Skotos

The ultimate luxury is natural darkness.

What would it take to achieve it?

Obviously, we'd have to move: from the urban wildland to the wildland. Urban is the enemy of the dark, it is the faint glow that vitiates the vast night sky and blows away the incandescent cobwebs of a billion years of pre-history; it is the pernicious miasma of photons that eats away at the pin-holes in the firmament that reveal the heavenly light; it is, quite simply, the destroyer of the star map - that most ancient guide to the fortunes of humankind.

What's up with the dark in Upper Ojai?

The lights of Santa Paula creep up over the Sulphur Mountain ridge washing the valley in a pale luminescence that turns the bejeweled black velvet of the night into a worn, grey, dish towel. From the west come the glaring security lights of the Black Mountain Ranch barn compound, and closer yet, the ridiculously over-lit, overwrought and, yes, over-the-top, gated entry to the otherwise mostly charming community that lies to the south of the 150 just a few hundred yards to the west of Koenigstein. Beyond, there's the smudge of light that filters up over the grade from the town of Ojai and creates a faint halo around Kahus, Bear Mountain. Don't talk to me about practice and game nights at Nordhoff High School - Friday Night Lights are destroying small town night skies all over the country.

Belatedly, and still not quite yet, Ojai City Council has a new Dark Sky Ordinance. It is sitting on the City Attorney's desk. Unfortunately, in the usual disfunctional manner of the Council, said attorney just upped and retired leaving the document, still awaiting his approval, in his in-tray. Gail Topping has worked on the ordinance for six years and finally presented it to the Council for adoption this March. If approved by the (new) City Attorney, it will replace a ten year old code.

A lot has happened to raise awareness of light pollution in that decade and the issue is now front and center in any city intent on preserving natural amenities: our ability to appreciate the night sky has been deteriorating, in plain sight, for far too long. Gail crafted the ordinance by referencing the work of cities such as Santa Cruz, Santa Monica, Santa Ynez, Berkeley, Tucson, Boulder, and Ketchum.

We live in an unincorporated area of Ventura County which has no effective Dark Sky Ordinance. However, our closest neighbor, Margot, is rigorous in limiting light pollution: she has no landscape lighting and minimal, fully shielded deck lights. We are also paragons of virtue in this regard relying on just two,13w, fully shielded lights on the garage and, when we remember to turn it on, a single compact fluoro down light in our entry eave soffit. We have also eschewed landscape lighting.  Ken and Charlotte who live up the hill, have two lights at their entry gate visible from our back yard, and they were persuaded to drastically reduce the lamps' wattage. We have, therefore, been effective in keeping our patch of south-facing valley on the dark side. Unfortunately, we look out to the south onto a hillside studded with extraneous lighting.

Although one could argue that humankind has spent the last few thousand years quite deliberately emerging from the gloom, I believe a more compelling narrative can be developed that suggests that we are skototropic - we seek out the dark. It is only in the last two centuries that the west has developed the kind of technology that convincingly holds the night at bay and we are beginning to understand the deleterious effects of that effort on our health, our imaginations and our spiritual well-being.

An absence of light causes S.A.D. (seasonal affect disorder), I would argue that a far more prevalent ailment is C.A.D.D. (chronic absence of darkness disorder). The two are clearly connected. Our ancient lizard brains are attuned to a circadian rhythm - to the chiaroscuro of light and shade, of night and day.

Denied the daily reset of the void, with its fierce, yet impossibly remote starlight, our urban world has degenerated into the light and the not so light. It has been a long while a-coming. There are reports of street lighting as early as the ninth century, and by the 1400's when the Mayor of London ordered that "lanterns with lights to be hanged out on the winter evenings between Hallowtide and Candlemasse" (Wikipedia) it received its first beaurocratic mandate. Benjamin Franklin invented a storm-proof candle-lantern and is credited with introducing street lighting to Philadelphia; by the early nineteenth century, parts of London were being lit by gas-lamps. In 1880, Wabash, Ohio became the "First Electrically Lighted City in the World" using Edison's recently perfected incandescent light. Today we are on the cusp of consigning his invention to the long dark night of History but light pollution remains perhaps the fastest growing and most pervasive form of environmental pollution (Missing the Dark: Health Effects of Light Pollution, R. Chepesiuk, 2009).

Yesterday was the Summer Solstice. Our thoughts are on long-summer days, perhaps, rather than short dark nights. Yet, the density, the viscosity of the night, however short, preserves the wonder of the 'rosy-fingered dawn' and completes the circadian dyad of night and day. The purpose of the Ojai Ordinance is "to protect and reclaim the ability to view the night sky and thereby help preserve the quality of life and the tourist experience of this desirable visual resource". But this rather meek objective does not plumb the existential question: if a fully dark night is our balance, what becomes of us if we relinquish this essential prop to our humanity and to our health? We exist in a world that serves as a living experiment: where our twilight nights constitute an ongoing exploration of the impact of darkness deprivation.

Paolo Sassone-Corsi, a U.C. Irvine pharmacologist writes,

"The.....circadian clock affects physiologic processes in almost all organisms. These processes include brain wave patterns, hormone production, cell regulation, and other biologic activities. Disruption of the circadian clock is linked to several medical disorders in humans, including depression, insomnia, cardiovascular disease, and cancer....Studies show that the circadian cycle controls from ten to fifteen percent of our genes, so its disruption can cause a lot of health problems.” (Missing the Dark)

Ironically, the one dark place remaining in Ventura County is Mt. Pinos, which the Chumash understood as the center of their world and the source of its balance. It represents the tallest peak in the County and is a favored location for amateur astronomers and star-gazers. In Upper Ojai, or              ?Awha'y, valley of the moon, the stars of fourth magnitude brightness are no longer visible. These illustrations of the 'alchuklash fables have disappeared from human view (Space and Practice II). The layered complexity of the night sky has been replaced by a parody where only the brightest stars remain visible like the last sequins hanging on a threadbare magician's cloak.

Our eyes seek the starlight experience of infinite depth, of infinite complexity and overwhelming awe in the trite electronic entertainments of our age. We have, as Robert Frost writes, " ....taken artificial light, Against the ancient sovereignty of night".

What's up with the Dark? It has become dark-lite. We are denied the solace of the Night Sky, where that old Romantic and renegade Transcendentalist, Walt Whitman, finds a regenerative transformation:

 ".... tired, and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,  Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars."

Beep-Beep

One of the attractions of Christian theology is that it slices, dices and peels. The three-in-one concept of the Holy Trinity dispenses (you'd think) with arguments about the distinctions between the man behind the curtain, his terrestrial emissary and the universal soul - the spirit immanent in the world - that kept the Transcendentalists up at night (Albion); but I'm going to leave it at that. A final metaphysical thought before plunging on with the real narrative force of this blog: weeding.

The last few days have been perfect weeding weather. A thick blanket of cloud sits over the valley: we are locked into June Gloom. I began my latest assault on the exogenous bio-mass that exists at the fringes of our chaparral garden last Wednesday afternoon. The sun was out. The weekend of the Ojai Music Festival (The Song of Life) had been cold and cloudy, but right on schedule, given that Irony has the planet in its grip, Monday dawned clear and sunny. It was that way for the first few days of the week before the iron-cold gloom descended once more.

I was weeding the edges of the gravel terrace that bridges between the house and the pool. The pool backs into the bowl that rises up beyond the house and wraps around to the east, where sits an oak-strewn rocky knoll, before falling away to accommodate a seasonal stream. The land then rises in an upfold to become the dominating eastern ridge that shelters the site. In a world of synclines and anticlines the terrace is an oasis of flatness, a ledge cut into the dominant slope. Here was my work.

Mostly it's deerweed (Lotus scoparius) (Manichean Plant Order) creating a dwarfish canopy for bromes, thistles, mustard, clover and erodium at terrace edge. The ground is no longer soft, but most of the offending material comes out with some of its root structure attached - the ne plus ultra of the weeding experience. The terrace is bounded in rocks and coarse native gravels sieved from the spoils of small scale excavations necessitated by post-occupancy site work - a terrain which makes for difficult weeding. Seeds are more likely to germinate at a rock's edge because they benefit from the local intensification of moisture that the rock face affords; and having begun life in a cranny the roots then spread beneath the rocks and have some measure of protection from the weeder's grasp.

In Southern California, however, the act of turning over a rock does not let loose a slimy bestiary as is experienced in many damper parts of the world. The occasional stink beetle scuttles off into the brush and if there is any residual dampness there will be earwigs, but mostly it is a barren wasteland; once I found a dark grey, almost ebony, wasp nest stuck to the underside of a rock. It was pitted like a golf ball, and about the same size but more bullet shaped - the disturbed wasps crawled in and out but none took wing: I quickly replaced it in the nether-world, nest down. So there was a fair amount of scrabbling beneath rocks searching for the basal stems of plants on which to tug.

Once, I disturbed a mouse. The slope, particularly as it edges towards the rock knoll, is riddled with holes. Not all of them belong to gophers. We see ground squirrels, chipmunks and very occasionally a wood rat. Gopher snakes live amongst the big rocks beneath the oaks. On Wednesday afternoon, after going in the house to take a tea-break, I wandered over the gravel terrace to take up my place at its edge and continue weeding. Just as I was about to kneel down I saw movement in my peripheral vision. I focused in its direction and saw a beautiful juvenile rattlesnake practicing his or her undulatory locomotion up the hill away from where I had been about to kneel. It made swift progress for a couple of yards and then stopped long enough for me to admire its markings, its incipient rattle and diamond shaped head.

In a few moments it continued up slope. Then, four or five yards from where I was working it arched half of its twenty four inch length up into the deerweed above it as though it was picking some exotic Lotus fruit. Instead, it manoeuvred its body over a deerweed stem and lay there, draped in the bush about eight inches off the ground, for some considerable time. Perhaps it planned to drop out of the bush onto an unsuspecting mammal; in any case, I continued working and next time I looked it was gone.

We have seen several Roadrunners about the house recently; sometimes alone or in pairs (the Geococcyx californianus, that is). One I saw early morning in a dry creek bed beneath an oak, rooting around, it seemed, in the leaf litter. W.S. Head notes in his slim volume, The California Chaparral, Naturegraph Publishers, 1972, that they are a characteristic bird of the chaparral although Quinn and Keeley's much more recent California Chaparral, UC Press, Los Angeles, 2006, does not mention it.

Head notes that the early pioneers called these birds Chaparral cocks and would tame them to stay around their cabins catching rats, lizards and snakes. He writes about seeing a fight between one of these birds and a rattlesnake and although this probable death struggle was disturbed by a passing car he is convinced that the bird would have been victorious; its opponent was close to three feet long.

The adolescent snake perched in the deerweed would have been be easy pickings for this gawky cartooned avian, its comedic carapace masking a stealthy killing machine. Perhaps it's time to remake those old Warner Brother's cartoons with an edgier, darker tone.

The Song of Life

Two white-tailed kites quartered the sky to the south of the house. I watched from the kitchen window while they carved up the firmament - a twinned quest that had as its goal the humble diurnal rodents of the chaparral. One stopped in a characteristic hover, high above our wolf oak (Wolf Oak) whilst its mate flew to the east and alighted on a mountain mahogany bough, just long enough for me grab my father's old Carl Zeiss Jena binoculars and focus on the bird, before they both flew off over the ridge in search of their afternoon snack.

A couple of weeks ago, on a rock art trip near Lake Isabella in Kern County (Owlish Avatar) we stopped just off Hwy. 178 and clambered along the banks of the Kern River to get close to a cliff-side rock art site that is actually visible from highway. I was the first to arrive midway up the cliff as it rose above the river; gashes of white guano were splashed down the rock face amidst the red, yellow and white pictographs. My eyes travelled up these vertical white lines to a rock shelter just beneath the cliff top, perhaps thirty feet above where I was standing. A pair of ravens were nesting there, the untidy structure of their nest spilling beyond the ledge and stained white like the rock below. I was more intent on them than the pictographs and was extremely wary of disturbing the birds. Here, it seemed to me, was a rock shelter almost certainly used by shamans to journey on their datura fueled vision quests before recording them on the rocks below: now occupied by a family of ravens - a favorite spirit guide of the Yokuts - it was not a great leap to imagine that these animal familiars were acting as guardians of the rock's ancient secrets. At this point I would have been content to retire quietly and leave the art and the birds alone on the cliff.

I do not use a camera to record rock art. I rely on my senses to process the experience and trust that the salient information will be "recollected in tranquility"; better that, I believe, than to confine a digital impression to the depths of my hard drive and rely on it as surrogate memory. I am, of course, almost entirely alone in this pecadillo. When my colleagues caught up with me, many clambered further up the cliff to get closer shots of the pictographs. In the process they spooked the birds and first one raven and then its mate launched itself off the cliff face into the warm thermals and, with a few flaps of their wings, crossed the narrow river then the wide highway towards Bodfish Canyon. Moments later a third bird, a juvenile, followed in pursuit of its parents.

Birds animate the landscape. Like rabbits on their darting runs that sew a crude blanket stitch across my chaparral running path - my eyes following them from side to side - raptors piece together the landscape in their graceful arcs. Hawks, with their panoptic vision embracing vast swathes of country - hungrily surveying their larder - provide us earthbound creatures with a vicarious glimpse into the sublime: following their flight momentarily removes us from the thrall of gravity and allows us to enter into their almost weightless caress of the air. Closer to the ground, tiny wren tits of the large chaparral army of LBBs (little brown birds) flutter through the bushes, weaving from twig to twig. Birds are instrumental in our romantic embrace of landscape: didn't Emerson say something of that sort?

Dear reader, you must have known I wouldn't leave Emerson and his Over-soul alone. How could I ? Over-soul, large-as-life, raised its beatific head at the 65th. Ojai Music Festival last weekend. On Saturday morning, the Australian Chamber Orchestra played Peter Sculthorpe's piece, Irkanda, ('aboriginal' we are told, disingenuously, in the program notes, for 'faraway'; it was presumably phoneticized from one of the almost 150 surviving native languages). No matter, the music was transformative - taking me back to the Australian bush. Sculthorpe offers the explanation,

"I love Australia passionately and I love our landscape so it's influenced most of my work. Almost everything I've written is about the landscape - trying to find the sacred and spiritual in it."

Emerson saw Nature as the source of Spirit, of the Over-soul, the divine energy that pervades the universe. He had that mid-nineteenth century spiritual certainty that today we find so intensely annoying. In 1849 he wrote,

"(Nature) always speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us......the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it."

Peter, you are, it seems, on the right tokara (an aboriginal word for track).

On Sunday afternoon, Maria Schneider, an American composer, brought her chosen instrument to the Libbey Bowl, a twenty piece big-band. Her compositions are heavily influenced by her interactions with nature. She is a birder, and many of her pieces make specific reference to bird calls, migration patterns and flight. Her music is suffused with intimations of the universal spirit.

That evening, Dawn Upshaw, the Australian soprano, sang songs Maria Schneider had composed from a collection of Ted Kooser's poems. Here Maria's lush jazz was joined to the slightly more astringent view of the poet. Both visions are steeped in a romanticism ultimately based in a belief that the natural world is imbued with an energy that speaks to the human condition. Sometimes I hear screech owls at night - they make more of a burbling trill than a screech - but it is a sound capable of immediately connecting me with the deeply resonant natural world.

If I could sing about it, perhaps I would: but these prosaic blog pieces are my songs of praise - lumpy eulogies scratched from my hard-scrabble word patch - that pale in comparison to the seemingly effortless music that is so similarly inspired.

Albion

In the mid-1990's, I studied with the great Mortimer Chambers (Harvard and Oxford) at UCLA. His area of speciality is Classical Greece and the historian Thucydides (460 – 395 BCE). In his class, Herodotus (484 - 425 BCE), although approximately contemporaneous with the slightly younger historian, got short shrift; despite the fact that Herodotus predates Thucydides and is acclaimed as the first historian, the quasi-mythical sources for Herodotus' The Histories allow champions of Thucydides (and Chambers is one) to claim the latter as the first modern historian.

It should be noted, however, that Herodutus also has his champions in the modernity stakes and in addition to his paternal role in the birth of history he is also acclaimed as the father of comparative anthropology and ethnography. You pay your money and you take your choice: but what all this has meant for me is that I missed the bit in Herodutus about the Tin Islands, the first mention of Britain in the classical world.

Herodotus located the Tin Islands, or Casterides, beyond the Pillars of Hercules (now the Straits of Gibralter) and was referring specifically to Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. A hundred years after Herodotus, Aristotle, writing in De Mundo, notes that "the ocean flows round the earth, and in it are two very large islands called Albion (Britain) and Ierne (Ireland)".

Albion, you may remember, for a brief historical moment (1579), was destined to be the name of what we now call California (An Island on the Land). More precisely, it was to be named Nueva Albion - long before a portion of the continent's Atlantic coast was dubbed New England (1620).

But in the name Albion there is also a connection to a vision of Britain that pre-dates the Roman occupation and the establishment of Christian monotheism where the land is peopled with fairies, Druids and other dabblers in occult pantheism. This is a living tradition, burnished from time to time by fey Romantics. It is the tradition that accounts for this writer's accretion of ancient references and cosmic intimations: I am a prisoner of my coming of age in England in the 1960's - now California is the land upon which I cast the shadow of Casterides, of the Tin Islands, of Albion, the faerie kingdom.

It is not that this country doesn't have its share of Romantics. I'll get to that in a moment. It's just that living in Surrey in my late adolescence I developed a communion with the local countryside that still colors my view of the natural world: it was the age of paisley - need I say more?

Well yes, there was also that fascination with the occult that began with the pulp-fiction of Dennis Wheatley and progressed to a study of Aleister Crowley. There was a copy of the The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, James George Frazer, London, 1890, in my high school library and 'the good bits' - those dealing with the dark arts - were well thumbed.

Enchantment with the occult is, after all, a mutant form of romanticism, and many of the great Romantic artists have come under its spell, from Coleridge, William Morris and W.B.Yeats to that great post-romantic, William S. Burroughs. The eighteenth and nineteenth century English nature-worshiping verse of Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Clare, Keats, Wordsworth, and Shelley has its roots in a spiritual connection with the universal spirit - which emanates from the natural world. The Transcendalists, most famously, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, among many others, used the ungainly, rebarbative word 'Over-soul', which no one could mistake for fey romanticism, in explaining the mechanism by which God pervades nature (and man); yet the pantheistic demiurge remained fully intact.

Emerson was emphatic in his insistence that God is revealed through Nature, but his was a transcendant God - he was a theist rather than a pantheist. Whitman was of the belief that Nature is God, not just his handiwork; not just a medium for revelation as it was for Emerson. The Transcendentalists all believed themselves to be inspired by the Divine soul - Emerson's Over-soul - but its source remained a point of debate: was it immanent in the world (the Pantheist position) or was it transcendant, theistic - the deity behind the curtain of the material world?

The Romantic position has usually hewed close to the doctrine of Pantheism where the world is numinous - possessed of an all encompassing spirit existing in a sacred Universe. Whitman was confident that there was no personal, anthropomorphic or creator god: Nature was all. But the Transcendentalists were an eclectic bunch - they drew on Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity as well as Greek thought: Xenophanes and Heraclitus vie as the first Pantheist philosophers and predate our battling Historians by a century or more.

This eclecticism endeared Emerson to the Theosophists. Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant (Wolf Oak) quoted him with approval and regarded him as a kindred spirit: they recognized a fellow seeker. Quite what Emerson would have made of Blavatsky's Masters of the Ancient Wisdom or Mahatmas is another matter. But Theosophists and Transcendentalists share a similar conception of God: Emerson's Over-soul is not so different from Blavatsky's Universal Divine Principle. However, the time and space travel undertaken by Besant, Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner to meet with the Masters across the astral plane, tips Theosophy well into the realm of the occult.

Although Ojai houses one of the greatest occult libraries in the world, the Krotona Institute, and erstwhile Ojai stalwarts Krishnamurti and Annie Besant provide a direct link back to Madame Blavatsky, a simple Romantic love of Nature is probably more characteristic of the town's residents than an adherence to this occult tradition. While I might be tempted to make the case that the Chumash 'antap (Space and Practice II) were but a New World manifestation of the Druidic priestly class that held sway over Celtic Britain, the joy I take in nature is, most often, similarly unclouded by thoughts of the esoteric.

For example: there really is nothing like a shadowy oak grove of a sudden splashed with sunlight - the added frisson of a spiritual connection with some sort of universal energy (as we now tend to characterize Over-Soul) can make it a sublime experience. These revelations are one of the reasons I hang around in the chaparral and the oak meadowlands of Upper Ojai - it is my attempt at communion with nature in Nueva Albion.

Owlish Avatar

All writing is autobiographical: and so it is that as much as this blog purports to be about Landscape, Shelter and Community at the Wildland/Urban interface, it is mostly about me - but not an un-mediated me. I choose to write about my interactions with the environment in ways that begin to build an idealized avatar: the me I wish to present to the world.

But a reader of even the most modest powers of perception can quickly discern the shadowy bundle of neuroses and idee fixe that lie beneath this buffed up, intellectually penetrating persona that, week after week, I attempt to manifest on this blog; and when my avatar receives praise from my friends and acquaintances for another penetrating or informative piece, it is the real, more fractured me who accepts it. On Friday night at the one year anniversary of Chris and Debbie's marriage (Wedding Weeds) held at Theater 150 on Matilija, when Kit Stolz says to me: I've been reading your blog, you know so much about the Chumash, I assume the demeanor of the successfully flattered and demur - but not too forcefully.

The reality is that the anthropology and archaeology community at large knows almost nothing about the Chumash and I know about a hundreth of what little they know. But even at 1%, I feel strangely comfortable extemporizing on this lost civilization.

It is this comfort that Kit registers - my confidence on the high-wire of history. This derives from a long habit of reading histories with a critical, and truth be told, mostly left perspective. I learnt much at the feet of the great Marxist historian C.J. Hobsbawm, author of a magisterial, three volume work on modern European history which I read closely before reducing to a sort of Cliff Notes for my prep school students at a snooty private high school, on the west side of Los Angeles. Economic history interests me so Braudel's books on the development of capitalism are a key influence.

When I came to study American history I gravitated to the work of Eric Foner and taught my eleventh grade class at Oak Grove here in Ojai using Howard Zinn's The People's History of the United States. All of these historians focus on the prosaic and the plebian as well as the extraordinary and the aristocratic; and they present the economy as the milieu in which people are most evidently touched by the unfolding of power relationships - or politics.

Thus whatever understanding I have of native cultures derives from sifting the ethnographic and archaeological record through a historiographic scrim that sees politics as the apportionment of power and power as deriving from the ability to dispense basic economic benefits. As I mentioned in Space & Practice II, the 'antap were able to exert a kind of aristocratic control over the Chumash through their mastery of ritual which provided for the health, wealth and spiritual safety of their subjects. There are obvious parallels with other times and other histories.

The Chumash relationship with the land was intrinsically economic. Jan Timbrook's Ethnobotany spells it out: every plant they encountered became part of a complex culinary, pharmaecological and fiber store-house. 'Ownership' of particularly useful minerals such as obsidian derived from the simple fact of adjacency; shells, chert, flint and ground pigments, as well as prized foodstuffs like chia moved around coastal and southern central California across trade routes lubricated by the shell money produced at the Channel Island mint.

Lacking a written language, elements in the natural world took on a symbolic role in explicating the Chumash cosmology. The shadow, spirit world was also understood in terms of plants, animals and artifacts and here we have a graphic record in the form of rock art. While much meaning can potentially be derived from the Native American practice of the layering of glyphs over their terrain, (even if some of the symbolic significance of animal representations, for instance, is lost to us), the introduction of the specificity of place adds a fourth dimension to this schema that renders the whole ultimately and profoundly unknowable.

For the local tribes unerringly found the fairies at the bottom of their garden, or, as David Whitley puts it,

"The shaman's rock art site was a sacred place that served as his portal into the supernatural: during his altered state of consciousness the cracks in the walls of the site were believed to open allowing him to enter the sacred realm." (The Art of the Shaman, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2000)

I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago when I joined John Bretney's final Rock Art Trip of the season in Kaweah territory along the Kern River. This area at the southern edge of the Sierra foothills and to the east of San Joaquin valley is at the southeast perimeter of the Yokuts' homeland. The Yokuts represent  congeries of tribes sharing a common language stock (Penutian) and significant cultural similarities. Like the Chumash, they were creators of pictographs; and the rocks upon which these motifs were daubed still resonate with an elemental spiritual connectivity: they were and are power spots.

I was introduced to the notion of power spots by the works of Carlos Castenada. He describes his Yacqui Indian protagonist, Don Juan, as maneovering to seat himself in a room or when at rest in the desert in a location in which he can channel the energy of the place. In Western thought we use the term genius locii. Here in the western United States it seems appropriate to use the term offered up by Castaneda.

As an architect one is deeply constrained by one's clients, bureaucratic strictures and programatic requirements, but once or twice, particularly in landscape projects, I have located power spots within my work. Dumb luck. The new summer house dba has created for our neighbor Margot seems to be favored with an energy vortex more or less in the center of the space.

The medieval masons who laid out the great Gothic cathedrals were geomancers of the first order, understanding that lines of force as they naturally occur on the land can be concentrated through architectural alignments. Something similar occurred in neolithic cultures that erected vast stone geometries. Native American shaman lacked the technology to modularize rock and artfully reassemble it, or even, so far as we know, move large rocks, but they certainly marked rocks with paint or through percussive incision and thereby potentiated them. Shaman endowed the landscape with power and would ritually return to particular places and use that power for good or ill.

As a resource, the geomantic energy of potentized rock exists in the world and was subject, in the Native American world, to a process of politics and economics; and the sacred and profane, the spiritual and temporal are together, proper subjects for both history and that mash-up of anthropology, archaeology and ethnology that concerns itself with societies that have left no written record.

Owlish avatar, sort of a post-middle-age Harry Potter, has no issues with processing the entire mess.

Space and Practice II

In the space that was the Chumash Homeland, there existed the practice of 'antap manifested by a shamanic society of Chumash astronomers and magicians who cured the sick, attempted to control the weather and believed that their rituals maintained the cosmic balance.

At Burro Flats, a Chumash rock art site in Simi Valley, there is a shallow cavern that functions as an astronomical device. A few moments after the first light of winter solstice falls on a rock painting within the cave, a small luminous triangle fills out to become a finger of sunlight pointing at the center of a motif that features five concentric rings. This is the work of 'antap. (Echoes of the Ancient Skies, E.C. Krupp, Dover, N.Y., 2003).

Like the rock art sites at Vandenberg, and most notably the Coso Rock Art Monument at China Lake (Things fall Apart), Burro Flats is preserved within the web of defense installations that cover the state. At the Simi Valley site, the 'antap pictograph has been protected by Rocketdyne who built test beds within a few hundred yards of the rock art and upon which the space-shuttle engines were originally tested some three decades ago. As at Vandenberg, (where there are curious parallels between the ascension of Chumash souls at Point Conception and the secular, heaven-bound activities of the Air Force), these may be instances of the defense industry locating their facilities in vortices of power similarly identified and marked by Native Americans.

For the 'antap were all about power. They were a shamanic cult with its members spread across the villages of a political province exercising an overlay of control, primarily through their direction of ritual and the making of astronomical predictions, that transcended the independent powers of village headmen.

Membership in the 'antap was hereditary and based on a family's economic and political power. This aristocratic caste stabilized the otherwise nucleated power structure of Chumash society. While the members of individual villages did not think of themselves as belonging to a shared culture, the 'antap did, in fact, establish a coherent cosmology throughout the area we now think of as Chumash. It is thus more compelling to speak of a Chumash astronomy than of a Chumash people.

The 'alchuklash, the dedicated astronomers of the 'antap cult, believed that their ritual magic ensured the orderly progression of the celestial bodies they observed traversing the deep ebony velvet that was the pre-modern night sky. Discrepancies in this synchronization were portents of cataclysmic events. One such anomaly, a solar eclipse on November 24, 1677 became enshrined in the Painted Cave in the Hills beyond Santa Barbara (Bingo) where a black disk represents the sun and the two red disks below indicate Mars and Antares.

While the 'alchuklash regularly identified stars of fourth magnitude brightness (for their names were recorded by Harrington) and these minor celestial objects were woven into stories and a kind of astrological system used for divination and the naming of children, the moon - the dominant object in the night sky - was treated as a familiar, and in their legends functioned as a referee of the celestial battles in which animals stood in for asterisms and constellations. (December's Child, Thomas C. Blackburn, U.C. Press, 1975)

I was reminded, in this week of the Taurus full moon, of how essentially terrestrial is this natural satellite. The 'alchuklash certainly seem to have intuited that the moon was of a different order to other objects in the celestial sphere that formed the tapestry of their night. It was intimately associated, Harrington's informants tell us, with people's health and was considered to be, like the Earth, female: mother moon, mother earth.

A world away, in the Wesak Valley high in the Tibetan Himalayas a celebration of the birth, enlightenment and death of Buddha accompanies the eight minute apogee of this month's full moon. Sometimes called the Buddha moon, or Wesak Moon, it is considered the most auspicious day in the Buddhist calendar. Like the 'antap winter solstice ceremony or Kakumupmawa, it is a day to celebrate continuity, humankind's union with nature and the cosmos and an acknowledgment of our place in the cycle of life.

The moon is a pale, watery reflection of the great solar driving force of our planet. It is a domestication of the fearsome sun; the earth's satellite a lantern and a clock. For the 'antap it was both of the earth and of the heavens, an intermediary and an agent of intercession; and a referee of the cosmic gambling game of peyon (Living the Sky, Ray A. Williamson, University of Oklahoma Press, 1984)

In our world, shaped as it is by the energy derived from fossil fuels, petro-chemicals and the technologies and politics surrounding them, it is easy to dismiss the ethereal sources of power pursued by pre-modern peoples; but Chumash culture, as Harrington's record of the 'antap illustrates, was highly politicized precisely because of the reality of these sources of power - the effectiveness of the supernatural was manifested in the network of control the 'antap imposed on a fragmented people.

The cosmic, astrological and space/time vortices of power these 'antap shaman accessed, are, I believe, an enduring aspect of our world. Sometimes, (and this week as the Buddha moon shone in to the bedroom window was one such), I believe that this supernatural energy can still be harnessed to our human purposes.

Space and Practice

Early last week as dusk fell, the new moon was revealed dipping low over the western horizon. As the week progressed the moon grew fatter and, rising later, was still high in the sky by dark; I imagined it, by about midnight, sliding behind the San Rafael coastal range and entering the sea somewhere around Point Conception.

The Southern California Bight (SCB) describes the inshore turn taken by the coastline from Point Conception to just south of San Diego and east of the Santa Rosa-Cortez Ridge, an 1800 m high, 180 km long underwater range that lies 90 km off the coast directly south of the northern Channel Islands.

Point Conception is the westernmost headland of the SCB. It is the point at which south trending storms peter out in the ocean - which accounts, in part, for the wetter, colder land north of the point and the drier south. It is also, according to Chumash legend, the site of The Western Gate, proclaimed as a point of embarkation into the Milky Way for the spirits of the dead.

I touched on this briefly in Death Comes to Koenigstein mentioning only that the Chumash dead experienced soul-wanderings over the earth and ocean in preparation for their heavenly journey to paradise. I was unaware, at the time of writing, of the controversy swirling around the Point Conception terminal for 'soul wandering' that has developed, over the years, into a debate on the existential status of the Chumash - both in the present and in the historical record.

Before blundering into this controversy, I had indicated in past posts such as Saxon Hall, Hoop Dreams and Bobcat Magic et al, that the Chumash were not a people, but an agglomeration of individual Native American bands created for the taxonomic convenience of nineteenth and twentieth century anthropologists. Influenced by E.J. Hobsbawm's critique of nationalist mythology and his notion of invented ethnic 'traditions'; my work with the UCLA's Cotsen Center for Archaeology Rock Art Archive under the direction of Dr. Jo-Anne Van Tilberg, and a long-standing interest in historiography, it was perhaps inevitable that I would take this position: I am profoundly sceptical of histories that serve contemporary interests at the expense of detailing the messy realities of the past.

Thus I was a willing convert to the position of Haley and Wilcoxon who argue, in their paper, Anthropology and the Making of Chumash Tradition, Current Anthropology, Vol. 38, #5, December, 1997, that Chumash practice, as delineated by self-styled Tradionalists, is an amalgam of New-Age ideology, the Hopi Traditionalist movement, popular primitivist imagery and the ethos of non-Indian counterculturists. I noted in Peace Walk, that such faux pan-Indian syncretism does little to uphold the enormous variety of Native American culture and much to demean the profundity of local tradition. Similarly, Jo-Anne van Tilberg has deplored the travesty of Southern Californians of Native American descent dressing up in the buckskins and bonnets of the Plains Indians to celebrate Chumash Days in Malibu.

Haley and Wilcoxon suggest that "ultimately, the entire category of Chumash is modern and neither its members nor its cultural content is unambiguously indigenous". Having established the cultural discontinuity of the Chumash Traditionalists with their possible Native American forbears (and much doubt is cast on this relationship) they go on to suggest that The Western Gate may have had only limited significance to the local Purisimeno Indians as suggested by J. P. Harrington in the early twentieth century.

The proposed development of a Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) terminal at Point Conception in the late seventies initially galvanized the local community of ranchers, surfers, environmentalists, archaeologists and the Sierra Club; they banded together with Chumash Traditionalists in establishing the sacred nature of the place. From Haley and Wilcoxon's perspective this consortium ultimately oversold the significance of the site by suggesting it to be the only place at which the souls of the Chumash could depart for the land of the dead. In the spirit of the times, and following the example of similar occupations at Alcatraz and at Wounded Knee, Chumash Traditionalists occupied the site and proclaimed themselves to be 'Keepers of the Western Gate'. While there was clear evidence of a Chumash village at the Point (Humqaq), 'The Western Gate' appears to have been an entirely new-age act of naming.

Harrington's Chumash sources indicate that the souls of the dead do indeed ascend to Shimilaqsha, the western land of the dead; but this seems to have occurred at a great many hilltops where feathered and painted pole shrines were placed to guide the souls of the departed. It is probable that such shrines were erected at Point Conception, but highly unlikely that they were any more significant than others of their kind.

Haley and Wilcoxon evaluated the site in the early nineties to gauge the impact of a proposed development at the Vandenbergh Air Force base, twelve miles away from the Point. They concluded that while Point Conception was a traditional cultural property according to the Department of the Interior's guidelines, the same could not be claimed for the coast line as it extended north towards the base - despite the claims of some who saw the need for preserving the shore as an archaeological park.

Vandenberg Air Force Base is one of two primary rocket-launch sites in the United States. Satellites are launched into a north-south orbit over the poles so it is advantageous to launch to the south over water so that if the rocket blows up, the pieces will fall relatively harmlessly.

By the mid 1960's the Air Force had already constructed six launch sites at the base; in the 1970's they decided to use NASA’s Space Shuttle to launch its satellites into polar orbit. After over a decade of work and several billion dollars the Air Force halted the use of the shuttle for launching satellites because of the Challenger accident in early 1986 and their 'Spaceport' was mothballed. In 1995, Lockheed chose the location to launch its Athena rockets but after three expensive failures discontinued the program.

Some have suggested that this miserable record suggests that there is a curse on the facility connected with the disturbance of The Western Gate's psychic air-space. Likelier, is the more prosaic explanation that most close reviews of military expenditures would reveal similar tales of waste and failure.

This January, a Delta IV Heavy, Boeing's most powerful rocket, was launched from Vandenberg, carrying a spy satellite. Preparing for the launch had taken three years and $100 million in infrastructure upgrades at the launch site. The rumble of the liftoff was heard across a fifty mile radius of Chumash territory.

Haley and Wilcoxon's decision to use their deconstruction of The Western Gate mythology to question the broader authenticity of the Chumash community has not gone unchallenged. Jon Erlandson (An Island on the Land), for one, suggests that their thesis denying the validity of the Chumash grouping ignores the pragmatic reality of a contiguous geographical cluster of bands who spoke related dialects of a common language group and shared a suite of cultural traits and traditions.

For what its worth, as a blogger and independent scholar, while I have argued that the Chumash are, regrettably, an extinct culture (Bingo) I see no reason to abandon this historical, taxonomic conflation of space and practice. As for The Western Gate, I believe it may have functioned for the souls of departed Chumash as a non-exclusive portal into the heavens. Remarkably, a few miles to the north, in a radically different culture, the Air Force and its sub-contactors continue to have similar aspirations for this lonely headland.

Manichean Plant Order

The Good:

Now is the time for some of the most beautiful sage-scrub and chaparral plant groupings. I'm thinking of young buck-wheat, both the yellow and pink varieties with Artemesia, Brickellia and Salvias; the creamy topped chamise, mimulus and bush poppies; sprays of California everlasting and Solanum xanti (purple nightshade) amidst antic deerweed. The native morning glory and goosefoot and larkspur nestling together on the very edge of the chaparral; rarely, a stand of woolly blue curls amidst chamise - but popping up all over, the native hiacynth known as blue dicks . Amidst the weeds (see below): lupine and caterpillar phacelia, blue eyed grass and this year's not-so-much (last year's prolific) purple owl's head clover.

The Bad:

Clover, Erodium and mustard - all assiduous colonizers of broken ground. Thistles, of many varieties but most notoriously, the yellow star thistle, Centaurea solstitialis - so noxious it is consigned to land fill rather than compost. Grasses: so many introduced after 1769, their seeds in animal hair, packing materials, ship's ballast or in soil surrounding fruit tree cuttings (Grasses in California, Beecher Crampton, UC Press, 1974) - now spreading across the disturbed ground and turning it into a hideous caricature of European meadowland. So much else that I recognize from my youth in England and all so wrong in California.

The Argument:

There are some who argue that all plant life is precious. My friend Sarah Munster, the Landscape Designer, argues for the value of the Peruvian pepper (Schinus molle) - often erroneously called California pepper - in the chaparral landscape; I consider them abominations. Margot, in her wisdom, has planted oak seedlings beneath each of the peppers and jacarandas (installed by the original owners of her property) and once they are to six feet or so she will remove the offending exotics.

Trees, we can presume, if not sentient, certainly have a spirit-life and this is confirmed, perhaps, by the experiences of such as Jiddu Krishnamurti who received enlightenment under the pepper tree in the East End of Ojai and Siddhartha Gautama who sat in meditation beneath a Bodhi tree, resolving not to move until he had attained nirvana. At a minimum, trees function as conduits for unseen energies and those sensitive to such currents are understandably reluctant to remove the antennae.

But while it's never easy taking the life of a mature tree, if we allow exotics full rein then the individual character of unique plant communities will eventually be destroyed and the world's vegetation will slowly be homogenized into a collection of the planet's most aggressive colonizers - chaparral, for instance, crowded out by arrundo, peppers and eucalypts - and the variety of the world's fauna decimated by the destruction of unique habitat.

T.C.Boyle addresses one aspect of this conundrum when he writes in his lastest eco-thriller, When the Killing Stops, Viking, 2011, of the National Park Service's campaign to eradicate wild pigs and sheep from Santa Cruz Island and the counter-campaign of animal rights activists who believe all animal life, whatever the ecological consequences of their living situation, is sacred. The shock troops of this war on feral pigs came from New Zealand, a land that has its own history of fighting introduced species, and an antipodean friend tells me that they were awarded the contract based on price - they cut the pigs throats rather than shooting them - saving the cost of bullets and firearms.

Readers of this blog will be well aware of where my sympathies lie: I have undertaken the quixotic mission of rolling back the time-clock on my patch of chaparral and sage-scrub to before 1769. The Channel Islands have been dubbed California’s Galapagos, for the unique variety of flora and fauna that developed there in isolation from the mainland. Chaparral is hardly less precious but under equal threat.

Ursula K. Le Guin, creator of the fictional universe, Earthsea, writes in her review of Boyle's recent book, (The Guardian, Saturday 19 March 2011),

"California was an island in the earliest, fanciful maps. Ecologically, the maps were right. Isolated by the ocean, the Sierra and the great deserts, dozens of species unknown elsewhere flourished in the benign climate, until the white men came. Then, under the impact of a thousand imported exotics, native species began to decline or perish.

There are Californians today who, far from planting lawns around their desert condos, would like to uproot all the golden Spanish wild oats to let the bunch grasses of Indian days cover the hillsides again."

I am one such Californian attempting to hold the line.

Death Comes to Koenigstein

I wrote recently of the death of Ralph Hansen Sr. (Nymphs and Naiads). He was our neighbor. He lived at the top of the hill and was surrounded by his passion - seven water wells and an ad-hoc museum of rusting drill-rigs and sundry drill equipment. I pass by one of his abandoned efforts most Sundays when I run through our land and then cross over the bottom spit of his property heading for the road as it sweeps north along a ridge between the abandoned County road hairpin and the gorge that drops down to the old County ranch property. Ralph's house sits at the top of the hill and looks south to another hill-top aerie, the Atmore's Lazy II Ranch.

Greg Atmore and his wife were the first neighbors to greet us on Koenigstein. Seven years ago they both lived in their house with their small yapping dog who would bark everytime I wandered the hills in view of their property. Then a few years ago, his wife was incapacitated with Alzheimers and she went to live at a facility in Santa Paula. We would continue to see Greg most often when he was driving back from seeing his wife at dinner. Then a couple of weeks ago he died while undergoing back-surgery; he was writing his autobiography. His career was spent selling life insurance; I imagine his wife is now considerably richer (but she may not realize it).

The dog continued yapping for a few days after Greg died, and the American flag still flew over the property - and then the yapping and flapping was gone. The Atmore home now sits silent in the landscape, no longer a human habitation but instead a roost for birds, shade for snakes and lizards and the crawl space a sanctuary for rats safe now from the shrill bark and needleteeth of Greg's rat-catcher.

When the Egyptian royalty realized that the ostentation of the pyramids encouraged constant plundering, their kings chose the bleak and desolate hills of Thebes as their new burial grounds hoping to ascend to the sun-god Re with their funery objects - essentially the goods needed for a continued existence - unmolested by grave robbers. The natural shape and color of the Theban Hills are reminiscent of pyramids and this seemed to confirm them as likely points of ascension for the deceased Kings and Queens of the New Kingdom.

I was reminded of this when I tramped around the two deserted hilltop estates of Ralph and Greg. The Lazy II ranch sits on a peak at a crook in Koenigstein as it turns sharply north. A steep drive winds around the slope and crude terraces have been back-hoed into the land so that it appears like a mastaba or a stepped pyramid topped with a simple suburban house from the 1960's.

A little further up the road, Ralph's ranch-style house sits on a narrow defile between the road cut and a deep bowl that spans across to our property. To the west of the house a nissen hut perches at the edge of the slope and is open at one end: like funery goods, an old tractor, lawn mowers and drilling equipment sit ready for service in the after life. Entombed at the closed end is a late fifties De Soto, the up-swept wings making it a suitable vehicle, perhaps, for accompanying Re in the sun god's daily journey across the heavens.

I did not explore the closed end of the hut, and saw only the back of the car. I was unable to see whether the hood ornament was still in place. The De Soto was a Chrysler brand from 1928 to 1961 and was named after the Spanish Conquistador who blazed a trail in the south east of what is now the United States, brutalizing the native peoples as he went. He reached as far west as the Mississippi and died on its banks in 1542 (the same year that Cabrillo conducted his exploration of the California coast in search of the North West passage (An Island on the Land)). The brand's chrome hood ornaments were fashioned in De Soto's likeness.

However unlikely the link between the pyramidal landscape of the Theban Valley of the Kings in Egypt and the Topa Topa foothills it is nevertheless buttressed by the fact that in both places there existed the practice of burying funeral goods with the dead. The Chumash buried portions of tomols (canoes), effigies, deer bone whistles and beads with high status individuals. They were equipping the dead for their soul-wanderings over the earth and ocean in preparation for the heavenly journey to a paradise where the soul is nurtured and prepared for its descent back to the world to be reincarnated. (Kuta Teachings, Reincarnation Theology of the Chumash Indians of California, Dr. John Anderson, 1998).

While status was indicated by the goods buried with the body, the depth of Chumash burials was also a gauge of an individual's wealth because diggers were paid for their work in baskets which held burial soil; the more baskets a family could afford to pay the deeper the grave. There is much evidence that in Chumash funeral practices, the majority of the deceased's possessions were burned at the time of death or in an annual mourning ceremony. Grave goods were often contributed by relatives.

Greg and Ralph were dispatched, most likely, via a Santa Paula funeral home to a crematorium - their ashes scattered to the winds. Their bodies burned, their primary possessions - their hill-top estates - stand, in my mind at least, and for the moment, as their funeral goods, empty relics awaiting their owner's spectral return.

In the one, there may appear the dim glow of a computer screen where a diaphanous Greg taps away, eternally unaware that his story is over, his life insurance check cashed; and in the other, the ancient well-driller may again wander his land, his sun ravaged hands clutching his diviner's rod forever awaiting the downward twitch that signals the location of his eighth well.

Death has come to these erstwhile Kings of the Hill. Death has come to Koenigstein.

Nymphs and Naiads

Ralph Hansen, now head of the well drilling company Well-Do founded by his father Ralph Sr. (who died last year), tested a well of ours last week on an undeveloped property on Koenigstein. The previous weekend, Sarah Munster had pronounced that it would produce eleven and a half gallons a minute, after communing with the earth spirits through a crystal pendulum (The Land Speaks for Itself). The likeliest spirit, if there was one, would have been a Naiad - at least according to the Greek taxonomy of lesser divinities.

Nymphs of fresh water, whether of rivers, lakes, creeks, or wells, are known generically as Naiads. They preside over springs and are believed to inspire those who drink the waters, and the Naiads themselves are thought to be endowed with prophetic powers, and to inspire humans with the same. Our image of them often derives from the sentimental paintings of the Pre-raphaelites, and in my mind at least, are best depicted in John William Waterhouse' - Hylas and the Nymphs (1896). When not whispering to lovesick swains (viz. Hylas) or frantically trying to calculate well flow rates - all the while converting liters to gallons - they join with other gods, such as Pan, Dionysis, Hermes and their attendant Satyrs in Arcadian frolics.

I was delighted to see when I visited the well mid-test, that clear water was being pumped out at a rate of twenty gallons per minute, and to discover that it tasted pretty good. It was also warm - which should have been a dead-giveaway. As Ralph later explained we were drawing down the well at a rate of knots; from an original water height of seventeen feet below the ground surface it sunk after the test to 80 feet below with no signs of recovery. In short, we were pumping out the water that had seeped into the well over the ten years since it had been dug, and after several wet winters - which is why it was warm: it had been sitting at or near the surface for many moons. The cool clear water from the icy depths of the aquifer was not being accessed. Ralph is certain that somewhere down in the depths of Koenigstein is a sandstone aquifer producing cold, Fiji quality water in copious quantities. This certainty will not assuage the County however; from their perspective, this well is a dud.

While Sarah was trolling the land evaluating potential building sites, Les Toth, who owns another undeveloped hilltop parcel across the road, pulled up to our site on his ATV. I went over to talk to him and explained what we were up to. When I mentioned that Sarah was a dowser he told me of his experience with a piece of land he owned in New Mexico where for a case of beer and fifty bucks a local Native American had dowsed his land and located water - where Les went on to drill a well. But Les is an engineer so while this experience made him a believer in dowsing he wasn't about to embrace the full implications of Sarah as Geomancer and I said not a word about the Naiads.

There is much spring water in the area. It feeds Bear Creek and augments Sisar. Inevitably, both streams are swelled by rain and snow melt. The late winter rains from a month ago made Sisar impassable immediately above the park entrance on Sisar Road except by those willing to get their feet wet like your intrepid correspondent. When my friend Gar and I walked up Bear Canyon last week we returned down the creek (White-Out) which was still flowing well and was almost entirely above ground. Here, just below its spring source, the creek is still inclined to dip beneath the earth for a spell and reappear to continue rippling over the surface rocks. By the time it reaches Margot's property its reticence is such that its appearances above ground are to be remarked upon. The water is refreshingly cold, but not achingly so. Last winter, in a scramble along a tributary to Bear Creek, I fell flat on my back into a foot or two of water. The experience was at once shocking, humiliating and exhilarating.

Sisar Creek flows along the east side of the I50 as it dips down to Thomas Aquinas and is in view of the new 3 story studio building dba has designed for the film-maker Ethan Higbee on his property behind the Painted Pony, the small-holding and petting zoo. I went by the site on Easter Friday and the framer told me he had had a paddle in the stream at lunch time and had seen trout.

As you move down the canyon towards the confluence of the Sisar and the Santa Paula creeks, it becomes increasingly obvious why this area is called Sulphur Springs; driving out of the canyon beyond the school, the undeniable smell of sulphur assails you. Between the oil, the gas, and the elemental stew of sulphur, radon, boron, arsenic and iron the well-water hereabouts is often compromised. The creek water contains many of the same chemical elements but is also contanimated with discharges of brine from abandoned oilfields, DDT and PCBs and the newer insecticide Diazinon, which is particularly hazardous to fish and birds. But the view from Ethan's new studio is magical, a bend in the creek dappled with willows and alders; where the shallow water moves quickly over rocks and looks edenically pure.

My first memory of fresh water is being taught by my father how to cup my hands and drink from a leaking dam wall at Frensham Little Pond where my family lived when I was four. My father was repairing the leak in the dam (which was originally built in 1246 at the instruction of the Bishop of Winchester). Memories of that time include catching perch off the end of the dock and my mother cooking them for breakfast.

The Steelhead trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) is a local variety of the rainbow trout and a finer eating fish than perch, but while the perch could be had with the simple expedient of dropping a line in the pond with a bead of bread on the hook, the trout in Sisar creek are few and those few are protected by Fish and Game. They were observed in many Sisar creek sites in 2005 and in 2011 by Adam, the framer at the Higbee's place. I have not seen them, and am unlikely to while my major interaction with the creek is splashing through it in winter or rock hopping over it in summer.

If I gaze wistfully into its waters like Hylar, my odds are probably greater of seeing the trout than those freshly pubescent nymphs, but at this point, I'm not sure which sighting would be the more thrilling.

The Land Speaks For Itself

Somewhere along the valley of Upper Ojai two roads run off from the highway and head towards Sulphur Mountain; there they both meet the tangle of the Arco Oil Company roads that skitter along the ridge amidst oaks and oil wells. They parallel each other for much of the way and are only about a quarter of a mile apart; each serves a scattering of houses, sheds and barns. Their names are almost identical. The western road is Awhai and the eastern is named Awhay. What's up with that?

Both names derive from ?Awha'y, the Indian village site that lies somewhere between these roads on the northern flank of the mountain. Both are pronounced ah-wah-hee. Somewhere, in the linguistic trail established by Harrington (Yuccapedia) that leads back to the Spanish missions, and beyond that to a Chumash Village, things have gone awry.


The Spanish coined the name Ojai in response to hearing the name
?Awha'y in the Ventureno Chumash dialect. It was a transliteration. A phonetic transcription of the sounds of the Indian language into eighteenth century Spanish. It meant nothing beyond the inherent meaning of the original Native American name of 'moon' (New Moon). Now, in these two road names, 'moon' has reverted to an anglicised version (or versions) of Harrington's phonetic inscription of the Chumash name.

The two road names are signs of the past. Signifiers of Indian occupation. Close by the westerly road are the remains of a Chumash burial ground presumably associated with the old village of ?Awha'y. The moldering bones are the archaeological signifiers of a way-of-life cut brutishly short by the Spanish conquest and the subsequent Native American die-off. The graves remain hidden and un-disturbed, protected by order of the State Archaeologist - thus the history of the place is signaled only by the obtuse street names.

There is a less ambiguous history enshrined by the sign at the junction of the 150, a few miles east of the ah-wah-hee's, which reads 'Koenigstein Road'. This junction is at the location of a spring which feeds Sisar Creek and was formerly the site of the hotel which served bear hunters at the turn of the century and which was named for the family who owned and ran the hostelry (Nightjars). Other street names in the Ojai area memorialize the names of those who ranched or developed the area (I am thinking of Thatcher, Montgomery, McNell, Nye Road in Casitas Springs and Osborn Road in Upper Ojai and others too numerous to mention) and of course John Meiner lent his name to Meiner's Oaks (or Mojai as the kids call it) (Mining Gravel). Indirectly, Charles Nordhoff was responsible for the naming of Ojai's precurser town.

There is a magic to naming. In many cultures, naming signifies appropriation, a bringing of something into one's world. In anthropology, place names are an area of intense study, at least since the work of Franz Boas, because they intersect three fundamental domains of social analysis: language, thought and environment - they tell us something about how people experience their world. The name ?Awha'y, now exists in four languages, the oral chumash tradition, Harrigton's phonetic transcription of the native language, Spanish and an anglicisation of Harrington's transcription. Its meaning transcends all: as I have noted (New Moon), Upper Ojai is eternally the valley of the moon.

The Chumash may have gleaned this information from a transformative incident or were merely formalizing ancient knowledge. Whether in moments of sudden exposition or in slow accretions of meaning, the land speaks for itself.

The issue is: who is prepared to listen? We had dinner with three such on Saturday evening: Sarah, my erstwhile Architecture and Gardens landscape partner is an old hand at listening to the land (Dowsing); neighbor Margot, although a scientist, is acutely attuned to the natural world and makes space in her work as a native landscape restoration ecologist to commune directly with it; and Mary Ann, a new Ojai friend, e-mailed me after our dinner and relayed her listening to trees experience at Big Sur. She writes,

"On the tree listening subject, this morning I pulled out my notes from a trip Stuart and I made into the redwoods near Big Sur a few years ago. We walked around and I was in a sort of trance, just feeling the presence of the trees, trying to pay attention. Here is what the trees said to me then:

1. You are in everything and everything is in you.

2. The patterns of the smallest are also the patterns of the greatest.

3. You are in no way incomplete. You are whole and fully connected to the universe, to all that is.

4. Is/was/will be to all time, through and beyond all time, you permeate being and being permeates you. Everything is alive.

This seems so simple and obvious and yet it was profound. It was just so evident that the trees and I were connected, united even, and that we belonged to each other and to a huge matrix of life. I had this feeling of intimacy, of interpenetration, of deep recognition, even though it was my first time there. I was so aware of their consciousness, of the trees paying attention to me. Their voices were clear and direct and kind -- as though they knew this was how I needed to be spoken to."

On Sunday, Sarah dowsed some land on Koenigstein which we are considering developing as a house site. She asked general questions of the land using coat-hanger dowsing rods and a crystal pendulum. She identified energy vortices on parts of the north facing meadow slope and found propitious sites for the buildings. She confirmed that the well, which has lain dormant since it was drilled eight years ago, stands ready to disgorge eleven and a half gallons of water a minute.

In my interactions with the land hereabouts I have intuited its desire for an end to the roiling and turmoil of back-hoe and excavator, of the unearthing of its rocks and the invasions of weeds at its broken edges which agitate and distress its enduring rhythms. Its voice is shadowy, it speaks to me in "elegant adumbrations of sacred truth"; I have yet to achieve the clarity of communication given to our three dinner guests; but I am increasingly aware of the insistent ebb and flow of its conversation: I am prepared to listen.

New Moon

Sometimes truth arrives in a plain brown wrapper. Unannounced. Given our temporal location in the second decade of the twenty first century in this instance the truth actually arrived buried on an unmarked CD which I opened on my trusty PC.

It was in a PDF document amongst many that related to disclosures on a parcel of land in which we have an interest across the street from us on Koenigstein. In the archealogical reconnaissance conducted on the 144 acres which the Trexon corporation (Jim Exon and David Trudeau) subdivided into seven 20 acre parcels, was the news (to me) that,

"?Awha'y, meaning "moon", was the name of the principle rancheria (Chumash village) of what is the upper Ojai Valley, and from which the modern name Ojai is derived."

I had read that same document seven years ago when it was bundled in the disclosures given to us when we were in the process of purchasing our original Koenigstein parcel. But its 'truth" did not resonate at the time, namely that we are living in an area that has an historical connection to a place-name with roots sunk deep in pre-history, in the traditions of its indigenous people.

The moon is remarkable in this high valley. When I left for my run a few days ago the quarter moon was just rising above the hill that shelters the house to the east, the shadowy full moon from two weeks ago was in its arms and its horn seemingly ripped at the ragged edge of the skyline. By the time I was up on the mesa above Sisar it had risen to become a sliver in the brightening sky. We missed its full glory, for we are seeing now the waning of what was the brightest moon in eighteen years. The full moon of March 20, 2011 - a so-called supermoon - was obscured in Ojai by dense cloud and rain.

Elsewhere it was experienced as bigger and brighter because the moon was closer to the earth than it had been since 1993. The moon follows an elliptical orbit with one side (perigee) about 50,000 km closer to Earth than the other (apogee): according to NASA, nearby perigee moons are about 14% bigger and 30% brighter than lesser moons that occur on the apogee side of the moon's orbit. The coincidence of a full moon with the extreme perigee condition renders it a supermoon.

The moon was used as a calendar by the Chumash, the thirteen lunar cycles keeping in reasonable sync with the earth's annual orbit of the sun. Like the Iroquois who named moons (in spring it was the Moon called Day Will Become Longer) the Chumash likely identified the thirteen cycles with other natural events; but the moon was also understood to be a protagonist in the heavenly wars that the Chumash observed as having direct influence on their lives and in which they could have some small influence by their appropriate ritual behavior.

John Peabody Harrington (Yuccapedia) is our link to the sky-watcher cult of 'antap in which the astrologers were known as 'alchuklash. He interviewed Chumash survivors at the beginning of the twentieth century and recorded their tales of the heavenly wars in which the moon acted as a referee. Local Native American astronomical records survive in the form, most notably, of rock paintings and Chumash solstice rituals are survived by sun-stick and feathered sun-pole paraphernalia.

So, we have Upper Ojai pre-existing back into the mists of time as
?Awha'y and the name of what is now known as Ojai (or, as Jeffray Fargher called it, L'ojai) dating back to the First World War when it was no longer convenient to have a German-sounding name like Nordhoff. Nordhoff too, originated as a flag of convenience. The nineteenth century village in the lower valley was named in 1874 to take advantage of Charles Nordhoff's guide book, California for Health, Wealth and Residence, published in 1872. Subsidized by the railroad, Nordhoff championed the settlement of Southern California and his book was carried by most of its tourists. He did not visit Nordhoff until 1881 and in a subsequent issue of his guide, wrote glowingly of the valley's salubrious climate. In 1917, the name was unceremoniously changed to Ojai.

In 1914 the glass magnate Edward Drummond Libbey hired a San Diego architect, Richard S. Requa to design a new downtown for the ramshackle western town. The Spanish Colonial arcade, post office campanile and Libbey park pergola were styled to take advantage of the Mission Myth - single handedly propogated by Helen Hunt jackson in her best selling novel Ramona, 1884 (California Dreamin'). Thus for a third time, the town of Ojai (nee Nordhoff) adopted a brand makeover based on contemporaneous popular taste or prejudice.

Richard B. Applegate, in a paper titled Chumash Placenames published in the Journal of California Anthropology, 1974 categorizes the place-name    ?Awha'y as originating in a specific incident. Perhaps it was the rising of a supermoon over the Santa Paula ridge which, from a Chumash vantage point on the northern slope of Sulphur Mountain may have identified this place with ?Awha'y, the moon. In the late summer of 2008 when our house was framed in shiny metal studs we visited the site in twilight with friends and watched as a full moon rose over the east hill and the carcass of the house, its ribs gleaming, came alive in the moonlight. The moon is capable of a strange magic: tomorrow I will watch for the crescent of the new moon which will be briefly visible to the south west, before it sinks behind Kahus (The Bear), the Chumash name for Black Mountain, the hill below Sulphur Mountain, between Soule Park and Lion Creek.

This morning as I left the house at the first sign of dawn a great inland sea lay before me: the marine layer was densely settled in the valley and washing up the slopes of Sulphur Mountain while Kahus rose out of the sea, an island in this ghostly ocean. As the sky lightened the high clouds to the north west were dappled in a deep pink, reflecting the blush of the awakening sun. We live in a supernaturally-charged valley: we live in the valley of the moon, ?Awha'y.

Nightjars

When I came across the lines from Seamus Hearney writing of Dane-myths which "sweep in off the moors" and come to us, "down through the mist-bands of Anglo-Saxon England" (Saxon Hall) I was reminded of the mytho-poetic tradition that has Landscape as its object. Landscape has meaning quite apart from its morphological, botanical and geological significance, and it is here, at the edge of history and anthropology and in the murk of romance, superstition and legend that I imagine the wallows and the rises of the land through a mythic home-spun.

Walking down Koenigstein Road on the weekend, Sunday afternoon: low clouds describing a curtailed valley spread below, weed patch at roadside trending to chaparral beyond: there is a pathos in the rough marks of man that one hundred and fifty years of Euro-American occupation have made on the land. Specifically, the crude pragmatism of the development of 20 acre parcels along a road (that originally served a hunting lodge at the opening to Bear Canyon) where plastic piping rises vertically in places from the bush marking lot lines or lies broken on the ground turning brittle in the sun and tumbled sandstone rip-rap emerges bright yellow in the even light from the darkening brush. The detritus of a developer's dreams being slowly obliterated by the primal energy of the earth; the hunting lodge lost in a long ago fire.

Worked at long and wisely enough a kind of symbiosis can develop between the landscape and human settlement. It's called civilization. It is not the place I have chosen to live.

Classical civilization has, as Simon Schama notes in Landscape and Memory, 1995, always "defined itself against the primeval woods". Likewise, the east coast of the United States - with its Jeffersonian, neo-classical overtones, establishes its identity in part in opposition to the left coast, the barbaric frontier of California. Latter-day warriors arrived in the Upper Ojai valley weilding not clubs and spears but back hoes, chain saws and oil drilling rigs. Oaklands were turned into rough fields of alien grasses and chaparral into weed patches. Looking down the valley there are horse properties, mac-mansions rubbing shoulders with manufactured homes and the occasional well-sited house at ease in the landscape. Mostly it's the marks of raw accommodation between immediate, un-restrained human appetites and the natural world - this afternoon edged by low clouds that threaten soon to smother them.

Perhaps because I grew up in the velvety Surrey countryside where moss and lichen quickly soften the edges of road and building and even the railway cuttings seemed ancient like Offa's dyke (the great earthwork built by the Saxon King of Mercia to discourage attack from the Welsh people of Powys) I have ended up in places where nature is yet to be submerged, or co-opted by the blandishments of multi-layered civilizations. I have chosen the raw and the newly desecrated. I have repaired, as Tacitus writes of Germania, to "region(s) hideous and rude". Here I find the rough energy of ancient landscapes brushing against arriviste civilization. The chaparral and the Australian bush - both so recently home to aboriginal peoples bound to the land and where lingers still a spiritual imprint - are landscapes that tell stories barely dimmed by the ravages of the barbarian horde (and count me amongst their number).

In Kangaroo, his one Australian novel, D.H. Lawrence writes,

"The soft, blue, humanless sky of Australia, the pale, white unwritten atmosphere of Australia. Tabula rasa. The world a new leaf. And on the new leaf, nothing. The white clarity of the Australian, fragile atmosphere. Without a mark, without a record."

And here, it's still morning in California, the dew has not yet quite left the land and faint vibrations remain of a spiritual vision that saw all the living things of the world fully enfolded within the cosmos. There is a scale to the natural world at the edges of the Upper Ojai valley where chaparral or oak woodland begin to dominate the urban/wildland dyad. Mystery and myth begin at these edges. There is separation between the sublime and the prosaic. In older cultures, in Europe, this separation is less obvious - there is a co-mingling of the two, a symbiosis that perhaps vitiates the power of both.

Magical things still happen in these places of comfortable accommodation between the built and the wild environments. As a child I believed in fairies at the bottom of the garden, and circles of mushrooms, or pixie rings that I would come across in the suburban woods confirmed my faith. Later, riding pillion on my father's motorcycle through the South Downs, he would point out (shouting through the noise of the tiny 125cc engine and the flapping of scarves and macintoshes) the bronze-age burial mounds (tumuli) that dot the soft de-forested hills.These signs of death amidst ancient life fascinated me and gave the landscape a gothic tension, a frisson of the macabre. The hills had long been brought into the agricultural realm, cleared of their woodlands some 6,000 years previously as the stone-age people abandoned their hunting and gathering existence and developed grazing for domestic stock and fields for crops. The truly wild, in England at least, is best imagined, for there are precious few acres of untrammeled land.

Venturing into un-touched chaparral up on the mesa between Koenigstein and Sisar, land marred only by a crudely drawn bulldozed trail, there is a sense of entering a primeval realm. One early morning last week, fully dark with my head light illuminating the path, I saw a bright light close to the ground just up ahead. My first thought was that it was a firefly. As I approached the light rose into the air and fluttered away. I saw a second light and was still going with the firefly theory. When I saw the third, I was close enough to see that it was a bird which rose from the ground - with a firefly in its beak perhaps? As the lights continued to appear before me, my senses fully alert, I realized that it was the bird's eyes that burned with this fierce light (reflecting my head lamp) and that I was disturbing a flock of ground-roosting Nightjars.

Sometimes known as Goatsuckers (in the mistaken belief that they feed at the teats of goats) these crepuscular birds have large round eyes - like their nocturnal brethren the owl. What I saw, according to my bird guide, were Lesser Nighthawks ( Chordeiles acutipennis) - what I experienced was fluttering fairy-lights in a mythic landscape.

Saxon Hall

Robert Venturi, in his seminal 1972 book, Learning from Las Vegas developed an architectural typology that includes only 'ducks' - buildings that are shaped in a way to reflect their purpose (named for a Long Island poultry restaurant literally shaped like a duck) and 'decorated sheds' - prosaic structures that are adorned with symbols or signage that identify their business.

I arrived in Los Angeles in 1980 and shortly thereafter got to know Jim Heimann who had written the definitive work on Los Angeles 'ducks'. His book was called California Crazy, 1981, and depicted road side vernacular architecture - often restaurants and mostly from the 1930's and 40's - that, like Venturi's 'duck', were shaped in ways that reflected the morphology of the meals they served (think Chili-bowl). Jim's abiding interest was not architecture per se, but the use of buildings as marketing iconography. Trained as a graphic designer, he saw the urban fabric as text - as existing as a kind of three dimensional advertising copy. I was briefly interested, in the late 70's and early 1980's, in this kind of literal architecture, but by then the world had moved on from Venturi's approach and embraced the sophisticated sheen of European post-structuralism. We were no longer interested in 'ducks' and 'decorated sheds' but in semiotics and my architectural messages were not about commerce but presumed to be social critiques.

The simple fact is that almost all buildings are freighted with meaning beyond their functional manifestation. In Hoop Dreams I wrote about a disinherited people who developed a new identity out of the Ghost Dance; for most of their existence, native peoples' identity was established by geography, kinship and band affiliation. Certainly in California, home was the local village and the surrounding environment; it was, as Peter Nabakov and Robert Easton point out in Native American Architecture, 1989, the central place, the source of identity. In building a house in the urban wildland, I have adopted some of that geocentrism and derive some of my new Ojai identity from the chaparral and the house we built in it.

Nabakov and Eastman note that part of a band's collective identity was the village's house type. This could only be significant if the band was aware of other building types. We know that California was rich in Native American house forms, and that trading routes criss-crossed the area - Chumash shell money has been found as far away as the Great Basin.

Even amongst the Chumash (who, it should be noted, were not a homogenous people but a loose collection of bands that anthropologists have aggregated through language families and dialect groups) there was an array of house forms including their dome shaped thatched huts (Edge Times), sweat lodges, which were sunk into the ground then thatched over with deerweed (Lotus scoparius) and ceremonial enclosures similar to those described in Burn Notice. It can be presumed that there were also storage buildings and perhaps menstral retreats. We also know that shamans had a predeliction for rock shelters, and the Santa Monica and Topa Topa-San Rafael mountain ranges are studded with caves that at one time or another may have became retreats for those out-of-body experiences favored by Chumash medicine men. This variety of shelters underwent subtle transformation from Southern to Northern California such that regional groups could find identity in the particulars of their building stock.

We Euro-Americans share certain house-forms that support our sense of identity, well being and connection to our archetypal notions of shelter. Levi Strauss suggested that mythologies around the world shared fundamental similarities in structure - hence the school of thought he helped found, Structuralism. Something similar, I believe, exists in house forms. Modern buildings are at least partly shaped by wind loads and seismic factors, but all buildings through time have been shaped by vertical loads - the tyranny of the earth's gravitational pull. Within these constraints a set of primal shapes seem to appear in culture after culture.

We still find identity in certain house forms that resonate with our present sense of cultural heritage and more profoundly, with the shelter archetypes we carry with us in our unconscious. Lorrie and I set out to create a barn on the meadow. In our innocence we called it a barn: I am now coming to realize that we may have been accessing, deep from within our memory banks: he, the Saxon hall; she, the Viking long-house. Our imaginations are entwined in the long tail of human memory.

In Cave and Rock I made the distinction between an architecture of object (a rock) and of anthropology (a cave). This comes close to Venturi's typology, the rock being roughly analogous to his 'duck', an object;  and the cave his 'decorated shed' - where there is at least a hint of architectural space-making. I was, I think, beginning to make the argument that the envelopment of space is critical to the way we 'feel' buildings and thus I was suggesting that a cave, with its primal sheltering aspect resonates in our sub-conscious in an entirely different way than an architecture that relies for effect on its exterior form. However, as Venturi taught us, it's not 'either/or' it is 'both/and'. Thus the rock can contain a cave and indeed, be an indicator or a sign of it.

As an object in the landscape, our barn-like home resonates with an ancient notion of human habitation. Although completed less than two years ago, it advertises our long tenancy on planet earth. As the wattle and thatch hovels of the Anglo-Saxon invaders fifteen hundred years ago evolved into the great Saxon Halls built in Britain at the end of the first millennium (pre-figured in the epic poem Beowulf that told of the Dane-halls of Heorot and King Hrothgar) their purpose remained constant. It was to protect their inhabitants from the threats of an enveloping wilderness.

We are not threatened by monsters, but we do contend with reptile infested rocks and the tough sclerophytic leaves of the chaparral that, like dragon scales, protect the ancient earth crust. In Beowulf resides the myth-memory of the Danes, but as Seamus Hearney writes, these myths continue to live through time: they "sweep in off the moors, down through the mist-bands of Anglo-Saxon England, forward into the global village of the third millennium".

Hoop Dreams

Throughout the nineteenth century native peoples confronted the establishment of a hegemonic alien culture on their ancestral homelands and, in a paroxysm of grief, they called forth a stream of visions, phophecies, apocalyptic forecasts and dreams that coalesced into a spiritual revival known as the Ghost Dance. For cultures that understood time as a recursive, seasonal phenomenon, prophecies took the shape of changing worlds; for native Americans the nineteenth century was truly the winter of their discontent and prophecies inevitably involved the coming of spring, the disappearance of Euro-Americans and the return of all the living things which the newcomers had destroyed. This was not a cultural renaissance (Edge Times) but instead a loose aggregation of stress symptoms masquerading as a spiritual awakening. It spoke of desperation, disintegration and disenchantment. It elicited a reaction of fear and hysteria from the European settlers ending famously in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.

This was a movement that thrived best in relocation camps - the Indian Reservations - and had a significant Western incarnation, notably amongst the Northern Shoshone and Paiute. In South Dakota it is said that the Lakota people gave all their waking hours to the Ghost Dance and there was an attempt by a government agent to introduce baseball as a competing attraction. The Ghost Dance, based on the familiar round or circle dance, accompanied by wild exhortations and prophesying and interspersed with lengthy periods of trance, won out. Both rituals have become central to the building of their respective national identity.

Late in the nineteenth century the Chumash were a barely surviving relict population scattered to the four winds. They took no part in this last flowering of pan-American native revolutionary spirituality. Their cycle of time had ended in deepest winter.

It was through the Ghost Dance that many tribes forged new social identities that would become critical in their survival as a people. It was one of the key experiences that fostered an Indian identity relevant to the native peoples' coexistence with what was essentially a colonizing power. As Gregory E. Smoak writes in Ghost Dances and Identity, U.C. Press, 2008, "in the late eighteenth century, European colonists along the eastern seaboard of North America, invented a nation and began to invent a national identity". In the nineteenth century, Native Americans began to respond by "developing an Indian identity both as a way of incorporating the newcomers and positioning themselves in the new order".

As I have pointed out previously, such identities are not immutable, they are often shaped by circumstance (Things fall Apart). Pre-contact, native peoples did not possess a shared identity, the essential foundation for social organization was the village or kinship ties; for the Chumash, this foundation was destroyed by the missionization pogrom, and never re-made. For other native peoples, the Ghost Dance was a means for re-establishing identity in a radically changed world while continuing to access their cultural practices and religious beliefs (Smoak).

The Chumash as an ethnically cohesive band, no longer exist. Their blood lines and their kinship ties have been dissipated over the last one hundred and seventy years and only crudely patched together since 1988 to take advantage of the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA). Yet the idea of the Chumash lives on (not least in this blog) and not just as a source of spiritual plunder for new agers eager to appropriate native American spiritual beliefs and warp them to their own ends (Peace Walk). They are the poster-tribe of Southern California.

So when Barbara Kingsolver reviews T.C. Boyle's 'rollicking' new novel, When the Killing's Done, Viking, 2011 which describes a battle between the originalist National Park Service, attempting to restore the Channel Islands to a pristine, pre-contact state and an animal lover rushing to the aid of the sheep, goats and rats that are being removed as invasive species, they are her (and perhaps his) go-to tribe in describing the islands' fishing camps as "dating back to the Chumash"; as if they define the ne plus ultra of ancient habitation.

The Chumash are a fixture of our imaginative conception of the pre-contact, edenic Southern California. But as I indicated in Bobcat Magic, they are far from the 'First People' of California. In a moment of ethnogenetic alchemy the Euro-Asians that followed the kelp road and landed on Santa Rosa became the first Californians thirteen thousand years ago. Absent a living tradition that links back to this point of origination, however tenuously, we are left with a scant archaeological record and the syncretized mythologies of a missing tribe.

The Chumash origin myth concerns Hutash, the earth goddess who populated Santa Cruz island with people conjured from magic seeds. Later, her husband the Sky Snake sent lightning bolts down to the island and thus gave them fire. They prospered to such an extent that the island became crowded and the noise of their gatherings began to annoy Hutash. To alleviate the overcrowding, she created a rainbow bridge across which they could journey to the un-populated mainland. The bridge, high above the ocean gave many of the travelers vertigo and they fell into the sea. Hutash was concerned that she had caused them to drown so she turned them into dolphins, creating a kinship between the marine mammals and the Chumash people.

Rainbows and dolphins are staples of the New Age sensibility and it is hard to imagine that these prototypical feel-good symbols would have survived unchanged in the crucible of revolutionary spirituality that informed the Ghost Dancers - invincible in their white ghost shirts and convinced that change was a comin'.

The great white ghost-bird of Chumash legend that wheeled in the sky and swooped low to investigate a cooking-fire and, charred by the flames, became the coal-black condor might have emerged as a symbol of survival against all odds. Perhaps in that still center of the circle of time, in the middle of the hoop, a prophesy linking their survival to that of Gymnogyps californianus might have galvanized the Chumash people; and perhaps the condor's unlikely survival should give us pause in writing a final epitaph to this lost tribe.

Bobcat Magic

The house is wreathed in bobcat energy. I looked up from my breakfast the other morning to see a small bob-kitten moving through the rocks, deer weed and poison oak at the side of the bowl that rises up beyond the pool terrace. Too young, it struck me, to be entirely without supervision, its mother never showed itself and I assumed the parental role and watched over it for a few minutes. But this fanciful assumption may have run counter to the true nature of my relationship to this wild thing: was it watching over me?

Note the narcissistic tone here: either way it's all about me. In our collective unconscious are housed the archetypes of all creation (if we are to believe Jung) and an animal's physical manifestation, in certain circumstances (Ellen Macfarland), can trigger the free-flow of unconscious archetype to conscious understanding. Perhaps our relationship was bi-lateral; each aware of the other's physical presence (I moved close to the window and I think that we made eye contact) each triggering within ourselves a connection to each others archetype.

We inhabit a world of ideograms which are hard-wired in our brains and these patterns limit (or structure) the pathways of both our thoughts and our creative constructs (Levi Strauss). This bobcat, and others in its family, have laid a web of their archetypal energy over this house and us: we are conjoined, for we have similarly entered into the animals' conscious and unconscious understanding of their surroundings.

The cat represents an atavism, a reprise of our genesis on the savannah (Cave and Rock) - an element in our earliest racial memories. We twenty-first century Americans spend precious little time connecting across the millennia to the 'time before history', as ColinTudge calls it; to the time of our continental wanderings as we emerged from the grasslands of Africa to conquer the planet somewhere between 50 -100,000 years ago - as fully modern homo sapiens.

Our arrival on this continent was comparatively recent. The coastal migration theory (or the Kelp Road) is now widely accepted in debates about the peopling of the Americas and it is believed that Paleo-indian peoples settled the Channel Islands about 13,000 years ago (An Island on the Land). Evidence of this initial landfall on the Americas has been reinforced by the discovery of a Clovis-like fluted point on the coastal plain of Hollister Ranch which suggests Paleo-indians roamed the area using large flint-tipped spears to hunt ice-age mega-fauna - an activity previously believed to have been confined to areas around the land route from Beringia (the so-called land bridge continent) down through the retreating ice-flows into the heart of North America.

This afternoon, with time to kill in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles, I walked over to the La Brea Tar Pits. Here the observation pit, set aside from the more than one hundred excavations that have been dug since 1915, has been left to show the bones of animals as they originally appeared to the researchers mired in a sticky trap of tar and oil. In what appears to be something like a giant's midden, bones of mastodon, sloth and sabre-toothed tiger are scattered amongst skeletons of the dire wolf, western horse, camel and bison. Elsewhere on the site, the bones of extant species such as the bobcat, coyote, fox and badger have been un-earthed from this fabulous store of ice age fauna dating from 10,000 to 40,000 BP. It is not entirely coincidental that the larger, more lumbering fauna experienced a precipitous decline and finally extinction right about the time that man appeared on the scene. 

Perhaps as a reaction to the die-off of these easy prey, around 9,000 years ago a new adaptation emerged locally, characterized by a seed grinding technology (hence Milling Stone peoples);  settlement along the coastal plain and foothills of the central coast became sedentary and focused on seed gathering and the collection of shellfish. About 6,000 years ago a new hunting people emerged archeologically evidenced by small projectile points and animal bone middens of antelope, big-horn sheep and mule deer; and then, by three to four thousand years ago a recognizably Chumash culture had developed characterized by a diversified material culture, the use of acorn flour and a sophisticated political and religious infrastructure. But the larger Chumash coastal settlements that may once have housed up to a thousand inhabitants were mostly abandoned by the early 1800's as missionization decimated the Chumash people and undermined their economic and sociopolitical systems.

There was one brief spark of resistance to their seemingly inevitable extinction. In 1824, after the vicious beating of an Indian at Mission Santa Ines, the Chumash were galvanized into open rebellion at Santa Ines, La Purisima and Santa Barbara missions. The revolt was harshly supressed and many of those who had fled to the back-country elected not to return to the missions (Phantom Dwelling). But worse was to follow: Mexico, having gained control of California from the Spanish, secularized the missions in 1834, which abandoned, then fell into disrepair. The Chumash survivors were dispersed into a foreign society where they attempted to take jobs in towns or on ranches. By the 1880's it is estimated that there were fewer than 300 Chumash still living and of those a handful were eventually relocated to the Santa Ynez reservation, established in 1901. (Jon Erlandson)

Bobcat, fox and coyote have outlasted the indigenous peoples who, millenia ago, contributed to the demise of the mega-fauna; small, fast and cunning these animals eluded spears, clubs and later, arrows, in sufficient numbers to avoid extinction. Instead, they went on to become intimates of the native peoples in myth and magic - as spirit helpers, jokers, talismans and totems.

We are shunned by the coyotes who roam Koenigstein and howl in the Bear Creek gorge to the east of our neighbor Margot's property; foxes are ghost-like - appearing like phantasms in the gloaming at road's edge but never showing themselves close to the house. Only the bobcats' have chosen to include us in their lives. A review of the collected internet wisdom on the role of the bobcat as a shaman's spirit helper seems to suggest that they are a useful adjunct in the transcendance of time and space - a particular obsession with Chumash shaman whose schtick primarily comprised altered states of consciousness (Mining Gravel). They assist (we are told by such as animalspirits.com) in understanding psychic knowledge and ancient mysteries. The animal shows itself, it seems, to those on the path of developing natural internal power and psychic abilities.

What was it that made me trek today to the ancient buried bones of family Felidae? Bobcat magic? You decide.

Edge Times

The interesting stuff happens at the edges, in space and time, at the area or moment of separation between two states. It happens in plant communities, at elevational changes, in the relationship of sun to horizon and in patterns of human habitation.

Wind is generated in between areas of different barometric pressure and in this distended edge-space fierce gales blew overnight on Tuesday. The winds continued through the morning and returning from my run, up Los Osos Lane, I watched a flock of quail swooping in the charging air: rising up they were illuminated by the sun which had just crested Santa Paula Ridge and, dropping low as if to perch amidst the elfin forest they disappeared into the shadows. Twenty or thirty birds in perfect synchronicity, wheeling in the air, playing in the boundaries of sun and shade, probing the edges as the rising tide of light slowly sunk over the land, from mountain top to canyon bottom.

The winds blow down Koenigstein and in the lower reaches, where there is still trash pick up by Harrison, the plastic cans, just emptied, are wind-strewn across the street. Further up, empty beer cans, tossed perhaps, by the callow students of St Thomas Aquinas joy-riding of a weekend, are tumbled down the gutters.

These were north easters, Santa Anas blowing in cold from the desert. The gusty cleansing winds may have been the reason the El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, established in 1781, was laid out at a 45 degree angle to the usual Spanish practice of aligning streets along the cardinal directions. Carey McWilliams suggests that this was to take advantage of the scouring effect of the Santa Anas; in any event, now the City of Los Angeles follows this skewed grid in the Mission district and on these windy days fast-food wrappers and drink cups skuttle down Main, Broadway and Grand until Martin Luther King Boulevard, more or less the southern border of the old Pueblo, where the grid gets religion and reverts to orthodoxy. To the north, the skewed grid comes to rest somewhere around the wilds of Elysian Park. Thus the extent of this apostasy reflects the original boundaries of the Pueblo - which was designed to extend a league, or about two and one half miles, in each direction.

This original settlement at Los Angeles, a primarily secular undertaking, (the Mission was in San Gabriel) was located to take advantage of the pittance of a river (for it flowed best in subterranean aquifers) but was laid out, we can presume, to funnel the howling Santa Anas. These winds are a connection to the deserts beyond the mountains, their fierce dryness a reminder that most of us in Southern California live in a state of hydrated grace.

In continental terms most Southern Californians are edge-dwellers, clinging to that broad ecotone between the mountains and the sea; protected from the aridity of the Great Basin by the San Jacinto, San Bernadino, San Gabriel and Topa Topa - San Rafael mountains that trend north west across the lower part of the State. It is here, on what is essentially a flood plain, that our weather happens. Like California's first people (An Island on the Land), the weather comes (when it comes) from the North Pacific sweeping down from the Gulf of Alaska and, in wet years, it makes it to the Mexican border.

In this La Niña year, it mostly stays north. December was the exception - high pressure in the north Pacific diverted storms south into California, but January saw a reversion to the typical La Niña pattern, with less than an inch of rain and thus far in February not a drop.

Wet or dry, warm or cold, calm or windy, the Southern California basins, flood-plains and canyons that run from the barrier mountains out to the ocean south of the Tehachapi (The Citrus Belt) have offered a reasonably temperate environment for the 13,000 years of human habitation. The Chumash occupation, which accounts for about half that span, occurred at some distance from the retreat of the ice-age, and they enjoyed a substantially settled existence. Already at the westernmost edge of a vast continent they further sought the areas where ecologies were in tension, at marsh, creek, ocean, forest, grassland and chaparral's edge - for it was here that the richest opportunities for sustenance existed.

Despite their varied locations but largely because of the prevailing temperate climate their architectural response to the environment was consistent: circular, framed, domed thatched huts holding as many as fifty people. Using sycamore or willow poles up to twenty feet high planted in a circle of fifteen or twenty feet in diameter they were lashed at the top then connected with thinner horizontal stringers. This space frame was then thatched with giant rye (Leymus condensatus) or, closer to estuarial marshes, California bulrush (Scirpus californicus). Willow bark was used as a lashing material and thatching needles were fashioned of laurel sumac (Malosma laurina) twigs. For their sweat lodges they used deerweed (Lotus scoparius) thatch because it is fire-resistant. Woven Tule (bulrush) was used for door flaps and interior partitions. Floors were hardened by pounding and a ditch surrounding the hut carried away roof drainage.

We know much of this because John P. Harrington (Yuccapedia) encouraged his Chumash consultants to build a traditional thatched house for the 1924 Ventura County Fair, (Jan Timbrook). Harrington understood his opportunity as an ethnographer in the first third of the twentieth century: to record the vanishing life of the Californian natives before their final decline.

This tragic edge, towards which the Chumash culture was nudged after the voyage of Cabrillo became, after the overland arrival of the Spanish in 1769 (Bingo), a precipice. The culture was then summarily dispatched over this cliff by the first wave of European settlers from the eastern states. This flux, this edge-time, seems to have produced, however, little in the way of creative efflorescence.

On the contrary, it has, it seems to me, laid a pall of sadness over the land that is intensified the closer one comes to understanding the natural environment. It is a psychic wound that resides deep in the mountains, creeks, meadows and beaches: a disjunction of human habitation that ultimately diminishes what it is to be Californian.

Personal Entombment

"I keep my temperature at 74 when I'm at the crib
And 79 in the winter time, that's just how I live"

Tech N9ne

In winter, the local ectotherms, snakes and lizards, are torpid. Their blood temperature has cooled and they are, quite literally, chilling. Holed up in a burrow, under a rock or rotting tree trunk their metabolisms have slowed to the point where they no longer need to forage for food. I still tread carefully through the chaparral but I haven't seen a snake for months; but today is warm and the lizards have stirred - one is skittering on the terrace as I write. Ectotherms are animals that warm their bodies by absorbing heat from their surroundings. We endotherms work the other way round. We give warmth to our environment - and this winter, at the house, one of our donors is missing. Griffin, our youngest son, left for art college last fall.

Our linear house is binary in respect to southern glazing - repetitive sixteen foot bays are either fully glazed to the south or not. Griffin's room and my office (two bays) are not and have shaded glazing to the west and east respectively and eight foot ceilings beneath an attic space packed with an air handler, ducting, a photo-voltaic inverter and solar panel piping (carrying glycol) to the hot water tank heat exchanger below. While they do not have the advantage of solar gain the rooms also suffer little or no solar loss at night. They represent the warm heart of the house.

Solar gain is convected to these spaces from both ends of the house and there it is trapped under the low ceiling providing a temperature of five or six degrees warmer than the more glassy ends. Griffin and his machines - TV, computer and powered speakers - added to the warmth of his room and he was pretty snug. "79 in the winter time that's just how I live" had some reality in his life.

Michelle Addington, a systems engineer and materials scientist at the Yale School of Architecture, makes the point that the energy consuming devices, primarily lighting, heating and cooling (HVAC) that exist in a building are all intended to serve the comfort of the human body: but conventional systems attempt to do this by servicing the building rather than the body - we heat and cool entire volumes; we provide standard lighting levels throughout a room. Only when we are sleeping do we focus intently on the body rather than the room because the space we occupy is rigidly prescribed - twin, double, Queen or King.

As homes have become larger, smaller and smaller percentages of the systems that treat the entire space actually impinge on the inhabitants. She notes that, "the body’s heat exchanges occur within a zone of a few centimeters around it, and the eye intercepts only a tiny fraction of the light in a room. Our conventional systems provide ambient conditions in a building—a steady seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit or a constant forty foot-candles".

Everything that exists in a building has a thermal boundary layer - a thin, tight sphere of thermal influence that is then transmitted through convection currents. Griffin managed his boundary layer quite efficiently. He stayed in his room (mostly) and was never known to turn off an electronic appliance - their boundary layers convected to his and all was right with his thermal world. I conducted a long and in the end losing battle with him trying to have him not eat in his room - given his druthers he would have had a toaster oven and micro-fridge in his room so that he could simulate the dorm living that he had so enjoyed in his sophomore year at Besant Hill School.

His room has two 50 w MR-16's down-lights on dimmers and he used a single task light with a compact flourescent when drawing. He lived in about 250 square feet (including his bathroom) and it was we who insisted that he share his meals with us in the larger high ceilinged spaces of the house - otherwise he was ready willing and able to conduct all of his life processes in his man-cave.

Sadly Griffin no longer contributes his warmth to the center of the house. I notice when I go into my home-office first thing in the morning, before dawn, that sometimes the ducts are pumping warm air into the spaces making up for his endothermic contribution. (Yes, we do miss him in other ways....)

Our children live in a world explicated both through real-world visual, aural, tactile and kinetic inputs and social interaction and their electronically simulated equivalents. The latter constitute their primary home or crib connections. While there is a clear separation between the real and the imaged (or texted), the electronic stimulus is convincing enough to demand an architectural container which supports the verisimilitude of these connections. Shadowy light levels, tightly contained space that amplifies the resonance of powered speakers and, in winter, the fug of electric resistance in appliances all contribute to a profoundly energy efficient environment where space is personal.

Buildings continue to be treated as autonomous entities that we almost incidentally inhabit. Thus the house is net-zero-energy, or sustainable or green (whatever) on a stand alone basis rather than as an intimate wrapper to our particular activities. Griffin treated his space as a personal enabler of his relationships with his body (primarily its need for rest, thermal comfort, aural and intellectual stimulation and, kinetic stimulation (video-games): localized lighting and an intimate relationship with the thermal boundary layers of small appliances served these personal interactions.

It is his model that represents the future of energy efficient design. The new social and entertainment media have expanded our 'at-home' worlds. Our need for theatrical space where the kinetic experience of volume and visually stimulating effects - like a view - are paramount has been replaced by the 52" HD screen and the i-pad. This virtual experiential expansion can now reasonably be housed (or shrink-wrapped) in a smaller, better fitting architectural expression where energy inputs are carefully calibrated to the convection currents of the persons and appliances that inhabit the spaces.

In short, to be truly energy efficient, we need to act more like teenagers (or ectotherms), absorbing energy from our (electronic) environment and savoring the shadowy spaces of personal entombment.

An Island on the Land

Long, long ago it was Vineland, then in 1776 it was branded by the founding fathers as the United States of America. The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw an explosion of branded territories - henceforth known as nations: briefly, California was one such.

William B. Ide issued a proclamation of independence on June 15, 1846, it read in part:

"The Commander in Chief of the Troops assembled at the Fortress of Sonoma gives his inviolable pledge to all persons in California not found under arms that they shall not be disturbed in their persons, their property or social relations one to another by men under his command.....
........He further declares that he believes that a Government to be prosperous and happyfying in its tendency must originate with its people who are friendly to its existence. That its Citizens are its Guardians, its officers are its Servants, and its Glory their reward."

Thus was born the Republic of California. It lasted twenty five days.

California's coast was first populated more than 13,000 years ago. Daisy Cave (official site designation CA-SMI-26) is a rock shelter on the former Chumash burial grounds of San Miguel, the western most island of the four in the Channel Island chain that stretches out off the coast of Ventura (Anacapa, Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa are the other three). Here Jon Erlandson of Oregon University has discovered evidence of a kind of kelp culture that could have sustained the first human arrivals. He writes,

"By about 16,000 years ago, the North Pacific Coast offered a linear migration route, essentially unobstructed and entirely at sea level, from northeast Asia into the Americas....With reduced wave energy, holdfasts for boats, and productive fishing, these linear kelp forest ecosystems may have provided a kind of kelp highway for early maritime peoples colonizing the New World."

At Daisy Cave, Erlandson found evidence of human occupations extending from ca.12,000 to 700 Before Present. The oldest artifacts include the remains of kelp resources and small quantities of chipped stone artifacts and marine shells all of which indicate, he suggests, an occupation by an early maritime people during the terminal Pleistocene.

European interest in the lands emerged in the sixteenth century when Spain dubbed their south western and west coast holdings in New Spain as Las Californias, but what is now called California remained an island in cartographers imaginations until 1705 when the Jesuit Missionary, Father Kino, by walking from New Mexico to the California Pacific coast, confirmed that California was indeed part of the North American mainland, but it was not until 1747, that King Ferdinand VII of Spain finally decreed that California was not an island.

Still under this mythic spell, Cabrillo's quest in 1542 was to discover the north-west passage - the imagined link between the Atlantic and the Pacific which would allow Spain direct ocean access to the riches of the Orient - a geographical miscalculation that was the motivation for much of the exploration of the New World on both sides of the continent.

San Miguel re-entered the history of California when Cabrillo broke his arm there while exploring the island. He continued his voyage and reached as far as Point Reyes in what is now Marin County but was forced to return by heavy weather and his gangrenous wound. On the return voyage he again put in at San Miguel where he died and was subsequently buried on the nearby island of Santa Rosa in 1543.

Later in the century, in 1577,  Francis Drake ventured up the coast reaching the present state of Washington; on his return he too put in at Point Reyes for repairs to his ship the Golden Hinde, and took the opportunity to claim the land he called Nova Albion (New England) for his Queen, Elizabeth I.

Despite Spain's interest in developing a west coast port as a lay-over on the arduous voyage from Mexico (Acupulco) to the Phillipines and further sporadic, exploration, California remained safely in the hands of its indigenous people until 1769 when threats of Russian encroachment spurred Spain to establish its military and religious presence (Blowback).

California continued, during the Mission period and through its annexation to a newly independent Mexico in 1824 to be both explored and peopled along a north-south axis, with settlers arriving either overland or by sea. Voyagers along the Kelp Highway had originally arrived from the north; in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the Russians followed this maritime route from their established settlements in Alaska and by 1808 were hunting and trading in Bodega Bay - a few miles north of Drakes Bay at Point Reyes.

California then, if not an island, was most certainly a land of the Pacific littoral connected with Mexico but entirely separate from the historical development of the United States until moments after its brief incarnation as the Bear Flag Republic.

Successive waves of migration from the east then fell upon the land (initially drawn by the lure of gold) and in short order the Grizzly and the indigenous peoples were gone, so too were much of the coastal wetlands, dunes, and sage scrub. The kelp survives in relict stands around the Channel Islands; in the cool currents of Catalina they support a unique marine eco-system (and the glass-bottomed boat tourist industry).

But in this month when the blossoming ceanothus veils the hillsides and its honeyed scent lies heavy in the air, I am reminded that the one inviolable connection to our pre-human history is The Democratic Republic of Chaparral. Fractured, disjunct and absent from the public imagination until it burns, chaparral remains the defining characteristic of the land we now call California and renders it, in an echo of how it was long imagined, An Island on the Land (Mission Creep).

Pitch Perfect

We may still associate Beginnings, Middles and Ends with fairy tales and the human span, but life all around us argues for a less linear view of the Universe. This second year of weeding I have abandoned my Cartesian mindset, embraced the recursive and transcended the lessons of Sisyphus. Along the way I have learnt to recognize California goosefoot (Chenopodium californicum).

The west meadow runs parallel to the gentle slope upon which our house now sits; at the top of the rise is an oak grove and at the bottom the confluence of Bear Creek and the eastern seasonal stream. When we purchased the site, the asphalt driveway ran safely over the seasonal stream via an Arizona crossing, past the Edison pole that brought power to the well and then stopped short, with obvious intentions - but no County requirement - to continue up-slope. Just before its termination, there was a path that headed west creating a fork with the incipient driveway acting as the eastern branch.

The driveway now continues to the house and the path has been further established by both the truck trips to the compost pile (Sinology) and the scattering of chipped laurel sumac along its length. Midway to the top is a flat area where our 200 tons of rocks - unearthed from the benching excavation that created the house terrace - were stored and later removed (Stoned). To the west of this area is a band of chaparral that then descends steeply to a riparian habitat along Bear Creek. To the east is the path and beyond that sage scrub, then a slope up to the rocky chaparral covered spine which runs between meadows. When the rocks were removed we were left with a reasonably level area of dirt, scraped clean of vegetation: a petrie dish awaiting the germination of post-1769 non-natives!

For that short period when the bare soil had been greened but the true horror of the weed infestation had yet to be realized I thought of that patch of dirt as my cricket pitch. There are 22 yards (a chain) between the wickets of a cricket pitch and while the outfield would be uneven in width it was more than adequate for a game of bush-cricket. The pitch (I imagined) would run east west because although I liked to think the area was flat the prevailing slope was very definitely in the north-south direction and a pitch with the same orientation would give a wicked advantage to a down-slope bowler and cruel handicap to the chap toiling up-hill; but before the summer had truly arrived the cricket field disappeared under a mantle of mustards and thistles.

Over the summer the weeds dried, shed their seeds and became a dense thicket of canes. Last weekend was spent in raking, hoeing and pulaskiing my way through the brittle thistle stalks, the re-leafing mustards and dried grasses and dumping the airy mass on the dense, dark, warm stew of last spring's weeds that is now the compost pile - situated just to the north of the erstwhile, imagined cricket field.

It was exhilarating to reveal the natives amidst the dross: great drifts of deer weed (Lotus scoparius) are emerging that presage the revival of Sage Scrub; poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) is beginning to leaf out; wild cucumber (Marah macrocarpus) is vining promiscuously and at the edges of the disturbed soil, California goosefoot has established itself.

Lorrie, anxious to begin her program of domesticating the chaparral close to the house cleared the mixed border (the east face of the spine closest to the house) of dead twigs and grasses and then moved onto the banks of the seasonal stream where ferns face east and the bright green foliage of California everlasting dot the west facing slope. Lurking at the ready, close to the ground, are the serrated, basal leaves of the dreaded thistles - still a little too young to yank from the ground.

Up slope, a little east of the stream, she trimmed back the toyon and holly-leaved cherry and hacked away at the dead branches of......three scrub oaks (Quercus dumosa) that had been hiding in plain sight; awaiting, apparently, the kind ministrations of an elf (or its earthly minion, Lorrie) bearing a pair of loppers. They form a small grove and are delightful to behold - the typical oak (in Spanish, chapporo) of the chaparral almost at our doorstep. Towering above them to the west is the magisterial grouping of oaks (Quercus agrifolia) that seem now crass in comparison with these delicate multi-trunked, tiny leafed denizens of the Elfin Forest (Brand 'X').

A close reader of this blog may have discerned in its author a level of enthusiasm for California and its 'signature eco-system', chaparral (Richard W, Halsey). I was pre-sold on this native wilderness long before we built a house in its midst. Annie Proulx (Brokeback Mountain, Shipping News) had long written about Wyoming before deciding to build her dream home in 670 acres of wetland-grassland-shrublands where prowl elk, mountain lion and, apparently, the neighbor's cattle. She began building her house in 2003, just a year before we bought our first land on Koenigstein, and her experience has not been a happy one.

After two years of construction with recalcitrant builders, seemingly constant 70-100 mph winds and massive cost overuns she stayed just one year in the completed project driven out of her home by the discovery that the road into town was not plowed - rendering her a prisoner of the snowy wastes for five months of the year. Despite her love of the land she came to understand that this place she called Bird Cloud, sited atop a precipitous cliff overlooking the North Platte River "never could be the final home of which I had dreamed". (Bird Cloud, Scribner, 2010)

Building in the wildlands has a degree of difficulty that we in no way approached with construction of our house in the Ojai hinterlands. We built at the Wildland/Urban interface - where we have a foot in both worlds and access to a broad, and broadly competitive range of trades and services. If there are similarities between Bird Cloud and the project we sometimes call Rock Fall they exist in the attempt of both endeavours to replace a whole range of Urban experiences, social propinquities and opportunities for diversion with the compelling presence of the natural world. That presence demands a high level of tolerance for the cyclical nature of being. It offers not a linear experience of progress, moving ever forward, but a glimpse instead, into the eternal verities of the natural and spiritual worlds.

Like the snows of Wyoming the weeds will surely return: the mark of our spiritual progress - if there can be such a thing - is the extent to which we abandon notions of ultimate triumph but nevertheless enjoin in yearly battle confident that we can, at the margins, make a difference.