WEIRD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real Suspense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moai

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strictly Analog

Last night it snowed on Koenigstein.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Little Lake

For more than ten thousand years, until the late nineteenth century, the sounds of hard rock striking soft reverberated around Little Lake, in Inyo County, California, an oasis situated in the ecotone between the Mojave Desert and the western Great Basin, as indigenous peoples made rock art.

For the last decade, a team of multi-disciplinary volunteers, working with Jo Anne Van Tilberg, the Director of the Rock Art Archive at UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, recorded the now mute testament to this primal mark-making. I was a part of that group from 2007 and the results of our work, Rock Art at Little Lake: An Ancient Crossroads in the California Desert, was published in December, 2012.

My introduction to the team was through Doug Brotherton, who became a friend after I designed a re-model of his 1920's Greek Revival cottage. Doug was key to the effort both as a photographer of the work and then the designer of the book; I made small contributions as an illustrator and word-smith. From the beginning, my involvement was inspired by a belief that rock art exists as a conduit to the spirit realm and I was much influenced by my reading of David Whitley's book, The Art of the Shaman, Rock Art of California, University of Utah Press, 2000.

Working with Jo Anne, I was introduced to the Archive's painstaking scientific method and came to realize that this 'third level' of meaning (beyond semantic or taxonomic evaluation and the next level, the linkage of the motifs with associative phenomena) which potentially reference the spiritual or mystical, may only be discovered through experiential participation in the art work's cultural framework. Given that that is no longer possible, all else is conjecture.

Whitley's notion that all rock art is exclusively the work of shaman has come under increasing scrutiny and certainly our book takes the position that over the extended temporal landscape that exists at Little Lake, this art was produced by both men and woman with a variety of societal motivations. One such motivation, the ritual activity surrounding hunting, is considered, particularly as it relates to big-horned sheep.

More generally, Jo Anne takes the position that petroglyphs are key elements in the ritual construction of a landscape, that the pecked motifs are instrumental in giving meaning to place. Our consideration of the work at the site was thus divided up into eight loci which were characterized by their terrain. While this represented a unique point of departure in the analysis of rock art I am not sure that it returned any substantial insights. It did, however, afford the opportunity to single out the most remarkable rock art phenomena at Little Lake - Atlatl Cliff, where, on the planar faces of seismically fractured basalt boulders are hundreds of pecked representations of the atlatl (a spear throwing stick that adds leverage to the thrower's arm and pre-dates the bow and arrow). This dramatic rock fall, marked by the proliferation of this motif (in varieties of shape and size) is unique in south western rock art.

Much of the other work at Little Lake pales in comparison to the rock art at the nearby Coso Rock Art Landmark (Things fall Apart). From an archeological perspective they are not strictly comparable. A great deal of the Little Lake production is earlier, but it was during the Newberry (1500 BCE - 600CE) and early Haiwee periods (600-1000 CE) that Big and Little Petroglyph Canyons, carved into the sugar loaf Cosos, debouching thousands of feet above the salt flat of China Lake, became the Greece and Rome, Paris, and New York, of North American rock art (while out-of-town try-outs were consigned, perhaps, to the marshy fringes of Little Lake).

It may be inappropriate to apply contemporary aesthetic judgments to this work but once your eyes adjust to the low levels of contrast between the pecked and un-pecked rock in Little Petroglyph Canyon and the full graphic impact of the motifs (many created in seemingly impossible locations high on the canyon walls) begins to reorganize the cellular structure of your brain you know you are in the presence of great art. Here, higher level meaning transcends ignorance of its originating context.

Little Lake was an oasis, but to use a crass analogy, it was a truck stop compared to the rarified convocations at the Coso canyons which were more akin to Davos where the World Economic Forum gathers. At Little Lake, the vernacular messages are garbled (with the exception of the stentorian but enigmatic voicings from Atlatl Cliff); at Coso, the high seriousness of matters concerning rainfall and the successful procurement of large game animals was negotiated, at least partly, through the magnificent clarity of iconic rock art motifs.

Remarkably, the clean peal of rock against rock was likely very similar in both locations; but while the joyful noise that tumbled out of the Coso canyons (like the torrents that emerge from these chasms during the wet, or the herds of big-horned sheep and antelope that were prodded down their lithic defiles and fell to their death on the salt flats below) was in incidental service to the production of cosmically affective petroglyphs; at Little Lake, there is the suspicion that the gravitas of the graven motifs was secondary to the glorious tintinnabulation of this percussive art.

Ultimately, Jo Anne's sense that the rock art at Little Lake, whether inspired by the local psycho-tropic drug of choice (datura), the eidetic imagery available to us all behind tightly closed eyelids, environmental mimesis or simply age-old tradition, functioned as an amplification of the ritual meanings inherent in the landscape, made our work and the resultant book worthwhile. The establishment of a fully dimensional ethnographic, geologic, geographic and archeological context for the study of these millennia of scribblings brings this particular place, in all its vast temporal vicissitudes, into a highly resolved focus: where an oasis has, across the ages, served to sustain the human spirit.

Joy

There is joy in running in the chaparral, in the dark. There is pleasure in running in moonlight - the lumens sufficient to show the monochrome path, but not the intense flood of emotion, in a "It hurts as much as it is worth" kind of way - the joy - that comes from being guided along the track by the scratch of chamise or the stiff fingered corrections of black sage. This early fourth day of Christmas morning, when the full moon was sometimes shadowed by mountain or bush, and before the eastern horizon lightened, I experienced both kinds of synaptic response.

O.K., I was primed by reading Zadie Smith's essay in the New York Review of Books, January 10, 2013, which begins, "It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy...." moments before I started out. I tried. I think I succeeded. As she points out, these two emotions do not live on the same spectrum: the one is not a more extreme version of the other. They belong to different orders of things. There are daily pleasures of living with the chaparral: now, I am noticing goose foot, soap plant, wild cucumber, peonies and blue-eyed grass emerge (their leaf forms stenciled grey in moonlight).

The joys are rarer. This morning I was transported by the close thrum of a startled bird's wing as it took flight (it sounded like a quail). At other times when the frantic rustle of some small mammal is right beneath my feet; or once, in Will Roger's State park, in the dark, in the rain, when I brushed against the flank of deer before it sprang away; or, along a single-track bordered by dense chaparral on one side and and a sharp drop off on the other, when a young bobcat scampered along a bank alongside of me, having few directional choices, (I marveled that this animal was close enough to touch while being vaguely aware that its vision of me was doubtless much sharper than mine of it), Joy has entered my consciousness. It is in this almost haptic connectivity, in a shared world of no-light, that, most often, this magic happens. But a momentary whiff of sage with laurel sumac top-notes can also distill this universal essence (strangely akin to love); again, this seems to occur more often when one's visual faculty is impaired.

By contrast, as Smith points out, children are not a daily pleasure, but often an all-suffusing, heart-aching joy. Years ago, we composed a photograph of young William, not yet two, with a red baseball cap askew, sitting on the black vinyl tile floor by an open refrigerator door from which had tumbled, in our conceit, a can of reddi-whip cream. Cream besmirched his cherubic face and on the floor, apparently by his hand, were squirted the letters J-O-Y. This snap was enclosed in our Christmas card that year. It seemed cute at the time, but in a way not then realized it now seems prescient. In his nearly three decades, joy has hovered, but in the daily grind of parenting and then of fretfully watching an independent life unfold, pleasure is a less frequent presence.

Over a holiday marked by several parties, celebratory meals, the annual orgy of gifting and this year the attendance of our three children and a wife, girlfriend and dog, I have tried to keep the pleasures of the chaparral in my life. Early morning runs are a part of it, but for the third year now we brought in a dead yucca whipplei which reaches up into our living room by about ten feet and its seed head top, mimicking the shape of a Christmas tree, is decorated with clear and silver glass balls which glow from a 50 watt MR-16 down-light in the sloped ceiling above. A mess of christmas lights is entwined in its spiky, spiny base. As a self confessed merriment minimalist (Christmas Sage), that would have done it for me. But I bowed (gracefully) to family pressure and twinned it with a seven foot spruce Christmas tree on the other side of the room - the two dead plants co-exist in a sort of ecumenical borderland, perhaps in the Buddhist state of bardo. In my mind they look well together, the wayward gravitas of the yucca compensating for its restrained decoration while the spruce keeps alive the Dickensian, nineteenth century invention of the modern Christmas while still echoing the truly ancient tree cults of the Egyptians and the Celts (amongst countless others unknown to me).

This ecumenical spirit carried over to the Topanga wedding we attended a few days after Christmas. It was held at a friend's house built about twenty years ago on Henry Ridge Road. At that time, it was largely isolated, surrounded by the craggy tops and vertiginous slopes of the Santa Monica mountains, with the ocean glimpsed through the cleft of Topanga canyon. Further south, the houses above the Getty Villa were the closest visible development. Now, ten and twelve thousand foot neo-classical houses are sprinkled through the chaparral and smaller suburban abominations are scattered along the ridge-tops. Nevertheless, the site retains much of its majesty and the house has settled into its rustic setting. A recent fire claimed the free-standing garage and four steel pipe columns and two badly charred beams have created a vestigial carport.

The service for Lucas and Bane was conducted by Murshida Tasnim Hermila Fernandez, a trained semazen (whirling dervish) in the Mevlevi Sufi tradition. She was, according to her web site, awakened to the inner life of spirit in her late teens and,

"Over the years, her journey of inquiry and discovery led her to study and participate in Hermetics, Alchemy, Vedanta, Kundalini Yoga, Judaism, Tibetan Buddhism, Huichol Shamanism, Mystical Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jungian psychology and what has become a lifelong immersion in the sacred literature of the world religions and mystical traditions. All of this exposure to the variety of forms taken on by Holy Wisdom only helped to deepen her committment and appreciation of the universal message of Sufism as brought to The West by Hazrat Inayat Khan".

A century ago, she would have embraced Theosophy, Ojai's founding faith. This day she quoted from Hindu, Judaic, Christian and Islamic sacred texts and did a little wailing and rattle shaking in the syncretic native American tradition, thanking, along the way, the Great Spirit for holding off on the rain during the outdoor ceremony. As your Reporter on the Occult, I was in my element, although somewhat disappointed that there were no manifestations. A clap of thunder, or a beam of sunlight directed at the happy couple was not, I think, too much to ask and the lack thereof was, I hope, reflected in her fee. Also, it was damned cold. The bride, in diaphanous lace gown, her four month baby bump mischievously prominent, was visibly chilled.

Let's put it this way: Tasnim is no Helena P. Blavatsky, upon whose two volume treatise, Isis Unveiled, A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern, New York, 1877, I have just embarked: but, sanctioned by the great State of California, she got the job done. Helena B was a dab hand at manifesting bunches of roses (according to many, unimpeachable sources) and this occult party trick (the practice of which Balvatsky despised) was echoed at this Topanga wedding by the throwing of rose petals (almost certainly sourced in Chile) held in clenched hands during the long wait for the ceremony to commence and thus bruised and bedraggled by the time they were finally unleashed upon their target. Nice thought, but arguably executed in the wrong dimension.

Bane (pronounced Bahn) is of Lebanese heritage, and her father is a prominent Beirut architect; her mother now lives in Paris. The bride's party was notable for it's sophisticated dress, great shoes and disdain for Topanga mud. I regret that they have now left Los Angeles unaware that Bane was married amidst one of the world's most distinctive ecosystems and that, with a few subtle gestures, this setting could have been fully embraced rather than treated as an impediment to civilization, OK at a distance, but let's grow rosemary, bougainvillea and hybrid sages in the courtyard.

As Pete Seeger wrote, "When will they ever learn?". Here was truly the potential for great joy in the Chaparral.

Ancient Isle

T.C. Boyle has written a second novel primarily set on the Channel Islands. The first, When the Killing's Done, 2011, focused on the removal of the invasive pig population on Santa Cruz, the second, San Miguel, 2012, tracks the history of two sheep ranching families on the eponymous island. So, as they say, what's up with that?

Why the fixation on these scrappy mountain tops left exposed above the rising melt waters of the last ice age? The celebrated author lives in Montecito and perhaps, on a clear day, he can see the shadowy forms of Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa and even San Miguel on the horizon from his writing room. It is but a small step from the admonition, 'write what you know' to 'write what you see' - a step that I have certainly embraced - but T.C. (Tom to his friends) is no beginning writer casting around for a journalistic focus. He is famously prolific and many of his books can reasonably be claimed to be about something beyond the prosaic meaning of their narratives. There is something else driving his current purview.

The geographic imperative has a long history in America. 'Go West, young man', exhorted Horace Greeley, seeking to materialize Manifest Destiny (Fortune Cookie). Us Euro-Californians can relate (Asian-Americans less so): but I was reminded that there can be contrary directional impulses within the United States somewhere around the seventh hour of last Sunday's staged reading of The Great Gatsby which Lorrie and I attended. (Gatz, By Elevator Repair Service, from the text by F. Scott Fitzgerald, directed by John Collins; at the Roy and Edna Disney Cal-Arts Theater, Disney Hall, Los Angeles).

In a work that slides into penny-dreadful territory in its closing chapters, Fitzgerald remembers his elevated literary ambitions when he mythologizes the great trek east: Nick, Jay and Daisy have all migrated from the mid-west and Fitzgerald briefly considers that fact's significance (to draw his reader away, perhaps, from pondering the automotive and ballistic carnage he has just foisted on them). Until the mechanics of the plot run away with him, I was enraptured by Fitzgerald's prose lucidly presented by this New York theater troupe. Let me tell you, T. Coraghessan Boyle is no F. Scott Fitzgerald. The former is a novelist of a distinctly different stripe. His are the narrative skills of a westerner: no complexities of syntax, no elaborate metaphor; he writes instead with the propulsive force of a locomotive carrying the reader, pell-mell, along the lines of the plot and through richly rendered landscapes and weather.

As such, he is a writer who uses externalities rather than interior monologues or the finely crafted apercus of Fitzgerald. He is, in a real sense, an environmental writer in which human characters share the stage, on an equal footing as it were, with their surroundings. In a recent interview he says, “what I seem to be writing about through all my books is us as animals in nature”.

Boyle's islands are not true wildlands. They might be seen as highly attenuated urban wildlands. But these are not suburban annexes (such as Upper Ojai), they are truly remote - yet the wildness of the isolated setting has been transmuted by the pasturing of livestock which creates its own barren, rusticated hinterland. This transmutation of the real into into the ersatz, of gold into dross, of, ultimately, wilderness into pasture, is presumably one of T.C. Boyle's novelistic concerns. His are tales of paradise lost.

The families who sojourn on San Miguel (both his recent books are novelistic glosses on the facts of nineteenth and twentieth century ranching on the islands) lead lives made miserable, in one way or another, by the environmental damage caused by the depredations of the Spanish, who first de-forested the island early in the nineteenth century, and then successive waves of ranchers whose sheep herds nibbled the vegetation down to the nub. Lacking all hindrance, the abrasive winds that sweep down past Point Conception drive sand deep into the food, shelter and clothing of these coastal pastoralists. Their lives are abraded by grit. The wool that is their livelihood is similarly infiltrated and the sand quickly blunts the blades of the Mexican and Indian itinerant sheep shearers. As Boyle tells it, when the lash of wind driven sand abates it is replaced with a shroud of fog that wraps its dampness over the land and its chilled inhabitants alike. Fun Times.

I am now reading Scarlet Feather, 1945, by Joan Grant, a so-called Far Memory Book in which the author ostensibly recalls a story from a past life. There is a connection to Ojai in that Grant's grand daughter (also a writer) now lives in Ojai having been gifted an estate that included a house and grounds in the east end by an avid fan of her grandmother's writing - she, in turn, is now embarked on telling this strange tale of inheritance. Scarlet Feather is the American story in Grant's canon (Joan incarnated in many of the more storied civilizational epochs) and relates to an Indian tribe loosely located in the west.

Grant recounts the story of Piyanah and Raki, princelings of the Two Trees band who are charged by the chief to lead a new tribe into the promised land in which the Canyon of Separation between men and women will be bridged, Love is recognized as the source of Life, the Sorrow Bird is banished, Superstition is extinguished and The Before People - their ancesters - emerge from the shadows to become spirit guides. Grant might reasonably be accused of projecting a mid-century, feminist mysticism on a midden of accumulated anthropological cliches, yet she leaves us with at least one useful concept.

The Before People represent the beginning of things: they are, Grant writes, "Those who came before we can remember" where, in their Country Beyond the Water, men and women walked hand in hand and shared their days, "it was together that they wept..laughed...worked and loved". I cannot speak to the equality of the sexes on San Miguel in its early days of human habitation, but the island's first men and women arrived at the end of the last ice age and given their great discontinuity with the lives and culture of the Chumash it is, perhaps, appropriate to think of them as The Before People.

Having navigated the 'Kelp Road' down from what is now eastern Siberia, they made landfall south of Point Conception where a pine-forested San Miguel beckoned. At that time, it formed the northern tip of Santa Rosae, before rising sea levels divided the land mass, then a mere five miles off of the mainland coast, into separate islands. Carbon dating establishes a Paleoindian presence on this scrap of land beyond the California coast as long as 13,000 years ago. John Erlandson, the archeologist who has spear-headed the Kelp Road theory, 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."

And it was in Daisy Cave on San Miguel that Erlandson found evidence of kelp culture, North America's earliest shell midden and an ancient weaving technology evidenced by basketry and cordage (all this, despite looting by the ranching families of whom Boyle writes).

By 1543, when the first European to explore the Californian coast, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, suffered a fatal wound after slipping on a San Miguel rock, the Chumash had found the island's most propitious use to be the burying of their dead. The Spanish removed the relict pine trees and the remaining native population early in the nineteenth century. As noted above, sheep and goats destroyed what was left of the native flora. In the middle of the twentieth century, the U.S. Navy administered the final indignity by using the island as a bombing range.

The Rainbow Bridge (Hoop Dreams) no longer connects San Miguel to the mainland: Santa Rosae's vestigial isthmus is now truly the land beyond the water: rising seas lap at her shores, live ordnance lies buried beneath sand and rock and her Before People have retreated to the shadows. Yet I am heartened that a moment in the island's time has now been animated, in all its grim beauty, by Boyle's pen. May other legends of this ancient isle be similarly revived.

Fortune Cookie

There is scarcely a town on the planet that does not possess a Chinese restaurant: Ojai is no exception. Introduced to the world in the middle of the nineteenth century they represent, perhaps, the most ubiquitous cultural export from the east. The Golden Moon, firmly established on the corner of Park and E. Ojai Avenue has survived for twenty three years, weathering both the close oversight of Ventura County health inspectors (and numerous citations for unsanitary conditions) and the recent, decidedly mixed reviews on Yelp. It represents a local link to the Taishanese who first arrived on our western shores over a century and a half ago.

Taishan is an area in the Pearl River Delta in the southeastern province of Guangdong. By the mid nineteenth century, isolated by the rise of Shanghai as southern China's pre-eminent commercial center, and with an agricultural economy battered by successive droughts, Taishan's population of unemployed coolies, warehousemen, porters, money changers and subsistence farmers were desperate for economic relief: whatever financial security they achieved was daily challenged by the depredations of roaming Red Turban bandits and Taiping rebels. When word reached China that Gum Saan, (the Gold Mountain) had been discovered across the Pacific, salvation appeared to be at hand. Taishan's proximity to Hong Kong, Macau and the 'treaty ports' of Amoy and Shantou, provided the means by which dreams of migration to Gum Saan (the synecdoche by which America became known) could be achieved.

That other latter-day signifier of this migration, the Chinese Laundry, existed in Ojai at least until the 1920's - operated by Wah Lee on Ojai Avenue just to the east of the lumber yard. Chinese were also employed, at that time, in wood cutting or as domestics. Others sold vegetables from horse drawn carts. They were also responsible for the first stone walls in the east end (Early Stories of Ojai, Howard Bald, Ojai Museum).

There have been successive waves of migration into California and each has contributed to its current incarnation as a highly urbanized, technologically sophisticated and largely prosperous first world territory. It is ironic, however, that the people of the earliest migration into California, who arrived some 10-13,000 years ago, were close to extinction (achieved through the homicidal agency of Spanish, Mexican and American colonists) at the precise moment of this second Asian influx. While the earliest migrants from southern Siberia had drifted down the kelp road along the Pacific fringe and entered California when mega-fauna still roamed the grasslands to the east of the Sierra Nevada, the Taishanese arrived, a millennium or so later, to mine gold to the west.

The gold gave out even more quickly than the woolly mammoths. The boom years quickly turned into a bust. Many Chinese were then employed to lay the railroads that opened up the west to tens of thousands of east coast laborers - who blamed the 'Heathen Chinee' for the tough economic conditions they found here. The Chinese, once welcomed for their work ethic, were blamed for lowering wages and monopolizing employment opportunities. Long-held racial, cultural, and religious prejudices were unleashed and organized labor began to advocate for restrictions on the Chinese and changes in the immigration laws, culminating in the passage of The Chinese Exclusion Act by Congress in 1880. Initially enacted for a ten year period, it was amended to run in perpetuity in 1904 but was finally rescinded in 1943, just one year after FDR's Executive Order called for the internment of the 110,000 Japanese who lived along the Pacific coast.

As a political entity, California is a very recent invention. Until 1847, it was but an under-populated northern extension of Mexico. The territory fell into that country's maw following the expulsion of their erstwhile colonial overlords - the Spanish - in 1821 when on August 24, representatives of the Spanish crown and Colonel Agustin de Iturbide signed the Treaty of Cordoba, which recognized Mexican independence.

After the secularization of the missions in 1834, and the distribution of their lands as political spoils, the system of ranchos was established and California lapsed into a golden age (for some). Still under Mexican sovereignty, but in reality controlled by a network of land-rich Dons, it was a a time of "prodigal existence, generous and unheeding" ......where, "Everyone was connected by blood or baptismal relationships...families met for three meals a day, and there were mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks..and no child went uncared for" (California, A History, Kevin Starr, 2005). Upon the existence of this 1% was established that enduring Californian mythology, the 'Romance of the Ranchos'.

The eventual American conquest of California unfolded in a series of events that would play well as Opera Bouffe. It was ultimately effected in 1847 when, almost independently of the wider Mexican American War of 1846 - 1848 it fell, like a ripe peach onto ground which had been pre-ordained as American by such acts of philosophical sophistry as 'Manifest Destiny' (propounded by Senator Thomas Hart Benton) and Lyman Beecher's Plea for the West (1835). Lightly defended by Mexico, and populated by Californios favorably inclined towards the United States, the territory was inevitably ceded to an imperial power intent on becoming a continental nation, from sea to shining sea.

The discovery of gold the following year at Sutters Mill enfolded this geographically remote region into relations with the rest of the world. While it was to be expected that covered wagons would trek overland from the east in ever increasing numbers to share in the natural bounty of the state, it was gold that opened it up to Asia. The Spanish quest for El Dorado had been Americanized.

Yet America was never more than the sum of its immigrants: California, even before it achieved statehood in 1850, established itself as home to Mexicans, Central and South Americans, Europeans, Asians and anglo-Americans and over time, despite egregious lapses in the consistent application of civil liberties it now shines its golden light on both the 99 billionaires who claim residence here and, not coincidentally, a higher proportion of immigrants than any other state. 90% of its immigrants are from Latin America (55%) or Asia (35%) and the State (where the modern fortune cookie was invented in 1908) continues to be, despite a difficult economy, the leading destination for immigrants into the United States.

Our Gold Mountain is now a reputation as the global epicenter of high-tech, entertainment and entrepreneurial hutzpah.

Red, Blue or Green

About a week ago, after a long and very warm fall, winter fell like a hammer. A couple of days later, when the daytime temperature returned to the 80's F. we were able to joke, 'well, that was winter'. Such are the joys (and yuks) of living in southern California. But the fact is, the season has changed - our pool water temperature has slumped to 60 and there's no way it's getting any higher until next April, however many 80 degree days we have over winter - cold nights wipe away the day's injection of solar calories.

Apart from the loss of our swimming privileges, there's not much to dislike about the start of winter in the chaparral. Low to the ground the grasses are sprouting and above, the winds are ruffling dried summer stalks. There has been just enough rain to wipe the grime off of the leaves and the grey green hills have adopted a more emphatic verdure. Now, you'd think, we'd begin to see more wildlife - newly comfortable in meadowlands no longer withering in the heat of summer.

It hasn't turned out that way. No bobcats or foxes and precious few deer; occasionally a distant coyote chorus in the middle of the night but no sightings. We have pursued several explanations. Was it the early summer appearance of a mountain lion? I spoke with Ilona the other day (she and Les are planning to build a 4000 sq. ft. house on a knoll just below Josh and Megan's place (Love comes to Koenigstein)) and she blames the half dozen mules that Josh runs which have stripped the pastures bare on both sides of his property as it spans Koenigstein. Certainly the fencing of the old Lazy Two Ranch (Death Comes to Koenigstein) has impacted the game trails that once ran free over the ridge, but there's still plenty of open land.....I am not convinced. Then, I met Charlotte walking her dogs along Los Osos and she mentioned that the bow hunters at the top of the road (who I had run into early mornings and were, I thought, hunting rabbits) had a permit to hunt deer on the Old County Farm property, now owned by a local family, the Drinkwaters. How many deer, I wonder, do you have to shoot before spooking the entire local population?

In any case, we are now down to a solitary roadrunner (notable amidst more prosaic but always prolific bird-life). Alex and I spotted it again on the west meadow the other day. They are sprightly birds, but are really best in their role as light relief: they don't have the gravitas to perform as the primary wild life attraction as we gaze from our windows. We are searching for more archetypal fauna. Somewhere, in the activities of our local top predators - man and lion - lies, I suspect, the explanation for this apparent faunal desertification. Alex found the hind legs of a fox the other day, stripped clean of meat but with enough mangy fur to afford identification. Mountain lion? Coon hounds? These latter are another peripheral annoyance - they are a pair owned by Peter Jump the entomologist (Alpine Chaparral), that he allows to run free over the chaparral chasing game. Perhaps one day they will meet their match.

This country has just emerged from its quadrennial exercise in considering the merits of two shades of grey: a ritual that involves the highly constrained discussion of doctrinal difference where little of real substance is at stake. Nevertheless, despite the marginal nature of the debate, the country emerges with two populations: the vanquished and the victorious. Traditionally, the beaten side briefly retires to its rural sanctuaries, suburban enclaves or urban salons to ruminate over the unjustness of their recent defeat and plot revenge scenarios. Meanwhile, the real business of the country continues undisturbed within this larger celebration of the exceptionalism of its people, uniquely beneficent governmental structure and the glorification of its militaristic might.

Four years ago, we escaped to this particular world of rusticity for reasons that had almost nothing to do with our preferred shade of grey. Arguably, we have retreated to a sanctuary where majority political opinion runs counter to our own. Many who live and and work here pursue activities within the Urban wildland that are inimical to our largely passive consumption of what we presume are its aesthetic and spiritual qualities. I readily admit to being an urban dilettante operating at the margins of the wildland in ways that probably mystify many of those who are more established residents.

Thus I have found it convenient to center my own validation more on the area's erstwhile indigenous populations than its current inhabitants. I recently found further support for my removal from the fray from an unlikely quarter: seventeenth century China, where many of the country's most celebrated artists withdrew from public life (while the bloody war conducted by the invading Manchu Qing dynasty destroyed the old order of the Ming Empire) and sought solace in nature and reclusion. Some of the work produced by these cosmopolitans in rustic exile is currently on display at The Santa Barbara Museum of Art's exhibit, The Artful Recluse. The exhibition is highlighted by a monumental work of twelve, hanging scrolls from the National Palace Museum, Taiwain titled,  Plants of Virtue and Rocks by Water (Sketching Bamboo) by Shitao (1642–1707). I recommend it.

The exhibit moves to the Asia Society in New York next spring, where the anticipatory blurb reads,

"This is the first exhibition to explore the theme of reclusion in Chinese painting and calligraphy within the broader context of political and social changes during the seventeenth century, a time of rich cultural expression and dramatic political change. The trauma of the Ming dynasty’s collapse...and the Manchu Qing conquest provided an extraordinary context for the creation of historically conscious, often emotionally charged and deeply personal paintings and works of calligraphy. These images, however varied, share an overarching theme of reclusion, a concept of withdrawal and disengagement that has deep and significant roots in China..."

The Qing dynasty was established by the Manchu (Mongolian tribes that had conquered Manchuria in the early middle ages) in 1636, when, allying with rebel Ming generals, they emerged as a major threat to China's rulers. In 1644, the last Ming emperor hanged himself on a hill overlooking his palace. The rebel generals were dispensed with and the Manchus entered Peking and from that time on it was a Manchu emperor who sat on the throne of China until Hsian-T'ung, the last of his dynasty, was forced to abdicate following Sun Yat-sen's republican revolution in 1912.

Mid seventeenth century, China's artists and poets headed for the hills rather than live under a foreign regime. The poetry and painting produced in their rural retreats represented a transcendence of political trauma; their work still resonates with those of us retreating from the clamor of red versus blue. In the green of the urban wildland I have found an inspirational refuge.

Huang Ding (1660-1730), in a poem called Silent Mountains in the Evening writes,

     Passing alone through the empty mountains, caged by evening mist,
     On a special visit to an isolated recluse, examining the lying pines.
     Suddenly, the toils of the dusty world are completely dissolved;
     The single tone of a bell from deep within the verdant cliffs.

We Are All Marsh Dwellers Now

We are at the very beginning of the great give-back; the relinquishment of those lands pilfered over the ages from ocean, wetland and river. Viz: New York City, late October, 2012. Without prodigous feats of engineering, great political will and huge amounts of State and Federal treasure, it is now likely that swathes of the poorer boroughs will be given over to the rising waters in the next decades.

Lower Manhattan, it can be presumed, will be preserved for the foreseeable future as a bastion of late capitalism (No Soft Landing). Super Storm Sandy, however, wreaked real and symbolic damage on these drained riverlands.The museum beneath 9/11 Plaza, which houses the most precious relics from the provocative skirmish at the very beginning of this century's great asymmetrical war of North versus South, was disastrously flooded - fully submerging the iconic fire truck used by Engine Company 21 and the truck on which Ladder Company 3 arrived during the aerial attack on the twin towers.

The memorial to the 3,000 victims of 9/11 has become inextricably enmeshed in the unfolding of a potentially far greater human tragedy: anthropogenic global warming. Michael Arad's twin reflecting pools placed in the footprint of the World Trade Center towers are each flanked, on their four sides, by walls of perpetually cascading water neatly symbolizing the inundation precipitated by Sandy's storm surge. This minimalist gesture may now be commandeered by our imaginings of a future water world, where the Financial District is regularly besieged by storm surges, rising sea levels and hurricanes pushed over the area by the meteorological impacts of Greenland's melting ice-cap. It is often the fate of memorials to be 're-interpreted' as events shape our view of the past. Rarely, if ever, has such a dramatic shift in meaning been instantiated prior to a memorial's official opening.

A little over two years ago, MoMA and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center jointly developed an exhibit, Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront. It featured the work of five interdisciplinary teams who were tasked with "re-envisioning the coastlines of New York and New Jersey around New York Harbor and to imagine ways to occupy the harbor itself with adaptive “soft” infrastructures sympathetic to the needs of an ecology that encompassed the sea-level rise resulting from global climate change". At around the same time, Vision 2020, New York's comprehensive plan for its waterfront, was released. Currently, the New York City Economic Development Corporation is seeking proposals for innovative and cost-saving solutions for completing marine construction projects in New York City.

While Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made the re-imagination and reactivation of New York’s “6th Borough” – the Waterfront – a central economic development priority, Sandy's storm surge has heightened awareness of its fragility. Post-storm it is evident that the city's 565 miles of waterfront is a frontier that must be defended, or strategically ceded, in an increasingly aqueous world. The shoreline can no longer be defined by traditional, fixed locational matrices (such as grounded buildings and transportation infrastructure) but must be conceived of as a buffer zone alternately firm and fluid. One of the Rising Currents submissions presciently showed how farming oysters in New York Harbor could occupy that zone. Mussels, eels, fish, and crabs offer similar opportunities whereby our urban shorelines could revert to their pre-industrial state and support twenty first century, locavore, coastal tideland collectors.

All creatures impact their environment: there is no static, edenic state of grace to which we can revert. We are part of a highly dynamic system. From oak gall, spider-web and gopher hole to megalopolis we are all opportunistic users and abusers, biologically defined by self-interest. Bloomberg imagines (and is currently creating) parks, running paths, recreational boat-slips, riverside dining emporia and retail quays that will bring new economic life to his city's moribund waterfront: but he is projecting this vision within an environment that is in a heightened state of flux and not necessarily supportive of fixed boundaries between land and water.

Similar imaginings, on a smaller scale, are currently fueling the attempts to re-naturalise the Los Angles river. Personally, I have great affection for the megastructure that channelizes L.A.'s terrestrial hydrologic system that in past times varied from a trickle in the desert to waters rampaging over a vast flood-plain and was never anyone's idea of an archetypal river. However, given the City's acknowledged shortage of green spaces, it may make sense to impose an old-world, Europeanized, park-like vision on the 'river': it remains ironic, however, that its location, arbitrarily defined by the heroic efforts of W.P.A. laborers, will now be further immobilized by efforts to make it recreation-user-friendly and even navigable, both intentions that fundamentally misunderstand the mutable, chimeric character of this sometimes water-course.

The creation of a static boundary for an inherently amorphous system is, of course, doomed to fail. Locally, development is sufficiently sparse and agriculturally oriented that our mighty local rivers, the Ventura and the Santa Clara have some room to move. The re-wilding of the Ventura River, remains a plausible project but the Santa Clara's usually sluggish passage across the agri-business plains of Oxnard is likely to continue to be constrained by the concrete embattlements of economic interest. The containment of these rivers will undoubtedly be stressed by the increased volatility of our Pacific weather systems but it is perhaps the rising ocean that is the greater threat to our developmental infrastructure.

It is a characteristic of successful civilizations that they internalize mechanisms to deal with environmental stresses. The decision of the Chumash and their ancestral cultural congeries not to pursue agriculture (although they were undoubtedly aware of its basic precepts) but to rely instead on the nutritional bounty of the indigenous eco-systems may have enabled them to survive for 13,000 years during which sea levels rose a total of over 300 feet (sometimes at the rate of 24" in a century). We, by contrast, are flummoxed by the prospect of a few inches rise in the Pacific and scared witless by the prospect of the geoid effect whereby the gravitational forces at the earth's surface would be radically impacted by the loss of mass at the poles and thus shift the global displacement of water several meters here or there; or a reversal of the prevailing winds over the Pacific that currently push water levels up to two feet higher in Asia that could swiftly inundate the U.S. west coast.

Disaster scenarios abound, but all are predicated on the unknowable instability likely initiated by the planet's ever thickening carbon blanket. We have drained our coastal wetlands and have paved over our dune successions so that the natural absorptive systems at the continent's fluid edge are inoperative - we have caused our soft edges to atrophy. Protection of the commons has been sacrificed on the altar of narrow self-interests: now we begin to pay for our misaligned attention at the crumbling edges of our continent.

One small, but widely reported installment was rendered in New York City by superstorm Sandy. Another less heralded give-back occurred on Long Island's North Fork, where a year ago I attended a wedding at the Galley-Ho!......

".......a hundred year old scallop-packing shed, latterly converted to a restaurant (long-failed) and currently owned by a local non-profit preservation group. Amidst a century's turmoil, its various owners had neglected to provide either heating or insulation but its prime water-front location was sufficient compensation. It was a beautiful ceremony which I watched while keeping a weather eye on the rising ocean which seemingly threatened to engulf the fragile building; and what began as rain lashing the single paned windows that lined the seaward side of the structure changed texture right about the time that vows were exchanged .....and assumed the soft granulations of wet snow. But the seas failed in their efforts, as they have for five score years, to wash away the scallop shed........" (Waterland)

Until, that is, October 29th 2012, when the building was destroyed by the storm surge.

Nether Land

In Ojai, we have a strange and complicated relationship with the past, living heartbreakingly close to those sixty years (barely three generations) when the climax culture of the Chumash people was almost entirely hollowed out by the Spanish rot. The older culture succumbed with barely a fight (there were brief neophyte rebellions in 1824) before the furies of a moribund colonial power and its enabling religion destroyed the practices, wisdom, and low-impact technologies of the hunter-gatherers. The Chumash remain a spectral presence: their culture, artifacts and shallow impressions on the land may have almost totally disappeared yet, for me, these lost tribes still cast shadows over the chaparral and oak woodlands.

In California, although we are historically adjacent to that primeval paradise (as we romantically suppose) of the land before America, we are also heirs to what Morris Berman, (No Soft Landing) suggests is a condition of modern civilization,

"Traditions constantly fall to the wayside. Spaces once hallowed by millennia of sacred ritual get plowed over in a heart’s beat. Whole eras of human occupation of particular spaces become erased from our collective memories so that other eras can be reconstructed as tourist attractions. Atrocities and all manners of inhuman treatment and social injustice can be deleted from our group consciousness as we march forward toward progress."

Given this annihilation of tradition (in tandem with the creation of false narratives), this willful destruction of all real connections with the past, how is it that we can connect with a place other than through the immediate exigencies of the now? We are inevitably bound to the axis of time, but how is that we can develop an understanding of locus, or place, beyond the moment that it transects the present? I mean, what threads bind us to a geographical location other than its concurrence, or complicity, in our existence as it unfolds in the present?

I grew up at, and read the books of, a time that valued organization - the compartmentalization of information. Ideas of the mash-up or serendipitous anachronism were verboten, except at the avant garde. So my early ideas of how we conceptualized space (and thus inhere place) owed a lot to people like Kevin Lynch whose book The Image of the City (1960) attempted to demonstrate that real people actually thought of spaces in terms of paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks (just like Planners!). While his later book, What Time is This Place? (1972), at least recognized the temporal axis, it warned darkly of the dangers of paying too much heed to the past which, he chides, must be 'severed from the present'. He quotes Nietzsche, "Man must have the strength to break up the past" and Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" in support of his nihilist agenda.

Somehow, I survived this era and the intellectual fashions that followed like structuralism (Levi Strauss) post structuralism (Derrida et al) semiotics and environmental psychology (known quaintly in the early eighties as man-enviroment studies) and arrived in the twenty first century with my fascination for Place intact. This blog is an emerging real-time experiment that attempts to demonstrate that, lacking a flesh and blood community through which one inherits local lore and tradition, narratives can be serially constructed (both absorbed experientially and blogged!) that can transform a place, almost independent of ones temporal allegiance to it, into Home - where flows inspiration, spiritual rapture, sensual delight, aesthetic pleasure, environmental comfort and a connection to one's place in the river of time.

Like I said, I feel shadows of lost tribes flickering over the chaparral; I also hear the squelch (glug-glug-glug) of the asthmatic oil well down the street, smell laurel sumac on my work-shirt and, on watching a road-runner walk along the swimming pool edge, feel a frisson of connectivity to the universe: moments that affirm that I am At Home. This experience is usually dependent on a particular geographic location; but it is more than can be directly attributed to the prosaic realities exhibited at specific GPS coordinates. There needs to be an alchemical transmutation of the base natural and cultural properties that surround us, into objects of power in our lives, allowing for an apprehension of meaning that can reach beyond the apparent or the superficial.

This is ground well trod by the ancient philosophers, shamans, the 15th century magus Marsilio Ficino, the great aggregator Sir James Frazer (The Golden Bough, 1922) and Carl Jung. Plato pointed out that the temporal is but "a moving image of the eternal", while the limitations of the empirical observation of one's surroundings can be expanded, as the Transcendentalists (Albion, Beep-Beep) and others have averred, into a symbolic conception of the universe. There is, of course, a career to be made in studying this stuff and an Ojai friend has recently embarked on such a journey: signing up for a PhD at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, in Eco-Psychology where, and here I quote their literature, "the imaginal, as it appears through image, dream, symbol, story, myth, and ritual....creates "pathways for human/nature/animal relations" (Wild Thing). This is some serious woo-woo that relates directly to shamanistic practices of the local, lost, civilization.

As it happens, she and her husband, like Lorrie and I, are newly putting down roots (as they say) in Ojai. They in the East End, we in Upper Ojai. Together we have found shelter in places of dark shadows: our new lives are carried out under the penumbra of an ancient civilization; our understanding of these valleys darkened by the adumbrations of colonial conquest.

While I have tended to browse the academic literature on Ventureño Indian lore, and am currently reading Lynn Gamble's, The Chumash World at European Contact, (2008), perhaps no one book more effectively portrays both the 60-odd years of civilizational destruction between 1769 and the 1830's and the glories that were lost, than Terry Tallent's, Making the Reata (2012). This simple, but emotionally resonant tale of a mestizo boy being schooled in native ways by an old, full blood Indian, artfully incorporates virtually everything that is known about the Chumash, their aboriginal world and the structure of mission, presidio and rancho that fenced in that world in the early 1800's. It thus functions as a highly accessible primer on local Indian and historic Spanish and Mexican culture and avoids the tiresome academic trap of forever hedging the data.

For those of you who wonder whether the sussuration of oak leaves stirred by baleful breezes is whispering of some doleful past, or that the inky shade in the chaparral under-story speaks mournfully of  brighter times when redmen and grizzlies enlived these schlerophytic groves, then Terry's book (available at Kava on the arcade or at the museum) can help elucidate the shadowy nether land that is pre-historic Ojai - now and forever imprinted on the natural world - for those who have eyes to see.

Word of Mouth

Black Bears, Grapefruit and Star Thistle - all alien life forms on planet Upper Ojai. My provenance is also deeply questionable. But we are mostly tolerant of new life here and, if we have any understanding of history, we accept that everywhere on Earth the new inevitably replaces the old in the supernal flood tides of the cosmos.

It is only fitting however, that we occasionally stop to mourn those who have been recently swept away. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Alexander Cockburn, Gore Vidal and Tony Judt have all shuffled off in recent months and together they represent a phalanx of brilliant, historically aware writers for whom there are no immediately apparent replacements. On a selfish note, I regret that my bookshelves just got burdened with another row of dead white male authors.

The evanescence of life becomes ever more apparent as one ages and there is a kind of rearward-looking genetic immortality that some seek in their genealogy. For a historian manque or, on my better days, an independent scholar, I've never been much for looking backwards at my own family records. My standard retort is that I come from a long line of ne'er-do-wells, but the reality is that I have no knowledge of anyone beyond my grandparents. While it is not unusual for someone to be able to trace their lineage for a half millenium or more, Ernestine Ygnacio de Soto, a Santa Barbara resident, makes the stunning claim that she can trace her family back thirteen thousand years.

She makes this bid for a connection to the first peopling of California in Paul Goldsmith's film, Six Generations. As it happens, I know Paul (Shamanize or Die), and I have tried to watch his film a number of times, but the inherent goodwill I have towards it is destroyed in the first few frames when the following note appears over images of an idyllic Santa Barbara seascape:

"Chumash Indians have been living along the coast of Southern California for many thousands of years, as far back as the archeological record can determine."

Now as it happens, I have some familiarity with said archeological record and it is unambiguous in establishing that Chumash culture reaches back, at most, three thousand years. To wit:

The Chumashan languages are sui generis, linguists treat them as a 'classificatory isolate'. Yet their lack of wide diversity - just three main groupings, Northern, Central (which includes the local dialects of Purisimeño, Barbareño and Ventureño) and Island (the languages spoken on Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa and San Miguel) - suggests a time depth of not much more than two millennia. In other words, the languages exhibit the same sort of internal diversity exhibited by the Germanic and Romance languages of Europe and, in fact, they likely developed over the same two thousand years or so, up until the dawn of the nineteenth century (Victor Golla in California Prehistory, 2007). So that while there has been significant demographic and cultural stability, over twelve or thirteen thousand years, in the lands now considered 'Chumash', the language arrived only recently.

The Yukians, who occupied coastal lands north of San Francisco, may have represented a relict population of the earliest people of California - their fiercely independent, war-like character has led to them be labeled the Basques of northern California - and it is their early language that may have served as the base linguistic strata for much of California, including the central coast and inland ranges. At this time there is no compelling theory as to how the comparatively recent languages of the Chumashan phylum developed.

While various Hegira theories remain at the fringe - relics of the notion that the Americas were solely peopled via the Beringian land bridge and the Laurentide and Cordilleran inter-galacial corridor - it is now considered more likely that coastal California was populated via the Kelp Road along the ice free Pacific coast (Jon Erlandson). Within an overriding cultural stasis, civilizational diversity was engendered, over time, by climate change (as it impacted the biophysical environment) leading to significant dietary adaptations both along the coast and inland valleys. Technological innovations, again mostly driven by the exigencies of subsistence, also contributed to a clear delineation of peoples over the millennia - most notably in the establishment of the milling stone horizon (9,000 - 8,500 B.P.).

Thus the notion that any coherent cultural link can be established between a baptized Chumash woman of the early nineteenth century (Ernestine's first documented ancestor) and the first peopling of California is at best, naively romantic. Distinct societies evolved, at least partly prompted by climatic changes with each iteration possessing unique cultural traits and languages until about 1000 B.C. when there appears to have been a homogenization, of both culture and language, over the area we now consider to have been peopled by the Chumash.

None of this addresses the genetic linkage proposed in the film by Ernestine and Dr. John Johnson, Curator of Anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Johnson studies the genetic relationships among California Indian tribes belonging to different linguistic families. Pre-contact, over 60 ( some say a hundred) different languages were spoken within a vast patchwork of different cultural groups (reflecting, perhaps, significant migration events in pre-history). Using mitrochondrial DNA molecules (passed along the female line) from extant mixed blood 'Chumash' he hopes to establish the genetic prehistory of the Indians who lived along the central and south coast and determine if they were genetically distinct from other neighboring tribes. Ernestine is Exhibit 'A' - or rather Haplogroup 'B', one of several such mtDNA markers that originated amongst the ancient people of Asia.

Ernestine possesses one of the genetic markers characteristic of Native Americans - whose four mtDNA groups can all, in turn, be traced to Asia. A rare Haplogroup 'D' is more specifically associated with the early peopling of the Pacific Coast dotted along the entire seaboard of North and South America (providing more support for Erlandson's Kelp Road thesis). Does this make Ernestine 13,000 years old as she coyly suggests in Six Generations? Does her self-identification as 'Chumash' have any meaning at a time almost 200 hundred years distant from any semblance of a coherent Chumash culture? Neither of these questions is addressed in the film and the fact that they may even occur to the viewer is a symptom of Paul and Ernestine overselling their story - for the simple fact of her connection through six documented generations to her great great great grandmother, a full-blood Barbareño Chumash ironically born in the first contact year of 1769 and baptized Maria Paula (numbered 3302) at Santa Barbara Mission on the third of April, 1807 provides, one would think, sufficient narrative structure.

As remarkable as her well documented lineage back to the moment of first contact is, it is enormously enriched by her family's close connection with John Peabody Harrington (1888-1961), the man who almost single handedly preserved the ethnographic and linguistic history of her erstwhile people. She is the daughter of Mary Yee (1897-1965) who was Harrigton's last 'informant', and the last native speaker of Barbareño and indeed of any Chumash language. Mary followed both her grandmother, Luisa Ygnacio and her mother Lucretia Garcia as the great linguist's 'informants'. Ernestine grew up around Harrington who was an almost daily visitor to the family's house, and it was her mother who nursed him as he lay dying of Parkinson's disease. Mary Yee kept her own extraordinary illustrated notes as her work with Harrington progressed over the final eight years of his life. Her heritage and her daughter's is truly remarkable: too bad, that in Six Generations, it is mired in overblown claims of unproven genetic kinship with California's first people.

This just in: Black Bear Attacks Woman in Ojai. This blog more often attempts the timeless than the timely; but sometimes the present intrudes. Perhaps because she had seen that I was working on a piece provisionally titled 'Black Bears, Grapefruit and Star Thistle' (remember them?) Lorrie texted me

"Go to Yahoo News: Story of Black Bear attack on Gridley Trail. Yikes!"

Or, perhaps because the attack occurred at seven a.m., prime running time and, in fact, on part of an old trail route of mine, she was anxious to provide documented proof of the foolhardiness of my private passion. I appreciate that she cares deeply but I take the moral of the story as do not turn your back on a mother bear with her cub (even when accompanied by three dogs, as was the woman), unless you are running like hell. Mama bear took a couple of swipes at the human and inflicted superficial lacerations. She refused medical help. Meanwhile, Game Wardens with the California Department of Fish and Game are vowing vengeance and plan to hunt down and euthanize the poor animal. Since 1980, there have been about 15 confirmed bear attacks in California - none fatal. I'll take my chances.

Neighbor Margot neglected to call the police department when a black bear strolled through her garden recently, understanding, perhaps, that part of the Urban Wildland thing is forbearance (so to speak) of the slight risks of animal attack within the greater joy of equitably sharing this ecotone with wildland creatures. We've been down the 'euthanasia' road before. Grizzlies, as we all know were hunted to extinction in California, the last being shot in 1922. Living on Koenigstein, where once was a hotel dedicated to the hospitality of grizzly bear hunters, and which dead ends at a trail that wanders up Bear Canyon where flows Bear Creek (which, as it descends towards its confluence with Sisar Creek along the 150, describes our westerly property line and a little further south, Margot's eastern boundary), we are a part of that sad history. We are sensitive about bears. L.A.'s last grizzly was killed in 1897 while the last grizzly in Southern California was tracked and killed in Trabuco Canyon less than 20 miles northeast of San Juan Capistrano early in 1908. We can assume their gig was up on Koenigstein well before that, perhaps by the turn of the century.

After the California grizzly became extinct, black bears started to appear in Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties (Grinnel et al 1937). The Department of Fish and Game then supplemented this natural range expansion by moving black bears into southern California during the early 1930's (Burgduff 1935). The current bear population is a mix of these populations. They are, then, more interlopers than aliens. No such modifers need be applied to grapefruit. The mediterranean fruit does well here in Upper Ojai and there is a particularly luscious variety on Margot's property. She surprised me by mentioning, as Alex and I were eyeing the fruit, that they take 18 months to reach maturity. Well almost - turns out that the fruit reaches maturity in nine but can stay on the tree for another seven months to reach maximum sweetness. That's a long time to wait for your locavore breakfast treat borne of an exotic citrus tree (but bears are patient creatures).

Josh (Love Comes to Koenigstein) stopped for a chat the other day as he was riding his mule down the road while I surveyed a field to the south where Alex and I had cleared star thistles. Josh is always on the look-out for pasture for his mule herd, but despite being very catholic in their food preferences, mules stop short of eating this particular invasive species.

We are operating at the margins: saving a bit of sage scrub from thistles here, not alerting the constabulary upon sight of mountain lion or bear, there: but our work pales in contrast to the likes of Harrington and Mary Yee, both devoted to the notion of salvaging an oral language - the highest order of cultural artifact - of an extinct people.

Through a Glass, Darkly

Chumash settlements along Sisar Creek, which flows down the present site of Highway 150 towards its confluence with Santa Paula Creek (on their combined way to a co-mingling with the Santa Clara River), represent the historic, eastern Venturan reaches of these coastal bands, loosely agglomerated by shared customs and allied languages. To their east were the Tataviam, a Shoshone speaking people known to the Chumash as Alliklik (the stammerers) for their entirely alien tongue.

Sitting here in the foothills of the Topatopa Mountains, broiling in the late summer sun, looking across to the oak meadowlands of the north facing damp-lands of Sulphur Mountain, we share something with the Tataviam. They were called such by their neighbors the Kitanemuk and we too - as this name implies - are 'people of the south facing slope' (Campbell Grant). Their sunny lands looked onto the Santa Clara River basin and South Mountain.

The Tataviam village of Kamulus, just east of Piru (the modern town founded on another of their villages) and to the south of Highway 126, was established sometime after 450 when these desert people filtered into the Santa Clarita Valley. To the south lies the Santa Clara river and to the west, Piru Creek - both once rich in steelhead trout. The gently sloping land runs along the route of El Camino Real and was quickly appropriated (along with perhaps 200 of its people) by the Franciscans of Mission San Fernando Rey de España and used for growing European crops and grazing Spanish cattle; its future from the very beginning of the nineteenth century, firmly entwined with the colonial power.

A small part of that history was honored in 2001, when Rancho Camulos - the name under which the village became known by the Spanish - was dedicated as a National Historic Landmark. As part of its 'summary of significance', San Buenaventura Research Associates (Judy Triem and Mitch Stone) write,

"The Ygnacio del Valle adobe, winery, fountain, bells, and chapel are...eligible for listing as a National Historic Landmark under Criterion 1 for the exceptional significance they attained as one of three of the nation's most prominent and widely recognized Ramona landmarks, following the publication of Helen Hunt Jackson's book Ramona in 1884. This singular event, combined with the arrival of the Southern Pacific railroad at Camulos in 1887, propelled the rancho into a nationwide acclaim that proved key to the romanticizing of the mission and rancho era of California history"

Left out, in this self-serving ecomium, was the period of roughly 1800 to 1880 when the history of this part of California was roiled by the changing face of its colonial overlord but each remaining constant in their exploitation of the native people. By 1810, almost all of the Kamulus Indians had been missionized and they then experienced the loss of culture, identity, freedom and lives induced by the Franciscan work house environment. Then, under Mexican rule, after the secularization of the Missions in 1834, survivors became Rancho peons when Antonio del Valle, an administrator at Mission San Fernando, received a land grant of almost 50,000 acres of the Indian's former rangelands.

By the early 1880's, when Helen Hunt Jackson undertook her Californian tour of the disposessed native populations, there were fewer than 4,000 Indians. Spurred to document the appalling conditions of these last remaining few, her novel Ramona aimed to galvanize opinion in their support. Upon publication, her book achieved almost instant success but it entirely failed to arouse public concern for the treatment of local Native Americans at a time when both individual anglo-American Californians and the State conspired to complete their extermination. Instead, readers took to heart its sentimentalized view of the Spanish aristocracy and their Mission-style domestic architecture and the Ramona mythology was born.

Ojai is heir to this romanticization of an architecture that in its initial incarnation was the institutional style of the Mission death camps. George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian, January 11, 2010, expands the notion of the Californian holocaust by likening Junipero Serra to Adolf Eichmann, the German bureaucrat largely responsible for organizing the Nazi exterminations,

"In California during the 18th Century the Spanish systematised the extermination (of native populations). A Franciscan missionary called Junipero Serra set up a series of “missions”: in reality concentration camps using slave labour. The native people were herded in under force of arms and made to work in the fields on one fifth of the calories fed to African-American slaves in the 19th century. They died from overwork, starvation and disease at astonishing rates, and were continually replaced, wiping out the indigenous populations. Junipero Serra, the Eichmann of California, was beatified by the Vatican in 1988. He now requires one more miracle to be pronounced a saint...."

Locally, Wayne Mellinger, writing in Santa Barbara's Noozhawk 12-14-2011, Remembering the Past — Empire, Subjugation and Collective Amnesia, encourages us to make the link between that City's mandated architectural style and the bloody history of its inspiration: the old Mission and the Presidio,

" (in) downtown Santa Barbara with make-believe Spanish imperial palaces more reminiscent of Granada, Spain, in the Moorish era than the actual town of 17th-century California, we have sanitized history with a pastoral frontier myth in which all horrors and brutalities have been removed".

Mellinger makes the point that an architecture of oppression (or, as he puts it, subjugation) has been adopted as a part of the City's branding. This Spanish Colonial conceit, like the Romance of the Ranchos, can only be sustained with an amnesiac or ill-educated population.

In the last half of the nineteeenth century, the Gold Rush hordes, who turned to random frontier scavenging after the easy pickings of 'placer' gold were exhausted, were enthusiastic participants in the final stage of the Californian Native American genocide. Their mopping up operations were conducted without the benefit of a specific mythology: this stain on the national character was covered by the imperial mantra of 'Winning the West' and more generally absorbed into the 'Cowboys and Indians' saga.

So it is that Mission Revival architecture remains the most awful physical signifier of the local holocaust for those not blinded by over a century of specious mythologizing - the fountains, bells and chapels of the mission style all redolent with the stench of death.

In 1917, a year after the passing of the last Tataviam native speaker, his tribe forever sequestered in the grey pages of the archeological record, work was completed on Ojai's mission-style arcade, post office tower and pergola designed by Mead and Requa and financed by the Chicago glassware magnate Edward Libbey. Libbey sought to retire in a romantic 'Spanish' town and re-made the erstwhile ramshackle, clapboard main street facades in the popular Ramona revival style, foreshadowing similar stylistic guidelines in Santa Barbara, Palos Verdes, San Clemente and Rancho Sante Fe.

Now, as the murk of history clears, we see the town of Ojai unmistakably draped in the architecture of the Californian Holocaust.

No Soft Landing

As Clive Ponting calmly states in his up-date of my old standby, A Green History of the World, 1991, now published as A New Green History of the World, 2007, "the world is clearly approaching a crossroads". He sees the potential collision between continuing high energy consumption and the realities of declining oil and gas production being headed off, at the last moment, by Global Warming - a rampaging environmental reality over which we have demonstrated a complete absence of control and which threatens to take the planet into uncharted territory. Ponting writes, in his measured tones, "before the world has to cope with a shortage of fossil fuels it is likely to have to face the far more severe environmental problems caused by their consumption over the last two hundred years".

The recent advances in increased energy efficiencies have done nothing to stem the overall pace of consumption: we continue to dump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at ever increasing rates. The first decade of this century has seen the CO2 concentration increase an average of 2 p.p.m. per year as against 1.6 p.p.m. for the last decade of the twentieth century. By 2016 we may well exceed 400 p.p.m., a 55% increase over pre-industrial levels.

Ponting dismisses the possibility of a near-term technological fix for these rising levels and is similarly disdainful of the ability of liberal democratic nations to make major reductions in energy consumption. In any case, it is the developing world that is contributing most to the CO2 build-up; China alone is expected to contribute over 40% of future emissions. He believes the prospects for the world's climate look bleak. Rising average temperatures across the planet continue to exacerbate the inherited environmental problems of deforestation, soil erosion, salinization, drought, loss of wildlife and urbanization while rising sea levels have the potential to destroy coastal infrastructure and thus severely impact world trade, including the shipment of oil.

Into this doomsday scenario now steps Morris Berman (The Waning of the Modern Ages, Counterpunch, September 12, 2012) who reviews the deep historical currents that have swept us into the gyre (to switch metaphors). He references the work of two historians, Immanuel Wallerstein and Christopher Chase-Dunn, who adhere to the World Systems Analysis school (an off-shoot of the Annales school of French Historians led by Fernand Braudel). Their analysis is simple: we are experiencing the end of capitalism, the tail end of an ideological arc that, they suggest, spans from about 1500 to 2100. This arc is characterized by three phases: mercantilism, or commercial capital during the 16th and 17th century, industrial capital in the 18th and 19th., and now the waning days of financial capital where money creates money (e.g. through interest, arbitrage, hedging and derivatives). They point out that the last time the West experienced a change of this magnitude occurred during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as the medieval world slowly began to give way to the modern era.

The end of feudalism was precipitated by an environmental catastrophe, The Black Death, which destroyed up to a third of Europe's population and thus greatly increased the value of labor. This last fact, together with the growth of trade, the establishment of towns and increasingly centralized Royal governments spelled the end of local, feudal arrangements of land, the military and agricultural labor. Now the Modern Age, underpinned by Capitalism, is threatened by Global Warming - the only viable response to which is a dismantling of the ethos of capitalism, of perpetual growth, of an increasing standard of living - and a return to something equivalent to the energy-use levels of pre-industrial society, via, perhaps, what Naomi Klein calls Eco-Socialism (Capitalism vs. the Climate, The Nation, November, 2011).

Now you know why the Right is so adamant in its denial of climate science: it has connected the dots. As Berman puts it, "the Right is not fooled: it sees Green as a Trojan horse for Red". Ponting, Berman and Klein thus agree: protection of the commons is, in all likelihood, impossible without a thorough re-thinking of western societal values. Klein writes,

"The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits….These are profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of progress.”

Meanwhile, the leading edge of conventional, commentariat thinking on the crisis is occupied by the likes of Al Gore and Thomas Friedman who espouse market-based solutions such as developing alternative energy and buying green products and, most radically, developing a system of carbon trading: a sort of Corporate Green Capitalism. They are, of course, living in denial. Capitalism is part of the problem and can never be a part of the antidote demanded by the existential threat of a devolving environmental system. They can help us drive deeper into the problem, perhaps, by buying us a few years but offer no prescription for avoiding calamity. Their, and other neo-liberal solutions will, at best, merely slow the inevitable on-rush of climate instability and environmental degradation; but, as Ponting points out, a few years here or there is unlikely to see the development of a viable technological fix.

Even Klein has a tendency to adopt platitudinous panaceas when she writes,“The real solutions to the climate crisis, are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system—one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate power." Our global program of reining in corporate power starts when? As Berman trenchantly observes, there is no diet cheesecake to be had, "To put it bluntly, the scale of change required cannot happen without a massive implosion of the current system. This was true at the end of the Roman Empire, it was true at the end of the Middle Ages, and it is true today". Naomi's unlikely prescriptions for a new civilizational paradigm, listed under such headings as Ending the Cult of Shopping, and Taxing the Rich inadvertently confirm that there will be no soft landing.

Berman quotes Shadia Drury who writes in Alexandre Kojeve: The Roots of Postmodern Politics,

"Modernity’s inception and its decline are like those of any other set of political and cultural ideals. In its early inception, Modernity contained something good and beguiling. It was a revolution against the authority of the Church, its taboos, repressions, inquisitions, and witch burning. It was a new dawn of the human spirit—celebrating life, knowledge, individuality, freedom, and human rights. It bequeathed to man a sunny disposition on the world, and on himself….The new spirit fueled scientific discovery, inventiveness, trade, commerce, and an artistic explosion of great splendor. But as with every new spirit, modernity has gone foul….Modernity lost the freshness and innocence of its early promise because its goals became inflated, impossible, and even pernicious. Instead of being the symbol of freedom, independence, justice, and human rights, it has become the sign of conquest, colonialism, exploitation, and the destruction of the earth.”

Modernity has been subsumed by its underlying ideology of Capitalism, now Global Warming is likely Modernity's Black Death. Bring it on.

CAP'N CRUNCH

There is a pleasing crunch as you walk (or run) over a late summer meadow in Upper Ojai. It is the sun-fried Erodium giving way to your footfall. This long hot summer has given new meaning to 'dried to a crisp'. Despite the few drops of rain from the last gasp of tropical storm John not much is stirring in these chaparral clearings (rarely are these native meadows - more usually they are erstwhile or currently grazed areas, or land graded, at one time or another, for development). The grasses (native bunch, exotic oats and bromes) are a peroxide blonde, the bed of Erodium beneath - the low-lights - the color of dark marmalade.

Sometimes, in these dry grassy meadows, there is a drift of vinegar weed, with its amazing smell and delicate blue flowers; often sprinklings of turkey mullein and tarweed. Then there's an occasional stand of narrow leaved milkweed (Asclepias fasicularis). Most of the winter weeds are now turned to straw skeletons with only the star thistle sometimes still in bloom. There are other faint signs of exotic life: tumble weed appears out of nowhere and horehound is emerging at the margins.

California owes its official nickname (since 1968) of The Golden State to both the discovery of gold in 1848 at Sutter's Mill and the fields of golden poppies that suggested their adoption as the State flower. The fields of mustard that in many areas have now supplanted the poppies have also, conveniently, a golden cast when in bloom. But suffused in crystalline sunshine through this long, intense summer, vast areas of Southern California now have a platinum glint, where the dried stalks of annual weeds create a straw matrix drained of almost all color. The miracle of the deep and dusty greens of the mature chaparral hillsides that often flank these dry meadows is never more in evidence; this ancient adapted ecosystem seems even more remarkable set off against the arriviste, European grasses annually felled by our seasonal warm weather.

The conversion of native plant communities in California to exotic annual grasslands is one of the most dramatic examples of habitat alteration associated with exotic plant invasion (Heady 1988). The hills and valleys of coastal California were once dominated by native perennial bunch grasses and sage scrubland (the not-quite-chaparral to which our local disturbed soils, given half a chance, revert). In the endemic ecosystem, native plants (forbs) grew between the perennial grasses and shrubs. The introduction of European annual grasses and weeds together with intense grazing that began in the late eighteenth century has converted these habitats into the golden fields, interspersed with the occasional stands of live-oaks, that now dominate much of the summer landscape and which are regarded, in the popular imagination, as iconically Southern Californian.

It is the dominant exotic forb, Erodium, that gives the crunch to our dry meadows. Hidden in its rusty leaf litter (that effectively hampers the germination of natives), are its corkscrew seeds that wait for the Fall rains before swelling, twitching, and given the right lay of the land, spiralling down into the soil to take root: by mid-winter the meadows will be carpeted with this 'scissor grass'. The native species (and I, as inveterate weeder) are powerless before it: by the time the locals get around to germinating mid-winter, the Erodium has fully taken hold.

The heat of this summer has brought to an end the carpet of deerweed that in the past few years has spread across the graded 'bowl' behind the house. In Cool: Very Cool, written at the end of July 2011, I noted that the deerweed was aflame - turned a bright orange after a season of brilliant green with a frosting of yellow blossoms. It mostly made it through last winter, although we culled it in the spring, but now it's done: dead. Nothing too remarkable here, it's a short-lived native; but having now removed it from the slope, tiny bunch grasses, under-storey survivors from our initial hydro-seeding, now pepper the ground. By next summer we should be able to look north towards the Topatopas and see in the foreground something resembling a native meadow.

Isn't it romantic? Another step in the construction of what we must now rate as a reactionary, pre-historical landscape. I am not alone in such endeavors. The National Park Service carefully manicures Yosemite (if that is the word for felling 100 foot redwoods) to preserve historically significant views. In an attempt to freeze time at around the moment when Carleton Watkins photographed El Capitain in the early 1880's agents of the Yosemite Scenic Vista Management Plan keep busy removing conifers that obstruct views of the massive lithic face. It is gardening on a grand scale.

As I have suggested previously (My Arundo), gardening is nothing much more than deciding what lives and what dies; then there is the added frisson of deciding which species one will introduce to the territorial ark over which one holds sway. Here on our acreage in Upper Ojai I have been vigilant in meting out death to exotics and highly nurturing of the pre-lapsarian natives. The fall from indigenous grace that befell California occurred most precipitously after 1769, but there had been human interference before in the hands of torch wielding Chumash who understood the regenerative power of fire. While the two and a half centuries of European colonization (both human and vegetal) are as nothing in the context of 30,000 years of a reasonably stable local eco-system, we nevertheless exist at a time of profound change to the environment which is unlikely to be reversed any time soon.

What we are attempting - the creation of a picturesque, 'natural' landscape in which our net-zero-energy house sits - is whimsy, but is also profoundly pre-historicist: we are privileging the aesthetics of a seemingly simple botanical past over the difficult, complex present.

As I make my imperious footfall over prostrate Erodium, crunching gently through the dawn light, I am certain that our presence here in this exalted part of California (precisely: the chain of dry ridge-top meadows beyond Koenigstein that run south towards the Silver Thread oil leases and afford views of Santa Paula mountain to the east and Nordhoff Ridge to the west) is contingent. We will be expunged from this place through drought, plague, war or natural cataclysm in at most, a millennium or two. I am equally certain that Erodium cicutarium will remain and by then, should any sentient being exist to pass judgement, be considered an essential California native.

Woo-Woo

One recent morning, as I waited for the first light of day to begin my run, I was startled by a flash of lightning and then a distant rumble of thunder. The fire doors on either side of the house were rattling in the squall front that was blowing across the valley. Fields of bunch grasses around the house swayed in the pale light that had begun to flush away the dark, leaking into the space between the night sky and the silhouetted land. In the distance, drifts of rain appeared as smudges linking the low clouds and the hills beneath them. July in Ojai: Monsoon weather.

Much later that day - but it is till warm and humid. The operative word is muggy. The westering sun is filling that rosy space between cloud and land where the thickened atmosphere glows of an evening. The blonde grasses are turned piebald as the chaparral spine that runs between east and west meadows partially shadows the slope that rises up to the house and pool terrace.

The day's fevered drama is a product of the steamy mingling of Emilia and Fabio far out to sea in the Eastern Pacific a few hundred miles south of Cabo San Lucas: two hurricanes plying their historic routes, stirring up the usual summer torpidity bringing heat, humidity, electrical storms and the threat of flash floods to Southern California.

The sheltering hill to the east of the house, which throws a protective arm around the site, is my chaparral touchstone. I watch it from the breakfast table. Right now, frizzled by this recent heat, it features the implacable ceonothus, fading cream blossomed laurel sumac, yellowing foliage on the walnuts, grey spumes of seed shrouding the mountain mahoganies, the dark black-green of the stoic oaks in the folds of the slope (where the winter rains run), but most emphatically, the slope is marbled with the deep orange of fried chamise blossoms. We live in chamise-dominant chaparral. Our weather is predominantly Mediterranean - dry summers and wet winters. It is this combination that brings great stasis to our lives. Thus the occasional clap of thunder or a sprinkle of rain in early July is notable but the foundational plants of the chaparral are indomitable, thankful for fog drip or random rain drops in summer but capable of surviving great seasonal privation.

Out of this balance of a 30,000 year old eco-system enduring in a bi-polar weather pattern, only occasionally ruffled by tropical depressions, I have tried to suggest that the stentorian voice of the divine can sometimes be discerned, as though the chaparral, in the mostly still air, is ventriloquizing spirit breath. The notion that we live in an etheric landscape has the imprimatur of Ojai's usual suspects: Besant and Bailey. Both women staked a great deal on the gnostic powers of the Ojai countryside.

When she arrived in 1926, Besant (1847 - 1933) spurned the lower valley and, at some inconvenience, arranged to travel to Upper Ojai and the Happy Valley site via what was then a rudimentary and muddy track up the Denison grade. She was, of course, rewarded with some of the most majestic views in Ojai: the view from the Beatrice Woods Center for the Arts back patio, an area where Annie and her party must have stood (atop the highest knoll overlooking what were then mostly walnut orchards) is absolutely stunning - the Topatopas spread their flanks across the horizon, the rock face emblazoned with fissures, spall boulders and streaks of exfoliated sandstone that records its geological genealogy in a mad scribble.

Annie Besant went for broke, wagering the future of civilization on 400 acres in the upper valley. As of this writing, that appears to have been a losing bet. The high school that occupies part of the land has recently fired its director and is seeking new direction from an avowed Roman Catholic and basketball aficionado. On the rise to the east, The Ojai Foundation is a long-standing tenant. It was originally founded in 1975 by Liam Gallagher (not the Oasis front-man) to explore the interface between science and spirituality. The Foundation then veered off into the Shamballic world of Joan Halifax (now abbot at the Upaya Zen center in Sante Fe) before turning to the shallow ecology of councilman Jack Zimmerman. Briefly in the secular hands of moneyman Barrie Segall, it is now directed by Jim Mangis who is continuing the focus on the way of council. Neither School or Foundation seems remotely engaged in fostering the sixth root race - Annie's vision (see David Pratt's root-race chronology) squandered by the hapless Happy Valley Foundation trustees.

Similarly, Alice Bailey (1880 - 1949), working through Florence Garrigue, established Meditation Mount in 1971. In the arcane world of esoteric theosophy, communication transcends the time its practitioners actually inhabit the mortal coil. Alice received her marching orders telepathically from Djwharl Khul, known as The Tibetan, a disciple of the Ascended Master, Khut Hoomi. In turn, after shuffling off etc. Alice, it is to be presumed, had her disciple Florence do her bidding, all the while checking in, now perhaps face à face, with Khut.

 The Mount sits on a bluff at the end of Reeves road with views westward of the entire lower valley. Its mission is to inculcate universal spiritual principles upon which a new global civilization might be built. This immodest vision is supported by more than Ojai's slightly down at heel Meditation Mount, a collection of environmentally disastrous, vaguely Tibetan style buildings (designed by the architect, Zelma Wilson) ensconced in wildly inappropriate and over-irrigated gardens: this Ojai redoubt is but one link in a far flung chain of Alice Bailey spin-offs, from Culver City to New York, New Jersey, Ashville N.C. and Geneva, Switzerland - representing the deliquescent empire of a truly remarkable seer, undone by sadly underachieving disciples.

Thus the institutional attempt to leverage the spiritual conduit that the Ojai landscape represents has largely failed. I will not, for the sake of brevity, document the long attenuation of the Krishnamurti legacy, now fatally etiolated at the Oak Grove School and of palpably diminished relevance elsewhere, despite the best efforts of the Krishnamurti Foundation of America. It is, it seems, down to us lone, cranky, Thoreauvian and Emersonian observers of the wild to lift the curtain and experience the thrill of the supernal in nature. Attempts at co-opting and branding this particular, localized, transcendental enlightenment have failed. For this we should be truly thankful.

A few nights ago we drove into our driveway and were met by two or perhaps three owls calling to each other from atop telephone poles and oaks. They flew from one roost to another in response to our presence or because they were conducting some avian courtly ritual (were they preparing for a larger group convocation or parliament?). We watched the birds, sometimes silhouetted against the night sky, dip and call, as though their entire essence was distilled in their cooing: their bodies bobbing as their owl call was expelled in a brief spasm of transportation.

These not so little birds, their head plumage standing out like devilish horns (they were of the local Greater Horned tribe) may have continued in this behavior long after we continued up the drive; we attended to our ritual of going to bed as their nocturnal lives were beginning. We had been included (it seemed) in the owls discussions as they planned their night. Our lives were touched by these reputedly wise creatures. We became, for a few moments, entwined in the skein of life that brightens at the edges and where, beyond this barely revealed glow, can be glimpsed the woo-woo, the psycho-spiritual nether world.

School's Out

I am thirty months into writing Urban Wildland and, in 150 posts, have amassed close to 200,000 words. I have achieved my goal of demonstrating to myself that I could write a NYT op-ed column length piece, with a highly restricted focus, once or twice a week. In the event, as you may have already calculated, I have averaged five posts a month.

At this point, the most obvious pay-off to this effort has been a greater confidence in my ability to write engagingly. I have tried to write crisply, entertainingly and informatively. My readership has been miniscule, yet I have occasionally received encouragement and compliments on my work. On balance, however, I cannot reasonably claim to have an audience.

Along with my modest goal of exercising my writing muscle, which I have hitherto only flexed as a student, the writing of this blog has been a performative act. By writing it, I have made it so - I have constructed an Urban Wildland out of my musings related to the history, pre-history, geology, and botanical and zoological characteristics of the area. I have parsed Ojai. I have had fun.

So, while Blogging may be 'just saying'.......in this case, saying is doing, or, as Judith Butler puts it, a performative utterance harnesses “…that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.” If only I'd known two and a half years ago that I was set on a course to create the reality of Urban Wildland, from the base material of my words, one doggedly selected to follow another until, in some alchemical, linguistic act of genesis, UW staggered into being.

So there was something going on at the kitchen island, as I hunched over my 8 year-old Mac iBook G4 (which only occasionally exhibits Kernel Panic): an act of creation that had everything to do with the outdoors but was actually manifested indoors, on a grimy keyboard. Like some wayward graduate of Hogwarts, I have stumbled into the business of brand magick - Urban Wildland exists: now what?

First, a hiatus: an opportunity to consider what I have wrought. As always, I welcome your comments, see 'About the Author' at the top of page for contact information. At the appropriate moment, I will return.

Mountain Magic

Vincent Scully, the Yale Art and Architecture historian, in The Earth, the Temple and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture, Yale Press, New Haven, 1962, attempted to show that all important Greek sanctuaries grew up around ancient open altars which were sited where they were because the place itself suggested the presence of a divine being. They were surrounded by natural forms that somehow embodied a spiritual presence. The temple, when eventually built to commemorate and expand that presence embodied, in turn, a human conception of the deity. He argues that the elemental presence and the designed, architectural elaboration of that essence, play off of one another.

He goes on to suggest that certain natural shapes have a tendency to sequester the divine presence - that the places that the Greeks considered most holy were often set against a back-drop of mountains where there was a horn shaped cleft or a double peak. These, he seems to claim, are the marks of the divine.

Much later, having established his classical bona-fides, Scully was emboldened to tackle native American spirituality and the architectural responses of the Pueblo People to an all enveloping and scenically dramatic landscape (Too Late) where, " all living things are one....and all are living: snake, mountain, cloud, eagles and men". In Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance, 1975, he relates how Taos Mountain,"cleft, horned and terraced" inspired the location of the Taos Pueblo and that its architectural expression, "hand shaped, hand smoothed" is a human-made earth form that relates to the natural morphology.

We sit in the Upper Ojai Valley under the spell of the Topatopas while the lower valley is similarly in the thrall of their presence - blushed pink of an evening - as well as Chief Peak, Sulphur Mountain, Nordhoff Ridge and many, more minor, geological irruptions that enliven the foothills of the major, east-west trending ridges. As Scully might have predicted, this picturesque mountain backdrop has inspired, in many of those who visit Ojai, or who come to live here, intimations of the divine.

Temples of worship and learning have been built: Krotona, Meditation Mount and the twelve-sided Council House at the Ojai Foundation are all built expressions of those seeking a connection with a universal spirit in places where its presence is deemed palpable - well-intentioned but architecturally random attempts to reify the sublime - an achievement which the Greeks, over a period of some eight hundred years, single-mindedly perfected as the post and lintel, stone temple.

A few evenings ago, we sat on a friend's terrace on Vista Hermosa, above Cañada, with the fading light of a summer's eve casting deep shadows across Nordhoff Ridge, the Topatopa Mountains and, for a few moments, washing the spalled face of its ridge, in coral pink. This was a certifiable Pink Moment (RV III). To the side of the house, behind a small deck, was a large canvas backdrop draped over a hedge of jasmine. This backdrop, painted by Anni Siegel, depicted the view of the mountains that was presented to us as we sat on the pool terrace looking eastward. South was the painted backdrop, East was the live model.

To further enrich this layered experience of the real and the representational, excerpts from a theatrical piece, Ojai Spirits, written by Sue-Ellen Case, were presented on the deck with the actors referencing (but not chomping at) the faux scenery behind them. Scene One, and 'slices' of Scene Two, a reading of which was staged as part of the author's 70th birthday celebrations, are concerned, in part, with the relationship of spirit and landscape as manifested through that generation of Theosophists, chosen-ones and celebrity hangers-on that enlivened Ojai in the 1920's and who, as Case notes, continue to haunt this town.

Here then was the musical version (for the actors were unabashed in breaking into snatches of song) of much with which this blog has concerned itself: the alleged 'spirituality' of Ojai; the wacky esoterica of Blavatsky, Besant, Krishnamurti et al (Red Soil), their convoluted personal and professional lives and finally, the profound resonance of Ojai's natural setting. While I have burbled on in this blog, slowly building, over the weeks, some semblance of a reliable history that attempts to stitch these realities together, Sue-Ellen presented a transcendental confection that managed a level of skepticism, bawdiness and skewering of personal weakness that time-shifted the material into a compelling present.

For the issues she raises through her characters remain central to an understanding of Ojai's strange hold on our imaginations (at least, Sue-Ellen's and mine). Her cast, both substantiated and implied - Besant, Leadbetter, The Ascended Masters, The Huxleys, wealthy locals and (memorably) a garrulous oak tree, represent aspects of the enduring Ojai condition: the opportunity of living in a place of power, of living in a landscape which offers the promise of spiritual transcendence and in which the marks of the divine and the impacts of time (both on a human and geological scale) are clearly visible.

But it is a place, like Paestum (on the far fringes of the Greek empire, where a great Doric temple was built in 450 B.C.E. and dedicated to the fertility goddess Hera), that is profoundly provincial. Ojai, where temples can be conjured in the honeyed air, is removed from our cultural and economic centers as it was from those of the Spanish, the Chumash, and of the Oak Grove people before us. We are serial fringe-dwellers, dabbling in spiritual enlightenment but ever eager to welcome ambassadors from the loci of profane power and influence.

Paestum fell, within 50 years of the building of its temple, to local Latin tribes. Later, it collapsed again before the twin scourge of Muslims and mosquitoes. For a thousand years it moldered as a malarial swamp, the bleached carcass of its great temple inviolate in the marshes. Yet, as Scully writes, "the temple of Hera at Paestum is the most thoroughly overwhelming image of divinity in temple form that remains to us".

I would argue that it is the drapery of the chaparral that clothes the deific morphology of our high valleys (The Dance of Time) that represents Ojai's 'overwhelming image of divinity'. Those Theosophists were on to something: but they spent altogether too much time in the citrus and avocado orchards of the East End and sitting beneath other non-native vegetation like the Peruvian pepper tree (Manichean Plant Order).

Mr Chaparral Man

We have been invited to a summer solstice party - a bit early, since it is to be held five days before the astronomical event. When I first got the e-mail invitation, along with a request to wear white, I replied that it was winter in the chaparral (The Winters Tale) and, perhaps I could wear black?

OK - I'll play nice and wear a white shirt and khaki pants and scrounge up a fabulous selection of native flowers to stuff into my shirt pocket. The ladies will be sporting wreaths - I have the idea to pick yucca blossoms, yellow buckwheat and canyon sunflowers to help Lorrie make her's.

I intend be more chromatically indiscriminate in my pocket bouquet selection: elegant Clarkia, California everlasting, tarweed, deerweed, chamise blossoms, the last woolly blue curls of the season, sage, chaparral morning glory, popcorn flower, white eriogonum, poppy, mimulus and heart-leaved penstemon. A wander up Bear Canyon could produce more variety but I'm restricting myself to the easy-pickings. This profusion will already verge on the obnoxiously horticulturally prolix, but how often do I have an opportunity to be The Brand?

It all seems so simple to me, eradicate all non-natives and revel in the glory of the local plant community. In the event, as readers of this blog will have surmised, it takes a great deal of work to restore the broken crust, in areas of recent upheaval, to a pristine chaparral-ness. The perseverance required becomes, perforce, a radical act. The intolerance for the non-native an extreme act of biotic xenophobia.

But,

Hey ! Mr Chaparral Man, play a song for me

I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to

Hey ! Mr Chaparral Man, play a song for me

In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you...


Many have followed Piet Oudolf (whose U.S. work includes the planting scheme along The High Line). He has, in my very truncated understanding of the history of twentieth century landscape design, picked up the mantle from Gertrude Jekyll (April Showers) in designing wild gardens.  Jekyll was a great colorist and typically designed in broad washes of texture and hue. Mindful of the local native plant communities she nevertheless worked with the available, global horticultural palette - much of which had been developed, in the previous couple of centuries, by British plant collectors. Piet, like Gertrude before him, is an avid propagator, always keen to develop varieties of plants that can simulate wildness within the narrow confines of the typical suburban garden.

The intellectual groundswell that drives The Dutch Wave, that loose confederation of landscape designers (formed around the protean Oudolf) characterized by a desire for 'wild' and 'natural' gardens, is the understanding that the wild places of Europe and their unique plant communities are under siege. Roadside verges are increasingly managed chemically and, in any case, are under constant assault from gas and diesel fumes. Urban development has impinged on the waste-lands and commons of the post-war era. Industrialized farming has decimated the small-holdings, the inefficiencies of which made room for wild ditches, ponds, hedgerows, tree circles and copses. Remaining wild places have now become recreational resources and are managed to facilitate human interaction rather than the unruly fecundity of nature.

In Oudolf's Planting the Natural Garden, Timber Press, Portland, OR., 2003, Henk Gerritsen, his co-author, bemoans the rapid disappearance of wild flowers:

"I remember cycling around Utrecht at the beginning of the sixties and seeing ditches filled with marsh lousewort and fields overgrown with sun spurge and scarlet pimpernel. The water meadows of the river Lek were covered with ox-eye daisies, yellow rattle and rough hawk's beard; ten years later all had disappeared."

He sees the desire for more nature in the garden as a direct corollary of its diminution outside of it; the need for wild flowers in the garden reflective of their scarcity in the natural setting. He suggests that the old plant selections are over-cultivated, and unnatural in appearance.

Here in the New World, in California in particular, the comparatively short history of agricultural and industrial development has left broad swathes of wildland. Take a plane ride anywhere in the U.S. and the preponderance of wilderness, observed from 30,000 feet, remains daunting (Red Smudge). Thus, atavistic memories of the wild frontier are perhaps still too fresh for most Californians to embrace the wild in their back yard. The divide between civilization and the natural world still represents a wound to be cauterized, the infection of the natural world quarantined: the libidinous wilderness contained and emasculated.

Not so on 20 or 40 acre residential parcels in Upper Ojai, where the chaparral, or oak meadowland inevitably predominate. To fetishize the primacy of the pre-1769 landscape as I have, is merely an extreme position in a community where taming the chaparral except in the immediate vicinity of residential, agricultural or equine development is not really a viable option. Its 'improvement' is an expensive and time consuming task. Left 'un-improved' the natural soil is too poor and dry (most of the year) for anything but its indigenous plant cover and the panoply of invasive weeds that I battle on a regular basis.

Alex departed at the end of May for a summer of stripping roofs in Lansing Michigan, so I now stand alone on the front line of eradicating the thistles, mustards and other european-invasives. Now is their time. While the chaparral snoozes (and the energetic Alex is away) the ancient vernal impulses of the European weeds are in full flood as they rise to celebrate the Summer solstice. The armies of Russian star-thistle are mobilizing while their native enemies sleep: only the vigilance of the biotic xenophobe stands in the way of their ultimate triumph.

The summer solstice is the star-thistle's Tet offensive, a holiday excuse to pulverize the locals into submission. I therefore consider it as a highly inappropriate occasion for celebration. Nevertheless, I will attempt to separate myself from the vegetal doom that this axial zenith portends and try not to cast too long a shadow over this evening's festivities.

Too Late

La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís was ground zero for the Spanish colonization of what is now the United States. Never mind Florida, where St. Augustine was the first permanent Spanish (and thus European) settlement. It was Santa Fe, as it would become known, that spear-headed the northern frontier of New Spain. Despite over half a century of preliminary incursions and false starts in the American west (including Coronado's protracted walkabout) - during which time it became clear that New Mexico was a bad investment - the combination of church and state persevered. In 1610, Pedro de Peralta was appointed governor of the territory and it was he who founded Villa Nueva de Santa Fe to replace the erstwhile capital of San Gabriel which had been established, around 1600, in desolate country north of Abiquiu on the River Chama, a spot richer in opportunities for the fishing of trout than souls.

The Spanish had been beguiled by New Mexico ever since Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca arrived in Mexico City in 1537. He had survived a ship-wreck on the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico, en-route to the capital of New Spain after his exploration party of some 600 men was reduced to four intrepid souls in Florida. He subsequently spent ten years variously being imprisoned, starved and ultimately idolized as a faith healer amongst the indigenous people of the south west. (An enslaved moor amongst his party was murdered by jealous Indians for reputedly being too attractive to the local maidens). When he arrived in the capital he told of the great of riches of el norte, although he admitted this was hearsay from "reliable natives". Cabeza de Vaca (literally translated as 'head of a cow', but perhaps more idiomatically rendered as 'meathead') was indisputably the first European to see that wonder of the American plains, the Buffalo, but his other, non-bovine testimony, despite its dubious provenance, proved sufficiently incendiary to ignite Spain's burning desire to save souls and find cities of gold in New Mexico.

From the start, it was evident that nothing much would be achieved without the cooperation of the indigenous peoples. They provided the template for survival in the harsh environment. Thus in architecture and agriculture, the ways of the Pueblo Indians were faithfully adapted by the Spanish settlers; and after the successful Pueblo revolt of 1680 chastened the Franciscans into modifying their campaign to extirpate the native religion, a truly hybrid culture evolved allowing native spirituality, outwardly channeled though the rites and edifices of the catholic church, to retain many of its animistic impulses.

Certainly animism remains the schtick (influenced by post Ghost dance pan-native-American syncretism (Hoop Dreams)) that is publicly promoted amongst the more than one hundred tribes that still inhabit New Mexico, as indicated, at least, by the people of the Santa Clara Pueblo (in Tewa, Kha'po). In a place they now advertise as between 'sun and sky', intermittently occupied by their ancestors for about half a millennium, the current owners of the franchise run tours through the ruins of their ancestral home - cliff dwellings and a summer pueblo on the mesa above - on-the-hour, every hour. The apartments on the mesa were of adobe brick. It was the Spanish who introduced the notion of modularizing the indigenous building material to the locals and the use of brick therefore suggests a construction date no earlier than the mid sixteenth century and, more probably, sometime after 1600.

The native guides who chaperone the multitudes, emphasize the environmental acumen of their forbears that supposedly arose from a worshipful love of nature and all the things within it; but it is a sanitized commemoration of lives that were played out not only between sun and sky but also between cycles of drought and starvation, the cumulative effects of which swiftly drove them from the intense infrastructural investment that this place represented. Datura, one of the very few plants that cling to the edges of the cliff paths that link cave dwelling to cave dwelling, was excluded from the guide's accounting of the history of her people - she disavowed all knowledge of the plant and its likely role in their psychotropically enhanced spirit life.

While the Anasazi were descending from the mountains, transitioning from hunting and gathering to a settled life in pueblos on the high plains of New Mexico, Europe was emerging temporally from the Middle Ages and spatially from what were essentially the western reaches of the Asian continent to begin a despoliation of the Americas. For Spain, Santa Fe represented the northern frontier of this process until Alta California was breached in the 18th century. Everywhere the Spanish went, in search of wealth, territory to buffer the incursions of other European powers and spiritual conquest, the colonial societies they created were influenced by the local indigenous peoples and nowhere is this more evident than in New Mexico (in California, not-so-much).

The rich estofado of artifactual, architectural, agronomic and liturgical ingredients - spiced with green chiles or decorated with red - endured for three centuries, surviving the interregnum of the Pueblo Revolt, the machinations of the Inquisition (from which, in general, native Americans were exempt) smallpox outbreaks that decimated Pueblo populations and even Mexican Independence in 1821 which resulted in banishment of the fading Iberian empire: what ultimately destroyed this hard won cultural accommodation was the territory's annexation to the United States after the Mexican American War of 1846-48.

The Santa Fe trail, begun in 1821 as a trading route from Franklin Missouri to the newly independent Mexico served, in 1846, as the invasion route for U.S. cavalry making war on its southern neighbor. Once established as an American territory (New Mexico did not become a state until 1912) this trail, along which merchants and homesteaders had to trespass over the tribal territories of the Kiowa, Apache, Comanche, Arapaho, and Cheyenne, brought Yankee culture into the mix, and a variety of Victorian architectural styles to Santa Fe. The arrival of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railway in 1880, only intensified this assault.

That the City now exhibits a remarkably consistent Sante Fe style characterized by the pueblo-adobe tradition alongside of the Territorial style (which absorbed Greek revival influences into a modest mash-up of double hung windows with divided sashes, French doors and dentil cornices - with the indigenous adobe architecture), is a tribute to the efforts of early twentieth century artists, archaeologists and architects who fought to preserve Sante Fe from the full horrors of late Victorian eclecticism.

While the Spanish colonial cultural gestalt turned on a symbiotic relationship with the native Pueblo-peoples, the Santa fe style ultimately depends on an aesthetic fetishization of the indigenous architectural technology and a marginalization of the people who developed it. John Gaw Meem (1894-1983) was the architect instrumental in fully developing the idiom of the stage-set, and it is his vision that defines the Pueblo Revival architectural style which now defines, in turn, Santa Fe.

It is distressing that this erstwhile hard-scrabble City for whose existence the Spanish fought so hard, and on whose behalf it was deemed worthwhile to stage a mini-Reconquista in the late seventeenth century, has now been frozen in time as an up-scale resort destination quarantined against many of the viruses of modernity, sequestered from the mainstream of historical process and marooned in a lagoon dedicated to the Heritage Industry. Similarly ossified, the outlying Pueblos endlessly recycle, for the benefit of the tourist trade, the myth of their ecological consciousness as beating in harmony with the pulse of the Universe.

I guess I visited about a couple or three hundred years too late.