Across the Universe

For a moment in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s it seemed that Findhorn was the heart and soul of the New Age – the Aquarian Nazareth; but in 1967 the Beatles met the Maharishi Marash Yogi and, not for the first time, both East and West became entwined in the re-definition of personal and planetary spirituality. Ojai, already established as a center of occultism and Theosophy by the 1920’s, was inevitably impacted by the emergence of these twin focii of spiritual regeneration.

Shortly after I came to live here, I had the opportunity to listen to Dorothy MacLean and David Spangler (two of the four inspirational founders of Findhorn) when they gave talks at Meditation Mount. Their visits were arranged by the then director of the Mount, Roger Collis, who with his wife Katherine have long been involved with what is now the Findhorn Foundation. Roger and Katherine journeyed to Findhorn as young lovers and were married there.

Many in Ojai have the Findhorn experience as part of their resume but I have never gotten closer to the one-time caravan site (now a United Nations sanctioned eco-village) than Inverness when, over the Easter break in 1966, I drove up from Cheltenham to Scotland in an old Austin Somerset with two college friends.

Findhorn sits on its eponymous river which flows into the gaping maw that is the Firth of Moray. Inverness is located at the Firth’s throat, fed by the River Ness which travels east from the famously monstrous loch. We drove into town along the Great Glen on the A-82, tracing the massive geological fault which bisects the Highlands. The fault is evidenced by an almost straight line of prodigiously deep, unfathomable lochs which run west from the Inner Hebrides to Inverness, and here we spent the night at the local Youth Hostel before heading south on the A-9. We thus came within 20 miles of Findhorn - evidently just beyond the limits of its thralldom for we had no inkling of its existence. It was many years later before I became aware of the stories surrounding the place – of Dorothy speaking with vegetable spirits and of the giant plants and prodigious crops produced with the cooperation of these devas in the poor soil and sub-arctic climate of a windswept Moray scrubland.

The Community, begun in 1962 by Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean eventually become a magnet to the spiritually and ecologically inclined youth of the West who saw it as a modern Garden of Eden. We three returned to Cheltenham and continued our Environmental Design studies. A year later, the Beatles met the Maharishi and began their personal and musical transformation into a fey psychedelia, which in turn, helped re-establish an eastern front in the highly fluid space in which post-war generations defined their personal spirituality (Valley of the Blue Moon).

This English upper middle class tradition of tweedy spiritualism (veering on occasion, as with the much-married Peter Caddy, into a goatish occultism) established at Findhorn, and the ethereal asceticism of the Yogic tradition described the limits of the western alternative spirit realm for three decades; within these capacious temporal and intellectual boundaries, other consciousness expanding protocols existed, like Mahayana Buddhism (Lost Horizon), and the ingestion of hallucinogens, but Ojai - 50 years on from the beginnings of the Findhorn community - exists within that same psychic geography; in a spirit-land where still flows a Theosophical stream.

Recent research in Germany suggests that birds navigate during migration using both a genetically inherited sense of direction and magnetic receptors (which support an internalized magnetic map) that enables them to use the Earth's magnetic field lines to establish their location. Paul Hawken, who spent a year at Findhorn in the early 70’s and subsequently wrote The Magic of Findhorn, Harper and Row, 1975, proposes that the earth is also gridded with etheric lines that link places of spiritual resonance or power points. John Mitchell, in View over Atlantis, 1972, may have been the first to overlay this notion on the archaeological explorations of Alfred Watkins (The Old Straight Track, 1925) which reveal a dense network of ley-lines linking ancient mounds, dolmens and shrines across the British Isles, and suggest that these grids are, in fact, one and the same – fields of etheric energy organized into strands of vital energy, or what many cultures (including the Chumash) call spirit paths. Pilgrims, or shamans - in worlds more attuned to these etheric signposts - might journey along these paths between places of particular resonance, where, Hawken suggests, humans may experience other forms of consciousness. Sensitives (seers or clairvoyants), retain the use of ancient receptors and, apparently, see the golden lines that make up these energy fields. (There is not, as yet, a Max Planck Institute to confirm the validity of these visions).

Other authors have taken up this theme, and I last touched on the subject in the series of pieces I did on the mystical landscapes of the Languedoc, RV III, Red Soil and Legend. Findhorn is located on a sandy spit that lies to the south of the roiling delta fed by the River Findhorn and the Burn of Mosset. Its beach undergoes a ceaseless metamorphosis as the North Sea churns the sand swept down the delta. It is a place of sand, sky and water and in the quicksilver northern light it can become, as residents of the community attest, a truly mystical landscape. There are many such places spread across the planet. Southern California has more than its share. Ojai is a place of power and light, while in the Mojave there are places of preternatural natural beauty which possess intense energy fields, such as Joshua Tree.

Death Valley features histrionic landscapes that almost inevitably conjure other worlds and Hari Kunzru sets his 2011 novel, Gods Without Men in just such a setting, a place of power he calls The Pinnacles (Trona Pinnacles). Kunzru layers tales that occur within this landscape over a span of 250 years: there is the Franciscan missionary wandering in the desert; a nineteenth century Mormon outcast who sees The Pinnacles as an eschatological text; a John Harrington-like archaeologist desperately collecting the last snatches of Indian language in the 1920’s and a WWII Air force mechanic who sends messages out into space from a laboratory beneath the sand - and becomes a UFO-cult leader to the lost, meth-addled children of the local, spiritless desert towns. In other words, Kunzru mirrors the real histories of California where, amidst the strange allure of mystical landscapes, good and evil are magnified through an etheric prism.

Peter Caddy (a former Squadron Leader in the Royal Air Force) covered the spectral water front. He had relationships with sensitives that fed him information from the Christic, fairie, elvic, deva and alien worlds. The founders of Findhorn were avowed watchers of the northern skies. Caddy was convinced that aliens were about to arrive on earth and went as far as clearing landing areas for them. In true cult fashion, he assured his followers that the aliens would spirit them (and only them) away, ahead of a confidently predicted nuclear or environmental catastrophe. Caddy left Findhorn in 1979, re-married and died in a car crash in Germany in 1994.

In 1968, John Lennon wrote Across the Universe and it was included on the final Beatles album, Let it Be. He sings,

Images of broken light,
Which dance before me like a million eyes,
They call me on and on across the Universe…

and intones the mantra, Jai Guru Deva, Om

Roaming Charges

The landscape in Southern California has not existed independent of human intention for more than 15,000 years. Over the last two and a half centuries, evidence of that intention has increased exponentially as population levels have increased. Residential, commercial, sports, education, entertainment, industrial, military and agricultural development – and the transportation infrastructure that link these elements – now dominate much of the land. Prior to the Spanish, Mexican and Anglo-American colonization, Indians shaped the landscape to their ends primarily through the use of fire – rendering the land more amenable to their hunting practices and seed gathering (Another Day) - but the scale of this impact was limited by their relatively small population and Neolithic technology.

My interest is in the edge between land that has been obviously intentioned, so to speak, and the acreage that is still contested – wildland upon which a variety of interests, oil, logging, recreation, ranching and mining (for instance) have designs and which are variously privileged by its owners - usually the Federal or State Government. There are thus two tiers of intention, one that impacts the institutionally or privately owned environment and the other that impacts government land, or ‘wilderness’.

Here at the interface, there are sometimes strange adjacencies: instances of public and private land conjoined in awkward entanglement. Take Black Mountain, known to the Chumash as Kahus, or Bear Mountain, which presents an iconic cone shape to us here at the east end of the valley and appears to have a definitive summit. Anyone who has paid attention driving east along the 150 past Soule public golf course knows that the mountain is actually a ridge line that runs parallel to the road before terminating at the top of the grade – the switch back that climbs a thousand feet to the Upper Valley.

Access to the mountain is through Dennison Park, a County car park, picnic, barbeque and camping facility. The park backs up to Black Mountain Ranch, a vast property owned by Richard Gilleland who made a fortune with the Health care supply conglomerates Tyco and Amsco. His ranch, part of the original Fernando Tico Mexican land grant of 1837, was formerly owned by the Dennison family. It is now immaculately ranched and fiercely protected. In order to walk along the ridge-top fire road, which cuts through dense chaparral, it is necessary to hop a six foot oil-pipe fence elaborately bound with rusting barbed wire. The ridge offers stunning north views of the lower valley over the golf course, Lake Casitas is to the west, and to the east, distant vistas to Koenigstein Road are visible with the Santa Paula mountains looming beyond; to the south, the view is of the ranch, where oak meadowland is threaded with pastures grazed by occasional groups of lustrous cattle. The diminutive publicly owned park, at just over 39 acres, offers an enticing gateway to the mountain-top wilderness at the edge of the 6,000 acre ranch but this promise, for most fence-abiding citizens, is cut short by the aggressive barriers to its privately held neighbor.

In hopping fences to access ancient pathways (Kahus was a Chumash sacred mountain) I assume my common law Freedom to Roam - rights which, in many European countries have now been formally legislated. In America, less so. As an individual one is restricted to National, State, County and City parks and some Bureau of Land Management (BLM) territory. In this country, rights of property trump the individual’s freedom to roam, but oil companies, loggers and mining operations play by more liberal rules and often claim prescriptive rights over private land. The Mirada oil company, for instance, is currently suing the Rainwaters, owners of the old County Honor Farm at the top of Koenigstein, for an easement across their land to access wells that, in a recent CUP hearing, they claimed they were abandoning (see CFROG).

In the land of the free we have allowed ourselves to be penned in. Because of the vast system of National parks, a concept pioneered by the U.S.A. and initiated by Teddy Roosevelt, few are complaining – but my purview is strictly local; I am not interested in driving to the Sierras to trudge through wilderness when there is so much right on my doorstep. Indeed, the tangle of wilderness, transportation corridors, residential, industrial, and commercial development, agricultural and ranching acreages and everywhere oil drilling, amidst the rivers, valleys, plains, beaches and mountains of Ventura County is of far more appeal to me than pristine landscapes that, until the last century, have rarely known the footsteps of humankind. There is a reason that much of the Sierras, for instance, were spurned by Native Americans – they are lands where it is wiser to let the tree-sprits and glacier lake sprites well alone.

The etheric skein that lays over these parts is harder to comprehend but when spirits are discerned their mood is likely to have been tempered by long association with the human psyche and its intention. More often, earth’s primeval, animating energy has simply been extirpated by a gross trampling of the land. This was certainly my impression when walking along the crumbling asphalt road that snakes along Black Mountain ridge – recent tire tracks suggested frequent passage of heavy trucks - belonging to either the fire department or the Ranch – or both. Any notion of tracing ancient Chumash or Oak Grove horizon inhabitation was quickly dispelled. Nevertheless, were I to regularly tramp this path I imagine some sense of its past might ultimately make itself felt.

Meanwhile, I am poring over the National Geographic map to the Los Padres National Forest East and seeing blocks of land along the Santa Clara River administered by the Nature Conservancy and marked ‘No Public Access’, some of which extend more than two and a half miles along the river. What barriers, I wonder, have they erected to my freedom to roam? We (freedom-loving-roamers) are assailed on two fronts: by perniciously paranoid private interests and well-intentioned conservationists. Both bring their values (or intentions) to the landscape in ways that are exclusionary. Simon Schama in writing of the Charta de Foresta, the Magna Carta of the woods, established in 1217, suggests that “ it was not a simple matter of greenwood liberty defying sylvan despotism, each wanted to exploit the woods in their own way”.

I certainly have an agenda in the wildland: to mine it for its historic, pre-historic and botanic vibrations – for my personal pleasure, enlightenment and psychic titillation. As well, I have a generalized interest in preserving and observing a particular aesthetic gestalt (comprised of elements referred to above) that privileges decay, industrial process, random adjacencies, edge conditions and native flora and fauna and disadvantages the new, suburban lushness, exotic flora and commonplace juxtapositions. These preferences can be easily accommodated if I can roam where I want – but most often I am corralled within the mundane. The pristine wildernesses carefully curated within our National Parks are one such common place and therefore hold little appeal.

We exist in a fast-changing world where the divide between rich and poor is becoming more entrenched. The rich maintain their wealth by the expansion and elaboration of a financial-technology complex that operates almost independently of ecological concerns while the poor resort to extracting food and water from the land in ways that allow for little consideration of its sustainability. In the diminishing space between the two, scientists, academics, conservationists and artists are left to consider their powerlessness in attempts to preserve the planet. I am one of the powerless, my goal is but to observe and sometimes record: while I have the strength to hop fences I am determined to maintain my freedom to roam.

Sleepy Oaks

In Japanese Kabuki drama, there is a bridge over which the actors enter stage that represents the link between the real and the spirit world. Sometimes, in the urban wildland it’s like that. My walks in the chaparral are effectively forays into the spirit realm from which I return, across the driveway, as it were, to rejoin the connected, 21st. century urban-dominated world that passes, most often, for reality.

There are other passages between the two worlds – like sleeping and waking. Last night I dreamt of a rattle snake. In my dream the snake was lying on my bare back happily absorbing my 98.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Later, in the same dream, I watched the snake in a vertical terrarium: throughout the experience, my heart (and body) was suffused with warmth for the cold-blooded reptile.

At dawn I awoke to tiny puffy clouds drifting in a pink sky over the Topatopas. An errant down-draft had teased long wispy tendrils of water vapor away from each of the miniature clouds so the effect was as though milky jelly fish were floating in a rosy sea. I realized that they looked like box jellies – the world’s most venomous creature.

In northern Queensland, the box jelly (Chironex fleckeri), patrols the coast as a silent, translucent killer - covered with millions of cells which, on contact, release microscopic darts delivering an extremely powerful venom. A sting can result in death within three minutes. Our local rattlesnake (Crotalis viridis) delivers a venom that causes internal hemorrhage, kidney and heart toxicity, muscle-death, breakdown of the nervous system and partial paralysis in about twenty minutes. Death, in untreated cases, may follow within 5 days after the bite. Dreams and metaphoric clouds thus announce the perils of the wild as we blithely navigate through the shallows of the present.

More prosaically, a couple of weeks ago we discovered another merchant of death, a large black widow spider, in the garage. I wrapped it and its web up on the end of a broom, flicked it outside and then stepped on it. Later, Lorrie found several dead spiders from the same family in the garage; a friend speculated that having killed the mother, her children died from starvation. Too late, our hearts softened towards the inky arachnids. Black widow bites may cause severe muscle pain, abdominal cramps, and muscle spasms but are rarely fatal.

Venturing into the natural world (and corners of our garage count as such), we are reminded of death, but while Nature offers graphic explications of senescence and ultimate decay, it may also offer soul-shaping solace and simple friendship. Thoreau thought nothing of walking eight miles to greet an old friend – a remembered tree. I am familiar with most of the oaks here on our Koenigstein land but they are not yet my friends (for I am but an apprentice Green Man). The arborist Jonas Llewellyn MacPhail, who ministers to their old age and dismemberment may have a better claim on their friendship. Three trees have needed his attention recently. One old tree, severely fire damaged in the great Matilija fire of 1932 (Another Day), possessed until recently, a truly fabulous canopy under which sat a rock the size of a small car where, on a hot day, one could sprawl comfortably within the tree’s oaken microclimate.

Two weighty limbs collapsed on its north side and now, with these surgically excised by Jonas, the tree has been exposed as a skeletal, almost two dimensional scarecrow. Fixed in a kabuki-like gesture of extended, but slightly cocked arms, the tree emotes over the landscape in a menacing glower – an expression, perhaps, of the indignity of old age. It survives despite a trunk hollowed out by fire some eighty years ago, seasons of drought and flood and a precarious footing on a rock strewn hillside; its canopy decimated, its green skirt drawn aside, views from the rock now open to a stunning panorama of the distant Nordhoff Ridge – as though it has found, in its final decline, a grotesquely coquettish way to appeal to its human visitors.

Death in drought is all around us.

Recent hot weather and a second year of minimal rain may have been responsible for the collapse of a massive trunk that broke away from a quartet of limbs that supported a fine old oak crown that hovered over a track on the northern boundary of our land. The limb came crashing down – I heard it from the house a quarter mile away – blocking our secondary exit. The sound, only half registered at the time, comprised an initial crack which accompanied the rending of woody tissue and then a secondary crash which signified the breaking of branches as the trunk fell to the ground. When I discovered the fallen trunk on a morning walk, the sound-track of its demise came back to me, recovered from that dead file of unexplained noises that had lodged somewhere in my sensory cortex.

The surviving three-trunked tree remains defiant, rising out of rocks on a precarious ledge perched twenty feet above the dried grasses, thistles and leaf litter below and may well flourish as new light enters into its canopy from the west. It maintains its erect posture, the three remaining trunks capably covering for the missing fourth, but the pretense of continued vigor belies the profound trauma the tree has suffered. The episode reminded me of the old Rolf Harris song, Jake the Peg (with the extra leg),

“I'm Jake the Peg, diddle-iddle-iddle-um
With my extra leg, diddle-iddle-iddle-um……

'Cos I was born with an extra leg, and since that day begun
I had to learn to stand on my own three feet
Believe me that's no fun……”

Three trunks instead of four, believe me that’s a bore….or something.

There is a single oak on the East Meadow, supported by a single trunk. Here, Jonas removed an old snagged limb that had broken away from the trunk many years ago but remained frozen in its fall, caught by another branch. Freed of this decaying limb, the thicket of dead wood at its center removed, its canopy thinned, the tree - leaning slightly to the west - appears rejuvenated. After some discussion it was decided to leave another thicket of dead wood, on a low branch to the south, intact - for it houses a colony of wood rats (Neotoma macrotis) who painstakingly construct apartment complexes of twigs and leaves. These structures usually occur as large unruly piles on the ground; this is a rare example of aerial Neotomic architecture and we deem it worthy, for the time being, of preservation.

Behind the oak on a gently rising slope there are five aged multi-trunked walnuts. The chaparral, even in drought, is no food desert: the rats, whose diet consists of nuts, berries and seeds - nibble acorns and the meat within the tiny native walnuts, which split open within a month or two of falling to the ground.

In my childhood I would sometimes pass a great oak-strewn estate on the road from Elstead to Farnham, in darkest Surrey, called Sleepy Oaks: I was entranced by this name. I realize now that this was my introduction to the notion that trees are sentient beings which, when not asleep are awake and by extension aware. Only later has it occurred to me that sentience implies an embodiment of the sacred – and trees should be valued as partners in the global project for peace, love and enlightenment.

And rattlesnakes, black widows, and box jelly fish? I thought kind thoughts about the rattlesnake in my dreams, am respectful of the awesome lethality of the box-jelly, and resolve not to swim in the waters of Northern Australia - and I spared the rats: my karmic invoice, in this telling, is burdened only with the black-widow spider and her (probable) off-spring.

Oak trees can also kill: John Kaufer, the owner of Matilija Hot Springs, was crushed to death by an oak that collapsed on top of him - two years after it had been severely fire damaged in the Wheeler Fire of 1985. With my karmic debt in mind I will be wary beneath these not-yet-friends as I duck beneath their canopies seeking the coolth of their vascular respiration.

Another Day

Notwithstanding my assurance in Mission Statement that I was going to get out more, sometimes the story comes to you; it doesn’t take much: just a little smoke and rain during one weekend in July.

Friday. Fire in the desert’s forest fringe has darkened the valley; the smoke haze reached Upper Ojai at about 6:30 am this morning and it was as though someone had pulled down a shade screen. The sun rose an orange orb in a sky smeared with soot; later, as its rays were no longer angling horizontally through the low blanket of smoke, the day brightened and regained some sense of normalcy.

But come evening, the sun set as a fiery red disc over the Nordhoff Ridge. Filtered through the brown haze that now lay on the western horizon, the reactive processes of our expanding, nucleo-synthetic star were lent a brilliant, Kodachrome 64 cast.

For five days, the so called Mountain Fire has raged across 25,000 acres of dry chaparral and forest in the rugged San Jacinto range about 150 miles southeast of Ojai. The mountains rise steeply out of the surrounding desert floor and provide habitat for a relict forest of mixed conifers.

Growing at the southwestern margins of their range, these trees date back 50 MYA to the warm humid climate of the Tertiary period. The uplifting of the Rocky Mountains and the Cascade ranges isolated them from the rest of the continent and they spread southward, ideally adapted to survive cold, heat and drought. Low intensity fires occurred frequently, perhaps as often as every ten or twenty years, but the rich mix of species limited their intensity. Now, more homogeneous forests and a forest service history of fire suppression have resulted in high intensity conflagrations like the Mountain Fire.

Although fire has become intrinsic to the planet, conditions for its existence did not exist before about 400 MYA – by then oxygen was sufficiently dense to support combustion and land plants sufficiently fibrous to supply fuel: the earliest charcoal finds date back to that era. The beginning of man-made fire has now been pushed back to over a million years ago. Paul Goldberg and Francesco Berna report finding animal bones and charcoal in the earliest occupation floor of Wonderwerk Cave, in South Africa, dating to 1.2 MYA. (National Academy of Sciences, 2013)

 Our development as a species is intricately entwined in the story of fire. As M. Kat Anderson points out in Tending the Wild, Southern California Indians set deliberate fires to manage the natural build-up of fuels and provide advantageous conditions for hunting and gathering. Their settlements were protected by fire-breaks – the lands upon which they hunted and harvested and regularly burnt. In Fire: A Short History, Stephen J. Pyne, explains our co-evolution thus:

 “What began as a chemical event evolved, in humanity’s restless hands, into a device for remaking whole landscapes. No human society has lacked fire, and none has failed to alter the fire-regimes of the lands it encountered. Equipped with fire, people colonized the earth. Carried by humans, so did fire.”

 In the historic period, California has been plagued with the regular occurrence of firestorms in both urban and wildland environments. Today, fire suppression and species homogenization have created ideal conditions for high intensity fires in the forests, but in many areas of chaparral high intensity fires have always been the norm because the rugged back country has never known any permanent human settlement thus neither Indian burning nor fire suppression have been factors. The frequency and intensity of these fires are exacerbated only by the usual suspects of extreme drought, heat and wind (the severity of which anthropogenic climate change may now be worsening). In addition, the development of housing in the wildland-urban interface has both expanded the scope of ignition sources and increased the human costs of wild fire.

Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo arrived in Southern California in fire-season in 1542, and promptly named what is now the Los Angeles basin, Bahia de los Fumos or ‘Bay of Smokes’. Given the density of Indian settlement at the time, It may have been nothing more than the bay’s notorious inversion layer preventing smoke from their cooking fires escaping into the upper atmosphere (as it now traps smog) that prompted his descriptive naming, but it is also likely that he saw one or more chaparral fires, either deliberately set or ignited by lightning.

George Vancouver, the English explorer, was more explicit. When he arrived off of Bahia Todos Los Santos – just south of present-day Ensenada - in 1793, he describes seeing “immense columns of smoke arise from the shore… these clouds of smoke, containing ashes and dust, soon enveloped the whole coast”. Less than a hundred years later, the California State database (CALFIRE) provides details of the Tujunga Canyon Fire in the western end of the San Gabriel Mountains in Los Angeles in 1878, which consumed 60,000 acres. In 1889, the Santiago Canyon fire in Orange County may have been the largest wildfire in California’s history. It burnt between 300,000 and 500,000 acres and spread across over 30 miles of the Santa Ana Mountains.

The twentieth century opens its account in April 1906 with the earthquake induced urban firestorm that burnt 2,600 acres of San Francisco and utterly destroyed 490 city blocks of what was then the west coast’s greatest city (Simon Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World). The combination of highly flammable wooden buildings, multiple ignition sources post-earthquake, a fresh westerly wind and the broken pipes which caused a complete absence of fire-fighting water, left the city helpless before the inferno.

Closer to home, the 1932 Matilija fire consumed 220,000 acres of chaparral and oak woodland north of the Ojai area and in Upper Ojai burnt across Koenigstein Road towards Sulphur Mountain. There are oaks on our property that almost certainly bear the scars. The local live-oaks have a life span of a hundred years or more and we are now bumping up against that limit – in the last couple of years we have had three fire-damaged old trees lose one or more of their multiple trunks. In the remote, steep areas of the site there remain dead oak hulks that presumably date back to the nineteenth century, surviving fire in life and maintaining a soulful, sculptural presence in their slow decay in death.

Major Ventura County fires in 1970 and the Wheeler Fire in 1985 may also have touched Upper Ojai. The December 1999 Ranch Fire began on Koenigstein Road and threatened Ojai’s East End, but prompt VCFD response limited it to less than 5,000 acres. Fire storms in 2003 and 2007, when multiple fires raged over the shrublands of Southern California, were each driven by hot, Santa Ana winds, but Ojai was spared. Santa Barbara, however, has experienced multiple major fires from 2007 through 2009 with the devastating Zaca, Gap, Tea and Jesusita fires.

In the early hours of Monday morning it began raining and at first light a blanket of white cloud lay in the valley. Above, there was a yellow cast to the lowering monsoonal clouds. Around six, when small patches of blue sky appeared in the east, a rainbow rose above Sulphur Mountain ridge, arced over the valley – still shrouded in mist – and grounded itself, to the northwest, somewhere beyond Nordhoff ridge.

Over the weekend, it had rained in the San Jacinto Wilderness.

Thunderstorms brought one and a half inches of rain to the Mountain Fire's active north and northwest edges and by early Sunday fire crews achieved the upper hand. A fire-regime incident had been contained by human and meteorological intervention: un-burnt forest remains on its San Jacinto perch to ignite another day.

Mission Statement

There are signs everywhere that I am well and truly infected with the zeitgeist - blogging in the main-stream of what is arguably a major tributary to our shared, contemporary world culture. I am concerned with the particularities of place, my place – its landscape, its wildlife and its relevance within its broader bio-region. It is these concerns and my self-characterization as an independent historian, natural historian and speculative environmentalist (who shares his thoughts in essay form) that position me squarely in an increasingly popular genre. I have been reading Robert Macfarlane, a well-known British nature writer and a leading practitioner of said literary niche: I feel affirmed and only a little chagrined that everything I have ever said he has said better.

I suppose it was my father who first introduced me to some of the rituals pertaining to this particular form of creative non-fiction (Knowledge Scrublands). He would quote George Borrow’s minor nineteenth century classic, Lavengro (which I dimly recall sitting within the glass-cased bookshelf) and talk of those, ‘wind on the heath, brother’ types. I knew whom he meant, they wore shorts and carried khaki canvas knapsacks and strode across the Surrey downs. He was secretly one of them, although he wore a tweed suit, swung a cherry walking stick and spurned a back-pack  - often with me, in grey-flannel shorts, in-tow. It is only now, with the help of Mr. Google that I can connect this derisive characterization with a book he loved in which a character declaims that even in sickness and blindness he would cling to life, for when,

"There's the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that, I would gladly live forever”.

Sitting in our back yard this evening, I had a similar thought: will I ever tire of this view? And then, as Lorrie and I enjoyed the deepening colors of the evening - highlighted by the puce clouds in a still bright sky – a tremulous breeze wafted down the canyon and I realized that perhaps this haptic caress was, indeed, all I needed to remain connected to the wildland that surrounds us (well, that and the nocturnal mewling of the bobcats and the hysterical eventide caterwauling of the coyotes).

My father, who I sometimes characterize as the last of the Edwardians (born three years after the end of that brief reign, 1901-1910) was, it now seems, ahead of his time. Robert Macfarlane calls Borrow ‘the most charismatic of modern walker-writers’ who ‘set images loose in the nineteenth century imagination’. He certainly stirred something in my father who in turn, contrived to focus my aesthetic fetishism on the natural world,

“There’s night and day brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?”

Sweet.

Although Macfarlane’s new book, The Old Ways, A Journey on Foot, explores paths in Tibet, Palestine and Spain his home territory is the British Isles - what he calls the archipelago - and thus however intimidated I may be by his being, by Pico Iyer’s account, ‘the most accomplished (and erudite) writer on place to have come along in years’, as long as he stays well clear of the chaparral I can continue in my endeavors with some sense of purpose.

Meanwhile, not a chapter of his goes by without turning my head into a veritable carillon of ringing bells. Take ‘Grave’ in The Wild Places, for instance, where he writes of Burren on the west coast of Ireland, ‘Walking its grey reaches, you find memorials to the dead everywhere: stone circles, dolmens, wedge-tombs, headstones, crosses, burial grounds consecrated and unconsecrated’. And later, ‘At certain times and in certain places….one could see through the present land, the land of the living, backwards into another time, to a ghost landscape, the land of the dead.’

Walking the land this morning I propped up a rusted skeleton of a truck door from the 40’s or 50’s on a rock beneath the canopy of a fire-scarred live-oak, a makeshift memorial to the time when this was still a working ranch. At my childhood home in Surrey, built on land that had been farmed for millennia, and before that, grubbed and hunted across by early man, the earth offered up its past in artifacts like the hubs of old cart wheels, rusted scythe blades, hand forged nails, once, a Roman coin, and much Neolithic detritus such as skin scrapers and hand axes.

Here, across the road, where Bear Creek widens just east of Margot’s house, Scott Titus, who grew up at the Koenigstein/150 junction (in the house where fellow blogger Kit Stolz (A Change in the Wind) and his wife Val now live), tells me that he and his friends would unearth stone tools and debitage (lithic flakes from their manufacture) along its banks. Where once was an Indian village now frolic fuzzy coyote pups who venture forth to gambol along road’s edge and occasionally poke their collective noses up our driveway. These physical manifestations of erstwhile spirit helpers and Datura givers are now multiplying in the wake of a decimating parvo epidemic and preparing to put a serious check on our burgeoning rabbit population.

While the only known grave site in Upper Ojai is adjacent to the Awha’y village, just west and south of here, where lie buried the bones and artifacts of the departed Chumash, every Indian village contained its own burial area with bodies interned alongside tomol planks to enable their voyage to Shimilaqsha, beyond the western shore; their sky-journey marked with feathered and painted spirit poles placed on prominent hilltops. From the eastern reaches of Upper Ojai, perhaps the first such marker was erected on Kahus (Bear Mountain, now called Black Mountain).

No stone circles, dolmens, wedge-tombs, headstones, and crosses, but still this land is memorious (a favorite Macfarlane word!) of its human past - occasionally, hereabouts, rock art; sometimes cave shelters where carbon traces, bones, seeds and fiber betray a long-ago life; or depressions in the land revealed after a fire, that mark a village site - and paths.

Now is the time to explore the Indian spirit, summit and trading trails that start from Point Mugu and head off into the Boney Mountain State Wilderness through blackened land burnt in The Springs Fire which began on May 2, this year. Officially designated number 344, it has 343 predecessors – major fires in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area (which more or less overlays the Chumash heartland) dating back to 1925. Despite the lack of Indian burnings over the last couple of centuries, our smoking, barbequing and often just plain malicious society has contrived to replicate the intensity, if not the finesse, of their pyro-activity, and in this case may have again revealed the Chumash way over the mountains towards their inland trading partners and their vision-quest sites in the Simi Valley.

Northwest over the mountains, down through Thousand Oaks, across the 101, onward towards Bell Canyon and then into Santa Susana State Historical Park where Rocketdyne’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory now awaits radio-nuclide clean up and ultimate inclusion in the park, (complete with one of the finest remaining Chumash painted caves): here is an urban wildland path waiting to be discovered.

This is not easy country. Vestigial signs of its past are not easily given up. The frenetic human imprint of the last one hundred and fifty years has all but obliterated the previous 10,000 years of human presence. Mature chaparral is almost impenetrable; the trails – where they exist - can be steep and rocky; the suburban sprawl and the Amazonian freeways that service their off-ramp populations obdurately resistant to anything but vehicular passage, yet I have a feeling that George Borrow might have found a way.

If I have learnt anything from Robert Macfarlane it is that arm-chair research only goes so far. The wildland demands a physical engagement and in that effort may be revealed a glimmer of understanding.  On Wordsworthian reflection, that little knowledge may then be expanded in the act of writing.

Delta

Seat Guru advises that, on the Canadair Regional Jet 200 operated by United out of Albuquerque, “Seat 14 A is in the last row of the plane and may not recline. Proximity to the bathroom may be bothersome”. On the other hand, situated aft of the wing, seat 14 A offers a ripping view of the desert landscape below on an afternoon flight to Los Angeles. There was cloud cover as we flew over the forestlands of the Zuni mountain foothills but as we approached the dead desert heart of Arizona, north of Phoenix, the skies cleared and I dreamily tracked our progress over the trackless land.

We had left fire-ringed Santa Fe (Too Late) and driven to Albuquerque – well north of the 44,000 acre Silver City blaze in the Gila Wilderness and took off, our departure delayed a mere three hours, in this little 50 seat aircraft to fly home to the western fringe of the continent where charred battle lines were being drawn northeast of Banning and north of the Morongo Indian Reservation in the Hathaway Fire. Between the mountain pine beetle ravaged forests of New Mexico and Arizona and the San Bernardino National Forest (where the Dendroctonus ponderosae thrives in elevations above 2,000 feet) there’s mostly sand, rock and cinder cones.

In his book The Wild Places, British writer Robert Macfarlane writes of Rannoch Moor in the Scottish Highlands:

 “There was too the motif of the delta: in the antlers of deer, in the branching forms of the pale green lichen that cloaked the trees and boulders, in the shape of Loch Laidon, in the crevasses and fissures in the peat, and in the forms of the few stag-headed old Scots pines.”

In the Sonoran and Mojave deserts there are deltas written in the sand. No need for metaphor - the rippled land is stamped with the once-upon-a-time ravages of flood water. Everywhere, as I looked down over the brown land from my imperious (non-reclinable) sky-chair, I saw etchings of the hydrologic cycle. The resolution of these watery scribblings became evident as we flew over the California border where the Parker dam holds back the Colorado and forms Lake Havasu.

This reservoir feeds the Colorado River aqueduct, operated by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern  California, which supplies water to almost all the cities in the greater Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego areas (Wickipedia). Beyond the dam, the Colorado flows south, much diminished, and is further vitiated by its irrigation of fields of lettuce, cauliflower, cotton, cantaloupe and tomatoes; it then suffers the twin indignities of the Imperial and Laguna dams. As it approaches Yuma it is but a “dull brown glint…in the rushes”, as William T. Vollman writes in his opus, Imperial, and it serves as nothing much more than the main drain of the Quechan Indian Reservation.

A little further south, in the Sonoran border town of San Luis Rio Colorado, Vollman looks askance at the offerings of a taco shop: “three bowls of salsa: blood-red with a hint of orange, carrot orange and deep green. Their liquid content derives from Colorado River water…..” The withered Colorado River then makes its way through a narrow strip of Mexico and eventually dribbles into the Gulf of California across a fetid delta that Aldo Leopold, the great naturalist (A Sand County Almanac) proclaimed, in the early 1920’s, as “a land of milk and honey” amidst “a hundred green lagoons”.

Airborne, approaching Los Angles over Riverside County and then the Inland Empire, the quietude of the wide brown lands give way to an urban mosaic sinuously threaded with freeways – a built gestalt halted only by the implacable Pacific. Travelling north on the PCH to the 101, the 126 and finally the 150 to Koenigstein Road affords ample time to consider our fragile hold on life at the irrigated edge of the westward creeping desiccation. Earthbound, car-bound, constrained by asphalt and lane markings, I cannot shake the somber sky-message of the desert – drought lands between burning forests.

At home, we are cosseted in that broad swathe of chaparral that runs through the northern half of Ventura County, east to west, totaling over 325,000 acres. West of desert and forest, undeveloped tracts of Upper Ojai wildland are cloaked in shrubland, oak meadowland or riparian woodland; coastal sage scrub and vestigial wetlands then run on to the ocean – all lands that are both drought and fire-adapted and where, not incidentally, Native Americans achieved their highest population densities on the continent.

Yes, its dry. Yes, its crispy (CAP’N CRUNCH). But there is a pleasure to be found in the plant community’s phlegmatic survival and, even now, its floristic delights: the coy Acourtia where, amidst mostly drab white blossoms or fuzzy gone-to seed clusters, there are fringes of Day-Glo pink; white sage is ghost-like in a sea of rusty black sage; Laurel sumac is in creamy bloom and sometimes in fruit –tight pyramids of tiny red berries, the caviar of the chaparral.

Elsewhere, the California everlasting continues to be just that while the buckwheat blossoms, white muddled with pink, have now begun to oxidize and begun their metamorphosis towards a dark tannic brown. In these first days of summer the poison oak leaves have already begun to turn – from withered green to pink and deep carmine. Aloft, amidst whatever armature its tendrils grasped in spring (but often poison oak or laurel sumac) the seed heads of clematis, the size of Ping-Pong balls, add a white, fuzzy syncopation to the dry, entwined brush. Mountain mahogany is covered with its wispy beard of seeds while the florets dropped from the pendulous bracts of chaparral yucca blossoms are decoratively impaled on its spikey base.

Today a dense mist hangs over the hills. There is moisture in the air and the chaparral will soak up the fog-drip. It’s the time of June Gloom, when the marine layer grants soft light and moderate temperatures. The full heat of summer will soon be upon us and the pleasures of the chaparral will become primarily olfactory rather than visual. The sizzle of summer awaits us, but this afternoon I expect the cool winds to kick up and send the bunch grasses into a graceful dance - I revel in this season. Thoughts of fire, desert and drought recede and, if I look at the brilliantly yellow tar weed panicles I can see in the tracery a delta – harbinger, perhaps of a coming season of heavy rains, this year or the next, when the chaparral’s impassive stoicism will be vindicated.

Stillness

As penance for flying to Europe and thus bloating what had hitherto been a fairly trim carbon footprint, I chose to read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden on the flight. I consumed it from cover to cover, including the introduction by Walter Harding and his 65 pages of notes. It was the Variorum edition, which claims to be the only one “based directly on the author’s own copy of the first edition” (Boston, 1854). This was a volume I had acquired a few weeks previously from the ‘Free Books’ cart at Santa Monica library. Its pages are deeply yellowed and crumbling at the edges; the once glossy cover is begrimed from fretting against other discarded volumes. The acidic wood pulp pages have that characteristic smell of old paperbacks - somewhere between urine and vinegar. Its purchase price at its publication in 1963 was sixty cents: one can thus hypothesize that it has declined in monetary value at precisely 1.2 cents a year for fifty years before flat-lining at zero in the spring of 2013. Thoreau’s wisdom contained therein, however, remains priceless.

Closeted in the pressurized fuselage of either a 777 (shortly to be replaced by the 787 Dreamliner) (east) or a brand new 747-8 (the last gasp of Boeing’s Jumbo) (west) I enjoyed every word but I felt chastened by Thoreau’s trenchant critique of the profligate life styles he observed in Concord – what would he make of the debt peonage I and my fellow passengers had undertaken for the privilege of crossing continents at an altitude of 30,000 feet?

His was an age newly introduced to high-speed travel and Thoreau considered himself to be living amongst the ‘sons of Tell’. “Men are advertised that at a certain hour and minute these bolts (steam trains) will be shot toward particular points of the compass…The air is full of invisible bolts.” In Upper Ojai we have a similar impression: our bolts being the airliners plying the skies above the Topatopas (Red Smudge).

Thoreau lived between two worlds: the vanishing agrarian economy of small-holdings which Jefferson understood to be the basis for an American democratic civilization and the emerging plutocracy powered by an industrial revolution that had come late to America but here would reach its apotheosis. Thoreau advocates, by his example, a third way: lives lived in isolation and self-sufficiency nourished by the delights of the wilderness – a lifestyle made possible, however, only by his living in the shadow of both flourishing agricultural and industrial economies, in the urban wildland.

During his era, it was the steam train that was the most visible (or, by its lonesome whistle, aural) evidence of the stitching together of industry and agriculture into what, even in the 1850’s was a nascent global economy. When a freight train rattles past Thoreau he notes the “Manila hemp and cocoa-nut husks…reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe”. His ‘Economy’ is dependent upon living in the hinterlands of this mid-century mash-up of land wealth and capital. Both his frugality and his adjacency to the mid nineteenth century Maine economy (he lived only a mile away from the town of Concord) assured him of a lifestyle where there was little need to work and plentiful opportunities to bask in reveries inspired by his wild environment.

Thoreau bought his nails, screws, lathe and lime in Concord and while he cut his own framing lumber from the local woods, the boards for the house siding and the recycled windows came from town – as either products or cast-offs of an industrialized rural economy. Any truly individual or family based, self-sufficient material culture must look to models (often deep in the past) that do not depend on industrial technologies such as those necessary for the manufacture of metal and glass – materials that became the pre-eminent trade goods during the European conquest of the stone-age peoples of the Americas.

Glass and iron are thus emblematic of the transition from pre-history to the pre-modern era: but although the Iron Age, from an archeological perspective, arose in the Middle East around four thousand years ago, it was not until the Romans that it became the sine qua non of Empire. The Conquistadors are lineal descendants of the Roman legionnaires not least because of their iron studded boots.

Some of those boots (Roman’s not Conquistador’s) strode across the flatlands of Norfolk in their customary linear fashion early in the first century. Opposition to these iron-clad marchers and everything they represented came from Celtic outlanders – Britons of the Iceni tribe, led by Queen Boudica (Victory). In terms of ousting the Romans she failed to live up to her name but her spirit was later co-opted by Queen Victoria as an avatar of the British Empire – which explains the grand nineteenth statue of the warrior queen on the north side of Westminster Bridge, remembered from my childhood.

The main artery across East Anglia was carved out by the Romans from the ancient path known as the Ickneild way. It now serves as one of Britain’s long-distance walking paths: few who walk it now pay much heed to those long ago Iceni enslaved by the Romans to build the road it follows. Lorrie and I stayed with my cousin Robert whose house is on a portion of this historic route known as Peddars Way. While in Norfolk, we also visited Hugh Lupton who has created a story and song cycle inspired by the layering of history along Peddars Way (A Norfolk Songline, Walking the Peddars Way, Hugh Lupton and Liz McGowan).

Earlier on our trip, we made a brief foray along Offa’s Dyke Path, another of Britain’s long distance walking routes, which was developed to follow a defensive ditch dug by order of the King of Mercia to protect his lands from the depredations of the Celts to the west (now Wales). After a couple of days of desultory searching (by car) we failed to find much evidence of this massive earthwork now reduced by time and circumstance.

Both routes are latter-day reconstructions that do not necessarily reflect the full historical realities of either the Welsh borderlands or of Norfolk’s ancient pathways. They are devices to satisfy the demand of growing numbers of walkers - offshoots of Britain’s Heritage Industry which attempts to add value to the natural world through the overlaying of sometimes spurious historical associations along particular routes.

There is a great deal to be said for Thoreau‘s approach which suggests that paying close attention to your immediate surroundings results in the creation of a sympathy between you as observer and the plants, animals and landforms observed. Out of this, Thoreau developed an almost Franciscan way with chipmunks, squirrels and the birds that surrounded his house. A walk in his woods, a circumnavigation of his pond or a stroll into Concord was all the travel he needed.

The coarsening of our sensory receptors has resulted in our seeking out more and more exotic travel experiences. One of the great gifts of living in the urban wildland for these past four years (twice as long as Thoreau spent at Walden) has been a greater appreciation of the subtleties of the everlasting yet ever-changing chaparral. Having fallen off the travel-abstinence wagon, I look forward to lengthy periods of stillness in emulation of Thoreau who was on a kind of long distance path that could be fully experienced within the confines of his hut, his pond and his woods. While planetary, global and personal time races on, our last refuge is spatial stasis - the ability to stay in one place and open ourselves to the unfolding of the infinite.

Ruination

The thing about architecture is that it is mostly immobile. There are a few moving parts (like doors and windows) but buildings are designed to just sit there and their change over time is usually discouraged through a program of maintenance. That’s not to say that when this attempt to halt entropy – the slow collapse of buildings into their constituent parts – fails over time, the results are not charming. But by the time the rain starts to get in and there are structural failures, the building in question is effectively on its way to being subsumed by the surrounding landscape – absorbed by the vegetal world in ways that begin to deny its status as architecture. Ruins, it could be argued, are part of the natural world. Architecture is only architecture when it stands apart from both nature and the natural processes of decay.

Given that they are currently incapable of self-regeneration, buildings are characterized by a finite life span: they are created, maintained and then, if that maintenance is not rigorously upheld, they decay and die. Their death, in urban environments, is effected through a dismembering and recycling or, in rural situations perhaps, through a change of state in which they become a kind of artificial reef upon which all kinds of creatures find a home and in which plants, fungus and mold colonize.

Mostly, these days, we see buildings that a few years ago seemed quite serviceable and well-maintained suddenly (it seems) change in status and become redundant – boarded up, surrounded by chain link fencing and awaiting demolition as soon as the permits come through. Still, in rural situations like Ojai, a building’s redundancy sometime plays out more elegantly - peeling paint and broken windows slowly giving way to signs of structural collapse and ultimately a reabsorption of the building’s organic and inorganic materials into the earth’s mantle. This latter attenuated denouement, given the economics of real estate, is now regrettably rare. Sometimes, just when you think that process is underway, a rescue operation is mounted and the patient is miraculously revived, re-roofed, stabilized and returned to active service. I have been involved in such rescue attempts both for clients and on my own behalf.

There is, of course, no greener building than the one that is already built. Whatever intrinsic inefficiencies may exist within it, the mere fact of extending the period of amortization of the embedded energy in an existing structure guarantees its viridic bona fides. In the last thirty odd years I have had the good fortune to live in two ancient buildings in Los Angeles. Given that city’s short life, ancient can be credibly applied to anything built before, say, 1920. The murdered out mule barn in Echo Park dated back to the first decade of the twentieth century (Black Magic) while, when it came time to decamp to the west-side, the single-wall beach cottage in Santa Monica Canyon, built just before the First World War, served our family for almost two decades.

Professionally, my architectural career has touched on landmark modernist buildings such as the H.H. Harris Birtcher residence in Mount Washington (famously photographed by Man Ray, 1942), as well as several Spanish colonial revival, Greek revival, Craftsman and Italianate buildings from the boom years of the mid-nineteen twenties. In all these cases, the life of the building was extended well into the twentieth-first century with every prospect of the building’s useful life-span stretching to over a hundred years. Now, in a new house in Ojai, we are about to be confronted with our first five-year maintenance cycle.

Given the building’s location in the chaparral its life span is conditional on both such periodic maintenance and its ability to withstand the natural hazards that exist at the wildland urban interface. We have just witnessed 30,000 acres of coastal scrub going up in smoke between the 101 and the PCH south of Point Mugu where, for about eight miles, the land has been blackened clear to the edge of the ocean (The Camarillo Springs Fire, 2013). Our house has been designed to withstand such fast moving moderate intensity fires and we are reassured by our ability to close off all the buildings openings with the wide steel fire-doors which are an integral part of the design.

Situated on a bluff created between a sloped front lawn and a steeply raked bowl at the back, the house exists in a canyon and is vulnerable to the hazards of such landforms which channel fire, water, mud, rain and wind. After the second dry winter in a row, memories of rain and flood have receded – it has been eight years since the vast flooding of the Sisar and Santa Paula creeks on our side of the great divide (aka the Summit) where water sheds to the Santa Clara River and thence, across the Oxnard plain to the ocean (Wild and Free). Local creeks and rivers are now mostly dry and Bear creek, which threads through our property on its western edge, has fallen quiet, although a thin silver thread still winds along under overhanging cottonwoods, sycamores and willows. The seasonal stream to the east of the house, which poses a more adjacent threat, has been bone dry for twenty four months.

The plan for maintaining our sanctuary in the chaparral thus involves surviving natural calamities and preserving the steel and stucco envelope of the wood-free structure against the predations of time, wind, weather and opportunistic plant and animal life.

Strange echoes of this protocol reverberated in my mind as I visited the 13th century Tintern Abbey in south east Wales recently. While the church stood steadfast for about 250 years amidst periodic Welsh uprisings, Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 began its fairly rapid transition towards celebrity ruin – a style in which it is currently maintained. The processes of decay are now largely halted and the remains preserved for the edification and titillation of tourists. The abbey has been stripped of the clamorous vines which, entwined amidst the sacred lithic pile, so entranced the early Romantics and later Victorian visitors, and it now rises out of a closely mown green sward, its structure left to silhouette nakedly against the dense hard wood forest of the escarpment that rises a little way behind it or, depending on the angle of the viewer’s neck, the sky above.

Tintern Abbey now endures as a petrified relic. Wordsworth celebrated the surrounding landscape in his Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey without actually mentioning the church ruin. Absent too, is any reference of the pall of smoke that habitually hung about the Wye, from about 1700 on, when intense industrialization came to the valley which, in turn, rang with the sounds of foundries and mills drawing power from his ‘sylvan Wye’ and its tributaries. Similarly neglected, in his evocation of the ’ the deep and gloomy wood', was the ring of the woodman’s axe, for the local industries, which were at the very forefront of the Industrial revolution, were massive consumers of timber. Blinded by his romanticism, the poet blundered over the landscape unaware of the terrifying forces of environmental degradation all around him. Ginsberg, in his remembrance Wales Visitation, briefly cuts to the chase (amidst much chemically induced obtuseness) when he takes note of ‘clouds passing through skeleton arches of Tintern Abbey’.

The valley is now quiet, save for the rumble of traffic along its narrow roads, and the occasional jolly whoop from Oxford students down for the day. The broader landscape is largely restored while the ruin itself, the economic locus of the town, is celebrated for its apparently artful deconstruction rendered by ancient politics, and the elements.

There is an example of more recent ruination in central Europe, where the historical and natural forces at work are similarly capable of being, to some extent, untangled. In Vienna, the economic boom fueled by a potent monarchial combination in the nineteenth century is evidenced by endless streets of baroque apartment buildings restored in dazzling, as new, condition. Radiating out in avenues from the center of the city towards the Ringstrasse their construction was originally enabled by the total destruction of the old medieval quarter, save for the great cathedral which still manages to dominate the skyline - despite the best efforts of generations of Hapsburgs who vied with one another in the creation of elaborately confected palaces. The dual monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which existed between 1867 and 1918, established itself as one of the great European powers – behind just Russia in size and second only to the USA, Germany and the U.K in machine-building, industrial might. Its wealth created two great cities: Vienna and Budapest.

In the Hungarian capital, the explosion of speculative four and five story tenements rendered in florid Renaissance styles built during the last quarter of the nineteenth century is still evident on many of the major boulevards in the City center, but their condition varies widely from the recently renovated to those that remain as the crumbling hulks that they became during the forty years of Soviet misrule (1949 – 1989). When the elaborately molded plaster work that originally mimicked the carved stone, cornices, corbels and statuary of their sixteenth and seventeenth century French and Italian models falls away their hasty brick construction is exhibited in lesions across their facades - sores wrought by weather and neglect.

Begrimed in over a century of industrial and domestic coal-fire soot, crumbling at their exaggerated rusticated bases, many with boarded up widows and heavily lichened mansard roofs, these are text-book examples of ruination. As such they have a romantic appeal that suggests a gravitas entirely missing in the restored models which once again reveal their original, fin de siècle, venal, facile, fashion-backward facades.

In Ojai, we stand on-guard against such romantic ruination and are sedulously planning our five year maintenance protocol, naively determined to keep our building forever young……

Cave Woman

Earlier this winter I spent a weekend at Zzyzx. (There’s a strange, almost illicit pleasure in typing that improbable sequence of letters). The name is the invention of Curtis Howe Springer who squatted in an area of the Californian desert then known as Soda Springs, about seven miles south of Baker on the old Mojave road. In 1944 he filed 12,000 acres worth of mining claims under a moniker he felt confident would reside at the very foot of an alphabetic list of place names. Some would suggest that his choice was supremely apposite: many view this corner of California as the end of the world.

But it is redeemed, for others, by the natural spring which renders it an oasis - a gathering place for the people of the region. Close by is a prehistoric quarry site where Indians fashioned projectile points used to hunt the game that gathered at the spring. Curtis attempted to leverage the allure of the oasis by bottling the water and building a health spa with an apparently natural hot-spring but which, in fact, featured water heated by a large oil burning boiler discreetly located at some distance from the bathing facilities.

The enterprise was a modest success and he built a substantial establishment of guest rooms, a dining hall and meeting facilities on these public lands. His presumption was finally curtailed in 1974, when he was arrested by the United States Marshals for misuse of the land as well as alleged violations of food and drug laws. The property was reclaimed by the government and the village compound bequeathed to a consortium of Cal State Universities who use the buildings as their ‘Desert Studies Center’. It was here that I stayed, for three days at the end of January, to attend the seventeenth Mojave Rock Art Workshop (MORAW).

The participants, mostly male and grizzled, were educators, academics, park administrators and amateur rock art aficionados who were gathered together to give and listen to informal presentations of research, newly discovered rock art sites and the tribulations of site-stewardship. I attended with Doug Brotherton and was accepted as a participant on the basis of my association with Doug, the recent publication of Rock Art at Little Lake (2012) to which I had made small contributions (Little Lake) and, perhaps, because of this blog’s sometime focus on the Chumash.

I was on the lookout for great stories – and the tale of Zzyzx was going to be hard to top. Each morning at dawn I ventured forth in 24 degree F. weather to run along the dry salt beds and try to fathom this strange, anomalous place in the vast desert-scape of the Mojave. By mid-morning, I was immersed in the minutiae of rock art recordation and the presumed archeological import of the data.

Late Saturday afternoon I listened to the archeologist Steve Schwartz tell his tale of  Lone Woman Cave, San Nicolas Island: Sifting fact from Fiction. Here was a story with a true dramatic arc that glittered with historic and pre-historic insights; a tale capable of competing with the origination myth of Zzyzx and possessing an allure sufficient to eclipse, as the day’s peak experience, the beauty of the dawn’s impossibly low sun grazing the salt lake and sending the long shadow of my frozen body bouncing into infinity.

In 1814, the Russian Fur Company dispatched Aleut otter hunters to San Nicolas Island, the furthest west and most remote of the Southern Channel Islands, to secure some of the many thousands of pelts required to satisfy the booming Chinese market. While a desultory trade had existed for years between the native hunters on the Channel Islands and itinerant European trappers this represented a new and threatening expansion of the fur trade and there was a violent confrontation between the Aleuts and the locals resulting in the death of many of the already marginalized Islanders. (When Viscaino landed on San Nicholas on December 6, 1602, he had reported it densely populated).

Reduced to an unsustainable population, the remnant Nicoleños were removed from the island some twenty years later. One woman remained, however, to search for her missing child, or, as told by Scott O’Dell in his fictionalized version of the story, The Island of the Blue Dolphins, having dived overboard from the evacuation ship after sighting her young brother left behind on the beach. In 1853, George Nidever arrived on the Island with a hunting party and caught sight of the woman, who had survived alone for eighteen years (the brother is killed by wild dogs early on in Scott O’Dell’s narrative), and she was gathered up and taken to his estate in Santa Barbara. On the mainland, she shared few words with the local Ventureños but with the use of sign-language indicated that her lost child was never found. Shortly after being baptized as Juana Maria by the Padres of Santa Barbara Mission, she succumbed to dysentery. This story became a staple of popular magazines in the late 1800’s and was revived by Scott O’Dell in 1960 with his hugely popular children’s novel.

Artifacts related to Juana Maria’s lonely sojourn on the island were recently recovered from a sheer cliff on the leeward side of San Nicolas by the noted archeologist Jon Erlandson. It had long been established that the Lone Woman lived, for the most part, in a cave, and objects she had used in her daily life were recovered from her island home in the 1880’s but were subsequently destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. The cave’s location was lost for the entirety of the twentieth century and  Erlandson’s find was the first, twenty-first century indication that the cave's wherabouts might be recovered. Scott Bryan from U.C. Berkeley subsequently discovered an 1879 coastal survey that pin-pointed its location.

Steve Schwartz - seconded to Naval Air Systems Command which administers the Island and from which it fires test rockets – had attempted to locate the cave for over twenty years. Now, using Scott Bryan’s information he had the confidence to organize a major dig. Eighteen days and 40,000 buckets of material later, with the help of a team of volunteers, the cave was revealed in a sandstone outcrop that had held its secret for well over a century, in twenty feet of accumulated sand.

Steve reached the occupation floor of the cave and followed it 75 feet back into the cliff. At that point the Navy stepped in and halted his excavation. A cave of this magnitude almost certainly possesses artifacts from the beginning of human habitation on the Channel Islands. As Jon Erlandson has demonstrated at the much smaller Daisy Cave on San Miguel, evidence can be traced  back 15,000 years to what he calls kelp culture: the artifactual and nutritional basis of pioneer Asian Pacific voyagers - perhaps the first North Americans. (An Island on the Land and Ancient Isle).

While we can deplore the decision by the Navy to prohibit further archeological research in the cave, we can also be profoundly grateful that the island still exists. In 1945, San Nicolas was one of eight short-listed sites for the Trinity Atomic test, the dubious honor of which eventually fell to the White Sands testing range in New Mexico. The island thus missed its appointment with the apocalypse: but its place in history may yet arrive when proven to be the confirmatory site of the unique culture which came to the Channel Islands with the first peoples of North America.

On the brink of potentially major discoveries, thwarted by labyrinthine Naval bureaucracy, Steve Schwartz has chosen to retire.

Knowledge Scrublands

A little over two thousand years ago an event occurred that precipitated the marking of time in a uniform manner over much of the planet. This synchronization, which occurred in hindsight some 525 years after the event, was not widely adopted until the end of the ninth century when it received the imprimatur of the Venerable Bede. For more than a thousand years thenceforth, years were dated in the form of Anno Domini (the year of our Lord) or simply A.D.. Years prior to His birth were designated as Before Christ or B.C.. In our politically correct era this has been amended to Common Era and Before Common Era, and since this dating system is virtually universal it can be said that humanity exists, temporally, in a Time Commons. We all share in this fundamental database which clicks over, to much celebration, at each completion of the earth's orbit around the sun.

'The Time' is not proprietary knowledge. It is freely available and awareness of it does not confer special privileges. Neither is there a societal requirement to credit the source of this calendric information. This is the nature of commons. It was not always so. In primitive cultures awareness of the astronomical time was a source of power. The 'Antap, the intellectual elite who presided over the fragmented tribelets between Malibu and Paso Robles, controlled these wilfully independent peoples by virtue of accessing astronomical information and mandating the ritual calendar by which the awesome powers of the cosmos might be propitiated (Real Suspense).

Today, our sources of knowledge, once carefully guarded by both intellectual elites and those with a more demotic understanding of natural magic, are being democratized on the internet. We are moving towards a Knowledge Commons. Google tried to digitize all the books in the world, but were defeated by copyright laws and lawsuits. Nevertheless, the shell of the Google attempt remains as a ghost ship sailing the world wide web. I have often jumped aboard these creaking hulks, shot through with lacunae, and ransacked them for plunder in patching together my tattered blog pieces.

Now comes the Digital Public Library of America which promises to aggregate digital collections from public and private libraries across the land. One of its founders, Robert Darnton writes in the New York Review of Books, "the DPLA harkens back to the eighteenth century - what could be more utopian than a project to make the cultural heritage of humanity available to all humans?" All humans, that is, with a working command of English and access to the Web. Meanwhile, Europeana coordinates and links collections in twenty seven European countries to which DPLA will, in turn, link. Within a decade, perhaps, there will be web access to most of the world's storehouses of knowledge from a single portal - a digital Alexandria.

Already the ease of access to information on the web has created an explosion of fact based writing on and off-line. Creative non-fiction is arguably the fastest growing literary genre in America and is enabled, to a great extent, by the ease of access to facts on-line. Facticicity has become the glue of much writing (not least here) where arcane information gleaned from the web can laminate elaborate musings that would otherwise congeal into a puddle of solipsism.

Whilst your Urban Wildland scribe endeavors to give credit where credit's due and affects a veneer of academic rectitude, others are less punctilious. Jane Goodall has recently been exposed as a common-place plagiarist: her new book relies on un-credited gleanings from such prosaic sources as Wikipedia and the website of Choice Organic Teas. She quotes interviews with scientists with whom she has never met. The book, Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants, 2013, has been pulled from the shelves and will be replaced with a revised second printing.

Somewhere along the line, this erstwhile primatologist became a brand. Now her name on a book guarantees hard-cover sales in the mid seven figures. In this she resembles Jared Diamond, who has parlayed an academic career studying birds in Papua New Guinea into a series of popular cross-disciplinary books that have a devoted middle-brow following (WEIRD). Now, it is my dearest wish to become a brand, either in my own name or that of my blog, but as Jane's recent fall from grace illustrates, there are dangers.

Seeds of Hope credits a co-author - Gail Hudson - and it is reasonable to assume that it was she who was largely responsible for both the plagiarized and un-plagiarized portions of the text. Jane has relied upon Gail for her previous two books and, as a brand, the sometime primatologist has less and less time for writing: Brand's outline - they ensure conformity to the brand - but write? hell no! Be assured, at this prepupal stage in the development my brand identity, every stolen word, lifted passage and un-credited apercu on this blog is uniquely the work of yours truly.

I first became conscious of the word common as a descriptor of those open lands that were neither populated nor farmed in the parts of 'Darkest Surrey' where I grew up. Our local common was called Heaven's Gate - named perhaps, for its elevational prominence, for it rose slightly above the riverine flatlands that bordered the River Wey, a southern tributary of the Thames, that shaped the string of villages and towns that were studded between these empty, vaguely louche lands that we called commons. Here were smoked our first cigarettes, and if sufficiently precocious, undertook our first romantic trysts.

I now realize that the Common's characteristic scrubland vegetation of bracken, gorse and heather indicated their unsuitability for agriculture. These sandy wastelands were spared from the grasping local gentry who would otherwise have acquired them, had they been worth fencing, through the Enclosure Acts of the early nineteenth century. Happily these lands remained wild and free through the year's of my 'growing-up'; today, Heaven's Gate is riven by the A-3, a major vehicular artery between London and Portsmouth.

In her first book about the vegetal, as opposed to the animal world, Jane Goodall relies on the words of un-credited experts, largely culled from the web by her indefatigable Gail-Friday; but a simple walk through the wilds (or commons) can establish connections with Nature's freely accessible data bases. Sentient beings, as the Transcendentalists understood, can acquire truths in tramping the land that require no crediting - but demand a very un-academic willingness to embrace the non-empirical, to open oneself to the swirling power of the etheric landscape. This should be common knowledge.

Meanwhile, we await the arrival of the DPLA, an unfenced knowledge commons which promises to nourish us toilers in the vineyard of creative non-fiction. However, we should all be mighty afeared of the Gentry - the media barons and their political lackeys in Washington - who, if they see value in these digital collections will endeavor to pay-wall them in (as is currently the case with many academic papers). Perhaps, like gypsies tramps and thieves, we can then retreat to obscure corners of the web where will survive pockets of freely available arcana in the virtual knowledge-scrublands. Or, take a walk in the real woods. Here in the urban wildland I plan to continue doing both.

Night and Day

As the planet turns on its axis and captive humanity experiences a turning towards or away from our distant sun, night engulfs day and day rolls back the night. These diurnal ecotones of dawn and dusk allow for particular moments of reflection uninflected by either the full presence or absence of light - opportunities perhaps, to investigate grey areas of an otherwise manichean life. At other times they simply provide rich aesthetic experiences or space in which to prepare for the flicking of the solar switch. Often, at these moments of luminary flux, great beauty is pierced by pedestrian reality.

In the gloaming, color leaches out of the landscape turning oaks an inky black and shades of grey are all that's left to describe the land. Above, there is a monotone firmament, except to the west where, at the end of an almost infinite layering of dissolving ink washes - sfumato - there are the pinks and apricots of an early evening sky lightly bruised with clouds. Walking down Koenigstein, entranced by this blurred edge between light and dark, two flickering lights semaphored the arrival of the night - natural gas flares in the Arco Oil field half way up the the Sulphur Mountain escarpment across from the Summit.

My mind has been on the development of the local oil-fields recently. First, Marianne Ratcliff alerted her neighbors that Mirada Oil, a small operator with a number of wells between Koenigstein and Thomas Aquinas, has applied to ammend their County Conditional Use Permit. They are requesting that the document be modified to allow a further five wells (from 6 to 11) on their Harth lease which is located in the hills north of Arco's Silver Thread facility above the Painted Pony petting zoo on the 150. Then, Alasdair Coyne, in his invaluable newsletter for the Keep The Sespe Wild and Free Committee (which he co-founded and now spearheads), wrote a piece titled Fracking in The Sespe in the Winter 2012-2013 issue.

Maryanne and I attended the County Hearing on March 21 which focused on the Planning Director's Staff Report which had set Mirada's application on a glide path towards approval by Kim Prillheart, the County's Planning Director. Key to facilitating approval of this expansion of drilling activity was the staff decision not to require either a new Mitigated Negative Declaration or an Environmental Impact Report - a decision predicated on the notion that this was a minor modification to the original CUP granted in 1985, that there will be no significant additional impacts to the environment, and that no new information of substantial importance on the project's environmental effect has been uncovered since 1985.

The gallery of some 15 local residents expressed their disdain for these Pollyanna assumptions. History, is perhaps, on their side. Our immediate neighbor on Koenigstein, John Whitman, successfully challenged the granting of a CUP to Phoenix Corporation who planned to drill a single exploratory well within a quarter mile of his home (the old dude ranch Rancho del Oso) back in 1975. Four years later he won on appeal to Ventura's Supreme Court.

I called John the day before the hearing and offered to drive him to the County offices. He did not return my call but the next day his son Andrew, a lawyer, was there to represent the family's interests. His call to his father had also been unreturned, but he referenced John's erstwhile activism and expressed alarm that the County was again ignoring cumulative environmental impacts - the very issue that prompted the Appeals Court to overturn the C.U.P. granted to Phoenix by Ventura County.

I suspect that nowadays no public hearing which has as its focus the activities of the oil and gas industry avoids the hysteria surrounding the practice of hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Mirada's proposed extraction program does not include fracking, but we nevertheless listened to an Ojai resident who drove twenty miles to the meeting to deliver an emotional tirade based on the film Gasland, an alarmist and largely discredited account of the horrors of fracking documented by Josh Fox. Alasdair, in his analysis of the activity in the Sespe, makes the sensible point that this potentially hazardous technology requires firm State regulation. Several bills are making their way through the California legislature promising just such control.

California's Monterey Shale formation was the elephant in the Hearing Room, but the palavering pachyderm was eventually called out by Marianne. While having nothing to do with the case at hand, this geological formation looms large over the energy future of both California and the United States; it is estimated that it contains some 400 billion barrels of oil - although less than five percent of it is accessible through today's drilling technologies. Even so, this 15 billion bbl. represents ten years of Saudi Arabia's output and could radically impact both our dependence on foreign oil and the local economy.

Because hydraulic fracturing is effective in extracting oil and gas from shale it will be the preferred technology as this resource comes on-line. Marianne expressed a generalized unease that Ventura's part in this bonanza would generate deleterious environmental impacts. Alasdair points out that part of the Monterey shale sits under the Los Padres National Park which will require stringent review by the National Forest Service, but that other areas under private ownership, outside of the park or as in-holdings, will potentially allow for faster development.

These great reservoirs of oil that lie beneath the land represent the solar energy beamed down to the Earth between 300 and  360 million years ago in strict accord with the diurnal patterns that continue to govern the circadian rhythms of all animals, plants, fungi and bacteria. That energy now enables us to turn night into day, traverse great and small distances at extraordinary speeds; heat our built environments independently of the exterior weather, grow vast amounts of food and cook it at will. The word transformational barely begins to cover it. As I point out in Moai, it has enabled the Modern World.

In the Hearing Room, under the faint buzz of fluorescent lights fueled by a long ago sun, we argued about the form and propriety of sucking more oil out of the bowels of the earth. Our mostly pasty faces were by turns amused, annoyed and fiercely attentive to the process of our County administration and the extemporizations of its punctilious representatives and our querulous neighbors.

Perhaps I alone harbored memories of that morning's dawn in the chaparral - somewhere above the Ojai Oil Field, the marine layer still settled densely over Ojai, the sun half an hour away from splashing the dark Nordhoff ridge off in the distance, with thoughts only of choosing my next step over the still, grey land.

Worlds Apart

There are creamy yellow blossoms of mountain mahogany, blossoms of California bay, the passion-flower-like virgin’s bower (the cream-white native clematis) and the rest of the cream meme – star florets of wild cucumber, flat-top elderberry blossoms, pendulous poison oak flowers and the miniature grape-like flower clusters of its close relative, squaw bush - cream on grey skeletal twigs. The tiny fuzz balls on the mule fat (baccharis salicifolia) are the color of a tea-stained linen napkin while the local morning glory is whiter, but replete with red wine streaks on the exterior of its trumpet.

There are the blues of lupine, the nightshades, fiesta flowers, blue eyed grass and blue dicks and now sage; white popcorn flower, white California everlasting and the black to carmine of the California peony blossoms.

Most of the white ceanothus flowers were lost to the winds of late February and early March but there is still the blue. Owl’s head clover, tending deep pink, has pushed up in drifts amidst grasses, invasive erodium and clover; pink prickly phlox is set in sandstone cliffs and at the damp base, coral Indian paintbrush. The bush poppies and bush sunflowers provide splashes of yellow (along with the tiny punctuation of fiddlenecks) amidst the chaparral’s mostly blue, white, cream and pink flowers.

This efflorescence is a tiny slice of the local botanical diversity. As Lightfoot and Parrish point out in their California Natural History Guide, California Indians and their Environment, 2009,

"California is home to more endemic species of plants...than any other equivalent sized area in North America. 3,423 species are considered to be native and another 1,416 are classified as endemic, i.e. they are found only in habitats within the state. Nearly 25% of all known plant species in the United States are found in California. These include the world's tallest trees, the coast redwood (sequoia sempiverens), the world's largest trees, the giant sequoia (sequoiadendron giganteum); the worlds oldest trees, the western bristlecone pine (pinus longeava); and some of the smallest and unique plants known to mankind."

By contrast, as my friend Will Reed reminded me the other morning, Britain possesses only 32 (or maybe 35) native trees and 32 native shrubs, of which only one, an obscure hornbeam, is endemic. Yes, there are some 1,500 grasses and forbs native to the Old Dart, but Britain was wiped clean of flora during the massive glaciations which began around 100,000 years ago and has half the biotic diversity of its cross-channel neighbor France (quelle dommage!).

After the end of the last Ice Age, plants slowly re-colonized Britain in their general drift towards the northwest as the climate improved and the range of species was extended. However, about 8,000 years ago, with continued ice-melt, the rift between Britain and France was submerged in a cataclysmic megaflood fed by the rising waters of a vast freshwater lake formed over many thousands of years in what is now the southern north sea. This devastating surge of water pounded and gouged the land, creating a giant channel between the two land masses. This newly formed English Channel then halted terrestrial migration of plants from the rest of Europe, forever limiting Britain's native biotic diversity. (Sanjeev Gupta et al. in Nature 448, 2007)

It is interesting to note the comparative ages of human inhabitation in California and Britain. As I have detailed in Ancient Isle, the first humans arrived in California, perhaps via the Kelp Road (and if so, perhaps on the Northern Channel Islands) about 15,000 years ago during the last groans of the mega fauna.

Some 700,000 years before, early humans were mixing it up with hippos, rhinos and elephants along the banks of a vast meandering river that drained central and eastern England and flowed sluggishly into the North sea. This, of course, was millennia before Britain separated from Europe and the warm interglacial period afforded opportunities for settlement in the continent's northern reaches - what today is Suffolk and Norfolk. (Simon Parfitt et al. in Nature 438, 2005)

It is tempting to view the protracted isolation from the uber-predator as the reason for California's biotic fecundity. But, as I mention in WEIRD, human populations can sometimes foster biotic diversity and certainly the absence of pre-historic agriculture went some way towards preserving California's variety of plant-life - many of whose species native peoples incorporated into their food, medicine, craft and buildings. There are more profound, climatic and geological reasons why this 'Floristic Province' is now designated by Conservation International as a Global Biodiversity Hotspot.

Over the last 2 1/2 million years, California largely avoided the ravages of the Ice Ages. Instead, the coastal areas were characterized by grassy plains with rich sediments deposited by rivers meandering their way to the ocean. Seismic activity has bounced some of these old beaches inland and old sea floors now form our mountain tops. Old wave-cut ocean terraces step down towards the present-day coastline. Streams have cut through the up-lifted land mass and created deep valleys. As the climate warmed and sea levels rose these valleys were flooded to form estuaries rich in the deposition of soft sediments, which have eroded and spread their riches down stream as sea levels have dropped again (viz. the Oxnard Plain). Over time, these processes have shaped California’s unique habitats and produced a rich mosaic of life. Now, the cold ocean currents to the west and high mountains to the east have formed, in Carey McWilliams' phrase, an island on the land, where California's dizzying diversity is nurtured in its short wet winters and long dry summers.

The other evening on the pool terrace, drinking a Page tangerine cocktail (equal parts juice, Campari, and soda), with Jim Churchill, the drink's originator, he looked across at the east hill and asked, what is that pink bush mid-slope? It was at that hour when the world is suffused with an apricot blush (resonating with the color of our drinks) when the low sun, filtered through the planet's dust, casts its glow across the spalled cliff face of the Topatopas. I had no answer, but assured him that I would investigate the following morning.

Walking through the east meadow past the oaks and walnuts, I pushed through the chamise up the slope until I had a clear view of Jim's pink bush. In the morning light it was a more prosaic beige and it was apparent that the color belonged to a frost damaged bough of laurel sumac. In this floristic paradise, it is easy to imagine flowers where none exist.

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.