

I am not a chaparral ecologist - nor do I play one when when seated next to an out-of-state guest at dinner - but I do spend a lot of time observing (and weeding): I'm a chaparralian, an independent enthusiast and now I'm looking for a simple way to convey the glorious complexity of our eco-system.

God help me, I want to brand it!

Wolf Oak

Tetsuro Yoshida notes in his The Japanese House and Garden, The Architectural Press, London, 1955,

“The Buddhist religion, which is such an intimate part of the Japanese, teaches the transience of life, that this world is only a temporary home. Hence the inclination to trust fate rather than go in search of happiness. It is quite possible that this pessimistic Buddhist doctrine has also had a share in determining the peculiar attitude of the Japanese to his home, and so he accepts as inevitable its ultimate decay or destruction by fire.”

We know that the thirteenth century Buddhist hermit, Kamo-no-Chomei, believed that it is superficial or even sinful to live a materialistic and princely life or to care if one’s house is consumed by flames. He is after all, an ascetic (Primitive Hut). But as I discussed in Phantom Dwelling, the Japanese, historically, had a trick or two up their voluminous sleeves.

Despite frequent and devastating fires, the kura or storehouse tradition has resulted in Japan having an extraordinarily intact history of cultural artifacts. As far back as the eighth century, kura were constructed by Buddhist and Shinto temples to store their religious treasures and sutras. Later they were built by noble families, the warrior class and tea-masters, and from the seventeenth century on, they proliferated as status symbols of the merchant class. All the while, the public and private dwellings of those with access to a storehouse were presented as sparsely furnished spaces of a refined and minimalist sensibility – their chodo, or stuff safely tucked away in the kura, a museum quality, fire-resistive building where both humidity and temperature were passively controlled.

Kura also functioned as pre-industrial warehouses, factories and storehouses for pawn-brokers. These commercial kura were collectively known as doso or dozo – literally clay storehouses – the most fire-proof of all. (Kura, Design and Tradition of the Japanese Storehouse, Teiji Itoh, Tankosha Ltd., Kyoto, 1973)

Dotted through the cities, towns and villages of Japan these buildings with their minimal openings, heavy shutters and thick walls presented a forbidding appearance. Their function was quite simply to keep their contents safe from moisture, rats, fire, theft and earthquakes – your typical concerns of the Southern California wildland/urban interface dweller!

The closed, affectless facades of these buildings, battened down as they were to fend off environmental and societal dangers led to their becoming associated with mysterious and sinister events: many were considered to be haunted. Truth-to-tell, the Japanese like their material possessions as much as anyone and they are often reluctant to let go of them even after death.

In the Buddhist tradition, the mind takes over after death and travels through the world in the ‘mental body’. This is the Bardo of Becoming, a way station on the path to re-incarnation. Sogyal Rinpoche writes in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Harper Collins, San Francisco, 1994,

“……We do not realize we are dead. We return home to be with our loved ones. Fruitlessly we try to make use of our belongings…….”

And,

“…the mental body is ceaselessly on the move. It can go wherever it wishes unobstructedly, just by thinking. Because the mental body has no physical basis, it can pass through solid barriers such as walls…”

Some claim to see these spectral beings or feel their presence lurking during their 49 days (and occasionally longer) of the Bardo of Becoming, and the folk tradition seems to suggest that the kura is a favorite place for those days in limbo. They are the haunted houses of Japan (obake yashiki). During the midsummer Buddhist festival of Obon the souls of dead ancestors are supposed to return home for three days, some to rummage through their erstwhile possessions in kura.

I was enthralled by ghost stories as a young teenager, and consumed anthologies of the same: one I remember in particular was called (as I believed) The Man who Loved Trees, by Algernon Blackwood. On finding it on the web, I discovered that its true title is The Man whom Trees Loved – a fabulous man-bites-dog turnabout with the title immediately telegraphing the theme of vegetal sentience (how, you ask, could I have forgotten?)

On re-reading it, it is apparent that it is a contender for being the first of a now popular genre, Eco-Horror. It was published in 1912. An old married couple lives at the wilderness/urban interface, in a cottage abutting England’s New Forest. She is a devout Christian; he is enamored of the forest and is called into the woods where his soul merges with the tree spirits –he makes a cosmic biological connection with the wildlands (initiated by the trees) while she stares into the abyss of loss, loneliness and spiritual doubt.

Blackwood came of age during that late nineteenth and early twentieth century resurgence of spiritualism and interest in the occult, of which Madame Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Annie Besant and her protégé Krishnamurti were also products and was a member, along with W.B. Yeats of the secret society, The Golden Dawn. The Man whom Trees Loved, however, draws both on Celtic Druidism and the roughly contemporaneous traditions of animism exhibited in Japan’s nature religion Shinto which predates Buddhism in that country by about a thousand years.

Shinto gods are called kami. They are sacred spirits which take the form of natural elements such as wind, rain, mountains, trees, rivers and life processes such as fertility. Humans become kami after they die and are revered by their families as ancestral kami. The Japanese are adept at juggling the alternative theologies of Buddhism and Shinto and each is honored in their everyday lives.

If transcience is the Buddhist conceptual contribution to the feather-light, flammable tradition of historic Japanese houses, then it is Shinto that animates much of their interior spaces and their relationship to the garden – which serves as an idealized representation of nature in the raw; a humanized vision of the wilderness. The Japanese garden tradition pays homage to the picturesque grotesqueries of the natural world. It celebrates the individual genius of each plant, rock, faux stream-bed and fallen leaf and in such gardens the Shinto spirits can play and radiate their beneficence toward the human soul.

In Blackwood’s tale, it is the elemental, raw primal power of the wild that casts its spell: a character muses,

"behind a great forest, for instance, may stand a rather splendid Entity that manifests through all the thousand individual trees—some huge collective life, quite as minutely and delicately organized as our own. It might merge and blend with ours under certain conditions, so that we could understand it by being it, for a time at least. It might even engulf human vitality into the immense whirlpool of its own vast dreaming life. The pull of a big forest on a man can be tremendous and utterly overwhelming."

This is the impact of The New Forest on Blackwood’s protagonist, David Bittacy. Around the house he views “the prim garden with its formal beds of flowers as an impertinence”. He is drawn to “the great encircling mass of gloom”. It is ultimately, perhaps, a Druidic vision - dark, dependent on density, on an entanglement of trunks and an engulfing canopy of leaves. In this primal forest he believes,

“Evil tends to separation, dissolution, death. The comradeship of trees, their instinct to run together, is a vital symbol. Trees in a mass are good; alone, you may take it generally, are--well, dangerous.”

Come Samhain (the Druidic precursor to Halloween), Beware the Wolf Oak…………

Phantom Dwelling

With a set up like this...

“....few worshipers visit the shrine, and it’s very solemn and still. Beside it is an abandoned hut with a rush door. Brambles and bamboo grass overgrow the eaves, the roof leaks, the plaster has fallen from the walls, and foxes and raccoons make their den there. It is called the Hut of the Phantom Dwelling.”

...I’m hooked. This is Matsuo Basho, writing in seventeenth century Japan of the hut he stumbles across close by a Buddhist statue in the hills above Lake Biwa, close to Kyoto - and not very far from the site of Chomei’s hojo (Primitive Hut).

He fixes it up, and four months later moves in for the rest of the year. But he is, at heart, a social creature and enjoys the company of the odd pilgrim and the local villagers. In the evening, he writes,

“I sit quietly waiting for the moon so I may have my shadow for company, or light a lamp and discuss right and wrong with my silhouette”.

He signs off the short piece, Record of the Hut of the Phantom Dwelling, 1690 with,

‘..we all in the end live, do we not, in a phantom dwelling?”

And, as a coda, inserts a haiku,

                             Among these summer trees

                             a pasania -

                             something to count on

A pasania is a Japanese evergreen tree. Basho, for much of his career an itinerant poet, struggled with the Buddhist notion of the transience of life - exemplified in the haiku by those fickle deciduous trees!

Born into a samurai family he rejected that world and became a wanderer, studying Zen, history, and classical Chinese poetry. He lived in comparative poverty supported only by his students. When he felt the need for solitude, he withdrew to his basho-an, a hut made of plantain leaves (basho) - hence his pseudonym.

Like Chomei, he recognizes the inevitable impermanence of both human life and the shelters we inhabit. Both make the latter explicit in their choice of huts - Chomei’s is a demountable affair that “would be no trouble at all to take it apart and put it back together again”, and Basho’s perhaps is even more transitory such that the Hut of the Phantom dwelling represents a certain permanence.

This characteristic of architectural transience in historical Japan has a real world parallel to its poetic expression. It was, at least in part, a function of the fires that regularly swept through dense urban neighborhoods. This was also the reason for the development of two separate architectural traditions: one for human shelter and one for stuff. The Japanese call the latter chodo, and this term essentially covered the acoutrements of their way of life. Chodo were stored in kura, or storehouses which were built considerably more robustly than the typical residence. Many were designed to be substantially fireproof and government edicts sometimes covered their location, such that they should be separate from other buildings to reduce the chance of fire.

We thus have a tradition where interior domestic space was thought of as nothingness - and infinitely transmutable according to season, festivity, guests and general circumstance when animated by the furniture, screens, scrolls and accessories selectively brought from the kura. In addition, the house was expected to burn (in event of a fire), while the kura was elaborately protected both by its means of construction and location.

Hmmmm. A couple of weeks ago I attended the SAFE Landscapes presentation spearheaded by the University of California Cooperative Extension along with a number of agencies including the Ojai Fire Safe Council and VCFD. Here the focus was on eternal human life and the transience of stuff. Having just watched the unpacking of the Limoge china service given to Lorrie’s grandmother on the occasion of her 1906 wedding I am inclined to question this premise.

Ready-Set-Go, the VCFD’s Personal wildfire action plan is predicated on leaving your chodo behind - save for those few items you can fit in the trunk of a Prius - to be potentially consumed by the flames, or perhaps, have it extensively water and smoke damaged.

Historically, the Japanese were ahead of the game on two counts: at any one time, their house was sparsely furnished with the bulk of their goods fire-safely stored in a kura; and because of all the to and fro’ their goods were all designed to be easily transportable by hand cart. Their stuff - including the furniture - was light and often made of hinoki (Chamaecyparis obtusa) or sugi (Cupressus japonica). I seem to remember seeing nineteenth century Ukiyo-e prints of people escaping fires - each pushing a handcart full of their chodo. We need a pantechnicon and a crew of super-sized movers to shift our stuff.

Lorrie and I made the decision to live in the storehouse. Our house is our kura. We believe it is substantially fire-safe. But the alternative, historical Japanese model has an an intriguing relevance to living at the wildland/urban interface. Why not strip down the living space and furnish according to the season? Avoid Ikea at all costs - their particle board technology is inherently heavy and brittle. In contrast, our old wrecks of nineteenth century storage chests (tansu), which we have collected over the years, have survived because they are both easy to move and although flimsy are easily repaired.

A strategy for the wildland/urban interface might be to build a kura on site - of concrete block, metal roof and fire and spark baffled vents - and erect a much lighter, transient structure close by that serves as the living pavilion - lightly furnished (in both senses) and appropriate to the seasons. Ready-Set-Go would then involve moving the light furnishings and acoutrement from pavilion to storehouse and then leaving. In the event of fire the pavilion would be sacrificed, but perhaps the slab and utility hookups could be designed to survive a typical fast-moving chaparral blaze. With an average cycle of thirty years between fires this might prove to be a highly economical approach - most particularly in terms of the cost of firefighting. It would also ensure that the Limoge would survive for another century.

Yet, despite heroic efforts to pretend otherwise we all live, as Basho notes, in a phantom dwelling. The transience of our lives is not to be denied. Our cultures too, are only slightly less evanescent. Contemporary Japanese architecture is heavy on the poured concrete and light on the shoji screens (see Tadao Ando). Kura are now prized for their remodeling potential amongst the haute bourgeoisie of Tokyo.

I have no haiku to end with, but instead a reminiscence of Chumash culture at the dying of the light.

Georgia Lee, Jo-anne van Tilberg’s predecessor at UCLA’s Rock Art Institute (In Search of a Shaman’s Lair) in describing the Chumash rock art in a cave close by Mount Pinos, the spiritual heart of the Chumash universe, notes that in the 1824 Chumash rebellion against their Spanish oppressors, the cave was the last refuge of the beleaguered rebels. Here a few remaining Native American souls had to confront both the primal energy of the wilderness, the danger - particularly to these non-shaman - of the cave as portal to the spirit world and the Spanish soldiers eager to make an example of their insurrection. This lithic retreat became both a Phantom Dwelling and a dwelling of phantoms - the last stand of these La Purisima missionized Indians cowering in a cave that once was a wellspring of their culture.

Primitive Hut

If you live at the wildland/urban interface then you have to make a decision, either actively of by default, as to the most appropriate demeanor to adopt as a creature confronting a substantially alien environment. Broadly speaking, you can stand apart or attempt to be a part. Similarly, that carapace we call home can be designed to either confront or acquiesce to, the primal energy of the wilderness.

As I point out in Bingo, we are now and forever discontinuous with our aboriginal environment - having been well and truly cast out of the Garden of Eden - but as Joseph Rywkwert notes in his book, On Adam's House in Paradise: the Idea of the primitive Hut in Architectural History, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA., 1971, “Paradise is a promise as well as a memory," and, he argues, humankind’s quest for the archetypal dwelling has, historically, been most often resolved as a Hut which...

“....in some way resembled or commemorated those which ancestors or heroes had built at some remote and important time in the life of the tribe. ... And in every case they incarnate some shadow or memory of that perfect building which was before time began: when man was quite at home in his house, and his houses as right as nature itself.”

We took the barn as our archetypal model and situated it in a clearing. I like to think of it as an extruded hut. It is notionally open to the landscape and our conceit is that the land flows, like the canyon breezes, through the short axis of the building.

Although Rykwert focuses on the Western tradition, it is the Japanese custom of the simple life lived in a simple dwelling that speaks to me more insistently and it is my sons William and Griffin, who were the first victims of my pursuit of this elegant ideal - in 1998 they were each immured in a ten-foot square ‘hut’ or hojo on our property in Santa Monica Canyon.

Kamo-no-Chomei’s Hojoki or Record of the Ten-foot-Square Hut, Kyoto, 1212, is an undisputed masterpiece of Japanese literature, and its opening lines are known by every school-age child in that country,

“The river flows on ever changing, on the still pool foam appears and disappears, and so it is with the people and houses of this world....”

Rereading the translation by Burton Watson in his Four Huts - Asian Writings on the Simple Life, Shambala, Boston, 1994, I noticed my inscription on the flyleaf, “For William, Enjoy your New Hut, Love Dad, 1998”. Will was 13, his brother Griffin 7. They were to be sequestered each night in the hojo for the next five years until Will went to college, and then Griffin alone with Derek, our dog (Wild Thing) for a further four until he went away to board at Happy Valley School.

The word hojo has developed over the centuries to mean a Buddhist monk’s cell with an integrated garden. Our hojo functioned as a pair of 10’ x 10’ huts - in the original limited meaning - and in the later sense as novice monk’s quarters, for both rooms opened out to the south to a small sunken courtyard garden. The hojo was the only new structure in a compound that included two single-wall craftsman buildings from about 1915, and its simplicity informed the design of our Koenigstein house.

Kamo-no-Chomei wrote Hojoki at the beginning of the Kamakura Period, at a time of great political uncertainty and it records his retreat to the north of Kyoto where he lived in his simple dirt-floored and thatch-roofed hut in the forest - where the deer have no fear of him and trailing boughs of wisteria frame his views. There are obvious parallels with Thoreau: both Walden and Hojoki are examples of pastoral or hermit literature and Chomei has been called "the Japanese Thoreau".

Thoreau's cabin and Chomei's hojo are both huts and both exist at the wildland/urban interface: on Mt. Hino beyond Kyoto and Walden pond outside of Concord, MA. Thoreau and Chomei were, in varying degrees, political refugees and attempted to establish a cosmic-biological connection to their surrounding landscape.

Many years ago Lorrie and I stayed in a ryokan at Ohara for a month while studying the temples and gardens of Kyoto. Chomei writes, “five years I spent in the clouds of the Ohara Hills, though I have little to show for it”, and it was here, failing to find enlightenment, that he decided to build his hut on Mt. Hino further to the south. We had an altogether more positive experience. It was in Ohara that I fell in love with Japanese minka, the traditional farmhouse - in its simplest form not much more than a hut - and Lorrie was entranced with a traditional Japanese style of architectural drawing that ‘folds out’ elevations from the plan and in that style she drew Sanzen-in, a buddhist temple which dates back, through several iterations, to 788 and was across the street from our inn.

Chomei’s signature hut, the hojo, went on to influence the form of the tea house as well as suggesting the basic form of the monk’s cell. Such elemental buildings occur all over the world and here in Ventura County the Chumash built their version of the primitive hut.

I was looking at an 1853 map of Ventura recently and Indian territory was indicated either side of the mouth of the Ventura River - in that wedge of land between what is now the 33 Highway and Taylor Ranch Road which runs to the north below the hills that rise up beyond the delta. This was after missionization had run its course and it was a dispirited people that hung on in the littoral. But even at this stage they were still building their domed grass houses because as late as 1924, a Chumash man by the name of Jose Romero built a version at the Ventura County Fair. Their structure is thus well documented.

Willow and sycamore were used to erect a framed hemisphere approximately twenty feet in diameter and ten feet high. Tule (bulrush, Scirpus spp). was used to thatch the exterior and provide matting for the interior. Even the door was made of bulrushes and tule mats were also used as partitions in these huts that would house up to fifty people. There is still a tule marsh at the mouth of the Ventura River. Although more famous for their plank canoes, the Chumash also made so called balsa canoes of bundled bulrushes (Jan Timbrook).

The Chumash huts were typically clustered quite close together in villages and such social congeries of buildings belong in a quite separate category to the kind of eremitic tradition of Chomei and Thoreau. Similarly, many wildland/urban interface dwellers live in areas of suburban-like density pushed up against the wildland. But many of us in Upper Ojai have crossed over that line - we are not hermits, and not all of us live in huts, but we have deliberately spurned the social proximities of the suburb and embraced the primal energy of the wilderness and seek a cosmic-biological connection with our environment.

Bingo

Prior to 1769, on that day before California, the Chumash population is estimated at around 20,000 (The Day Before America, William MacLeish, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1994). Although there had been sporadic contact with Europeans since 1542 when Cabrillo arrived on the scene, their complex hunter gatherer society remained intact until the eighteenth century apocalypse of disease and missionization. By the early 20th century they numbered less than 200. They had been decimated and then decimated again in the literal meaning of the word. Remarkably, a group of people now thrive in the State who identify themselves ethnically with the Chumash and in some cases are direct descendants of that small band of holocaust survivors.

A week ago Lorrie and I traveled down the Chumash Highway (154) to visit one of the four towns of the Santa Ynez valley and I was quietly pleased that the highway’s name reflected the fact that it followed the path of the old Chumash trade route between the Chumash villages of Syuxtun in Santa Barbara to Soxtonokmu and Kalawashaq in the Santa Ynez valley via the San Marcos pass. My pleasure derived, in part, from a conception that there was - in part of Sacramento’s bureaucratic machinery housed in some musty wood paneled office on the fourth floor of an Italianate pile from the 1920’s (serviced by a rickety elevator) - a wizened and bespectacled bureaucrat who had made the naming decision on the suggestion, perhaps, of the Santa Barbara Archaeological Society. This notion was founded on a childish faith in the benign intent of an entirely mythical, paternalistic (and comfortably autocratic) government.

The naming rights to State Highway 154, I now learn, were bought and paid for by the Casino Industry by way of political contributions to Assemblymen up and down the State. The highway’s name reflects the fact that the Chumash Casino, in Santa Ynez, is now the preeminent cultural institution of the Chumash people.

On the way back to Santa Barbara, we stopped at the Painted Cave, in the foothills above the coastal plain, inland from Goleta. This tiny State Park is marked by a small sign at the road where there is room for a couple of cars to pull off to the side of the narrow road. A set of steep rock steps takes you above the road, past a shallow sandstone cave and then to a larger cave opening securely barred with steel gates.

Between the bands of steel we shone our flashlights and illuminated the amazingly vibrant iconography of the Chumash shamans - limned in red ochres, grey, black and white set against the buff colored rock of the cave. Rattle snakes (guardians of the spirit world), a centipede (representing death) and sun-like circles are depicted as well as a black disc which is thought to represent an eclipse from the late seventeenth century. In pristine condition, the work is reputed to be the finest example of rock art paint in the western United States. More significantly, it stands as testament to the intrepid work of the shaman - who broached pathways to the spirit world by the simple act of entering the cave and then recorded his findings on the rock wall. Absent such human conduit to the spirits of the Chumash world it is doubtful if their culture can now, in any sense, be considered intact.

Yet their casino does, in an ironic and perverted way, represent a kind of cultural continuity. For the Chumash people had a highly developed economic system in which shell beads were used as currency. Their mint was located on the Channel Islands and plank canoes, or tomols were the means by which goods were exchanged between the mainland and the islands. The demand for the currency from large population centers near the coast as well as more isolated groups of villages (such as those clustered around Ojai) served as an impetus for this intensive bead making industry. In turn, the currency provided a mechanism by which food and other commodities could be exchanged between communities. These currency beads have been located as far afield as the Great Basin and the Southwest. (The Chumash World at European Contact, Lynn H. Gamble, U.C. Press, Los Angeles, 2008). Chumash society, pre-contact, represented a peak of neolithic achievement.

Despite their proto-modernity, the Chumash retained, like all Native peoples of the Americas, some sense of a cosmic-biological connection to their landscape. And it is to this sense that we continually return in our romanticization of their ancient lifeways. They were fully sentient: we are domesticated creatures forever alienated from our environment. As MacLeish puts it, “Environmentalism signifies a concern for one’s surroundings, and early Americans seem to have had little sense of being surrounded. They were part not apart.”

Lorrie reminded me over dinner this evening that it was Farley Mowatt in his autobigraphical study, Never Cry Wolf, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1963, who claimed to have eaten wood rats to more fully understand the nature of the wolves he was tracking. He wanted to ingest what they ingested - to be part, not apart.

While the Chumash were heirs to the Neothermal - that post ice-age warming trend that we still enjoy and that made agriculture possible - their agricultural practices were confined to low-level environmental interventions such as fire to encourage grass seed yield, or sometimes to drive out rabbits. Jan Timbrook notes that the Southern Californian Cahuilla people burned stands of chia to improve their productivity and the Chumash may well have done the same.

But here in the chaparral, acorns, cherry, toyon, elderberry, chia and grass seeds were in ample supply while rabbits, bobcats, mule deer, grey squirrels, ground squirrels and foxes provided furs and meat. The Chumash lived off the landscape and therefore fully lived in it. Their bead currency allowed for societal savings - to purchase a hatful of acorns or chia in lean times. Alternatively one commodity might be traded for another such that one hatful of chia was worth five of acorns (Timbrook).

That connection to the landscape is now lost. The remnant, contemporary Chumash are truly apart from the natural world living, instead, off the netherworld of gambling where Blackjack, Let-it-Ride, 3, 4, and 5-card Poker, Ultimate Texas Hold’em, Omaha High/Low, Slots and Bingo provide a kind of sustenance.

Peace Walk

Traditions rarely develop without some political or religious impulse. This originating impulse, if lost in the mists of time, is sometimes replaced with a new idealogy: the gravitas of the past appropriated by the shallow presumptions of the present.

Originally a fall feast tradition of the Wompanoag - gatecrashed by the Pilgrims in 1621 - the Thanksgiving Holiday had fallen into disuse until Sarah Josepha Hale (author of the nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb) suggested to Lincoln that this hi-jacked Native American festival might become a celebration of national unity. The President subsequently issued his Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1863. Similarly, if less beningly, leaders of the National Socialist German Workers Party appropriated mystical traditions, symbols and pageantry from ancient aryan traditions. The conflation of Christian celebrations with pre-existing pagan observances is well known.

At the Walk of Peace, a celebration of the UN International Day of Peace, a joint production of Meditation Mount and the Ojai Foundation the organizers elaborated the send-off rally, and its celebratory ending, with a variety of purloined traditions. In between, the walk was held in silence save for the occasional striking of a Buddhist meditation awakening bell. In another nod to the Buddhist tradition, saffron scarves were tied to branches along the way.

The UN General Assembly, in resolution 55/282, of 7 September 2001, decided that, beginning in 2002, the International Day of Peace should be observed on 21 September each year. This was a reaffirmation of an early resolution in 1988 that established the opening day of the The General Assembly in New York as Peace Day. The change to a fixed date echoes FDR’s jiggering with the Thanksgiving date - Lincoln established Thanksgiving as the last Thursday in November but outraged shopkeepers concerned at the shrinking Christmas sales season when that Thursday fell on the last day of the month in 1939 persuaded Roosevelt to declare that the Day be the third Thursday of the month. After that date was widely reviled as ‘Franksgiving’ it was settled that the holiday be observed on the fourth Thursday of the month.

The UN Day of Peace is observed as a day of global ceasefire and non-violence, an invitation to all nations and people to honour a cessation of hostilities during the Day. The International Peace Garden at Meditation Mount is dedicated to strengthening the capacity of its visitors to lead more peaceful, purposeful and compassionate lives that are a real force for good in the world; as such it is the perfect venue for mobilizing a Peace March.

The secondary agenda of the event was to establish a physical link between the Mount and the Ojai Foundation by inaugrating a trail that connects the two. Thirdly it was about establishing a nexus between two nodes in Ojai, the Peace Garden promontory overlooking the Ojai valley to the west and and a knoll that rises above the Foundation which sits on Annie Besant’s Happy Valley both of which are considered places of particular earth energy - known as power spots or vortices. A connection between the two would therefore qualify as a ley-line (Stoned) although these are traditionally straight and our route through precipitous avocado fields, the meandering creek bottom and the switchback climb up the north eastern flank of of a diminishing Black Mountain, was anything but.

We walked between places of similar mystique and elevation - the so called ‘Power Point’ set in reasonably undisturbed chaparral above the Foundation buildings is about 200 feet higher and it was there we gathered in the gloaming for a circle around a fire-pit into which were thrown the sprigs of white sage that we had been given upon our departure. In the billowing herbal smoke, the occasional flash of a camera, the steady beating of a small conga drum and the drone of a didgerdoo we achieved the apotheosis of borrowed tradition, conflated spiritual practices and the miscegenation of folk instruments from different hemispheres. My deepest regret is that I could not accompany this witches brew with my wobble board (a home-made skiffle instrument popularized by the Australian musician Rolf Harris). The chant-along was concluded with a collective ommmm.

The event was held two days before today’s full moon and in the normal course of events our evening walk would have ended under the light of the rising moon. As it was, the marine layer drifted in half an hour after we started and we finally clambered down to our car at the Ojai Foundation in full darkness. The opening ceremony had been held in bright sunshine in the Peace Garden at the Mount and here was initiated the macedoine of ancient rituals - but heavy on the Native American.

Laura Whitney of the Ojai Foundation shared with us her vision for the connection between the two Ojai institutions which by ley line, are less than a mile apart. She mentioned that there are over a hundred miles of trails in Ojai and her ultimate dream is for these to be linked together. Most of the trails in Ojai, other than those in the Sespe, are profoundly discontinuous and linkage, when possible, is achieved through privately held land. Our short Peace March was dependent on the good graces of the owner of High Winds Ranch. Upper Ojai, as I outlined in Things Fall Apart is mostly a mess of privately held ranches, oil properties and institutional holdings.

Eric Baumgartner provided an opening prayer - a generic Plains Indian paen to the four cardinal directions given on what we were told was Chumash sacred land. Each obeisance to a cardinal direction culminated in affirmation by the crowd by way of the call, ‘aho’ originally a Lakhota expression of agreement, but borrowed into many other North American languages as a result of inter-tribal pow-wows in the 20th century.

Even within the Plains Indian tradition of directions and the colors associated with them, there are many variations. This cosmology was sculpturally expressed in the medicine wheel - earth art used for various spiritual, ritual and healing purposes. Most medicine wheels have a basic pattern - a central stone cairn with spokes radiating to an outer ring of stone - surviving examples have been dated back at least 5,000 years on the Great Plains of the United States and southern Canada.

On a Native American discussion forum ThunderDreamers.com, there were dark warnings of mixing traditions: “You never know what the outcome may be, and someone could get hurt, have a problem with their health, their family, or their home”. What I wonder, might be the result of of declaiming the prayers of the buffalo hunters on Chumash sacred ground? I demurred from shouting ‘aho’, and perhaps I wil be spared misfortune.

As a small act of compassion on our return to Meditation Mount, I slowed the car to pass someone walking down the dirt track from the Foundation out to highway 150, and Lorrie enquired if he would like a lift. He got in and we drove him almost to the end of Mc Nell, a good 5 miles, which apparently he had been willing to walk on-top-of his Walk of Peace.

I reflected that I had been surrounded on the walk by such good and resolute souls: believers in peace, lovers of nature, trusting in the power of community (and mostly convinced that there are telluric currents that energize all of life). I was with them, one of them: but next time perhaps, the organizers will hold the faux Native American spirituality - it diminishes us and the traditions we filch.

Q&A

I was introduced to the art of the Japanese Zen garden while I was at Sydney University School of Architecture in the late 1970’s. Zen Buddhist priests began creating gardens for meditation in the middle of the Kamakura period (1185-1392) and these typically included stones, water and evergreens, remaining visually constant, apart from a mantle snow in the winter, throughout the seasons. This minimalist approach was further developed in the Muromachi and Higashiyama periods (1392-1573) when gardens contained only stones, a style that reached its apotheosis with Ryoanji in the late 15th. century.

The Ryoanji temple serves the Rinzai branch of Zen Buddhism which emphasizes the use of koans in meditation. When I sat on the temple engawa (porch) at Ryoanji in 1982, during a semester abroad with UCLA School of Architecture, I pondered the raked gravel around the rocks and wondered what mind-teaser the monk had wrestled with while he created the flowing field.

When I was a kid I would enjoy short circuiting my brain by trying to think of nothing. By the time I got to an image of a black void I would call foul because void suggests that it is surrounded by non-void - at which point the synaptic fireworks would provide a pleasant buzz. Hey, it was healthier than sniffing model-airplane glue.

A friend asked me the other day how the weeding was going. “Fine”, I said. I didn’t have the heart to explain that it is winter in the chaparral and apart from mustard, pretty much everything calls it quits by the beginning of July. All my son Griffin and I have been doing for the last three months or so is raking.

We weeded all winter and then weed wacked for six weeks or so and now we rake. What’s taking so long? Shouldn’t we be sitting back in our lawn chairs by now and enjoying the parched land? The fact is that no one really likes to rake in the hot weather. So we catch a few hours at the end of the day, and then not every day. My son was charged with raking to earn a few bucks for college. He would do a few hours most days and there’s a pile of grasses, thistles and clover on the west meadow that attests to his efforts. I call it a compost pile, but it looks a lot more like a hay stack and is the size of a small house. I wish he had done more, but it really is soul destroying work and I was limited in my motivational resources.

In Haiiti, to make a zombie, a voodoo priest administers pufferfish poison to the intended victim. Exhibiting the usual signs of death the incipient zombie is buried, then, at the voodoo priest’s leisure the victim is dug-up, revived and, in his neurologically damaged state becomes a pliant slave in the sugarcane fields. There is some evidence that in 1918 a gang of zombie laborers was ‘employed’ by the American Sugar Corporation.

The novitiate Zen-monks of fifteenth century Japan underwent a more humane neurological intervention: they were set to work at jobs of mind-numbing boredom armed only with a koan. 

The Machiguenga Indians who live on the foothills of the Andes in southeastern Peru at a base elevation of around 2300 feet cultivate maize, manioc and other root crops in their steeply sloping gardens. They also hunt and collect wild food 2,000 feet up steep forest trails that run further into the foothills. Research has demonstrated that their work rate is beneficially impacted by their habit of chewing coca leaves.

Work on our acreage is conducted at a similar elevation and in similar sloping conditions to the gardens of the Machiguenga; the degree of difficulty in raking dried thistles approaches that of sugar-cane work and the boredom quotient compares (I suspect) with the leaf and gravel raking tasks undertaken by Zen monks. 

But Griffin’s labor was underpinned only by the lure of ten bucks an hour and that was clearly not sufficient to get the job done. I’m ending up doing a great deal of it. I understand, however, that I get a lot more satisfaction out of the work than my son ever could. At times I almost enjoy it - it’s the ultimate recursive activity. Seeds and straw fly through the rake tines away from the gathering pile so you rake again until, at last, you figure that the quail will take care of those last clover, rye, thistle and broome seeds and the wind will blow the errant straw away or perhaps it will be plucked to make a nest.

Griffin would mutter darkly that all this raking was asking for major erosion come the first rains of winter. I was seeing that after the birds did their work, the rains would gather the last remaining weed seeds and wash them down to Bear Creek. We have startlingly different world views vis a vis the little bit of scrub that we own. Let’s face it: I’m working on a vision that is not widely shared, even within my own family.

Lorrie tolerates my approach, but she’ll be wanting to see results by the first quarter of 2011. I tell her it’s a five year plan, that the idea is to rid the meadows and margins of weeds and allow the chaparral to grow back in and that our success is initially signalled by deer weed - the first plant in the chaparral succession. And look at that - the artemesia is growing in, and elderberry and walnut and chamise. She sees rocks and thistles.

She has profound doubts that I know what I’m doing. In this she is fulfilling the traditional role of the distaff side. She is right to have doubts. I am bouyed by my vision not my technical expertise. But my vision is based on observation, and that provides me with an unimpeachable guide.

We have raked down to the bare crust. I wish it were the 30,000 year-old soil crust of typical chaparral but we are working with disturbed soil, ravaged by excavators and back-hoes for nigh-on a decade. The accepted theory is that Chaparral succession is unique in that it succeeds itself rather than being preceded by other vegetative types. My experience is that severely disturbed soils, particularly at the wildland/urban interface come back as weed patches, then soft chaparral (coastal sage scrub) and then finally hard or classic chaparral.

The weeding/weed wacking/raking protocol is designed to hasten this process and also to facilitate seeding of select areas come the rains. Now according to Chaparral 101,

“Immediately after a disturbance the herbs and forbs initially dominate because of their sheer numbers and showy flowers. Within 2 - 5 years the seedlings of chaparral plants and the shrubs resprouting from their crown roots or burls take over. Their more aggressive root systems exploit deeper water reserves and they will eventually shade out the forbs and grasses and replace them.”

Santa Barbara City College Biological Sciences, Introduction to Chaparral.

the operative word in the above is, as Manuel the Spanish waiter in John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers would so affectively say, eeventuaarly.................

Our raking is in service to expediting the process. With Griffin gone, I now have two tools at my disposal, the rake and the koan. I know the intention. I know the answer to the koan must be ‘Chaparral’ - emerging flickeringly at first and then less faintly from the deepest recesses of the Zen beginner’s mind, echoing the emergence of the indigenous eco-system from the traumatized land. I’m still working on the question.