Blood Moon

Is Ojai cool again? It’s been an awfully long time, perhaps not since Beatrice Wood was a girl. The dead hand of the Ojai Valley Inn and the sepulcher that is the arcade have made this town a very dull place indeed.

Alex Proud, writing in the Telegraph notes, “I have seen the future – and the future is Paris and Geneva. The future is a clean, dull city populated by clean, dull rich people and clean, dull old people”.

Make that Paris, Geneva and Ojai. Except that something wonderful is happening in the Valley of the Moon. Hipsters have arrived.

Now some of you may be thinking that this is not an unalloyed beneficence. Many may have experienced being pushed off of the sidewalks of Venice and Silverlake in Los Angeles and herded aside along the streets and avenues of Brooklyn by twenty-something, facially hirsute and tattooed young men and alluring, inked young women lurching from noisy bars to shade-grown organic, cold-press coffee houses to artisanal bakeries and restaurants with market-driven menus. When they take to the road (where their elders may sometimes be randomly strewn, dazed and confused by this generational putsch) they are on fixies, Jack Spade messenger bags flapping in the breeze.

Here in Ojai, lacking the overwhelming numbers they are able to muster in the hipster capitals of the world, they represent a piquant seasoning to the still predominantly old, dull and clean - or at least clean shaven, and sometimes wealthy population. They do not threaten, they enrich. They will forever be exotics not endemics. But their influence is keenly felt………..and it’s a good thing.

Now, fortunately for the future health of the planet, hipsters have little interest in driving cars but they are curiously attracted to the derelict and defunct infrastructure of an erstwhile, car-centric world. Thus Summer Camp, a general goods store specializing in the ephemera of a simpler, pre-digital civilization, sits atop the toxic waste of a long-ago service station. The House of Fixies’ showroom (signage confusingly proclaims it to be The Mob Shop) is in the service bays of a gas-station that used to actually fix cars as well as sell gas (how quaint is that?). The building is thus re-purposed to cater to the urge for self-propulsion for which the aforementioned purveyors of hipster comestibles provide the necessary fuel.

One of the enduring mysteries of the modern world is that the increase in cars has resulted in the radical reduction of the number of gas-stations. Used to be, in the 40’s and 50’s, one could barely drive half a mile through Ojai without being beckoned by a forecourt enlivened by colorful gasoline pumps and their boiler-suited jockeys (or so the number of such abandoned and now re-purposed structures leads me to believe).

Pedaling east and leaving the many chambered, non-hipster, retail crypts of the arcade behind, our exotic, ex-urban twenty-somethings are accosted by the unbearably charming Spanish colonial revival forecourt that serves as an annex to Knead which now sells, in lieu of petroleum, serious hipster fuel – delectable, artisanal baked goods. Next up, our single-speeder finds, on the left, a Pet Spa specializing in the grooming of very small dogs, housed, inevitably, in a very tiny ex-gas station and, across the street, CJ’s repairs the farm-trucks of yesteryear in the service bays of a larger, but long-dry gas station - nostalgic, artisanal kinds of vehicles that still gladden the hipster heart.

Apart from its abandoned gas-stations there are few buildings in Ojai that might stir the hipster-soul. Adam Tolmach’s Ojai Vineyard now occupies one such, the old Fire House on Montgomery, a landmark WPA brick building which served the Ojai Fire Department from 1936 -1979, and it is here that his fine hand-made wines may be tasted. Predictably, the much lambasted (in this blog, at least) arcade, post-office tower and Libbey Park pergola, once the defining architectural icons of Ojai, appeal largely to the old and dull. The Libbey Bowl, set in the park, resounded to the sounds of an echt hipster band, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, for one brief moment -a magical night a couple of years ago - but customarily serves up, outside of its signature New Music festival, superannuated performers from the old and dull’s youth.

In the back of another brick building of only slightly later vintage than the Fire House Ben and Marissa, creators of Hip, a restaurant serving vegan food, have successfully bridged the gap between hippie and hipster and cater to locals as well as the Silverlake diaspora. The main room of this building (where once its owner Mary Goldberg ran her restaurant, Treasure Beach) is occupied by dba, a small design-driven architecture firm and P.Space where P.Lyn Middleton sells her stunning hand-made ceramics.

Now comes Warner Ebbink (owner of the Rocker-Hipster Coffee Shop 101 in L.A.), a serial restaurateur with an eye on the bourgeoning Ojai market, as the new owner of Mary’s building. His precise plans are shrouded in a too tight and too short hipster jacket of secrecy.

Topa Topa Brewery is optimistically proclaiming that its future space, the disheveled, barely roofed old plumbing workshop that has stood forlorn and empty for many a year on the Avenue, just west of Ojai Creates, will be open early in 2015. Some discerning residents consider this to be perhaps the finest of all the mid-century quotidian commercial structures in town but sadly its conversion to a code-compliant building will almost certainly eviscerate its charm. After a few craft beers (the young’s new wine), perhaps no one will care. Inspired to lurch west towards ersatz colonial arches, the buzzed throng might do well to visit The Hub - the single business that escapes the general opprobrium I have conferred on the arcade - a blue-collar bar that is ripe for a retro, PBR (Pabst Blue Ribbon) kind of revival.

Lodging for this youthful diaspora is now thoughtfully provided by The Rancho Inn, a motel from the 50’s recently infused with the early twenty-first century zeitgeist by two young, hip hoteliers. Regrettably, the new owners of The Capri, The Hummingbird Inn and The Deer Lodge have decided that there’s still gold in the old and dull hills. New publishers for Edible Ojai and Ventura have just replaced the perennially hip Jane Handel and they too, based on their first few issues, appear headed for those same hills. The two journals of Ojai real estate boosterism, the Quarterly and the Visitors Guide remain blithely unaware of the new kids in town, and continue to pitch their publications to guests at the Ojai Valley, rather than the Rancho Inn.

When Mike Kelley, the internationally acclaimed Los Angeles artist, visited town none of this mattered. His analysis of the place as evinced in a series of a dozen or more 8 ½ x 11 pencil drawings, currently on display as part of the massive show devoted to his work at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Gallery, depict three elements emblematic of this series of valleys - oil, oranges and the geomorphic shape of the enveloping mountains. All of which once seemed like the eternal verities of the area. Now, not so much: the presence of the oil industry in Ojai is an embarrassment to many while citrus is threatened by changing long-term weather patterns and a persistent drought – only the mountains remain un-moved by time, fashion or economic expediency.

The town too, is in flux. Kelley identified an arc that stretches from Thomas Aquinas College to the Libbey arcade at the center of town while citrus groves are shown quartering the East End. Hipsters who land here now favor the wilder reaches of Upper Ojai or the dramatic gorges of Matilija Canyon. The East End is dead to them, perceived as ground zero for the old and dull. For those youngsters with a more urban bent, Motown (Meiner’s Oaks) is an attractive, funky option with a growing array of hipster oriented services such as The Farmer and The Cook (Restaurant and organic produce); Book Ends (housed in a re-purposed Church) and The Coffee Connection.

The 150 artery, as Kelley discerned, is the life blood of Ojai but the arrangement of vital organs along its length is subtly changing: now the young are creating a new corpus corporis channeling energy to their favored haunts while the provinces of the old and dull slowly wither. It’s a brutal process, but one that is necessary for the continued relevance of our Lunar Valleys. This week's blood moon is a sanguinary harbinger.

Shell Game

Early this morning: dark clouds scudded across the eastern sky, as though fleeing the impenetrable, moonless night. A slightly fuzzy crescent the sun had carelessly painted on the side of our earth-washed satellite (which had arisen to greet the dawn) hung over the eastern ridge, a jewel bright morning star subtended below it. Sort of reminded me of the Turkish national flag – and no wonder, said red banner pays homage to the Tengriist beliefs of the ancient sky-worshipping Turks.

Status report from an earth-worshipper: underfoot the peonies, soap plant, wild cucumber, goosefoot and Acourtia are flourishing; at eye level ceanothus and chamise are beginning to bloom; poison oak glistens malignantly. Despite the general failure of winter, spring has arrived. Pantheists (and others) are rejoicing.

Last week, not for the first time, I was called to jury duty: actually for the third time that I did not have the ready excuse of resident alien status. Ah, those joyous years when I could scrawl “Non-Citizen” across the summons and return it (postage paid). But rendering such service is a small price to pay for the diminished night sweats. As a citizen of this fine country I can now luxuriate in my anarchist politics, comfortably ensconced in the great pluralism of the U.S. of A, protected by the might of Empire and assured of my First Amendment freedom of speech – and, by inference, of thought. Yes, dear reader, this country now clasps a viper to its bosom.

Now, when it comes to jury service, I am as willing as the next free-thinker. Turns out, such willingness is not reciprocated. Call number two (when it counted) resulted in my inclusion in a jury pool on a drunk-driving case. The case turned, as we were led to believe, on the accuracy of the breathalyser device. A young Latina was the defendant: casual observation would lead one to believe that she should more appropriately have been charged with under-age drinking. In any event, she had been stopped and blew, as the billboards suggest, $10,000. More perhaps, as she had the gumption to contest the charge. Seated with my fellow good men and women jurors I was questioned by defense and prosecution: I threw the racial profiling curve ball and followed it with the “in no circumstances will I find this woman guilty’” game ender – or so I thought. The judge came to bat and asked whether I would follow his instructions. Not necessarily says I – finally, game over. Judge asked to be reminded of my name and profession and then excused me from further service. That’s one potential client to whom I can safely say goodbye.

You’d think that that performance would have earned me an asterisk against my name – indicating that under no circumstances, save a massive die-off of eligible citizens, should I be called to assist in the machinations of the criminal justice system. But no….last Thursday found me in my jury attire lurking at the back of the hall with the on-line poker players. I was reading Edward Abbey. Mercifully, at around 3 p.m. we were sent home.

Having consigned the entire day to this civic duty I now found myself close to the ocean with more than four hours of light awaiting my pleasure. Gone are the days when I might have checked the surf report, instead, the Chumash Trail (which has some claim to being the oldest continually used footpath in California) was calling. Located across the Pacific Coast Highway from the Seabee’s rifle-firing range, it is at the southern end of Mugu lagoon in what once was the sizable Chumash village of Muwu, the path heads straight up the western flank of Mugu Peak (1050’). I usually pass the dirt parking lot on the left as I drive by at around 60 m.p.h., eyes looking ahead to the less photogenic side of Mugu Rock, and preparing for that first shot of ocean on my hurried way to Santa Monica, but this day I pulled in, parked the car, grabbed my paper cup of Peet’s Darjeeling tea and headed up the heavily used track.

This is in the area that burnt in the Camarillo Springs Fire of May 2013 and absent a wet fall, the vegetation is only now beginning to regenerate: first up, bushy red-berry; yucca, sprouting from blackened ‘pinapple’ stumps (the edible crown or base of the plant); bright green opuntia pads growing on charred cactoidal skeletons and coreopsis sprouting amidst its burnt ruins from last spring.

After about 25 minutes of steep climbing, I reached the first overlook of La Jolla Valley, green meadowlands that reach towards the jagged backdrop of Boney Mountain, reputedly a place of power for Chumash shamen. Behind me views of the ocean and Mugu Lagoon fading into the mists of Port Hueneme. To the right the trail continues up towards Mugu Peak where some functionary from the California Department of Parks and Recreation (I presume) had seen fit to raise an American Flag - a reminder of our crass conquest of these primal lands. Here, blue dicks, Indian paintbrush, poppies and white lupine have established their own mountain-top kingdoms somewhat less assertively.

Dropping down towards the rugged La Jolla Canyon the trail crosses a small creek and then leads back towards the meadow. Beneath skeletal oaks with bright green foliage nested in their carbonized upper branches I followed the creek where pools of water and jumbled debris of blackened sticks and rocks remained from the recent rain storms - crowded by patches of mugwort, nettles and poison oak. Along side, mounded, ashen earth forms were dotted with the burnt oaks where once the Chumash and before them, the people of the Millingstone horizon had made camp.

As I followed the track through a mostly monochrome landscape (the creek bottom and the puffs of new oak growth the only green) I noticed, on the blackened earth amidst the white ash of burnt sticks, other more intense dots of white. When I looked closer I realized that I was walking through a casual collection of shell middens – where mussel, barnacle, sea-snail and clam shells had been exposed by the fire. I picked up a small collection from the surface and put the shells in my now empty Peet’s cup. These were the leavings from some Chumash meal in the Mission period, below them no doubt, was buried the detritus from countless sea-food dinners consumed over many thousands of years.

At the other end of the sweeping curves of the PCH, which begin at Pt. Mugu and wriggle sinuously between the Santa Monica Mountains and the Pacific, is County Line beach (as it continues south the highway then veers away from the coast and heads across the Malibu hills). Neptune’s Net, a lonely sea-food roadhouse (except on weekends when it is beseiged by bikers) looks across the road to this surf beach and a small promontory that I have long understood to be a Chumash site (The Sage Gatherer). Immediately opposite this piece of scrubland which offers a fine perch from which to watch the surf, is Little Sycamore Canyon.

Commonly referred to in the archeological literature as the Little Sycamore site, VEN-1 was investigated in the mid ‘50’s by William Wallace who uncovered a kitchen midden site measuring 115m x 150m that, in the process of constructing the PCH has been split into two investigable fragments. He chose to dig at the surf-side promontory and beneath the surface shells he uncovered nineteen bodies, 116 metates (mortars), 123 manos (grinding stones), as well as pipes, charmstones, hammer stones, points (arrowheads), other stone tools and antler-bone flutes, diggers and pendants (Wallace et al. 1956). In the process, he more or less defined the characteristics of the Millingstone culture which he saw as unchanging over the 7,000 years of pre-history evidenced at the site. Later research has demonstrated significant cultural change over time culminating in the development of the Chumash civilization.

I had walked over a similar midden, the mounds, perhaps, not earth-forms but depositories layered over time and entombing a people’s artifactual history; the scattered surface shells remnants of the very last food consumed before their culture was swept away by the ravages of the Spanish.

Another......Beautiful Day

I have found, over the years, that the effort I have exerted in understanding a particular place from an historical, geographical, botanical, biological and meteorological perspective, is richly rewarded in terms of what I am going to call resonance – the feedback loop between a sentient being and its physical setting.

The scope of analysis can differ, but it does seem that the attention we pay to our surroundings enhances the possibility of symbiosis – where what we learn on a theoretical plane is enriched by the actual experience of a place. Perhaps it’s like knowing the plot of a Shakespearean play before attending the performance: an understanding of the narrative structure allows for an openness to the play’s more subtle emanations.

It is the weather, in southern California, that is one of the subtlest aspects of our environment. I often think of a remark attributed to Alice de Janzé in which she had once flung open the shutters of her window in her house in Kenya and declaimed: "Oh, God. Not another fucking beautiful day." De Janzé was a notorious Chicago meat-packing heiress and a key member of ‘The ‘Happy Valley’ set, a community of wealthy expatriates in East Africa in the 1920’s and 30’s, who clearly missed the meteorological vagaries of the Great Lakes region. I still miss the thunderous cycles of sub-tropical weather washing over coastal Sydney, Australia - that great build up of heat and humidity regularly broken by cyclonic storms - which I experienced for a decade before arriving in California.

Once in Los Angeles my regular plaint was, “and when exactly is the rainy season?” Although I arrived at the end of a wet calendar year, 1980, it wasn’t until January 1983 that I had me some serious southern California rain. It started raining late in the season, on my wedding day, the 23rd of the month, and It didn’t let up until late April, for a total of 32”. At that point, my meteorological acculturation was complete - with a visceral understanding of Albert Hammond and Mike Hazelwood's 1972 lyrics,

Seems it never rains in southern California
Seems I've often heard that kind of talk before
It never rains in California
But girl don't they warn ya
It pours, man it pours

Between 1986 and 1991, Southern California experienced a drought (I still remember the moratorium on water served at restaurant meals). Then the El Nino returned in 1991-1992 and began a series of wet winters culminating in the ‘super’ El Nino of 1997 – 1998, during which I was commuting a few times a week from Santa Monica to Ojai. In that memorable season the rains did not let up until the middle of May and totaled 41”. 2005 also brought heavy late winter rains (36”) to Ojai and briefly marooned our newly acquired land: the 150 was closed at the Grade and at Santa Paula canyon where it crosses Sisar  creek. The only reasonably wet year we have experienced since we moved in to the house in May 2009 was that first winter of 2009-10, when rainfall totaled almost 30”.

While it does sometimes seem as though ‘it never rains in southern California’ where one glorious sunny day succeeds the next, we remember the exceptions, the wet years….the dry, not so much. So it is that we find ourselves, in 2014, deep into a drought that has crept up on us like a (water) thief in the night. We have not, collectively, been paying enough attention and by now the emanations are no longer subtle: oaks are dying; year-round creeks are going dry and wells are failing.

Kit Stolz, a local journalist and the curator of a fine blog, A Change in the Wind, recently arranged a symposium, “Facing Drought Together, A Call to Community Response and Action” to focus the attention of Valley residents on the fact that we might just be half way through a 20-30 year drought. William Patzert, Ph.D., of JPL/NASA, introduced the audience to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) a measure of average ocean temperatures in the Pacific that, historically, switches from a warm-phase PDO (leading to cold and wet weather in the western states) to a cool-phase PDO, which causes warmer, drought conditions, every twenty to thirty years.

Many of Ojai’s residential and agricultural landscapes are predicated on a permanent warm-phase PDO. California’s agriculture was founded on such wet-year optimism: the cattle industry in the mid-nineteenth century was established during a warm-phase PDO and subsequently foundered disastrously when the PDO switched states later in the century - the industry then suffered a terminal decline from drought and drought-induced cattle disease. Ojai’s citrus industry may one day suffer the same fate as the Ranchos.

So, in denial of our own experience of the flood and drought cycles of southern California, it takes a NASA scientist to awaken us to the meteorological realities of our Valleys. A few days later, The Guardian published a synopsis of a new study sponsored by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center that suggests that industrial civilization is likely headed for irreversible collapse…………If it’s not one thing it’s another.

Every age harbors doomsayers, but it is undeniable that every previous civilization of the current post-glacial era, a 10,000 year epoch of civilizational efflorescence (a direct result of a warming climate) has collapsed in circumstances that are now alarmingly familiar. The study highlights the probability that global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

The sophistication of our late-capitalist western culture is no guarantee of its longevity. The study notes,

"The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent."

When I taught World History in High School, I used a college level textbook that, from my perspective, was blessedly free of pictures, bar graphs and side-bars. It demanded of the students a sustained textual engagement of which almost all were developmentally incapable. Oh well. But as we marched through the rise and fall of civilizations in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Indian sub-continent, we were alternatively entranced or bored stiff by the repetitive story lines. Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy were the recurring characters in these tales of unheeding hubris and mindless careening towards inevitable collapse. This was the mid to late nineties – when the writing on our own civilizational wall was not quite so evident.

It appears now to be all of a piece. Western Civilization is about to be added to the chapters of failed societies where the harvesting of resources outstrips the ecological carrying capacity of the planet and, concurrently, societies are stratified into rich Elites and impoverished Masses. As the lead author of the study, Safa Motesharri  makes clear, our civilization is doomed by either this collapse of the natural world and the resources it provides or a societal collapse engendered by the over-consumption of the Elites and the inequality-induced famine of the Masses or, most likely, a perfect storm of both.

What is striking about the report is that mathematical models suggest collapse is imminent, perhaps within the next fifteen years - which leaves me with the thought: Never mind the drought – Feel the impending civilizational collapse. Pay attention. Time and Place have assumed a profound, dystopian resonance.

Wild Thing

"It’s the question every writer faces, every morning of his or her life: Am I Malcom Gladwell today, or am I Arthur Rimbaud? Do I sit down with my pumpkin latte and start Googling, or do I fire a couple of shots into the ceiling and then stick my head into a bucket of absinthe?”

This is James Parker’s opening shot (so to speak) in a brief essay on literary bad boys (in honor of William S. Burroughs who was born one hundred years ago this year) in Bookends, The New York Times, February 23, 2014. If I define my personal choice of literary persona, faced by a blank lap-top screen (most often in the evening), along the continuum of milquetoast to bad-boy, then I clearly plump for the lily-livered end of the spectrum. The closest I have come to absinthe is its rather more civilized relative, Pernod, and my experience with fire arms ended in my adolescence with a few half-hearted shots at wood pigeons with a four-ten shotgun and several target rounds with a .303 World War II vintage bolt-action rifle. I have rarely lived my urban life on the wild side. But now, at the edge of the wildland, albeit comfortably ensconced in a modern house, I feel when I broach the keyboard, not only reverberations of the wilderness from without but also stirrings within: atavistic echoes of the primal.

This evening, retreating to the warm embrace of said modern house (which has mild pretensions, in its shape, simplicity and continuous ridged interior volume to being a barn) I brought with me, from my walk up Koenigstein, a frisson of the elemental spritzing my otherwise over-civilized and complacent brain.

A massive wall of marine layer stood on the western horizon, pierced only by the peaks of the Nordhoff range, behind which the sun slipped, its day’s work done well before its scheduled close. Quiffs of cloud scrolled slowly along the Sulphur Mountain ridge, while to the north thin whisps of fog appeared from the east, scribbling over the Topatopa bluffs. I watched the sun sink into its grey blanket while leaning against the south facing side of a riven sandstone rock, my feet against the opposing face of the cleft. From this position of repose, at a little over 2000 feet, there is a commanding view of the upper valley clear to Black Mountain. Walking back through dry grasslands and dead sage, dehydrated coyote brush and over bare earth through which even the redoubtable erodium has failed, thus far, to emerge, I was keenly aware of a change in the weather: an end, at least temporarily, of perhaps the worst Southern California drought in 200 hundred years. By the time this piece posts, we will have experienced the impact of what Wunderground describes thus: “Huge Gulf of Alaska low covering about 4.4 million square miles of the eastern Pacific will bring rain to the area today through Sunday”.

The storm duly lived up to its advance billing and dumped over seven inches of rain on Upper Ojai. The hills resounded with the rush and gurgle of streams: the chaparral came alive. Beneath each rocky fall in each seasonal stream I came across - when I ventured abroad in the lulls between storms - there were clouds of suds as though the rain had awoken the Naiads and each of them, in some sort of crazy mass psychosis, had decided to partake of a bubble bath (Nymphs and Naiads). A more prosaic explanation is that in the three long years since the last major rain, saponins from soap plant roots (Liliacaea Cholorogalum pomeridianum) had leached into the soil and were released, in a foaming frenzy, by the torrents.

The chaparral came alive, but did I? Was this an occasion when the stirrings of the primal were manifested, signaling a revival of my wild self? Was this an Arthur Rimbaud moment? Alas, dear reader, I found myself, on returning to the barn, with a deep yearning for a cup of Yorkshire Tea and a strong compunction to check, on-line, the Ventura County Watershed rainfall totals. In other words, I exhibited, not transformation, but a customary, persnickety frame-of-mind not altogether distant, I suspect, from that of the googling, pumpkin latte loving Malcolm Gladwell.

The wild weekend storm of the 2013-2014 rainfall season was also, by chance, the moment when I finished Feral, George Monbiot’s new book. It is a call to action: for planetary and personal re-wilding. Monbiot is a sometimes inspiring commentator and blogger for The Guardian although he is also, controversially, a proponent of nuclear power (like James Lovelock, the gadfly scientist who established the Gaia hypothesis), a position, post Fukushima, which I believe to be totally, irrevocably, untenable.

In Feral, he calls for the re-introduction of wolves, beavers, lynx and bison into the British countryside in order to initiate ‘trophic cascades’ by which top-predators, by culling their prey, limit the abundance at every level of the food chain and balance the entire ecosystem. The re-introduction of wolves into Yellowstone has demonstrated this remarkable phenomenon; by reducing the elk population the river and streams, absent over-browsing at their banks, now support a richer plant community which in turn supports a richer variety of fish, insects, reptiles and mammals.

Monbiot is an effective popularizer but he is very late to this particular party. In Rewilding and Biodiversity: Complementary Goals for Continental Conservation, Wild Earth, Fall 1998, Michael Soule and Reed Noss make a succinct case for the reintroduction of the entire set of pre-Columbian carnivores – bears, mountain lions and wolves - throughout the North American wilderness, contending that rewilding is “simply scientific realism, assuming the goal is to insure the long term integrity of the land community”.

There have been two catastrophic extirpations of native fauna on this continent. Human kind is deeply implicated in both. The first occurred over about two thousand years, starting around 12,000 years ago: the great Ice Age herds of megafauna vanished at the hands of Asian big-game hunters (the Clovis people) newly arrived in the Americas – in an egregious over-hunting of the energy resource that fueled their exploration of the continent.

As Soule and Noss point out, contemporary ecosystems remain profoundly altered by this extinction episode and beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing up to the present time, a second wave of killings precipitated the drastic decline of the continent’s mesofauna – the senseless killing of grizzlies, mountain lions, antelope, big-horn sheep and cougars. It is the loss of these keystone creatures that has led to a further biotic simplification and species loss in the American wilderness. At about the same time, another non-renewable energy source, fossil fuels, was being extracted from the earth with little concern for the environmental degradation it caused - so critical was this resource to the development of the modern world.

Now, such impacts have been exacerbated by the global triumph of corporate-driven consumerism, NAFTA, continued over-grazing, tree plantations and population growth. The wildlands are under siege. Rewilding offers a short-cut to a re-imagining of wilderness. While Monbiot bleats about the destructive impact of sheep on the uplands of Britain – territory he considers to be ‘sheepwrecked’ – Soule and Noss are equally emphatic in their belief that the American wilderness “will not recover from past and present insults and mismanagement unless its bears, cougars and wolves return”.

A few weekends ago I visited the California Oil museum in Santa Paula (A Tale of Two Cities) which was featuring a special exhibition, ‘Prehistoric California’ where the skulls of mega fauna such as the saber tooth cat, dire wolf, a prehistoric camel, a horse and ground sloth were on display. Greeting visitors, as they entered the gallery, was a life-size, life-like replica of a saber tooth cat on loan from the Page Museum (Bobcat Magic). This was one truly scary moggie (Brit-coinage for a domestic cat), a wild thing hunted to extinction for its meat, fur and saber teeth – variously used as ornaments, weapons or digging tools. Alive, it ripped and tore its prey with a staggering sanguinity, a bloody-minded top-predator that was a vital motor in maintaining the complexity of its ecosystem.

It is remote and miniaturized descendents of the murderous crew of Pleistocene marauders that biologists understand to be essential for the maintenance of our wildlands. We are fortunate that mountain lion, coyote and bear still roam the lowlands of the Santa Ynez Mountains. But the chaparral lacks the grizzly, the last California variant of which was shot in 1922 (in Tulare County) and it is the re-introduction of this bullocking giant of the chamise pampas (or, at least its northern cousin) that would truly energize the plant and animal community.

The grizzly would open up the chaparral up to its trails – for it is the only animal capable of bending the schlerophytic natives to its will. Its presence would spark a re-imagining of our place in the world, banish our complacency, encourage humility and ultimately move us all a little closer to an engagement with our wild selves. It is a thrilling thought: it makes my heart sing.

A Tale of Two Cities

We moved to Ojai a little more than five years ago. Now settled on a south facing slope of the Topatopa foothills our home is a part of the scattering of houses along Koenigstein in Upper Ojai. The road turns off the 150 almost exactly halfway between the downtowns of Santa Paula and Ojai. Although the mail is delivered by the Santa Paula Post Office, we are a part of unincorporated Ventura County that is officially known as Upper Ojai.

We have existed in geographic confusion before. In Santa Monica Canyon, where we lived for almost twenty years prior to moving north, we paid our property taxes to Los Angeles and the kids went to the local LAUSD grade school, but our mail was delivered by the Santa Monica Post Office and thus we had a Santa Monica address.

In L.A. we lived, topographically, in an ancient river bottom a few blocks from the beach. In the winter of 1938-1939 a great flood swept through the Canyon creating a wide brown river where once the road and the creek had been. The following year, the WPA created a concrete channel to carry the creek which ran alongside the road or, where the road was bifurcated, right down the middle of the thoroughfare. As a consequence of the flood, a switch in mail delivery from Los Angeles (Brentwood Post Office) to Santa Monica Post Office was organized and has remained in effect ever since.

Here, we live on the cusp of another watery divide: at the edge of Ventura’s two primary watersheds. (Koenigstein falls just to the Santa Clara River, rather than the Ventura River side of the divide). Thus it is that we drop downhill in both directions, some 1200 feet (and eight miles) to Ojai and 1500 feet (and eight miles) to Santa Paula. Despite the fact that Santa Paula enjoys a moderate climate, benefiting from ocean breezes that blow inland along the course of the Santa Clara River, it is, to all appearances, a less prosperous City than the much smaller enclave of Ojai, which suffers extremes of heat and cold. At the same time, there is a discernible class divide which I have discussed previously in Tsunami.

Ojai possesses many of the characteristics that Christopher Isherwood discerned in post-war Santa Monica Canyon,

“It is a shallow flat-bottomed little valley, crowded with cottages of self-consciously rustic design, where cranky, kindly people live and tolerate each other’s mild and often charming eccentricities. The Canyon is our western Greenwich village, overrun now by various types of outsiders, but still maintaining an atmosphere of Bohemianism and unpretentious artiness.”

Santa Paula has a slightly seedy main street with a number of empty storefronts; in surrounding streets are the often shabby Queen Anne houses, craftsman bungalows and period revival cottages that evidence a formerly wealthy community - from the 1890’s through to the beginning of the Depression in 1929, the town grew rich from the oil and citrus industries. Amongst the commercial and civic relics of a long ago economy are two fine neo-classical bank buildings; the 1923 Mediterranean style Limoneira building (now the Santa Paula Art Museum); the 1905 Odd fellows building with its recently restored copper clad clock tower; the shingle-style Women’s Club from 1917 (now the Santa Paula Theater Center); the 1910 craftsman-style Glen Tavern Hotel; the work of local architect Roy C. Wilson in a variety of early twentieth century styles and, perhaps the best known, the bizarrely eclectic Union Oil building on the corner of Main and 10th street.

Despite a brief flourish of store-front face-lifts in the 1950’s, development moved on, in the second half of the twentieth century, to the coastal conurbation of Camarillo, Oxnard and Ventura. Santa Paula now has a population that is 80% Latino (many of whose members work in local agriculture) and a built-environment locked into a small-town dream-time of late nineteenth and early twentieth century buildings with occasional grace notes of post war ebullience and a great deal of forlorn dereliction. The town, although popular with nostalgia fetishists, under-serves its population’s natural desire to live somewhere adjacent to the twenty-first century. Those aspirations can be fully realized at The Collection, via the 126 and the 101, a newly built urban-consumer fantasy now playing in Oxnard at the west end of a recent developer community, Riverpark – leaving Santa Paula as a dormitory exurb with a scattering of local services, a K-mart, a Vons, Tresierras, a supermarket specializing in Mexican and Central American foods, a furniture store, dress shops and two western wear stores (Muwu). It is all quite charming to fans of the Gothic - of small town America moldering in its grave.

This morning the full moon set behind a notch in the Nordhoff ridge surrounded by a bright, pink streaked halo and, as I crested the eastern ridge of Sisar canyon, in the middle distance, the lights of Ojai twinkled in the early dawn. Our lives are Ojai-centric, we are beguiled by Pixies, the Post Office tower and the sheen of prosperity, but back over our shoulders looms Santa Paula peak, and down the hill and east towards the Santa Clara River lies a town with real architectural gravitas and a very significant history in the economic development of the region.

Nordhoff developed as a small rural town in the late nineteenth century. Amidst the jingoism of the First World War it was renamed. Here was a missed branding opportunity: Nod-Off would have fully encapsulated the character of the sleepy town and recycled 75% of the original name. Instead, the moniker of an Indian village in the happy-hunting-grounds of the Upper Valley was purloined with who knows what long-term deleterious psychic consequences. In 1917, the newly christened and formerly shabby western town was made glamorous by the addition of an arcade financed by a mid-western industrialist besotted by the Romance of the Ranchos (Through a Glass, Darkly). Reborn as Ojai, it was, and is, a Potemkin village – the arcade a stick, chicken wire and stucco stage set - the town dressed to appeal to wealthy bohemians from Hollywood. From the beginning it affected an ‘unpretentious artiness’ and was considered, by virtue of its stunning natural setting, a place of spiritual resonance.

Across the street, in an echo of the arcade, there is a re-built pergola which replicates Richard Requa’s original design (bombed in 1967 in the so-called Ojai Hippie Riots and subsequently demolished). Completed in 1999, it partially barricades Libbey Park from the pedestrian and vehicular experience and leaves the park a wasteland frequented by addled teens and their drug-dealers. Thanks to Landscape Architect Kathy Nolan, the park is being naturalized at its edges and may one day approach the quality of the smaller Cluff Park at the western end of downtown. Meanwhile, it continues to be burdened with David Bury’s heavy handed rendition in steel and concrete (2010) of everybody’s favorite funky wooden band shell, home to Ojai’s signature cultural event, the eponymous music festival, whose spirit is now threatened by this ponderous and acoustically mediocre venue.

Ojai gets by on its charm, characterized by an insouciant raffishness that belies its impoverished downtown building stock. Santa Paula enshrines its past in its excellent Oil museum, Agriculture museum and its Art museum while its history lives - on its streets of architecturally significant commercial, civic and residential buildings. Tourism is the life blood of Ojai; in Santa Paula, not so much, although ironically it has a great deal more to offer.

Both towns emerged little more than a quarter of a century after the establishment of the 31st State, but have followed vastly different narrative arcs. I find it impossible to believe that this tale of two cities ends with Latino gangs roaming the streets of Santa Paula and wealthy Anglo-septuagenarians trolling Ojai’s arcade: the rediscovery and rejuvenation of Santa Paula is now being hatched by twenty-somethings in Silver Lake and other hipster colonies in Venice and the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles.

When that happens – watch out Ojai!

California Spring

For the last half century, I have pictured David Hockney with a schoolboy cap, owlish wire-frame spectacles, skinny, horizontally striped tie, a shock of blond hair and a cigarette drooping from his lips - the perennial bad-boy of British art.

A few weekends ago, in San Francisco, that image was finally retired and the artist, now in his seventies (and I not much more than a decade behind him), established himself in my consciousness not as a caricature but as a great painter of place. It’s not that he hasn’t been painting place all along but in his new show, A Bigger Exhibition, he is willing to demonstrate a level of profundity that he has often preferred to hide. During all those years in Los Angeles (he arrived in 1964, already a star) – a place that has never rewarded depth, except, perhaps, in its swimming pools – he painted surface; then he created the fractured desert polaroids that were so easy to love; but in the late 1990’s he moved to Yorkshire to be close to his ailing parents and he attacked (there’s really no other word for it) the landscapes of his youth. He held them hostage through the seasons, imprisoned them in photographs and video and then made them immortal through the epic scale of his paintings.

At the de Young, all was revealed. His practice, his passion and, ultimately the visual qualities of a very particular environment: the rolling farmland and woods of the East Yorkshire wolds. There were riotous examinations of how we receive images in glorious Technicolor but that the brain most often interprets in sfumato – colors toned down into a smoky medley of sage greens, washed out blues and soupy taupes. Hockney refuses to back off the loud pedal, he forces us to admit that yes, that muddy puddle really is magenta. This is the north of England, in winter, spring, summer and fall, every season rendered in splashy colors and frenetic line and with an urgency that is evident in every brush stroke. That urgency arises from a need to reflect what he sees, not as an idea, but as an image: in turn, we begin to see with him, in thrilling sympathy with his zealous eye and, ultimately, with his honesty as a painter.

The show, barely contained in some ten large galleries, was staged on the ground floor of the De Young, a typically bravura exercise by Herzog and de Meuron, Swiss architects who cloak their only slightly punk modernism with gloriously tactile materials: here embossed copper panels for the low-slung galleries and perforated copper sheets that drape the twisted tower, at one corner of the site, which houses the administration offices and an observation platform. Their 2010 building replaces a bizarre Egyptoid beaux-arts building thankfully felled in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

Across the way from the de Young is another architectural entertainment, the Renzo Piano Academy of Sciences, an overtly green building that extends from the surviving limestone wing of the old 1934 building (similarly dealt a death blow in 1989). Retaining the symmetry of the older building, the new is neo-classical modern, with slender steel columns which support an extended canopy shading the inner building in a peristyle. Piano’s new trick is to lay photo voltaics atop the translucent canopy. The body of the building is green roofed in a series of domes studded with occuli sky-lights. The roof, best seen from the upper floors of the de Young, seems to mimic the adjacent mounding land forms, which are heavily treed and vegetated sand dunes.

To learn that Golden Gate Park is an elaborate horticultural confection layered on drifting dunes was disappointing: predictably, I shed a tear for the now forever lost, bleak and wind-blown landscape of yore. By 1880,155,000 trees covered the dunes in typical late-Victorian excess, fashioned, in what we now consider a wrong-headed eclecticism, out of (mostly) California pines and Australian eucalypts. Lorrie noted that this greening of the dunes made it more accessible to the adjacent huddled masses. I was willing to admit that the dunes were probably doomed given the growth of the City and that misguided horticultural adventurism might possibly be preferable to their commercial development.

Back in the de Young, in their permanent American collection, there are a number of mid to late nineteenth century paintings by Albert Bierstadt, 1830–1902, one of those Hudson River School artists who was enthralled with the exoticism of Yosemite and the giant redwoods of California and came west to paint them. Among his paintings on display is California Spring, which portrays a pastoral scene of cows grazing in a field contrasted with an approaching thunderstorm over the Sacramento River valley. This late period Bierstadt is inferior to much of his earlier Yosemite works, less interesting than his giant redwood paintings and less iconic than his heart-rending late painting, The Last of the Buffalo, from 1888, a study for which is also on display at the de Young.

The Spring image is of a tamed landscape - a pastoral that proclaims its domesticity (hence the latter-day aurochs). Yet it is phenomenally popular and prints of the work, now in the public-domain, or hand-painted knock-offs, can be purchased in the size of your choice. Bierstadt’s earlier paintings of the Sierras celebrated the mystical power of wilderness: they were much favored by critics and the public who, at some level, understood that these paintings served the mythic pretensions of the young Republic.

Roderick Nash in his seminal work, Wilderness and the American Mind, 2001, makes the point that wilderness was a basic ingredient of American culture in the nineteenth century. In contrast, Bierstadts’s pastoral idyll, painted at a time in his career when he had fallen from favor, now sounds a ghastly pre-echo of Thomas Kinkade, the self-proclaimed ‘Painter of Light’ whose work became a mass-market cultural cliché in the late twentieth century.

Hockney’s Yorkshire Wold paintings, his iPad series of The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) and the 25 drawings in his charcoal series, The Arrival of Spring in 2013 (twenty thirteen) describe a landscape deeply familiar to him: one shaped by the human hand since the New Stone Age; farmed by Britons through the Iron and Bronze ages, the area then further deforested by the Romans and settled in succession by Saxons, Danes and Normans. Its fertile chalk soils are now subject to some of Europe’s most intense farming. Hockney found, through the seasons (but especially in spring), in the copses, rolling hills and farm tracks of his boyhood a subject for his relentlessly questing eye. Ironically, his iPad drawings of Yosemite which were included in this vast exhibit, and ink-jet printed to a staggering 12’ x 9’, are supremely decorative, but entirely lacking in gravitas.

I am cautiously celebrating the California spring: despite the lack of substantial rain, the season is well underway in the chaparral. Locally, soap plant, wild cucumber, blue-eyed grass, deer weed, peonies, purple nightshade (solanum xanti), goosefoot, vinegar weed, morning glory and erodium (the infidel of the group) are all poking their heads out of the dry ground. Elderberry and chaparral currant are flowering; sycamores and walnuts are leafing out.

Although several oaks have died on the property and, across the way on the north-facing slopes of Sulphur Mountain, many more are now shrouded in canopies of dead leaves, the overall resilience of the schlerophytic natives is phenomenal. Many of the trees are deep rooted and as I walk over the dusty land I imagine the aquifers beneath flowing sluggishly in porous rock or, more often, in slurries of yellow and black sands, nourishing the feeder roots of sycamore, oak, laurel sumac, holly leafed cherry, toyon, walnut, mountain mahogany and ceanothus.

Hockney is now back in Los Angeles, living in the Hollywood Hills. Beguiled for so many years by the exoticism of Los Angeles, fascinated by its faux irrigated landscapes and amoeboid pools, perhaps now, in his new maturity, he will finally discover the chaparral spring as fit subject for his scintillating, late-period landscape painting.

Pale Creatures

Sleeping alone on a 90 foot fishing boat, moored just off the Costa Rican Pacific coast, Dr. Lori Pye was woken by a dull thud. Getting out of her bunk to investigate, she stumbled on deck and bashed her head against a davit supporting the little motor boat which kept her connected to the mainland. Knocked unconscious, she lay where she had fallen, quite still, until dawn when she became aware that next to her on the cold steel plate was another pale creature: a dead shark, wantonly fished from the ocean, its fins sawed off, and then dumped on deck.

Lori worked with the environmental-action group, Sea Shepherd, when this Godfather-like threat was delivered, presumably by a local poacher enraged by Lori’s work dedicated to the eradication of shark fishing – an activity pursued solely for the profit in preparing the luxury delicacy of shark-fin soup, largely controlled by the Taiwanese. Sea Shepherd subsequently endured an un-happy relationship with the Costa Rican authorities after their intrepid leader, Paul Watson, prematurely attempted the arrest of a long-line shark fishing vessel, the Vadero I, off of Guatemala before taking up Costa Rica’s invitation to help patrol the waters around the Cocos Islands World Heritage site. Watson was arrested when he docked in Puntarenas and charged with endangering the lives of the Vadero I crew. Watson and crew managed to flee the next morning but he has been under indictment ever since and last year was briefly extradited back to Costa Rica to face these decade-old charges.

Lori’s story unfolded in the Administrative offices of the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy in a Wild about Ojai talk titled, The Human Ecosystem (January 11, 2014).

Twinned, for a few hours, with a mammal whose consciousness had been brutally ended in asphyxiation while hers had been merely suspended, Lori awoke to an epiphany: that we share our home, the earth, with all other living things in a complex ecosystem that relies, because of human kind’s great ability to do damage to that home and the life-forms within it, on ours species’ collective psychological health - on our understanding of the balance, stewardship and comity required to maintain a healthful relationship with our environment. The well-being of the individual’s psyche can thus be the key to ensuring the outer, physical, health of the planet. After briefly becoming Sea Shepherd’s Director of Operations Lori retreated to the calmer waters of academia to pursue her passion for Ecopsychology, the discipline that addresses these concerns.

 Lori challenged her audience to consider how we might create, as she puts it, “a new narrative for the relationships between nature and human nature”. There are serious structural obstacles in the way of developing such a revised narrative. The foremost barrier to lives lived on the planet in a sustainable relationship - and there are many - is a collective psychological pathology, the transcendent ideology of Capitalism.

This system is entirely dependent on turning natural resources into saleable goods and at this point, as Jerry Mander argues in The Capitalism Papers, Counterpoint Press, 2012, we are engaged in a kind of global, system wide Ponzi-scheme. The collapse of our macro-environmental systems such as the oceans, the atmosphere, rivers and the climate, at least as we know them, seems inevitable faced with the resource pillage necessary to feed the beast, for Capitalism demands not a steady resource diet but one that grows with the expansion of goods and services (the measure of GDP) necessary to ensure ‘the health’ of our economy.

As I pointed out in No Soft Landing, the development of Capitalism as a dominant economic force in the West is coincident with the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels. As such it has thrived over the past three centuries when these resources were plentiful and cheap. Given the finite nature of the world’s mineral resources it is self evident that a system for which growth is imperative will, sooner or later bump up against these limits. Put another way, Capitalism demands the conversion of the living into the dead. Animals, plants, minerals, sunlight and fossilized solar energy are appropriated by the economy at a scale that threatens the very viability of the ecosystem.

The Capitalist bastions are manned by the super-rich. With the possible exception of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age in late nineteenth century America, we have not seen such concentrations of power and wealth as exist today since the European monarchies of the eighteenth century - the excesses of which unleashed a democracy project that continues to unfold. That project, most notably in the United States, has now been captured by the Capitalist oligarchy, through political contributions and lobbying, and subverted to wealth accumulation and the cooption of the public commons to its own ends. Our government now routinely arranges for Corporations and their leaders to escape taxation, receive Government hand-outs and profit obscenely from health care, defense, communications and public works while belt-tightening in the areas of entitlements, education, social services and basic infrastructure is focused exclusively on the 99%.

We are thus faced with a system that is entrenched both economically and politically and supremely adept at the co-option of potentially threatening ideologies such as living in a sustainable relationship with the Earth. In the West, the development of newspapers in the latter half of the nineteenth century enabled the rich to quickly regain control of the recently enfranchised (male) masses. The ability to shape the debate around issues of war and peace remains with the media - still mostly owned by the oligarchy, and still supported, by and large, by purveyors of consumption, advertisers of goods and services blindly driven to an expansion of their markets - and is key to the demagogic control of the public-mind.

Eco-warriors such as Paul Watson operate entirely at the margins or worse, provide fodder for the media industry that perpetuates heedless consumption. Watson’s Whale Wars is into its sixth season on Animal Planet Cable TV which, as VP of ad sales Sharon O’Sullivan gushes to Adweek, November 18, 2013,

“… had all the pet endemics and all the major female packaged-good companies…now we have a really strong proposition against male categories—alcohol, home improvement and the more male-focused end of the movies category.”

Mander, like Naomi Klein (No Soft Landing), believes in a kind of Eco-socialism where corporations would be reconstituted “to harvest private interests to serve the public interest, rather than seek profit”. Perhaps he should try selling that idea on Animal Planet, right between the ads for Gillette’s Venus Embrace Women's Razor and Bud Light.

The history of systemic and radical societal change over the last few hundred years is not pretty, beginning in the late eighteenth century with the French Revolution and moving to the nineteenth to include that first foray into modern industrial warfare, the American Civil War; the twentieth century then offers up the grisly examples of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot, to name only the most egregious actors in the effort to create new social, economic and political paradigms.

The restructuring necessary to accommodate a fundamentally altered relationship between humanity and nature will dwarf all previous efforts at systemic change. Interior psychological remodeling seems like a very attractive alternative but the ‘new narrative’ must necessarily wait on the unraveling of Capitalism. The resolution, for now, may be to initiate a slow, peaceful, pulling of threads.

Ancient Bestiary

In the yellow dawn light chaparral is draped over the boney massif that is composed of the Topatopa mountains and fore grounded by the Santa Paula Ridge; this is the jagged head of the Santa Ynez mountain range that coils lazily back to the ocean in a long tail that terminates at Gaviota: It is as though a dragon had freshly emerged from the depths beyond the Continental Shelf, its tail dripping a few miles on-shore, its head resting in the Sespe Condor Sanctuary - and I was running in the folds of its scabrous skin, still black under the jaundiced sky.

A few nights ago I dreamt that I was lying on the planet’s crust and had an awareness of its curvature, of its being a sphere spinning through space: I felt profoundly lonely. What if the Earth itself was my only friend? Reason enough to anthropomorphize the planet so that its mantle is its skin, its vegetation a fuzzy insulation or a scaly armor, its magma the bodily fluids that occasionally erupt out of suppurating pimples, and its heart the lumpy mass of lode stone at the North Pole. In my dream I had caught it bathing in the vast oceans that enwrap it and the whole enchilada was floating blissfully in the firmament.

Now, in Upper Ojai, there appeared a dragon in an embrace of the planet’s moribund flesh. In many mythologies, dragons function as agents of creation and are enmeshed in doubleness - the light and dark, the yin and yang - that gives rise to the world. But here the dragon, substantiated in mountains, had assumed the traditional Chinese male form of Yang, recumbent on the female Earth – dark, passive and absorptive – the essence of Yin. This fantastical juxtaposition exists for me as a provocation, as a goad towards an understanding of what symbolic relevance might exist in twenty-first century landscapes.

There is, as a subset of Archeology, a discipline called Landscape Archeology, which treats landforms, in as much as they are symbolically interpreted by humankind, as cultural artifacts and investigates the morphology of the land as it has been adapted to serve farming, housing, transportation, burial and other ceremonial needs. Here in Upper Ojai, anthropogenic changes to the landscape have come only slowly in the last one hundred and fifty years or so. Previously, the Chumash and their forebears had neither the technology nor the will to make changes to earth forms beyond paths and flattened areas (cleared of rocks) for their village settlements and shallow mounds for burials.

Roads, oil roads, house sites, and farming have now altered the terrain in still subtle ways following in the wake of game trails, ancient meadows, and native village settlements (Sisa, Mupu, ?awhay and, here on Koenigstein, old Indian camps that nuzzle Bear Creek). What remain almost entirely untouched are the spalled face of the Topatopas, Kahus (now called Black mountain), scarred only with a single track along its crest carved from a Chumash spirit path (Roaming Charges), the Santa Paula Ridge - a spiritual focal point of Mupu, and the sinuous ridges of the Santa Ynez Mountains which surely penetrated Chumash and the Oak Grove Peoples’ consciousness as a powerful, serpentine earth form - a smaug-like guardian, perhaps, of the center of their universe, Mount Pinos.

Despite the availability of satellite imagery, we are slow to read the mythologies embedded in the planet’s wrinkled mantle and remain more attuned to meanings in the constellations above, than on the earth below. Hermes Trismegistus, the great Pagan Prophet, and founder of the western Hermetic tradition, established the maxim, “That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracle of the One Thing." Or, more simply, ‘as above so below’ which serves as a core principal of the occult sciences.

As I pointed out in Real Suspense, celestial beings mediated Chumash reality from above but they were twinned with creatures that roamed the terrestrial plane, thus the deer was associated with the Milky Way while the spirit of Mars was mirrored in the condor. Wolves, bears, antelope, coyote and rabbits all had their astral associations. What is not clear from the archeological and anthropological record is whether earth forms and rock alignments were recognized as a kind of visionary geography or even, as Richard Leviton (RV III) believes he has discovered at Glastonbury and Elizabeth Van Buren at Rennes le Chateau, a landscape zodiac.

The extent to which we are reluctant to accept evidence of the dragon in the landscape, so to speak, was brought home to me upon publication of Rock Art at Little Lake, produced by the Cotsen Institute of Archeology Press at UCLA, 2013, and with which I was involved as an illustrator and word-smith for several years. The book, beautifully designed by Doug Brotherton features, on the back cover, a stunning aerial image of the eponymous lake with a very obvious dragon form curling around its eastern shore. Obvious, that is, to me.

The confused morphology of dragon, serpent and lizard (or crocodile) is evident across cultures and where I see dragon, others may see a more prosaic reptile. Moko, for instance, appears in some Pacific Island cultures as a lizard with both human and avian features making it King of the Lizards, while at the same time, as a biological mash-up, it transcends the animal kingdom altogether and rises to the level of an entirely mythic creature. Similarly, the rattle snake, amongst some Native American cultures, exists as both a corporeal viper and a transcendent spirit animal sometimes associated with thunder and lightning (which, to some minds might signify a fire-snorting dragon!).

At Little Lake, the head of the dragon, formed from a basalt lava flow, faces due south while the western flank of its body is delineated by a talus slope. The creature sprawls along a mile of lake-frontage. The lake, a nearby cinder cone and the dragon make up the defining large-scale characteristics of this oasis site, an ancient crossroads on the western edge of California’s Great Basin. Teams of students and volunteers, led by Dr. Jo Anne Van Tilburg and John Bretney, combed the site for rock art over a period of more than ten years and were well aware of the power of this landscape image that forms the eastern backdrop to the lake.

Harrington (Trunk Show) noted that the Panamint Shoshone knew the escarpment as Rattlesnake Ridge and, as Jo Anne Van Tilburg et al point out, “There is little doubt that the serpentine configuration was noticed and valued by other….groups”. The Kawaiisu commemorate a mythic giant snake (tugubaziitbit) in several landforms close by, but no definitive evidence suggests that the Little Lake land-monster was amongst them, but today, be it Great Snake or Dragon its covert presence is dramatically outed on the back cover of the UCLA volume.

Little Lake (formerly Little Owens Lake) is just to the east of US 395 which is the primary route from Mojave to the ski resorts of the Eastern Sierras and the road is thus heavily trafficked with laden SUV’s in the winter. I drove by a few times a year for the decade that Lorrie and I took the kids snow-boarding. Over the years I fell into a rhythm of looking out for the lake, which comes right to the edge of the paving and is almost at the same level, then casting my eye beyond it to the curving line of the talus slope, which rises more than a hundred feet above the water, and fantasizing about one day running along its ridge - the dragon’s spine.

Early in the second half of the twentieth century, Noam Chomsky suggested that the basic syntactical structures of language are hard-wired within the human brain, and Claude Levi Strauss, the French anthropologist, proposed that similarly, a shared mythic consciousness exists across all cultures. A century earlier, American transcendentalists suggested that matter is but a metaphor for spirit.

While language is most often the medium of transmission for mythologies - and these expressions of speculative narrative share universal structural similarities - it is perhaps through the armature of landscape and the Etch A Sketch of starry skies that myths are most effectively reified – shared foundational stories made manifest in the world; matter made spirit.

So it is that landforms, gnarled oak trunks, rocks, rivers and streams can have metaphoric meaning in the world. Lacking an oral tradition of mythology (or the pecked and painted symbology of rock art), they may be our last repository of a universal consciousness, a link to the narratives of our becoming and - like the constellations - contain an ancient bestiary through which these stories may be told.

The Wild Frontier

Beyond the creek, and thus beyond our property line, I saw a glowing orange-leafed tree; a cottonwood in its autumnal glory massed against a dark wall of chaparral.....

By the eleventh century in Japan, the tradition of establishing houses within artfully created recreations of the natural world was well established in the capital, Kyoto. Distant mountain views were ‘borrowed’ to complete the illusion of living in nature while the family remained secure in a walled garden.

Already entrenched in Asia, the notion that one might look beyond one’s own domain and enjoy borrowed views came late to the aristocratic European mind, arriving on the heels of the establishment of colonies outside of Europe. The ‘new’ territories provided room for the more rambunctious and adventurous elements in society to pursue their often predatory appetites: in their erstwhile homelands views beyond the compound could then be safely parsed for aesthetic satisfaction rather than defensive intelligence.

As European artists began to explore more rural themes in their paintings, it became fashionable to value the bucolic scene beyond the stage-managed garden precinct. In England, the naturalistic style of landscape design developed early in the eighteenth century with the work of William Kent and Horace Walpole and was further developed by Capability Brown and Humphry Repton. Their work was facilitated by the use of the ha-ha, a sunken wall and ditch that provided security but allowed for vistas reaching far beyond the estate. Aspects of the bucolic scene were included in the grounds themselves – famous examples include the milking parlor at Versailles and the hermit refuge at Stowe.

In nineteenth century America, wilderness, the ‘out-there’, had a political as well as aesthetic role. Thoreau suggested that “in wilderness is the preservation of this world”. Simon Schama (Landscape and Memory, 1995)  notes that there was the sense that wildland, those frontier places beyond factory, farm and garden, “would be the antidote for the poisons of industrial society”. Politically, wilderness was conflated with the idea of frontier and by inference, freedom - whose swaggering symbol, for a brief cultural moment, was Davy Crockett - King, you will remember, of the wild frontier.

I have always believed in the experiential primacy of landscape over the built-environment, yet for much of our history it made sense to retreat behind structure - be it cave, castle or courtyard. The impulse remains. Spanning the second half of the twentieth century and the first several years of the twenty first, I was mostly immured in the walled garden typology.

Growing up in darkest Surrey, those walls may have been holly, hazel and beech hedges (or in places, wire threaded through concrete posts) but there was never any doubt that the immediate world around the Norman-roofed, steel casement windowed and red-bricked semi-detached was carefully prescribed. Our patch of green-sward, vegetable garden, fruit trees and flower beds was effectively barricaded against our neighbors' potential encroachment - as their territory was defended against our predations - although the hedges did afford a measure of porosity to pre-teens willing to suffer the sartorial and tonsorial mayhem that was the cost of passage. (It never occurred to these intrepid bipedal hedgehogs, and full disclosure, I was one such, to clamber through the more easily traversed but more exposed wire fences). Our worlds were quartered, and our horizons mostly measured by property lines - escape lay not into the wild but out the front gate and into the country lanes and 'B' roads that offered kinetic thrills on bicycle and then motor-bike.

Later, there were a few idyllic years in Sydney, Australia, when my backyard was the inland waterway Pittwater, and, on the further shore, the dense bush of Ku-Ring-Gai National Park: here was a borrowed view, an extension of a mean concrete patio, that exploded with a dark aboriginal magic which even the vacuous day sailors in the middle distance could not entirely expunge. In Los Angeles, first in Echo Park and then in Santa Monica Canyon, my gardens were again fenced, walled and hedged but six years ago I finally engineered my escape to the urban wildland of Upper Ojai.

Love of the wildlands is culturally conditioned. It is, let's face it, an intensely bourgeois predilection. In fact, it is an almost obscene luxury to find aesthetic pleasure in the natural world when, for most of human history (and pre-history) that world has represented nothing more than the source of an extremely hard-won livelihood amidst threats from ravening beasts. I blame the Transcendentalists. And John Muir. Now, we have all, metaphorically speaking, ventured beyond the walled garden: we went as soon as it was safe to do so and were ready to see the picturesque (the randomly composed) in nature’s apparently casual but inherently systematic ecosystems that drape themselves over the earth’s antic geological musculature. The Romantic notion that wilderness was a veil through which the guiding spirit of the universe might be experienced only encouraged its worship. Muir famously wrote of Yosemite that it was there that "Nature had taken pains to gather her choicest treasures to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her."

Here, in the upper valley, there are grazing lands, horse ranches, oil-lands, avocado and citrus orchards and boutique vineyards: beyond, the tangled complications of chaparral, oak meadow land, scree slopes and sandstone rock faces; a road runs through it, climbing out of the Santa Clara River basin and, a little beyond the Koenigstein turn-off, it reaches the Summit (grade-school, general store and hamburger stand).  This is the County divide where water flows east to the Santa Clara or west to the Ventura River. The road continues on a slight descent through the wide pasture lands until Black Mountain signals the beginning of the Grade, that precipitous decline down into the lower valley. There is much here on which the lover of the picturesque may dwell and almost all residences borrow a piece of the pastoral valley, back-grounded by chaparral or oak meadowland, as their view – a wild frontier fringed with grass.

Schama makes the point that Arcadia, the idyllic landscape that resides beyond the domestic realm, is of two types - wilderness or pastoral – and that these extremes appear to play out in opposition to one another across a range of landscapes, so that a lawn may be mown or left wild and unruly with clumping bunch grasses and forbs; a park formal or naturalistic. Ultimately however, he concedes that these two notions sustain each other: Thoreau, for instance championed both the wilderness and the picket-fence Arcadias of small-town New England.

Vast swathes of suburban Los Angles were laid out in the spirit of Frank Jesup Scott’s mid-nineteenth century The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds where mown-grass was intended to sweep to the street with no property fences to obstruct the suburban meadow. Lacking privacy, these undifferentiated front yards were eventually widowed, with family life confined to the back yard and the pastoral ‘views’ to the front losing their coherence once driveways were cut to conform to post WWII off-street parking ordnances.

Our front yard view includes aspects of the pastoral, and we have landscaped our property in a way that honors Frank Jessup Scott: a wild, currently drought stricken swathe of bunch grasses, drifted rocks and patches of bare dirt sweep down alongside the driveway to the street, an unruly echo of a suburban meadow.

To the rear, a similarly impoverished meadow beyond the pool quickly gives way to a chaparral fringe of toyon, elderberry, walnut, baccharis, laurel sumac and mountain mahogany which, in turn, is quickly consumed by a wilderness ultimately bounded by the distant Interstate 5 and State Highway 101. My view is cut short by the Topotopas but psychically, I have borrowed the entire Los Padres National Forest and the Carrizo Plain beyond as both an antidote to the “poisons of industrial society” and to be my wild frontier.

The F-Word

Rebecca Solnit, in her dazzling history of walking, Wanderlust, Berkeley, 1998, writes of the Nevada desert: "Nothing happens here most of the time, except seasons, weather, light, and the workings of one's body and mind" - Upper Ojai is like that.....but not New York City, except that even amidst the urban tumult the mind can sometimes float free and perceive the earth's mantle beneath the civilizational infrastructure or catch light, weather and seasons at play within it.

And so it was. I walked along the northern edge of Prospect Park and realized that I was on a ridge line: heading south, slightly uphill towards the highest point in Brooklyn. In the mid nineteenth century, Green-Wood Cemetery was the most popular scenic destination in the United States, exceeding, by virtue of its proximate population that had swelled to become the third largest in the country, even Niagara Falls. Today, this high ground to the south of Park Slope remains bucolic but the almost 500 acres of mounding hills are littered with a one hundred and seventy five year accumulation of tomb stones, mausoleums and crypts, and is guarded at its perimeter with a double row of spiked cast-iron railings sufficient to deter even this intrepid trespasser seeking further topographical stimulus, distant watery vistas - even, perhaps, a hint of some yonder wildland. Disinclined to continue my circuit, (turns out I was only a couple of blocks shy of the gothic-spired entry), I lowered my sights to the surrounding frame houses which have in common only their mean front yards and their composite claddings that make determined, albeit unfortunate attempts to simulate a compendium of wood, stone and brick finishes, and turned back.

As you move north along the avenues, this surficial dissembling resolves itself once you hit the upper-middle class enclaves of Park Slope, where a dark tan cementitious render has been uniformly slathered on the three and four story 'brown-stones' whose original cladding has long fallen prey to the acidic assault of this borough's erstwhile heavy industries which, for a century or more, cast a noxious pall over the land. Green-Wood cemetery occasionally emerged, if early photographs can be believed, from said pall into a relatively un-besmirched stratosphere, its greensward enrobed in a sylvan filigree.

Returning along Fifth Avenue, alert to the happenstance that can befall the flâneur (whose guise I had adopted during this East coast sojourn) I glanced along 22nd Street as it falls down to the East River and saw, between dockland infrastructure, Gustave Eiffel's Statue of Liberty: appearing dwarfish but effulgent, she stood splendidly marooned in the greasy swells of the turbid waterway.

As I pointed out in Waterland, New York's urbanity exists in a liminal state between the gelid ocean waters of the north Atlantic and post-glacial sedimentary flatlands (occasionally pierced by granite outcroppings). The City's architecture and infrastructure responds to this precarious netherworld, where solid earth is encircled by liquid ocean, by going tall and throwing long: hence sky-scrapers and suspension bridges. In a post-Thanksgiving haze of alcohol, sugar and L-trytophan, it was decided that son Will, brother-in-law Mike and I would broach one such strand of connective tissue by walking across Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge and then visit the New Museum in the Bowery, early Saturday.

It was a brisk morning, the temperature hovering around freezing, when we joined the multi-cultural throng headed for Manhattan along the bridge's boardwalk. Cable and arch were the dominant tropes until David Child's Freedom Tower, rising out of Ground Zero, began to dominate the distant shore. This building, by dint of an extraordinarily tall spire, is North America's highest whilst also bidding to be its blandest. It is a pallid replacement for Yamasaki's taught, minimalist dolmen.The formal duties of remembering the fallen of 9/11 have been off-shored, so to speak, to a hole in the ground into which endless walls of water fall, which, as I have noted elsewhere (We are all Marsh Dwellers Now), is more effective as an oracle than a shrine: foretelling the recent (and perhaps future) fate of lower Manhattan.

To the right of Child's Freedom Fry, which stands carbonized and erect, is Gehry's shimmering luxury residential tower, the tallest such building in New York. The building's warped stainless steel cladding appears to fall like rivulets of molten ore down its facades to Spruce Street below and on this wintry morning the rays of a weak sun bounced deliriously amidst the flow. As iconography that celebrates life over death it is incomparably greater than its starchy neighbor.

Once over the bridge, after a glance down to the now abandoned Pier 17 Mall and the closed-up Fulton Market building in South Street Seaport, victims of superstorm Sandy, we were quickly pulled into the Chinatown vortex. If art's purpose is to hold a revelatory mirror to the world then Chris Burden's sculpture succeeds at the highest level: a retrospective of his work awaited us once we had pushed north into the Bowery and beheld the antic storey-stacking of Sanaa's New Museum - the artist's 'Ghost Ship' perched on a facet of its discontinuous facade. While still young, Burden (a long-time Topanga resident), used his body in an extraordinary series of performance pieces that probed the very essence of our corporeal reality within the complexities of space, time and civilization. At Cal State Long Beach, he immured himself in a locker for several days then, in the following years he had an accomplice shoot him with a .22; cast himself away on a remote Baja peninsula; and had himself dumped in traffic on Wilshire Boulevard in a body bag with only a few flares to protect him - fragments from a grand sequence of performances that pitted his body against the world in dialectical ripostes.

Now an aging art superstar, he uses meticulously crafted objects to continue his investigations. He sent the clinker built dory (that, for the duration of the Retrospective, serves as a sign of the show) on an epic autonomous sailing voyage from Fair Isle, in the Shetlands, to the old ship building port of Newcastle-on-Tyne in Northern England. His ghost ship, an ocean going drone - a surrogate for our own fated journeying.

My final New York voyage into the psycho-geographic realm (a place where the writer Will Self suggests opportunities for "disentangling the modern conundrum of psyche and place" exist) involved driving deep into Manhattan from Cobble Hill (no elevated land in sight) in pal Michael Moran's forest green Toyota Highlander (a recent replacement for his late lamented Wagoneer). Over brunch, the decision had been made to visit Todd William's and Billie Tsien's almost completed ice-skating rink in Prospect Park, but a return to the park - in the vicinity of my earlier walk, the site of two of my runs and Thanksgiving morning's five mile turkey-trot, which (proud parent alert) son Will won with a string of five minute miles vanquishing 2200 fellow Brooklyn bib-chipped hipsters and yours truly, ghost running and bib-less somewhere in the upper reaches of the master's divisions - was not, NPI, an altogether engaging prospect.

Once in the car the decision was made to visit Roosevelt island, erstwhile home to the borough's criminally insane and now, at its southern end, straight-jacketed by great sheets of grey-white granite and sea-walled with geometrically placed dark boulders: it was there that we watched this lithic islet resist the on-rushing tide as the lights of Manhattan, apparently ring-mastered by the down-turned rictus of the Chrysler building's flashing dentition, emerged in the deepening twilight. We stood in the prow of this much delayed memorial to FDR (designed four decades ago by Louis Kahn) described by three walls and opening to the island's southern shore with views of Brooklyn's waterfront beyond. Behind us were two large (mis-matched) granite panels on which were inscribed the nub of Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union address in which he enumerated the four essential freedoms of speech, worship, want and fear. On the obverse side of this panel, facing the approach across a triangular lawn flanked by gravel walks and allées of little leaf Lindens (Tilia cordata) floats a giant bronze head of the man - greatest of the twentieth century's three great Presidents all of whom, perhaps not coincidentally, were known primarily by their initials - FDR, JFK and LBJ.

Moved by the place, moved by Roosevelt's humanist vision, and sharing in this experience with family and a friend, I reflected on the sad mis-use to which the word Freedom has been subjected over the last decade or so, mired as it has been in the tawdry imperialist program of a wounded state.

Lightning Wolf

We met Whitey at the Grapevine campsite off of New Mexico State Highway 15. He arrived in an early 1980’s F-250 truck. He proceeded to lead our group of two cute-utes and a full-size SUV through three crossings of the East fork of the Gila River. We were headed for a ranch - where Whitey runs a few head of cattle and acts as caretaker - that sits in meadowland described by a lazy oxbow. The river, in geologic time, has carved through the sedimentary rock – leaving horizontally striated canyon walls that rise up and are crowned by an assortment of  mesas, buttes and hoodoos (tall skinny spires of rock).

After we all spent the night in the adobe ranch house, Will, Nicki and I climbed up the north western slope along a steep scree path. Arriving at the narrow mesa that runs along the ridge we looked out to the west just as the sun was threatening to top the eastern canyon wall. While we idly searched for shards of mimbres pottery the sun began to play on the distant Mogollon Mountains and then slowly spread across the Gila Wilderness that lay before us.

This is remote country, but tourists regularly trek to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument located at the end of Highway 15, about seven miles north of the ranch. About mid-morning, this time without an escort, we took Will’s X-Terra back through the looping East Fork and headed up the highway – the last stretch of a route the State has named ‘Trail of the Mountain Spirits Scenic Byway’ that originates in Silver City – gateway to the Gila. The cliff dwellings were built into a series of shallow caves halfway up the south facing wall of a narrow canyon some seven centuries ago and although only inhabited for a generation, they stood intact until the late nineteenth century when local ranchers looted and burnt them in the belief that they were contemporary Apache redoubts. When we arrived they were in full sun and heavily patrolled by loquacious Park Service volunteers.

As late as 1883, a miner named James McKenna visited the caves and found the dwellings complete, with heavy pine beams supporting roofs of twigs and grasses and a layer of adobe plaster. In the cool interiors, stone hammers and war axes, turquoise beads, and mimbres-style pots decorated with images of bear, elk and deer lay undisturbed on the floors. In addition, he found a mummified female child of about two years of age with cottonwood fiber woven around it (James A. McKenna, Black Range Tales, New York, 1936). McKenna goes on to describe the mummy as about eighteen inches long with its knees drawn up and the palms of the hands covering the face, but with its high cheek bones and coarse, dark hair clearly visible. After its discovery, it was displayed in a shop window in Silver City for some months before being purchased by a private collector who had posed as a representative of the Smithsonian.

Their wanton desecration, the intrusion of bright sunlight into the cave rooms, the steady trickle of tourists and the oppressive presence of uniformed personnel combined to remove any magic that once surely inhered in these sensitively sited and painstakingly constructed ancient dwellings. On the way back to the ranch we visited a small canyon that led to a single cave dwelling which, while it had also been looted and its roof destroyed, was out of the sunlight and blessedly devoid of interpretive adjuncts: it resonated with a mournful immanence. A few hundred yards to the south of the cave were rock paintings rendered in a red, hematite pigment.

The novelistic accompaniment that I chose for this New Mexico trip was Edgar Rice Burrough’s greatest work, The Land that Time Forgot, 1918. In this age of Google Earth the plot is preposterous: it suggests that a mini-continent had lain hidden in the frigid mists of the far Southern Ocean, amidst icebergs sourced from Antarctica, until its discovery by Tom Billings, a Southern Californian commanding a captured German U-boat in World War One. Tom goes on to find within the Island, “…glimpses of a world past, a dead world, a world so long dead that even in the lowest Cambrian stratum no trace of it remains.” For in Caspak, the name ERB gives to this lost continent, there exists Cretaceous flora and fauna and a complicated hierarchy of creatures that represent the full range of hominid evolution. Tom and his subsequent would-be rescuers thus have the opportunity to battle dinosaurs, mastodons, cave-bears and sabre tooth tigers as well as a wide assortment of primitive and not-so-primitive tribes. It makes, as they say, for a ripping yarn.

Much of the New Mexican landscape was formed as much as 65 million years ago – at least according to recent Caltech research that dates the creation of the Grand Canyon, a close geological neighbor, to that era – a time when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. It was easy, then, to transpose Caspak to the Gila and imagine Tyrannosauri roaming the high desert plains desperate for the fecund flora of the Cretaceous, now atrophied to juniper, piñon, scrub oaks, mountain mahogany and dwarf grasses in this dehydrated world.

As Brian Aldiss points out in his Modern Library Classics edition introduction, The Land That Time Forgot is a part of the ‘Lost Race’ genre popular at the turn of the century and exemplified by writers like Ryder Haggard (She) and Conan Doyle (The Lost World). James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (Valley of the Blue Moon) is a late addition to the canon. It’s not hard to unearth the ‘lost races’ of New Mexico – evidence of previous inhabitations is all around. The Mogollon, whose culture lasted a scant thirteen hundred years, were responsible for the beautiful Mimbres pots we saw in the Western New Mexico University Museum in Silver City before leaving for the ranch and those left behind at their Gila cliff dwellings – some of which, by repute, are still hoarded by local ranching families.

Earlier that morning Whitey had left the ranch with his beautiful Mexican partner Diana and a trailer hitched to his truck bound for a cattle sale in Las Cruces. He was planning to sell four animals and that night, our last at the ranch, was haunted by the bereft lowing of a cow whose heifer-calf had been taken. Whitey, of indeterminate middle age and whose public appearances are always in a slouched felt Stetson, is an old school cowboy. He fiercely protects his herd until he gauges it is time to sell. A few years back he shot a ‘Mexican’ wolf that had been threatening his new-born calves. These beautiful lupine creature are on the Federal Endangered species list (I saw one recently in captivity at a private home here in Ojai) and thus the killing was a Federal offence.

Burying said animal under an abandoned truck on the Ranch seems like a reasonable strategy in the circumstances and in most cases would have been the end of it. Unfortunately for Whitey, buried within the wolf was a radio chip and the Feds were soon on to him; he fled to Mexico while the ranch owner argued his case and eventually had the charges dropped.

Driving north to Quemado, our next destination, the only billboards along the lonely highway were crudely fashioned rants against the outlawing of Wolf hunting (in contrast to all roads leading to Albuquerque and Santa Fe which are festooned with Indian Casino come-ons). The liberal sensitivities of us six southern Californians were duly pricked. Turns out that the recently re-introduced wolf is not popular with the local ranchers – who comprise the primary source of wealth in these parts. At Quemado, a miserable town where both gas stations, the local fortune teller and all save one restaurant have given up the ghost, we were met, in a derelict two-storey building that announced itself as the local headquarters of the Dia Foundation, by the driver who would ferry us to The Lightning Field – the putative reason for our trip to New Mexico.

Walter De Maria, who was part of a loose confederation of earth artists which included Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty), Robert Heizer (Double Negative), James Turrell (Roden Crater), and Nancy Holt (Sun Tunnels), died this summer. His most famous work sits in a vast high plain rimmed with cinder cones, rugged mountain ranges and, at a distance, the Zuni, Navajo and Acoma Reservations. Our driver knew Walter for her father Robert had helped construct his art piece. During the drive, on washboard gravel roads over which she maintained a steady fifty miles per hour, occasionally letting the rear end of the GMC drift in the lazy corners, she made it clear that her sympathies were not with the wolves and she briefly mentioned the notorious Silver City case in which Whitey had starred: in her world wolf-killers are heroes.

We were dropped off (or abandoned) at a picturesquely restored log cabin that sat like a little house on the high plain. Inside were Stickley and Heywood Wakefield craftsman furniture, three bedrooms and a creaking porch with a view of the grid of twenty foot high stainless steel rods anchored in the ground over an area of one mile by one kilometer. This is what we came to watch – for this matrix becomes an active participant in the passage of time, the changing of light and one’s relationship to the vast landscape.

The echt-Lightning Field experience can only be had in an electrical storm (the raison d’etre of the rods is, of course, to attract lightning). Earlier on our trip, Lorrie and I spent a night in the Murray Hotel in Silver City while other members of our party were driving through the night from Los Angeles. Around midnight we were awoken from our slumbers by the crashing of thunder and momentary day-lighting of the room by lightning. Wrong night, wrong place. Sunday night in the cabin passed uninterrupted by stormy weather.

At dawn I ran two circuits around the grid. Later we packed up and prepared to go our separate ways. Nicki and Will to the Grand Canyon, Julian to Chaco Canyon and Lorrie, Amy and I back to L.A.. Leaving Quemado and driving through the El Malpais National Conservation area to Albuquerque the primal landscapes of western New Mexico, even viewed through a rental-car window, served as an imaginative adjunct to the lost world that still swirled in my consciousness from the moments of reading I had snatched in the cabin, between festive meals spent discussing the finer points of our ‘Field’ experience - and the lost races are forever in my mind as I travel New Mexico (Too Late). The Lightning Field, sans lightning, stands as an effete affectation of modernity in this deeply affecting land: but with nature’s cooperation I imagine it might stir my soul to its primordial roots.

Trunk Show

In California, by the last third of the nineteenth century, Native civilizations had essentially collapsed after the prolonged physical and cultural assault of European religion, disease and colonization. The coup de grace was administered by the inundation of the State by gold seekers around 1850.

But by 1870, Californian Indian culture was ripe for one last revival. A catalyst arrived in the form of the prophecies of a Nevada Paiute named Jack Wilson or Wakova, and the revival achieved its frenzied apotheosis in the Ghost Dance - the practice of which promised not only the return of the dead, but the end of the world and the elimination of all white people.

Despite the widespread embrace of the cult, particularly in northern California, where tribes were less Christianized, none of these goals was achieved: instead, the confused, hybridized values inherent in the Ghost Dance distanced native peoples from their ancestral cultures and in many cases forever removed them from their traditional tribal practices. The belated realization of a common cause amongst discrete tribelets and the development of a pan-Indian identity merely hastened the destruction of their unique cultures.

The practice of the Ghost Dance became a red-flag in the face of Anglo-Americans confident of their hegemony and they redoubled their attempts to extinguish the cultural, economic and, in many cases, the physical lives of Native peoples. The Ghost Dance was revived in Nevada in 1890, but while this recrudescence flourished across the Great Plains to the north and east, Native California cultures had by then disintegrated beyond the point of resurrection. The movement was finally destroyed at the Wounded Knee massacre perpetrated by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry later that same year.

Other Indian cults arose in this brief twenty year interregnum, 1870-1890, and most were marked by an apocalyptic, end-times ethos that promised the elimination of white people. The Earth Lodge Cult stressed the end of the world, while the Bole –Maru abandoned the doctrine of imminent world-catastrophe and stressed the concepts of an after-life and a supreme being (The 1870 Ghost Dance, Cora Du Bois, Univ. Calif., 1951).

In light of this fin de siècle Indian renunciation of the core animism of shaman-centered spiritual traditions, it is no surprise, perhaps, that those who now identify as Native American swell the ranks of the evangelical Christian movement and, as adherents of casino capitalism (often quite literally), reliably vote Republican.

These cults represented both a reaction to what was perceived as a failed animistic magic and the adoption of a last ditch faith in authoritarian prophets or dreamers who promised an end to the long decline of their societies. In the early decades of the twentieth century, as Harry Lawton notes in his introduction to Carobeth Laird’s memoir of her life with John Peabody Harrington (Encounter with an Angry God, 1975), a generation of newly minted, University trained anthropologists (many the students of Franz Boas) were infected with a similar sense of time running out. He writes,

"They fanned out across the North American continent to record everything which could be learned about the dying cultures of the American Indian…they sought out those old people who remembered how life had been before the coming of the white man”.

Foremost amongst these researchers creating a new body of knowledge was the linguist-ethnographer John Peabody Harrington. In 1915, then 31, he met the nineteen year old Laird. She recounts their life together – he collecting information from his ‘informants’, she driving their model T to remote Southern Californian and Arizonan locations and living in isolated and primitive conditions, which he ignored and she came to despise. Harrington obsessively gathered information on moribund languages and half-forgotten ethnobotanical information from aged Indians and these gleanings apparently sustained him in mind, body and spirit. His habitual diet was a mix of boiled grains which he called ‘mush’. He disdained society and only reluctantly visited Washington, D.C. where his employer, the Bureau of American Ethnology occasionally required his presence. For him, field work was everything and he often worked eighteen hour days.

He drove his young wife has hard as he did himself and after six years together she left him for one of his informants, a Chemehuevi of mixed ethnic background who retained connections to his Native culture through his mother. Together this couple scratched a living on twenty acres in eastern San Diego County where she eventually succumbed to Christian Science and he to old age, dying in 1940. Some thirty years later, having revived her truncated career as an anthropologist, she wrote the memoir which had Tom Wolfe acclaim her as ‘an exciting new literary talent bursting forth at the age of 80’. Harrington recovered from Carobeth’s departure, acquired a new assistant and continued his fanatical collection of data until his death in Santa Barbara, from Parkinson’s in 1961.

While Urban Wildland has focused primarily on the spatial contexts of perceived Native spirituality under the category of Etheric Landscape, the relationships among people, place, and power are largely effected through language and it is the mechanics of this process that fascinated Harrington - it was his sometime mentor Franz Boas, who as a pioneer investigator of Native American languages, had established the importance of linguistic analysis and pointed out that language was a fundamental aspect of culture. How ideas are transmitted through the structural shape of language became, in the twentieth century, a decisive tool of social analysis. Harrington worked at the atomic level of this epochal intellectual project.

California supported several diverse culture areas and at least 100 distinct languages. The devastation was so rapid that the synthesis of Native and Spanish structure characteristic of Latin American Indian languages did not take place. As Catherine Callaghan notes in J. P. Harrington - California's Great Linguist, Journal of Californian Archeology, 1975, ‘there was a whole generation of older Indians in the early part of the twentieth century who remembered their language when it was largely in its pre-contact form’.

No piece even tangentially about Harrington would be complete without mention of his notorious habit of stashing material away in boxes, trunks and warehouses that was subsequently lost and then, as the stories usually go, miraculously recovered. Here is one local snippet of loss and re-discovery: in 1981, a trunk was uncovered in the garage of a house in Simi belonging to a Harrington relative. It had been stored there for the previous 40 years, and is believed to be the steamer trunk that young John took with him to Germany in 1905 where he pursued graduate studies at the University of Leipzig, then considered to be one of the finest schools in the world. When opened it was found to contain a mass of papers filling the trunk to a depth of a foot consisting of both ethnographic data and personal mementos, dating from as early as 1894 to the late 1930's (Benson and Edberg, The Road to Goleta, Journal of Great Basin Anthropology, 1982). 

Of particular local interest were the approximately six thousand slip notes (J.P.H.’s version of a note cards) in Ventureño Chumash. Harrington gleaned information from at least two informants, Simplicio Pico and Maria Antonia Tumamait (an ancestor, presumably of Ojai’s Julie Tumamait) concerning vocabulary and grammar, data on place names, ethnobotany, historical events, shrines, sweat houses, and myths - which has since become the source of work by Travis Hudson and the ethnobotanist Jan Timbrook, among others.

Harrington spent a great deal of time working with Ventureño informants in the El Rio area (now Oxnard) and he was sanguine about their chances of survival, on one of the slip notes he scribbled, " Mestizos siempre hay. No se acaban." But while confident that these people would endure, he was under no illusions about the purity of their Chumash ancestry – hence his use of the word mestizo.

Whatever we now know of the Chumash culture is largely a result of Harrington’s monomaniacal data collection. At some very fundamental level he understood that this was his role in the world. He eschewed personal gain and academic reputation (he published only a few short papers) and, most of all, a settled domestic life in the attempt to record fast vanishing Native cultures and languages: his secrecy, paranoia and the intensity of his work ethic were all symptoms of his ‘rage against the dying of the light’, the clouding of the crystalline visions of an animistic world that once had informed a myriad cultures in California.

O

Cumuli were massed over the eastern horizon; spare, drought savaged chaparral stood atop the low mounding hills of the old County Honor Farm silhouetted against the brightening cloud bank - just another dawn tease on Koenigstein – for these clouds did not presage rain.

By light of day, when the full color spectrum is revealed, it is clear that the most severe drought in thirty years is having an impact on the usual stoicism of the sclerophytic natives (Sleepy Oaks). Oaks are dying, their evergreen foliage desiccating into a gingery brown, baccharis is giving up the ghost and the deerweed died months ago. Only the laurel sumac remains, in places, brightly green: elsewhere its foliage has taken on a darker, reddish-purple hue that speaks of its struggle to achieve adequate hydration despite a root system that customarily descends more than twenty feet into the earth.

For a landscape aesthete, the various drought stricken tableaux that are currently on offer have an appeal independent of their meteorological cause. But as hard-hearted as I am in my devotion to the superficial beauty of the natural world, even I occasionally weep a tear for the existential struggles of the chaparral during this testing time when all but the deepest rooted or fortuitously located are showing signs of massive stress or have simply died.

Time to call in the Rain Shaman. In most dialects of the Chumash group of languages, water was simply called O. Its beneficence was conjured by a weather doctor who communicated with the Upper World where the Sky People lived (Real Suspense). Ritualistic intercession was considered necessary to ensure the orderly continuation of the biotic world – rainfall needed to be coaxed out of the sky. The instruments of persuasion were carried in a medicine bag or more simply in a bundle. Such a collection of rain making totems is discussed in the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2012) by the Tulare Lake Archaeological Research Group which includes Alan Garfinkel (Shamanize or Die). Many of the items are of Chumash origin, taken east during the great diaspora spurred by the genocidal proclivities of the Franciscans running the mission system.

Now housed in the Kern Valley Museum, the collection includes several bowls, nine steatite tobacco pipes with broken bird bone stems, river-washed pebbles, geodes, crystals, obsidian flakes, charmstones, a tobacco pouch and a medicine bag fragment. The most rudimentary of magics is sympathetic conjuring – the act of mimicry producing its simulacrum: as in spraying water in the air to produce rain; puffs of tobacco smoke sent heavenward to encourage the formation of clouds or stones struck together to encourage thunder. The Chumash practiced all three. The shaman’s power, however, depended upon more than these mimetic gestures. Quartz crystals were considered to be a powerful physical embodiment of sacred, environmental energies. Their shamanic power derived from their perceived function as intermediaries between the material and the spirit realm. Jay Miller, an anthropologist who specializes in American Indian history, suggests that thought and memory are literally crystallized within their lithic structure and as such can be beamed into the ether. He also notes that crystals were seen as particularly related to water and power.

Dark river rocks were prized, perhaps, for their ability to conjure thunder clouds. Charmstones, which are shaped or pecked rocks often carried for their talismanic protection may also have been instrumental in weather control. Basic to the shaman’s ability to control the elements were songs either passed on to him or dreamed anew. Snatches of these songs survive in the community which today identifies with the moribund Chumash culture. Their efficacy has doubtless been vitiated by the profane circumstances of a people now indebted to the vicious, Neanderthal capitalism manifested by casinos – a grotesque caricature of the cosmic games of chance practiced by these people’s forbears (Bingo).

We may have the kit, but where’s the shaman? The sad reality is that the human spark that might actualize these mystical objects is now entirely missing – the artifacts no longer have power: they are the dead apparatus of an extinct culture. The dominion that once resided in crystal, stone, quartz and smoking paraphernalia now resides in technocratic, military and intelligence organizations. The Special Collection Service (SCS), a mash-up of the NSA and the CIA pursues rendition of enemies, eavesdropping, surveillance and ’black-ops’ – all activities that were once within the purview of Chumash shamans. Inevitably, the SCS also has its own weather forecasting service. I have it at one remove from a deeply embedded apparatchik within this puzzle palace that we can expect, in the local area, fifteen inches of rain over the 2013-2014 season.

The timidity of this shadowy pronouncement is stunning. In an average year Ojai usually sees around twenty inches of rain. On the dry side less than ten and in seasons such as 1997-1998 and 2004-2005, close to fifty. Any shaman worth his datura would serve up not a projection uncomfortably close to the historical average, but a resolution that he and his powerful spirit allies would deliver rainfall precisely according to the needs of his people and the land. Speaking for the oaks, I don’t think fifteen inches will do it.

When Heinrich Harrer arrived in Lhasa after his epic trek across Tibet from North Western India where he was being held in an internment camp during WWII, he found even the sophisticates of the Holy City firm in their belief that certain lamas could control the weather. It was commonly supposed that they could hold up hailstones or call down rain showers as the circumstances demanded (Seven Years in Tibet, 1953). Certain simple monks were also reputed to have skill in managing the weather, blowing on conch shells, for instance, to repel approaching storms. The thirteenth Dalai Lama maintained a court weather-maker whose special charge was to protect the God-King’s summer garden from untoward hail storms.

Here in Ojai no one, at present, is offering up their services to break the drought. Perhaps Julie Tumamait, our local professional Chumash princess (available for weddings, funerals and the blessing of land) could step up to the plate and twirl her bull-roarer (a showy piece of pan-Indian paraphernalia noticeably missing from the Kern River Museum bundle). Perhaps Camille Sears, a local stone fruit orchardist and meteorologist who grew up in Meiners Oaks, can prognosticate more accurately than the SCS, or maybe we should just check the Farmer’s Almanac, by which Margot, our neighbor and chaparral restoration expert, swears. Meanwhile, I am left scouring the land and sky for omens.

We’ve had a few.

A few early mornings ago, the shadowy old moon was cradled in the bright silver sliver of the new as it rose over the eastern ridge – this phenomenon is caused by earthshine flooding the part of the lunarscape un-illuminated by the sun and is traditionally a bad weather omen. The fact that it happens regularly as part of the lunar cycle does not entirely destroy the poetry of the attendant myth, here referenced in an 18th century Scottish ballad,

'Mak haste, mak haste, my mirry men all,
Our guid ship sails the morn.'
'O say na sae, my master dear,
For I fear a deadly storm.'
'Late, late yestre'en I saw the new moon
Wi'the old moon in his arm,
And I fear, I fear, my dear master,
That we will come to ‘arm.'

In the event, Sir Patrick Spens, the ballad’s subject, sets sail despite this celestial omen and he and his crew foundered somewhere off the Isle of Islay in the predicted gale. In Ojai, right on schedule, we are now experiencing a fearsomely desiccating Santa Ana wind storm……

In the absence of coyotes and bobcats grey foxes have taken up residence on our property. We hear them calling to one another across the open meadow below the house in the evening and early mornings…..at night they cry eerily. With the moon still subject to both direct and reflected sun-light, but now higher in the sky, we were preparing to walk down to the garage one recent morning when Lorrie spotted two foxes on a nearby rock. They were juveniles – we had last seen them as kits a year ago – and now bobcat-like they were both standing proud surveying the scene with their long fluffy tails draped over the rock: one looked west and the other east so they presented themselves as heraldic creatures – crossed foxes.

Crossed Foxes. Watery lunascape with silver crescent. Omens? Perhaps, but we can be reasonably sure that at some point in the next three months it will start raining and that old Chumash magic (still imprinted on the landscape?) will kick in and order will be returned to our little corner of the biosphere.

Tsunami

It was the final Cruise Night of the season in Santa Paula, held on the first Friday of each month from April through September. The event begins at 5 p.m. when three blocks of Main Street are closed-off west of the Ojai-Santa Paula Road. Exhibitors begin parking their cars nose-in along both sides of the street well before show-time and turn them around immediately the road is barricaded.

Will Reed and I arrived fashionably late, a little after six p.m. Upon our approach to Main Street, barriers were swiftly removed at the eastern end of the closed section of street and we were ushered into the vehicle display area. One slot was left at the far south east end of the street and Will maneuvered his celadon green, 1968 Jaguar XK-E 2+2 Coupe into place. This beautiful sports car, a recherché symbol of a long ago, dare I say swinging ? England thus took its place among the American muscle cars, classic vehicles, low-riders and antique trucks that make up Cruise Night.

When we had collected our respective wives who had, perforce, parked two blocks away in their decidedly non-classic 2006 vehicle, we four sauntered along the ranks of cars almost all of which were built in the post-WWII era - in a nation that had, as its people understood history, saved the West from the evils of Germany’s National Socialism. Emerging almost entirely untouched by the ravages of war, the U.S. then proceeded to build the mightiest civilian industrial infrastructure the world had ever seen from the core of their military-industrial complex. This became the backbone of a society characterized by the easy availability of a cornucopia of consumer goods and which exhibited a hubris that still, it seemed, shone in the be-chromed vehicles before us.

These consumer goods, the car preeminent among them, were the envy of the rest of the world. The USSR, which lost 20 million men, women and children in defeating Nazi Germany, had no conception of the private car for personal or family use. Britain’s indebtedness to the United States, incurred while it pursued its lonely war against the Nazis between 1939 and 1942, crippled the country and enabled the U.S. to take command of the global capitalist system at Bretton Woods in 1944. For many years after WWII, most Brits were more accustomed to the sweaty confines of bus and train than to the interior of an automobile.

Walking through the promenading crowd of Santa Paula residents, some of whom had poured money, sweat and technical expertise into the restoration of the cars on display, and many more of whom were viscerally connected to this car-culture rooted in an era of American triumphalism, I felt excluded from the general bonhomie that prevailed. As a middle-class culture worker from Upper Ojai, not born in North America, I was at a distance from the white and Latino, predominantly working class folk enjoying the automotive display and the attendant music and food.

Living close to the tipping point where the watershed is gravitationally divided between east (towards the Santa Clara River) and west (towards the Ventura River), we also sit atop a class divide between the equidistant Santa Paula and Ojai. Torn by these territorial and class allegiances, the serendipitous display of the XK-E that evening, amidst the best of American iron, was, I realized, a statement loaded with ironic absurdity – the only reasonable response to lives spent in the limbo of false consciousness.

Retreating from the angst of alienation and oppression which perhaps I alone perceived on Santa Paula’s Main Street, we decide to eat at Familia Diaz, an historic Mexican restaurant at the corner of Harvard and the Santa Paula - Ojai Road. Settling into the red leatherette booth, Will told me that the restaurant had begun as a soup-kitchen serving the survivors of the St. Francis dam disaster.

Early in 1928, Santa Paula was engulfed by a wall of water - a fresh water tsunami. Although the word is usually associated with oceanic tidal waves generated by seismic activity, 'tsunami' can also refer to any large displacement of water resulting in a ‘wave train’. On this occasion, the two hundred foot wall of the dam, located at a pinch in San Francisquito canyon, ten miles north of Santa Clarita, failed disastrously and unleashed 12.4 billion gallons of water.

Built on a fault-ridden geological substrate and inadequately engineered, the St. Francis disaster effectively ended the career of William Mulholland, who had overseen this vast enterprise –designed to store a year’s worth of L.A.’s water safely away from its source, the Owens Valley, where ranchers had become increasingly militant in their efforts to defend their livelihood, culminating in the bombing of the L.A. aqueduct in 1924.

In Water and Power, U.C. Press, 1982, William L. Kahrl notes that “by the time the Owens Valley ranchers blew up the No-Name canyon siphon in 1927, the reservoir was nearly full and withdrawals to replace the lost flows from the aqueduct began immediately”. By early March 1928, the reservoir was again full, and on March 12, Mulholland personally inspected the structure and pronounced it safe. That night, at midnight, the dam collapsed and a one hundred and fifty foot tsunami wave swept down the Santa Clara Valley obliterating Castaic Junction, Bardsdale and Fillmore, before devastating Santa Paula and then emptying its victims and huge chunks of concrete into the Pacific just south of Ventura Harbor at 5:30 a.m.

Now, as you exit the 126, you are funneled onto the 150 and the Familia Diaz restaurant is on the right as you head for Ojai. While it is the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the town, and is on Ventura’s list of Historical Landmarks, it did not open until 1935, seven years after the dam burst. The connection made to the disaster in the restaurant’s literature is thus a tad specious,

“In 1928, José and Josepha Diaz family barely escaped the Saint Francis Dam break flood that destroyed much of the Santa Paula Valley. In 1929 a bakery was built at the corner of 10th Street and Telegraph Road (now Harvard Boulevard) but it lasted only a few years because of the depression. Josepha opened a café in 1935 with farm workers and their families as her main customers. In 1936 the Diaz family bought the abandoned bakery and an adjacent house and lived in a room in the bakery and José operated a cantina in another room.”

The fact is, as shocking as was the loss of life (the official death-toll exceeded 450), almost everyone extant at that time in Santa Paula ‘escaped’. Most of the victims did indeed die in the ‘Santa Paula Valley’ – more usually referred to as the Santa Clara Valley - not the town itself; but I do not know where José and Josepha were that night. Will, apparently, had unconsciously attempted to add narrative muscle to the restaurant's claim to fame.

In my mind, however specious the reference, Familia Diaz still connects me to that dark and tsunami-struck night 85 years ago. Passing through town, past the Union Oil Company building on the corner of Main street and the battling western-wear stores on either side, (Muwu), past the Limoneira building (now the Santa Paula Art Museum), there looms on the right, just before the train tracks, a life-size bronze casting of two motorcyclists and their bikes.

 These erstwhile, gallant knights of the road  (local police officers) were responsible for warning residents in the town to move to higher ground before the tsunami reached their homes and they were, perhaps, the saviors of José and Josepha.The sculpture, appropriately titled ‘The Warning’, by local artist Eric Richards, was erected to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the disaster – which represents the second biggest loss of life In California’s history, after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and fire (Another Day).

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.