Class of 2010

On Saturday May 29, 2010 Besant Hill School of Happy Valley held its Commencement. On Memorial Day we attended a barbecue lunch at one of the Pierpoint cottages in the East End that was the home for many years of Guido Ferrando, one of the three founders (along with Krishnamurti and Aldous Huxley) of the school. Our son Griffin is in the class of 2010.

Happy Valley is 500 acres of prime Upper Ojai real estate and was identified in 1927 by Annie Besant as the "setting for the New Civilization in America" quoted in The Story of Happy Valley, Radha Rajagopal Sloss, The Happy Valley Foundation, 1998. This 'New Civilization' was to be founded by a community under the guidance of the World Teacher who she had already identified as Krishnamurti and who was a part of the entourage that made the muddy journey up the grade to the Tucker walnut farm. In the event, K (as he was known to his acolytes) had other ideas.

Annie Besant was what we would now call an activist. Originally a Fabian Socialist and friend of George Bernard Shaw, she came under the influence of H.P. (Madame) Blavatsky a Russian noblewoman who claimed to have infiltrated the secrets of Tibetan Bhuddhism and who in 1878, became the first Russian woman to be granted U.S. citizenship. HPB (as her adepts called her), was a spiritualist, mystic, voyager on the astral plane and the co-founder (along with Colonel Olcott, an American military officer) of the Theosophical Society. Annie joined the Society in 1889 and by 1908 was its leader.

This Society was already well established in Ojai at the Krotona Institute, when Annie Besant arrived to shop real estate. The original purchase of the 300 acre walnut farm was augmented over the next 20 years with a further 200 acres and in 1946, Happy Valley School was opened - as a manifestation of the special purpose with which the land had originally been imbued by Annie Besant, who had died in India in 1933.

This is a heavy legacy for the class of 2010, but a little ignorance goes a long way and it falls lightly on them.

Traditions hung in the air on this Saturday morning and after the Procession of 25 graduates trooped onto the lawn we were treated to a mystical 'Blessing of the Land'. Madame Blavatsky's spirituality drew from an eclectic range of beliefs including Tartar shamanism, Egyptian hermeticism, the kabbalah, Masonry, Rosicrucianism, Christianity, paganism and Tibetan Buddhism. We were treated to a simple pastiche of native American traditions.

These included tobacco in an abalone shell scattered on the lawn, water from a 'sacred' spring (in a plastic bottle) sprinkled from a hand broom made up of rosemary and lavender and a brief whirring of the bull-roarer, a serrated wood paddle swung around the head of the professional chumash elder, Julie Tumamait.

In her blessing she claimed kinship with the Chumash people going back over 13,000 years. Amateur students of archeology in the audience were aghast (for surely I was not the only one). It is generally accepted that the Chumash have been around for about 7,000 years and the flowering of their culture only occurred about 1000 B.C. Before that, the Oak Grove People of the Milling Stone Horizon (an artifact complex dominated by handstones, millingslabs, and crude stone tools most frequently associated with the early Holocene in Southern California) held sway - these were a people who shared a time and a technology with the makers of the skin scrapers, hand axes and arrow heads that we collected in Surrey (see Stoned 2010-05-28).

The opportunities for intellectual angst were not over. Karen Brown gave the Commencement address and it was a wonderfully funny, poignant and wise speech. While the headmaster, Paul Amadio had lost his notes and was unable to regale us, in his introduction, with her curriculum vitae, I was aware that she worked for an outfit dedicated to the 'greening' of schools. It turns out that Karen is the creative director for The Center for Ecoliteracy 'a leader in the green schooling movement'.

As Kermit reminds us, "it's not easy being green". Glomming ecological awareness onto schools fundamentally dedicated to continuing the untenable approaches of re-invention, creativity and enterprise  is, it seems to me,  merely masking this gnawing cancer that infects our education system.

Progress, growth and improvement are the benchmarks of our societal aims for the education of our children. These values are inherently un-green - they run counter to the basic life processes that are in fact recursive, slow to change (or evolve) and conservative of energy, effort and enterprise. Our liberal education model could not have been designed more perfectly to ensure the continued and potentially fatal friction between the planet and its people.

The fact is that traditional societies with deeply conservative values passed on from generation to generation do a lot better job of living in harmony with the planet than those where an education model places an emphasis on creativity, invention and, above all, originality. These characteristics have for the last 600 hundred years, and at an increased pace since the Enlightenment, vastly increased our energy footprint and effectively doomed our co-existence with the earth.

It happened first in that primeval solar energy sink, the forest. Robert Pogue Harrison writes in Forest, University of Chicago, 1992 that Descartes notion of mastery and possession of nature through the scientific method led directly to the "rise of forest management during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...where forests are apprehended in terms of wood volume ..and resource management". In other words a multi-valent wilderness that was sanctuary to some, offered hunting and grazing lands for others and constituted a parallel world of spirits and totems to all was traded for an energy and construction resource that existed as an appendix to the City.

In searching for a time when Americans used energy at a sustainable rate Saul Griffith (see Cosmic Futility 2010-05-24) found that even in 1800, we were burning New England forests at a rate double the energy use of the average global citizen in 2010. That average reflects excessive energy use, broadly, by the North leavened in the South by societies untainted by notions of liberal democracy and where tradition has helped maintain a balance between people and environment.

Notions of originality run directly counter to the values inherent in most traditional societies. There, people have found ways to live in balance by refining a basic societal construct over many hundreds of years or, millennia. New ideas threaten this balance and even when adopted, are required to stand the test of time (which is often thought of as exhibiting a recursive or circular character rather than the cartesian linearity with which we are familiar).

Teaching our children to think creatively is what got us into this mess. We are forever prisoners of our planet. We need to look to life processes to understand the limits of innovation. Organizations such as The Center for Ecoliteracy are enormously adept at applying (green) lipstick to the pig and as such are a hinderance to initiating the essential debate:  what should be the fundamental nature of education in societies that have been spinning out of control for over half a millennium?

Stoned

I grew up with an appreciation for stone. It didn't happen because we lived in a stone house or because there were great rocks scattered on the landscape (as there are in Upper Ojai). It happened because my father would return from digging in the garden on the weekends (for many years we grew almost all our own vegetables) with shards of flint that he told us were stone-age skin scrapers. We lived in a part of the world, southern England, where early man had begun his precarious existence some half a million years ago surrounded by mega-fauna. There was a lot of skin to scrape.

By the time I was a teen, we had quite a collection of scrapers, arrow heads and hand axes most of which, since they were retrieved at spade depth - say 12"-18" - were probably from the Mesolithic period (around 10,000 to 5500 years ago) at the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the Holocene era.

Beyond this subterranean storehouse of stone-age tools, and at quite another scale, Britain has a treasure of megalithic monuments. I was fortunate to visit Stonehenge when it was still surrounded by farm-land and you could stop the car on the A344 and wander down the slope to the derilict monument and leave greasy fingerprints on the stones. Now it seems it has been privatized, and the experience is distinctly less 'hands-on' and more theme park - it has been co-opted by Britain's Heritage Industry where the authentic has given way to the branded. In the mid sixties, you could stop at villages built amidst stone circles, such as Avebury in Wiltshire, and drink at a pub while considering the wonders of neolithic construction.

These circles and henges along with barrows (tumuli or burial mounds), mounds, cairns and standing stone alignments are a part of Europe's shamanic landscape. I have already mentioned something of the Chumash spiritual geography (which includes, at least, Mount Pinos, the Painted Rock in Carrizo Plain, and the Channel Islands off of Ventura). The skein of connections that linked these and (presumably) so many other places in the Chumash world were both prosaic trade routes and spirit paths - something akin perhaps to the European notion, developed by the antiquarian and amateur archeologist Alfred Watkins (1855-1935), of ley lines.

Ley lines are straight lines between spiritual 'hot-spots' marked by stone alignments and many are undoubtedly spurious. However, the standing stones (menhirs) at Carnac in northern France, in a variety of linear alignments stretching thousands of meters, bear material witness to the power of Neolithic geometries. The Chumash paid similar obeisance to the straight line; their trade routes and trails were invariably linear, eschewing the topographical convenience of switch-backs and the like. In this they reflected the Roman roads that marched through Europe with a singular focus on the flight path of the crow, and the supposed preferences of spirits who are universally perceived as traveling in straight lines. In Chinese feng-shui landscape divination, homes and ancestral tombs had to be protected from straight roads or other linear landscape features because troublesome spirits travelled along them and would bring bad luck.

By contrast, the intimate geographies of the entranced Chumash mind laid out in cave paintings - notably at the Painted Cave east of Goleta and the Painted Rocks on the Carrizo Plain - are webbed in sinuous lines resolved into an echo of the shamans's vision.

A contemporary artist referencing both the cairns and alignments of neolithic megaliths is Andy Goldsworth and he, arguably, materializes his own 'intimate geographies' in his smaller works with twigs, bark, grasses and reeds. His fascination with stone is evidenced in his egg-like cairns as well as his work with english wallers who traditionally, have crafted dry-stone walls and folds (or pens) but under Andy's direction juxtapose their native craft with the artist's environmental insertions - tree branches trapped in walls for instance, or a boulder (or cairn) corralled within a stone fold. This art depends on an availability of local stone and craftsmen to stack it. Both are in ample supply in England's northern sheep country.

Martha's Vineyard, that miraculous island of unique climate and bio-diversity, is also home to a dry-stack stone wall tradition and on a recent visit Lorrie and I became captivated by a particular technique called lace walls where holes exist in the fabric of the wall to allow the atlantic gales to blow through and thus reduce the lateral pressure on the structures.

We had over 200 tons of rocks stockpiled on the west meadow after completion of grading for our new house. Most were between refrigerator and microwave size and they were eventually carted away for road building. Left scattered around the building site were the larger car and SUV sized boulders, unearthed but too large to move very far. We spent a day directing the operator of a CAT 320D placing the stones on the ravaged site. His skill was superlative and he manoeuvered his machine and the rocks as though he was sailing a namesake piece of equipment, the Hobie Cat - the excavator up on one track and the rock hanging out as counterbalance in the bucket. Now his work has mostly disappeared under burgeoning chaparral, flush from a wet winter but the largest of the rocks, removed from the swimming pool site was placed under an oak that sits to the south of the house. Morning glory (Calystegia macrostegia) is starting to vine over it but its buttery yellow sandstone is still prominent and it is now a grave marker too, for our dog Derek who was buried in front of it some 6 months ago.

We considered building dry-stack walls, and in one scheme the west meadow was to be divided up into several folds for fruit trees, a vegetable garden and firewood. As we discovered, over our first year, the scale of the project we had already undertaken - the restoration of chaparral and the creation of areas of native meadow over those acres of the site that had been most impacted and disturbed by the grading - it became clear that we did not have the energy (or money) to pursue large scale dry-stack wall building. It may have been, as they say, a missed opportunity but the empty raised bed at the east end of the house is a salutary reminder of our limited resources.

In any case, there are a variety of traditions in the dry stacking of stone. How to choose? There are certainly Mexican and Italian masons locally and almost certainly British or Irish wallers who were the first to bring the craft to the United States. Now we have an amazing example of the Japanese tradition close by in Ventura. The Awatas, father and son, 14th and 15th generation masons were invited, with their Japanese team, to lead in the design and construction of two ramparts set beside a stairway in Serra Cross Park overlooking the Pacific. Along with local support crews they completed the work earlier this year, which used 300 tons of local stone, in nine days.

Garfield Smith kindly forwarded me a video, Stone on Stone (in process) for which his sister Sharon provided the music, that documents the building process. Local wallers customarily select rocks with at least two flat planes and their wall building involves a minimum of cutting and splitting. The Japanese team employ a more sophisticated technique which appears to rely completely on rock splitting and chiseling and yet the finished inclined planes of the ramparts seem like an entirely natural agglomeration of rocks. Those familiar with the culture will recognize this intense investment of effort in mimicking nature as typically Japanese.

Both forward facing walls of the ramparts as they project from the slope are anchored by 'hero stones' - particularly large specimens (refrigerator to small car) that traditionally demonstrate the resources of the community who have built the fortification. We have a few such stones scattered around the site awaiting their call to heroism. Such enoblement requires an availability of disposable resources. We are currently fully invested expressing our braggadocio through brush clearance.

Cosmic Futility

Like some contraption from the steam punk genre the internet runs on coal. It's obvious really, but I had never quite internalized this basic truth with regards to our now ubiquitous interactive media machine. By all accounts the internet consumes more power, globally, than air traffic. As we all know, most electricity is created using coal.

Australia, a land of waving fields of grain and snow white sheep gamboling in grassy fields (discounting, of course, the red desert heart) when I lived there in the 1970's, is now the world's leading exporter of high-sulphur (i.e very dirty) coal. Newcastle, north of Sydney is home to the largest coal exporting facility in the world. The Hunter Valley has been ravaged by strip and pit mining. As I noted in The Planetary Mind, posted 2010-02-04 a new word, Solastalgia, has been coined to describe the psychological trauma of the local population that has seen its neighborhood transformed from verdant valleys to dark satanic mines within the span of a generation.

As Peter Maass suggests in his Crude World - The Violent Twilight of Oil, Knopf, New York, 2009, we are going to keep on grubbing for fossil fuels for as long as they remain the high density/low cost energy source. Google has committed to an initiative called Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal. One way to achieve this is to find a way to include pollution costs in the price of fossil fuels; Carbon Credits anyone?

More likely we will continue to plunder the earth until every last drop of oil, chunk of coal and fart of gas has been extracted from it in the time-honored tradition of the Easter Islanders who, after a thousand years on their island finally cut down the last tree in the early 17th century and then realized that the newly carved giant stone head and torso statues, which were literally the cultural bed-rock of their society, were forever marooned in the quarry at Rano Raraku - for tree trunk rollers were the only means of moving them.

Clive Ponting begins his A Green History of the World, Penguin, New York, 1993 with a chapter headed 'The Lesson of Easter Island'. I used this book beginning in 1996 as a core text for the tenth grade world history class at Oak Grove School in Meiners Oaks. Perhaps my students internalized the lesson, but there is absolutely no indication that current world leaders, captains of industry and the vast majority of consumers consider their fate to be twinned with the Easter Islanders, whose society went into a rapid decline and regressed to profoundly primitive conditions after the total deforestation of their land. Ponting writes,

"Without trees, and so without canoes, the islanders were trapped in their remote home, unable to escape the consequences of their self-inflicted environmental collapse."

(I now volunteer with UCLA's Rock Art Archive which is headed up by Jo Anne Van Tilburg who has, for over twenty years, been documenting the Rano Raraku statues.)

Well, perhaps those in the Transition movement have internalized the message, but they are at our society's ragged fringe and are unlikely to be effective in changing the energy calculus. More promising perhaps, are those like Google, who are attempting to change the paradigm from within the mainstream.

Nomi Morris who reviewed the Gulf Oil Disaster as part of her "Behind the Headlines" series at Theater 150 (May 10, 2010) asked the small audience whether they thought the oil spill signaled the beginning of the end for oil - more likely, it seems to me (as it did to Churchill in different circumstances), "Now this is not the end. ... But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." In any case, the spill has fallen off the news cycle and only a secondary catastrophe can ensure its re-instatement in the public eye. Effectively, we have re-calibrated the bottom line of the disaster meter from the Exxon Valdez' 11,000,000 gallon spill upwards...well who knows...perhaps ten-fold into the 100 million gallon range. The spill itself edged the 29 dead West Virginia coal miners off the front pages so many weeks ago and, more immediately, eclipsed the tragedy of the 11 incinerated oil workers on Transocean's Deepwater Horizon rig.

We have entered the era of deeper, dirtier and more desparate drilling that will forestall Peak Oil and plunge us into the 'violent twilight' of fossil fuels where coal becomes king and reckless mining, open pits, flattened mountains and scarred landscapes are tolerated in the maintenance of our cheap energy addiction. As long as growth is required for economic stability we are doomed to repeat the experience of Rapa Nui.

Alternative energy sources come with their own environmental baggage. Saul Griffith who was born in Sydney in 1974, and is the subject of a New Yorker piece, The Inventor's Dilemma by David Owen, May 17, 2010 estimates that we currently consume electricity at a more or less constant rate of sixteen terrawatts: capping green house gases such that we would limit global warming to a further rise of 2 degrees celsius would require that 13 of those 16 terrawatts be produced by clean, renewable power. Doing that would require the production, Griffith estimates, of:

"100 sq. meters of pv's; 50 sq. meters of solar-thermal reflectors, and one Olympic swimming pool of engineered algae (for biofuels) every second for the next twenty five years; one 300 foot diameter wind turbine every five minutes; one 100 megawatt geothermal plant every eight hours and one three gigawatt nuclear plant every week."

Ain't going to happen. Sierra magazine May/June 2010 reports that there are proposals for 52 solar power plants in the Mojave generating 39,000 megawatts. Each megawatt requires between 5 and 14 acres of cleared desert - say 390,000 acres. Diane Feinstein has already introduced legislation attempting to protect a million Mojave desert acres. Biofuels can use engineered algae, but a more attractive solution for loggers under the long awaited Kerry-Lieberman energy bill known as The America Power Act is to burn wood for commercial biomass electrical generation. I suppose there's a certain symmetry to clear-cutting forests for 'Green' power which can then be used to graze the farm animals required to provide the nitrogen for our organic food production (see Back-Yard Romance posted 2010-05-13).

Wind farms are inherently controversial generating fierce NIMBY reactions from even the most staunch environmentalists. We considered a wind turbine on our property (they're cheaper than PV) but were discouraged by the prospect of avian carnage. Let's not even talk about nuclear.

There really isn't a clean, scalable renewable energy alternative given our massive addiction to electricity fueled by the earth's diminishing underground store of solar energy.

Depressed? You could try sending one less e-mail tomorrow, but the futility of such a gesture is almost cosmic in magnitude.

Wedding Weeds

The weekend was fine and sunny. We were swimming, Margot was swimming and probably the Cornwell's were swimming. But as the week begins, we've had two days of intense fog drip and the occasional shower. There are puddles along the Sisar Trail beneath overhanging oaks that condense the mist.

The chaparral around the house is at its most stunningly beautiful. The bunch grasses are rimed with moisture; the deer weed, now blooming, is bent down with the weight of the dew and the oaks are green-black against the leaden sky. It's a good week for weeding.

My focus has been on mustard (Brassica species) which has re-colonized areas behind the garage and thistles (Cirsium species) which spring up wherever there is disturbed ground.

The Italian thistle (Carduus pyncocephalus), right at the moment is a beautiful thing, tall and slender, it would not be out of place on Ipenema, (but, it must be said, it is a little prickly in disposition). Crowned by a deep purple and silky soft tuft it is the belle of the ball: but die it must and there are a variety of means at one's disposal.

Its primary, and perhaps only flaw is its alien status. I would be willing to forgive its thorny nature - after all we give poison oak a pass - but as a seed stowaway aboard some (probably many) transatlantic clipper(s), secreted in straw bales or in animal feed, in clothing or in baggage it is part of a broad homogenization of the world's plants whereby the hardiest of them build a global empire of weed patches each identical to the other like a chain of vegetal McDonalds. I am committed, on my little acreage, to forstall such an occurance.

I was out weed wacking on Sunday, thistling while I worked - hitting the kill switch on the weed wacker occasionally and venturing forth to eradicate some thistles. Smaller ones can be pulled out of the ground directly with little resistance. Larger specimens require pulaskying - sometimes a series of wacks to the base of the stalk or just beneath the surface of the soil to sever the trunk. The wilier plants take advantage of the moisture that drips down a rock and wedge themselves into a lithic crevice. Here the axe side of the pulasky comes in handy and the adjacent rock becomes the strike against which the stalk is cut. The weed wacker itself is of some use for the more tender thistles. Earlier in the season I tried spraying them in particularly rocky areas with Round Up. It is hard to judge my success because it was not total.There they now are, wedged in amongst the rocks gaining territory in what at first blush seems like the least propitious of circumstances.

I spoke with Lorenz this morning and he views the rain as a beneficence (his word). He told me that he had recently observed a gopher snake backing up into its hole in the ground. Yes, snakes can slither backwards! Reconnoitering before starting work recently, I saw a Wandering Garter snake (Thamnophis elegans vagrans) in the clover meadow, beautiful in its tightly checkered green, yellow and silver skin.

Apart from mentioning our individual neighbors, and Lorenz who is Margot's estate manager, I have yet to post anything specifically about community. I haven't been avoiding that arena but truth to tell we haven't had a barn raisin' in these parts for a while. But what we did have on Saturday, while the weather was more seasonal, was a wedding.

Although not specifically an Upper Ojai event, (it was held at Libbey Bowl with a reception at the beautiful east end estate of Tom and Cathryn Krause) there were significant contributions from the upper valley community most notably Valerie Levett, who was a producer of the event and maid of honor and John Perry who sang at the reception; we were present and made a contribution to the cake, and Kit Stolz was on clean-up duty at the Bowl - a duty I imagine he was allocated in a spirit of reverse nepotism (he's married to Val, the producer).

Now in the normal course of events weddings require planners not producers, but this was no ordinary wedding: it was a full blown semi-autobiographical wedding musical with a theatrically trained Universal-Life minister who sprinkled fairy dust whenever the 'plot' needed a little juice and a talking dog as interlocutor. There were visits too, from Hermes, a mongol horde and dancing jello bowls (don't ask...). In any event the deed was done in hugely entertaining fashion.

It was, as almost all weddings are, an affecting experience; and having my emotions tugged at by the bride and groom (Deb and Chris of Theater 150) and their perilous progress towards true romance, I was perhaps in a vulnerable condition when the minister made the appropriate reference to the Great State of California under whose aegis the marriage was formally sanctioned - in any event, my heart was filled to choking with the pride, joy and thankfulness of living in this remarkable part of the world (thistles notwithstanding).

Back-Yard Romance

If you read Wordsworth's dirge, The Leech Gatherer linked in my last piece, you will know that it is pedestrian drivel enlivened only by the last two lines, which are a tribute to the Leech-Gatherer's stoicism in the face of very limited means (and would seem to apply equally well to my Sage-Gatherer). But it is sometimes salutary to read the Romantics: heaven knows, I'm still mining the vein!

Growing your own food (in 21st. century America) is a Romantic endeavor. The yearning for the simple life is understandable, but it's actually (wouldn't you know) quite complicated.

There's every reason to 'grow your own' in Upper Ojai. I visited a neighbor recently who had reclaimed some bottom land on his property on the flood plain of the Sisar Creek as it wends down the 150 to join the Santa Paula Creek and he had laid out perhaps 1000 square feet of vegetables. It was fully irrigated and clearly very productive. There is a good sized vegetable patch at Happy Valley where some of the produce is provided to the school in lieu of land rent and otherwise is operated as a csa (community supported agriculture). Margot inherited a wonderful orchard on her property where she has oranges, lemons, grapefruit and avocado; these she plans to irrigate with roof run-off via underground storage cisterns. The lay of the land is such that a gravity drip feed is feasible.

We were early adopters of the csa concept, as consumers, signing up in Los Angeles twenty years ago. This was a bio-dynamic csa and we joined because of our association with Highland Hall, a Rudolph Steiner 'Waldorf' school in the San Fernando valley. Steiner's Romanticism was of the German persuasion - he was fundamentally reactionary; his development of the bio-dynamic protocol represented a return to medieval agricultural practices and certainly the wizened rutabagas and wormy parsnips we received from the csa provided a vivid window into the gruelling subsistence of the middle ages.

More successful was and continues to be, the garden at Findhorn where direct communication with the vegetable fairies or devas along with herculean efforts at soil building have resulted in famously prolific crops. I am reminded now that the farmer at Happy Valley uses some elements of the bio-dynamic principles in the gardens at Happy Valley - at least to the point of sprinkling ground stag's horn onto the vegetable beds. The addition of animal products to the soil, in the form of manure or bone meal, gets to the heart of the organic dilemma, whether practiced in your back yard or commercially.

Organic farming, if it were to exclusively feed the world, would require both a massive die-off in the human population and a massive breeding program of farm animals to provide fertilizer. The global population has outstripped the ability of the planet to support organic-only food production.

I grew up in a small village in the south of England that was surrounded, like most of its kind, by farmland or where the soil had historically been poor, by what we called 'common' - it was just that, public land that may have served earlier as rough grazing. Much of the farmland immediately around the heart of the village belonged to a farmer who practiced market gardening - large scale growing of vegetables and flowers which he shipped by train to Covent Garden, the great produce market in London.

He believed that tractors over-compacted the soil so he retained, right through the early 1960's, a stable of shire horses that assisted in the field work; I remember their stately progress through the streets as they moved from one section of the farm to another, towering over me and seeming altogether more interesting than the motley selection of post-war english cars in the traffic parade that they led. When his sons took over, much of the operation was sold as a golf course (on the land where I had picked daffodils for 2 shillings an hour during my school's Easter Holiday) and more was developed for housing. We can all be grateful that by the time I was driving my father's car (an Austin A-40 and later a Morris 1100) through the village at break-neck speeds the streets were no longer encumbered by these elephantine animals.

Removing the internal combustion engine from the farm has a beneficial impact beyond providing ad-hoc fertilizer and retaining a friable soil. Anyone who has dropped down into the central valley from the grapevine will be familiar with the pall of smog that hangs over California's vast 'market garden' - much of it produced by farm machinery. But the efficiencies of GPS guided, auto steer tractors and laser leveled fields (using grading machinery) to prevent irrigation run-off, are a part of what ensures bountiful and cheap food.

Were all of America's croplands to go organic there would need to be a five-fold increase in cattle to provide the current levels of nitrogen fertilizer. Their grazing lands would consume much of the available land in the United States resulting in massive deforestation. In California, the impact would entirely eclipse the introduction of Iberian cattle in the eighteenth century. If Europe tried to feed itself organically most of the remaining forests in north west Europe would disappear. Now, introducing Clydesdales as the prime movers for agricultural machinery would make a small dent in the nitrogen requirements, but they too need pasture or hay.

While Ojai's horse population probably ensures an adequate supply of manure in the short term for those of us who organically grow at least some of our own food, the longer term back-yard solution is to run chickens and perhaps a goat or two to create something resembling a closed system.

An organic garden is a wonderful and Romantic goal. It is not however, going to save the world. As Robert Paarlberg points out in 'Attention Whole Foods Shoppers', Foreign Policy, May/June 2010 "..the mantra that sustainable food....must be organic local and slow...doesn't work. Africa already has such a system....and one person in three is malnourished".

We have got as far as creating a 4' x 16' concrete block raised bed (empty) with a hardware cloth gopher screen at the bottom. I am currently fully engaged in trying to meet the County Fire Department's brush clearance requirements. Once the weed wacking, grubbing and raking abates I will turn my attention to Laurel Sumac control. Then I will begin the soil building exercise....perhaps around early July. Meanwhile, I guess, we'll keep buying the cheap and bountiful food available at our local (not always organic) markets.

The Sage-Gatherer

We spent a few hours at Bates Beach last Saturday afternoon. This is the beach to the north of Rincon Point and the site of the old chumash village Shuku, renamed La Rinconada by the Spanish. Sometime early in the fall of 1775, a group of 240 soldiers, priests and settlers led by Juan Batista de Anza stopped for the night at the bluff overlooking the beach.

Last week on the way back from LA I was settling in for the drive from Trancas home when I saw a hitchhiker sitting by the road with a Peruvian chullo style knitted cap, one arm draped over a sizable pack, and the other, from elbow to thumb in fixed position jutting northward. It was an intriguing tableaux (as I flashed by) and a few seconds of thought later I pulled my Audi down to a speed at which it was plausible to do a 'u' turn (a brief glimpse of Broadbeach below) and returned to the light at Trancas Canyon Road where, with a second 'u' turn I was able to pull up just beyond the crouching form. I exited the car and she ( for it was now apparent that it was a women) stood up and shouldered her pack. She wore a hand-knit sweater and a much patched long dark skirt. Her face beneath the knit cap was deeply weather beaten and she grabbed for a stuffed brown paper grocery bag with the boney, sun-damaged hand of a field worker. Together we got the pack into the trunk and then, still clutching the paper bag she settled into the front seat.

Her name was Kim (yes, I was hoping for something less relentlessly suburban - a trail name perhaps) and she was 50 years old and had been on the road for ten years. At forty she was probably attractive, her ten years on the road had cost her her looks but she had, somewhat prematurely, achieved the clear eyed mien of wisdom that is associated with post-menopausal woman of spiritual disposition.

The setting was hardly a lonely moor but past Trancas development does thin out: thus it was that Wordsworth's quizzing of the old leech gatherer (The Leech-Gatherer or, Resolution and Independence, 1800) came to mind and I uttered some contemporary version of,

'How is it that you live, and what is it you do?'

She, it turned out, was a sage-gatherer and had a number of sage smudge sticks in her paper bag left over from a day's selling along the beaches of Point Dume and Zuma. It had been a good day. She told me that she sold them by donation but that people usually gave her between ten and twenty dollars apiece. She gave me an eloquent description of the benefits of sage smoke which more or less agreed with Jan Timbrook's note that "inhaling the smoke and allowing it to waft over the body....promote spiritual balance and harmony". Kim's take was that the smoke impacted a person's aura tuning it for greater harmonic resonance with the universe.

She had recently returned from Las Cruces - a long hard trip that, she said, involved lots of walking and hunger. She knew people there. The round-trip took over two months. She was headed for County Line where she planned to spend the night. At her request I dropped her off just past Neptune's Net right across from the chumash site on the bluff overlooking the surf break. This is a flat perch above the waves where I often stopped, during my surfing days, to check conditions and I imagined Kim settling down for the night on her bed-roll, lulled to sleep by the rhythm of the surf.

From Las Cruces, on the Camino Real from Mexico City to Sante Fe (established in the late sixteenth century), she may have returned to Los Angeles along interstate ten (begun in 1956) to Tucson and then she will have followed, more or less,the Juan Batista de Anza trail which passes by County Line and Rincon on the way to San Francisco. The de Anza expedition represented the first concerted effort by the Spanish to settle Northern California.

Will, our older son is with us for a week or so from New York and so a beach visit seemed in order. I know the local beaches primarily from a surfing perspective and have an affection for Emma Woods partly because of the winter waves, partly because of the approach (a scramble down the hill from the parking spot perched above the break, across the railway lines and then across the sand) partly because it is flat-out the closest beach to Ojai and partly because the waves at the north end feel as though they are almost underneath the 101 overpass. But it has its limitations as a family beach destination so we drove up the 150 took one exit south on the 101 and ended up at Bates Beach. It was a 50 minute drive and this protracted schlepp is one small price that is paid by those of us who live in Upper Ojai. We returned on the 101 south then ducked onto the 33, took Creek Road to Montgomery and then the 150 home. It was no shorter but 101 south has the virtue of being sometimes thrillingly close to the ocean.

Will and I swam and caught a couple of waves. We saw dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) playing and feeding and brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) dropping out of the sky to dive for fish. We took a run along the beach to warm up after our dip. We had done much the same at Will Rogers Beach in Santa Monica Canyon many many times in the 17 years that we lived three blocks from the beach. But this time the Topa Topas awaited our return.

No News

Small underwater asphalt volcanoes have been discovered in the Santa Barbara Channel. They spew oil and tar not unlike the oil seeps along the 150 perhaps, but more focused in their intensity. They are from 50 - 70 feet high. As of this writing, an uncapped off-shore well continues to blow oil, at a depth of around 5000 feet, into the Gulf of Mexico threatening sea-life, fisheries and the beaches of Louisiana. The blow-out is not expected to be capped for several weeks. Governor Schwarznegger has rescinded his approval of new off-shore drilling along the California coast, but Santa Barbara's beaches will continue to be besmirched with oil - there is no plan at present to cap the asphalt volcanoes or remove current drill rigs.

If we are not at the point documented by Peter Maass in his Crude World - The Violent Twilight of Oil, Knopf, New York, 2010, where in the Niger Delta he reports, "We saw pits of burning oil and we saw flames roaring from flares on the ground; the earth was hissing fire," we are never far in Upper Ojai from oil derricks and gas flares; and if Ojai is not yet Ecuador's "mutant panorama of oil fields and gas flares in which crude oozed and burned", Upper Ojai's machinery of oil extraction, storage and distribution is ubiquitous.

For a few days recently, the skies above Ojai were clear of europe-bound jets that fly, almost unnoticed, high above trailing water vapor, carbon dioxide and droplets of un-burnt kerosene.

On Sunday, the air traffic back to its customary pre-volcano volume, we hiked up to the Sulphur Mountain ridge directly across from the Koenigstein property. An Airbus A330 flew high over the Topa Topas while below us a red tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) surfed the thermals. It was a steady climb, much of it under oaks and past banks of lupine (species), coastal wallflower (Erysimum insulare), indian pink (Silene laciniata), heart leaved penstemon (Keckiella cordifolia), wild sweet pea (Lathyrus vestitus) and the invasives spring vetch (Vicia species), mustard (Brassica species), erodium (species) and trifolium (species) and, at intervals, the nodding heads of grasshopper oil pumps. Sometimes alongside the trail were bundles of oil pipe.

We may have wished that Eyjafjallajökull's mate Hekla would blow, prolonging the hiatus in air traffic, but for now the world is back to normal with the negative space above the earth brimming with globe trotters. Everyone of them is effectively destroying whatever other good works they may undertake to reduce their carbon footprints. Will, my elder son, flew back to California from NYC last week. One piece of data that scrolled across his seat back screen was that passengers flying the friendly skies do so at an average of 55 m.p.g. - which works out at about 55 gallons for the 3000 miles or 110 for the round trip. That amount of gas would fuel the family runabout (an Audi A3) for about 2750 miles or a quarter of its annual mileage.

There are other costs to global travel. We catapult ourselves into alien cultures and potentially threatening eco-systems. The results can be bracing and regenerative, merely discombobulating or flat-out catastrophic. It was the latter that confronted a young friend of ours whose girlfriend was killed just last week by a salt water crocodile (Crocodylus porosus) while they were vacationing in the Andaman and Nicobar islands that lie in the sea between Burma and the east coast of India.

The Andaman Sheekha is the local paper that reported the story but despite a web presence the story remains a local one - in the Andamans, New Jersey where the girl's family lives and Los Angeles, home to our friend. News remains local to an extent that few of us, perhaps realize. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is 'front-page' (so to speak), but similar occurrences in Nigeria and Ecuador go unreported. Despite a spate of shark attack stories just preceding the time that Gary Condit was under suspicion of being involved in Chandra Levy's disappearance and a few months before 9-11 the eight or so deaths a year attributable to sharks go mostly unreported, except locally. Similarly, crocodile attacks are not uncommon; by some reports 2,000 people a year are killed by the reptiles, but we hear nothing of them unless they strike someone we know.

News is scalable. A reasonable definition of 'newsworthiness' would reference events that impact the eco-sphere, continents, countries, communities, families and individuals. The focus on politics, celebrity and sport confuses this simple matrix. Ultimately, I believe that the news events I need to know about will have first impacted me in some direct way.

News from Clarissa is that a wild boar (Sus scrofa) is on the loose on Sulphur Mountain. We hiked past the spot where she was confronted by the snorting beast. Her Kangal (the Turkish hunting dog bred to such emergencies) handled the situation. The wild boar is native to North Africa, Europe, Southern Russia, and most of Asia. They were initially introduced to Monterey County in 1924, for hunting. Several years later more were released into the Los Padres National Forest.

Margot reports bear scat on her driveway. We have seen nothing but quail, contrails and western fence lizards (Sceloporus occidentalis). No news is good news.

Sky Bowl

My life in Ojai is made singular by a number of experiences - of people, places and things - but no experience is as critical to my personal Ojai gestalt than the sensation of driving east over the top of the grade down past Dennison Park over the narrow bridge at the left hand corner at the bottom of the slope, past the new gateway to Black Mountain Ranch on the right and, deep breath, into the open arms of Upper Ojai.

There is a counterpoint to this experience driving west and rounding the first bend on the grade and taking in the view of the valley laid out below and the sheltering mountains beyond. It is a majestic vista but it does not elevate my spirits like the big skies of Upper Ojai. Dropping down into the valley I feel the weight of enclosure. Driving into the upper valley I feel the exhileration of cresting a high plateau. Both experiences have to do with the relative containment of space. In both cases the positive landforms create a base for the firmament or negative space above. It is my interaction with that space that seems to be critical to my sense of well being.

After my friend Lorenz Schaller first visited our property he sent me notes of his impressions. He pronounced the meadow rise where we located the house a 'sky-bowl'. In other words, a container for the void. The landforms do generate a sense of the house (and us within it) being held in a vessel or, of being enfolded in the rills, ridges and declivities of the land. But ultimately this landscape, as Lorenz intuited, addresses the sky - the negative space above. He suggested we create a series of water features, in bowls, pots and urns that would reflect the sky.

The British sculptor Rachel Whiteread has long been the queen of negative space, memorializing it in such epochal works as 'Monument' , 'Ghost' and the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna. She makes unoccupied space manifest by casting it in plaster, concrete or resin. The negative is made substantive. Its an old trick, practiced in the death masks of the 15th century; Nolli's figure ground drawings of Rome, and (as Garfield Smith and others have noted) the space beneath Bruce Nauman's chair. But as Janet Goleas writes, " Ok! She's not a nun. I'll admit the whole idiom may be a little over-cooked, but it hasn't yet fallen off the bone."

Lorrie and I visited the Hammer Museum's show of Whiteread's drawings....and the odd resin cast. Her drawings are perfunctory and she was reportedly wary of an exhibit devoted to them. Her chosen medium exists in three dimensions and interestingly her drawings are not flat - she uses white-out extensively to build a crust or topographic layering on them. The drawing description credits 'correcting fluid' as the medium and she calls it by the trade name 'Typex'. (How delightful it is that american english retains an anglo-saxon freshness and uses the blunt 'white-out', compared to the recursive devolution of the mother tongue that prefers 'correcting fluid'.) There was enough sculpture to get a real feel for her work and for her - for this is an intensely personal show that included, for instance, an artfully curated collection of small objects that inspire her.

She came to the world's attention with 'Ghost', the plaster cast of a room interior in 1990 and later cast an entire, about to be demolished, house. Her fascination with architecture as subject gives her an affinity with Gordon Matta-Clarke but he very clearly worked with the vessel not the implied space; she sees in the curve of the hand reaching for the doorknob, a negative of its intended point of contact, something more fascinating than the leaden doorknob itself - he preferred the chain saw.

Her work is an astringent reminder that form has a partner, it can only exist as an intrusion into space like a rock or, both as an intrusion and a container, like a cave. Ojai is a bowl or in local lore, a nest. Upper Ojai is a broad plain, almost a bolson or flat basin floor. We live at the east end of this plain as Koenigstein winds up towards the Topa Topas. Our property is mildly dished, canted to the west, protected to the east and south. Always aware of the spatial impact of land forms, I now imagine casting the sky.

April Showers

Herbaceous borders became popular in the late nineteenth century partly as a reaction against formal beds of annuals that in various forms, had been in favor since the middle ages. Their apotheosis appears in the work of Gertrude Jekyll who, although half blind, had an intensely painterly approach to these plantings . The appeal of her work has helped ensure that, along with the mixed border (that includes shrubs along with perennials), it has continued as a dominant trope in garden design.

In the Surrey of my youth, herbaceous borders were certainly popular amongst the gentry - set against, perhaps, drifts of exotic rhododendrons and other woodland plantings. Often, another feature of note in these gardens was the rockery. This was an aggregation of rocks (or, at a pinch, broken concrete) inter-planted with succulents, alpine plants or heaths.

These two major thematic elements in the upper-middle class mid-twentieth century English garden canon, along with the more recent trend popularized by Piet Oudolf of the perennial meadow , and a swath of gravel (which arguably has its roots in the french parterre tradition), define the formal composition of our chaparral garden. Much of this has occurred without deliberate intention. At work is the miasmic zeitgeist and the happenstance of the site.

Last weekend we visited the garden of our neighbors Stephen and Clarissa Cornwell. Clarissa is responsible for the perennial borders of irises, lavendars, echium and sages. Here too are gravel terraces, lawn, rock walls and I suspect, somewhere a rockery. There is even a folly - the slab and foundation of a burnt-out house which has been artfully transformed into a terrace. This recent ruin has been imbued with an almost classical grace. Aeonium, kalanchoe, aloe and agave flourish in west facing beds. Beyond the garden to the south a tangle of oaks rises up to Sulphur Mountain ridge. To the north, majestic views of the Topa Topas, the foothills and valley and to the east Santa Paula Peak frame the predominantly blue and blue/grey plantings.

The horticultural conditions of our respective gardens are fundamentally different. The south facing slope of the Upper Ojai valley is drier, vegetated with chaparral and coastal sage brush while oak meadowland flourishes on the damper and cooler north facing slope. Rocks from the pre-historic spalling of the Topa Topas litter the south facing slope but, defeated by gravity, they populate only the lowest reaches of the north slope now splashed with oil seeps.

The siting of our respective houses means that we enjoy views to the south, north and west, with limited vistas to the east; their views are similarly expansive but are restricted to the west. Our houses face one another across the valley more or less at the same elevation and equadistant from the 150 which snakes through the valley floor alongside the creek.

Clarissa has embraced mediterranean and English plantings, along with a broad range of succulents while we have eschewed all non-natives, but both gardens draw from the same well of formal traditions. The structure of our garden has only slowly begun to emerge and it has been in a week of damp weeding afternoons that I have begun to fully appreciate its bones.

There are to my mind, five salient features: the tilted plain or front lawn; the spine to the west that is developing as both a mixed border and a rockery; the bowl to the north; the gravel pool terrace and the rocky clumping of oaks just above the north east corner of the house which was the anchor for the original siting of the house.

All these elements have been shaped by the underlying topography and successive waves of grading that have spanned the last decade. Rocks have been piled at the margins and now the spine that runs north south between the east and west meadows is a tumble of large rocks - and it is on the east facing slope of this feature that we have, by virtue of cutting back the rampant chaparral hard last spring, something resembling a mixed border with perennial flowers like phacelia (Phacelia douglasii?), bush sunflower (Encelia californica), california everlasting (Gnaphalium californicum), great stands of mimulus (sp. brevipes) and perezia (Acourtia microcephala), shrubby trees such as (the usual suspects) holly-leaved cherry (Prunus ilicifolia), walnut (Juglans californica) mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus betuloides), toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia) and laurel sumac (Malosma laurina) and in between the sage brush stalwarts artemesia (sp. californica) and coyote brush (Baccharis pilularis). Smaller dots of color are provided by blue dicks (Dichelostemma capitatum) and purple owl's head clover (Castilleja exserta). Coulters lupine (Lupinus sparsiflorus) is underfoot while tarweed (Hemizonia fasciculata) is preparing to bloom; entwined throughout are wild cucumber (Marah macrocarpus) and morning glory (Calystegia macrostegia).

The spine transitions into the bowl (cut into dry, rocky and sandy soil) where deer weed (Lotus scoparius) predominates despite being hydro-seeded with the same mix that has provided a very different outcome on the front lawn (which is fill from Grimes Canyon). The deer weed provides some color and its massing segues into the chaparral beyond. At the west termination of the bowl three oaks rise out of the rocks with an under-story of holly leaved cherry, walnuts, poison oak and chaparral currants.

One straggly and disassociated oak to the north of this group has been marked as a source for firewood - its absence will open up a view to the 2000' high-point of the site which sits atop a sensual mound that marks the northern termination of the east ridge which, at the southern end, wraps to the west and provides the site with its unique sense of enfoldment.

Those damp afternoons of epiphany were devoted to weeding the mixed border and the bowl. Great drifts of clover have taken over in the spaces between established shrubs and its removal is critical to the survival of the needle grasses that have survived beneath the trifolium canopy. Amidst the clover, particularly in areas of dampness, our old friend erodium was ripe for the plucking. Occasionally, star thistle and italian thistle provide easy targets for annihilation.

On Saturday Lorrie and Griffin joined me in a final assault on the weedy edges of the gravel pool terrace. Work remains to be done and the promise of rain this week will greatly facilitate the task. Griffin is (understandably) an unwilling weeder. He will begin the vast work of weed-wacking along the drive next weekend.

New Moon

April 13, Notes: Next weekend Griffin our about to be graduating high school senior will camp for three days at Coachella for the music festival. In August he leaves for Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. It's been almost a year since we moved into our house in the wildland/urban interface and almost two since we sold our home in Santa Monica Canyon. This evening Lorrie and I strolled down the property, to close the gate and pick up the mail, in the gloaming. Due west, just to the right of a transcendantly bright Venus was the new moon with the old in its arms. Somewhere in this is a new life for us all.

April 19, Notes: A few weekends ago Lorrie saw a five foot gopher snake lolling on a rock at Margot's and just yesterday Griffin tells us he almost stepped on a three footer on Besant Hill campus. I have been dreaming of snakes; Lorrie has been dreaming of snakes - classic dreams of transformation. The chumash and other native American bands saw snakes as metaphors of life, death and rebirth; the shedding of a snake's skin was associated with life and with a new beginning.

While the house was under construction the contractor told us of a big old gopher snake that lived in the rocks under the oak grove close to the house. Early last summer I saw its erstwhile skin draped over the rocks. It gave me quite a start. I have the usual fear of snakes although one of my earliest memories is of playing with a snake on a sandy path at Frensham Ponds in Surrey, England - until my older sister grabbed me away. I saw one young rattle snake last year in the shade of Griffin's 1977 truck almost invisible on the hardpan that is the compacted soil awaiting construction of a guesthouse next to the garage.

As our first year in the wildland/urban interface ticks away we are now able to gauge the flow of the seasons. As of the last week or so we are back in swimming season. It was probably still in March that, for a few days, the pool warmed up to just below 70 degrees and was comfortable for a quick dip. Now, at 72 it is almost ideal for swimming laps. What was a theoretical notion of a shallow pool being more energy efficient - should one choose to heat it - is now confirmed in practice as being more immediately responsive to the warmer days of spring, and thoughts of investing in a solar heating system are receding. The trick is to have the pool cover open on warm days and always closed at night. This is, after all, the most basic solar system with the cover functioning as both insulation and control valve.

A visitor to the house asked recently why we had raised the pool out of the ground so that the coping is 18" above grade - my glib answer was that it was designed to keep snakes out of the pool. We certainly had that in mind, but we also wanted the pool to read as a trough - like those for horses and cattle - so that it had an almost agricultural aspect and became a sculptural element in the minimalist gravel hardscape.

So despite living in a minimalist house and landscape there is room for metaphor. The house is fundamentally a representation of a barn and the pool a cattle trough. I was reminded of the function of metaphor (or is it simile?) in architecture when we all visited Otis College of Art and design for an open house for accepted students.

There are three buildings on the Otis campus in Westchester, a 1960's seven story concrete box raised on angled piloti (which I had always admired on my drives to LAX), a parking garage and Fred Fisher's skewed corrugated tin shed gallery and fine arts building. A few years ago I bumped into Fred at a gallery opening at his building (I knew him from my years teaching at the Macarthur Park campus of what was then Otis/Parsons) and he mentioned that he had long despised the adjacent concrete low-rise tower as representing everything that was wrong with modern architecture. It wasn't until last weekend that I learnt that it is in fact a notable building.

It was designed by Eliot Noyes in the early 1960's and built in 1964. Noyes was part of a group which also included Philip Johnson, Landis Gores, Marcel Breuer and John Johansen -- known as the Harvard Five. He was the house designer for IBM at the time and most famously designed their Selectric typewriter in addition to a number of buildings. The Westchester building housed IBM's aerospace division and utilized pre-stressed concrete panel cladding with small rectangular punched windows which were designed to echo the data input device of the time - the punchcard. I am certainly old enough to recognize the reference and for several years was employed by a company in Australia whose foundational business was the production of punch cards and their data input (think rooms of low-wage young women at punch card machines). It is a delightful, if dated, reference. More importantly it results in a playfully animated facade entirely independent of its hexadecimal origins.

Our long weekend as empty nesters (while Griff was away) has come and gone. The pool filter is clean and we are ready for a complete season of swimming. The snakes are all well and truly awake and together we await the fullness of spring.

Where Native Meadows Come From

It was probably 8 to 10 years ago that we first started looking for land. That's not counting the time, perhaps twenty or more years ago that we noodled around Ojai and Santa Paula - and by chance saw a land for sale sign at the foot of Koenigstein in Upper Ojai and drove up the road. This is a hazy memory but I do know that the then visible oil wells were enough to forestall any further enquiries.

The trip we made, sometime at the beginning of the century, was based on the notion that we needed a weekend getaway that would expand our lives and relieve the pressure from our Santa Monica House and Garden which we were forever remodeling (and worse, re-programming the three buildings that made up the compound). We targeted the areas north of Santa Barbara up to San Luis Obispo and seaward to Cambria. The explosion of grape growing was, by this point, well and truly under way and it was soon apparent that land in these areas was too expensive. After driving up the PCH to the 101 through Santa Barbara, we took the 154 inland and by lunchtime found ourselves in Los Alamos.

We were essentially exploring real estate through AVA's ( American Viticultural Areas) - Santa Barbara County contains the Santa Ynez and Santa Maria Valleys, and San Luis Obispo County Arroyo Grande, Edna Valley and Paso Robles.

Perhaps I should back up. What was this fascination with the wine growing regions? Why didn't we, like our design-head cohort in Los Angeles, go exploring the desert? Why were we not imagining some colorful casita in Joshua Tree or Desert Hot Springs? We had the desert credentials. We regularly visited Two Bunch Palms in Desert Hot Springs in the early eighties and once we had children we visited the more raffish MaHaYa close by the spa that April Greiman and Michael Rotundi would make chic and around the corner from Hope Springs that English designer Mick Haggerty and Steve Samiof designed as a hip minimalist overlay on a 60's googie spa, and which close friends bought with two partners a few years ago.

One reason is that the desert spooks Lorrie, another is that the drive from L.A. is tiresome and a third is that I have watched as the smog creeps over the pass between the San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains and it is like the vaporous spirit of Los Angeles coming to wreak vengeance on those who dare try to leave the valley of the smokes (as the Gabrielenos called it). There is certainly some powerful ju-ju in the desert, perhaps not all of it bad, but it gives one pause. The wind scoured Marmol Radziner Modular Pre-fab house that sits in the Desert Hot Springs bad lands - un-sold, un-tenanted and un-loved is a warning against the hubris of architects who believe they can tame the desert - and its demons. The John Lautner motel suffered a similar fate although his is a more modest building and less offensive, perhaps, to the Shoshonean spirit walkers.

But the most powerful reason for Lorrie's and my fascination with the vinelands is the romantic association with our (comparitive) youth together. Truth be told, we were both in our thirties when under the aegis of UCLA's architecture design program we toured the vineyards of Santa Barbara County to prepare for a studio based on designing a winery in Ojai (Mining Gravel 2010-01-30). It was probably the first time I had ventured north of Point Dume and it was at a time in my life when I was palpably enraptured by California. In a UCLA issue van we drove as far north as Cambria and then wound our way back through San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties, ending up in Ojai. A friend and I spent an evening watching The Great Santini at the Ojai Playhouse and in the morning I drove out to Rincon to surf. Lorrie had already bailed and was on her way back to Los Angeles. But we shared enough on the trip for it to become a touchstone in our relationship. A year or so later, we served Zaca Mesa wine at our wedding because we had both loved their winery in the Santa Ynez valley - of which Adam Tolmach, our putative client for the UCLA design exercise, was an alumnus.

Our search for land echoed this trip and like it, ended in Ojai but not until some years after we had driven through the central coast AVA's and right at the point where we had started two decades previously, on Koenigstein Road.

Last Friday, Lorrie and I found ourselves, by happenstance, back in Los Alamos in the Santa Ynez Valley. We breakfasted with Margot and her brother Craig (who joined us from Morro Bay) at the Quackenbush cafe. We were on our way to S&S Seeds who were holding their annual open house and barbecue. It's located just off the 135 in broad flatlands that rise to the east towards the 101, in the northern most portion of the Santa Ynez Valley. A few miles before Los Alamos, on the 101, we had passed the turn off to Zaca Mesa.

As we drove up to the S&S ranch house we passed fields of needle grass waving softly in the breeze. Here too, were fields of purple owls clover, glistening rows of goldfields, blue lupines and phacelias. We toured fields of native grasses, muhly, saltgrass, fescue, melics and brome all fated to be harvested and threshed and sorted in the seed shaking barn where the often minute seeds are teazed out and packaged. This is where the seed is grown for the state, county, institutional and private campaigns to remediate development scarred lands, create and maintain native landscapes and substitute natives for exotics at all scales of garden design. Rarer natives, or those not amenable to agricultural production, are hand collected in the wild and processed in the seed shakers.

Paradoxically, S&S thrives on the destruction of California' s wildlands: governmental requirements to remediate the disturbed soils have been at the core of their business model. But remediated landscapes are not the equal of undisturbed soil crusts that have supported evolving native ecosystems for 30,000 years and more. In recessionary times of reduced development there is less pressure on our wildland/urban frontier and an icreasing temptation for S&S to sell the land for grape growing. Zaca Mesa perhaps?

Fields of Gasoline

I received an e-mail this week from Wendy All, a colleague at the Rock Art Institute at UCLA, who mentioned that she and her husband Jay had visited the Carrizo Plain over the Easter weekend to look at wild flowers.

Having recently blogged about the Carrizo Plain as the dead heart of contemporary California (Cave and Rock, 2010-03-30) it was encouraging that someone was at least visiting the shriveled organ, brought low, in my estimate, by its isolation from the state's contemporary arteries of communication and trade. Wendy reports that the wild flowers that decorate the grave site are particularly vibrant this year. She referred me to a wild flower website which is replete with startling photos of yellow, blue and purple fields, many taken in the northern end of the plain around Soda Lake.

We should, of course, be thankful that this forgotten prairie exists in something approaching its primordial condition, for here perhaps, is a reminder that much of California was once a flower pasture. But as I indicated in Weed World 2010-03-08, to suggest as much is to enter into a debate about California's ecological heritage. Richard Minnich, in his recent book California’s Fading Wildflowers, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 2009, argues that California's wildflowers are a lost legacy and that,

"The long-believed bunchgrass theory, and its conversion to exotic grassland through overgrazing, encouraged people to take for granted the rapidly fading wildflower heritage......We need to recognize that California was not all grasslands in the past...”

It seems to me that Minnich is setting up something of a grass man here: can't we all agree that California was a botanical mosaic with chaparral, forests, grasslands, desert and forblands? Furthermore, grasslands and forblands co-exist now and, it is reasonable to presume, then.

Minnich also weighs in on the wildfire issue,

“We need to reintroduce fire into ecosystems.. we should work toward a Mexican model, which will become a low-maintenance management system...Land-use policies that permit building in indefensible spaces exacerbate the problem"

and then, echoing bullet point number 4 (chaparral is inimical to human habitation - see Cave and Rock 2010-03-30)

“You can’t live in nature in Southern California...You can save structures in an urban setting because they’re surrounded by pavement and watered lawns. In wildlands, you have solitary structures in the middle of a field that behaves like gasoline. It is indefensible and should not get public support. We’re burning billions of dollars (on fire suppression) in the western United States."

As an ecologist, Minnich indicates a rare show of support for irrigated lawns but seems to believe that solitary wildland/urban interface structures are doomed, awaiting their fate in fields of gasoline. One wonders how the pre-contact population of Native Californians, which by some estimates approached half a million, managed, living in their incendiary homelands with nothing resembling 'pavement and watered lawn' to save them.

We are indeed trying to 'live in nature', and as a part of that intent are developing needlegrass meadows close to the house which then shade to chaparral about 200' out. Immediately adjacent to the front of the house is an eight foot swathe of crushed rock with twenty or more feet of 3/8" gravel at the back - our pool terrace. At the west end is an abbreviated chip seal gravel 'auto court' and to the east is a natural gravel terrace. The house itself is built according to dba's fire-safe protocol .

Fescue is sprinkled within the needlegrasses and between them all is an opportunity for native perennials and annuals such as tarweed (hemizonia fasciculata); common fiddleneck (Amsinckia menziesii); blue eyed grass (Sysrinchium bellum); Lupin (Lupinus bicolor); Coulter's lupin (Lupinus sparsiflorus); purple nightshade (solanum xanti); owl's head clover (Castilleja exserta); wild sweet pea ( Lathyrus vestitus); peonies (Paeonia californica); perezia (Arcourtia microcephala) and the bushy deer weed (Lotus scoparius). All the above have made an appearance with the exception of the blue eyed grass, which although seeded was out-competed, I suspect, by the rampant erodium.

A good year for rain has meant that clover (Trifolium species) has colonized large tracts of our meadow lands and has now superseded erodium as the weed of the moment. I have succeeded in clearing most of it from the so-called tilted plain or 'front lawn' but have yet to tackle the bowl which rises up beyond the pool.

Somehow, a balance needs to be achieved between grasses and (mostly) perennial wildflowers. With our 'fields of gasoline' it's too soon to tell, but I am encouraged that there is developing something approaching a simulacrum of native prairie - at once grassland and forbland.

White-Out

Recently we visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The heavily patterned red brick building was completed in 1995 and designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta. At this point the Botta building is a bit of an embarrassment. A very late example of his post modern work it is a poster child for everything we now hate about that era. The building is replete with the cultural tics of the time - like banded black and white granite and elaborate ziggurat-like stairs that every architecture student of the 1980's attempted to include in their designs. Away from the decorated core of the building, however, the galleries, roof top garden and cafe show a stylistic evolution towards his later, more purely modernist work.

Architects now under consideration for a planned 100,000 sq. ft. addition include Renzo Piano, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Zumthor, David Adjaye, Steven Holl, TEN Arquitectos, Foster and Partners; Norway's Snohetta; and Diller, Scofidio & Renfro. No real outliers here - although I had to remind myself of the work of Snohetta.

After the despicable Broad addition to LACMA Piano should be excluded from any consideration, and having made the mistake of choosing an architect the first time round who epitomised the (fading) zeitgeist of the time, the Museum might be well advised to choose one of the less usual suspects like Adjaye or Snohetta.

The current Galleries work well and we began on the top floor with the Luc Tuymans retrospective. His work combines blurry abstraction with what David Shields' calls 'reality hunger' - he lards his almost monochromatic canvases with images from World War II, the Belgian Congo and contemporary politics and culture. The result is unnerving primarily because of his skill as a painter - Condaleeza Rice (the emblematic image of the exhibit) is entirely subsumed by the subtlety of his brush and color work.

Nazi war criminals are literally neutered when surrounded by Tuyman's neutral palette. He embraces the current zeitgeist - in my experience pioneered by W.G. Sebald in his stunning series of novels in the 90's - characterized by the notion of sampling or pastiching fragments of reality into a work of art, and ironically, since he uses the greys and whites of a printed page, his work almost looks like a page torn from a Sebald novel. Like the novelist's, his technique produced in me a somber, almost elegiac reflection on the nature of our small lives and their connection to the larger historical record of our times.

His limited palette of whites and greys bending seemlessly into the yellow and violet parts of the spectrum produces an effect that is both romantic and naturalistic. It is a palette that can be experienced in nature under certain circumstances. I am reminded of those white-outs on grey days of sitting in the surf line-up at Topanga moving gently with the greasy swell and watching as the yellow sunshine tried to creep under the ghostly mantle. Or, just last Saturday, on a scramble up Bear Creek.

Lorrie's cousin Ellary, partner Ethan and her daughter Odile were visiting and I was in charge of providing a local hike. On a previous occasion I had taken them to the look-out a few miles up Sisar. This time,we all drove up to the Greenburgh's avocado ranch at the top of Koenigstein in Griffin's white 1977 C-10 Chevy truck, and then walked alongside the ranch by the pomegranate hedge past the turn off to Leo Lockwood's avocado farm and then up through the sage and across Bear Creek. The creek was flowing and at its muddy edges we saw bear tracks.

Power lines and mostly broken irrigation pipes accompanied us to a point where the track again crosses the creek and where, reputedly, the Greenburgh's had considered erecting another house for, a half mile or so into the walk, we were still on their in-holding. It is here that the tangle of white 4" abs terminates and the creek widens to a gravelly wash before turning sharply south at the foot of a near vertical cliff face that rises a couple of hundred feet out of the chaparral. The path continues to the north but Griffin was intrigued by the possibilities of following the creek.

Thus it was that despite my dark warnings about poison oak we began bouldering our way up Bear Creek. Heads down, calibrating every step against the lie of the next foothold and the gravitational penalty of achieving it, we were enveloped, as ZZ Top once sang, in 'A World of Swirl'.

The sky was mostly absent. But hints of its blue were provided by overhanging bowers of ceanothus (Ceonothus oliganthus?). Underfoot the yellow, gray and white gravel, mostly yellow to cream sedimentary rocks and the occasional basalt-like black igneous boulder echoed Tuyman's palette.

Where the stream ran there was an orange cast to the iron-rich water. But often the water disappeared - running underground - and then would remerge in its rusty channel higher up the canyon. Everywhere were the bleached trunks and branches of trees up-rooted and hurled down the canyon when the winter rains engorged the creek.

Along the way mugwort (Artemesia douglasiana), lupine and chaparral pea, blackberry and yes, poison oak but entwined by the beautiful native clematis called Virgin's Bower (Clematis lasiantha) its creamy blossoms (fringed with yellow stamens) on long axilliary stems. 

Higher up Bear Canyon the creek becomes more truly a gorge - more pale rock, gravel and to the left as one ascends, dark rust colored shale that lies at its angle of repose and threatens with every footfall to slide into the creek. Here the spring fed water course heads off to the west in a narrow channel while the gorge heads on up and becomes more dramatic in its rock-strewn topography.

On the right there is an opportunity to climb up the bank and re-enter the chaparral above the creek and, with buckwheat beneath our feet and with sage, yerba santa and ceonothus at our side, we returned.

Cave and Rock

We are creatures of the savannah –and where it does not naturally exist we have created it. Sometimes it is achieved by casual or deliberate deforestation; sometimes pasture animals fulfill the role of making the wildlands grasslands; and sometimes fire does the job.

Now: imagine a house that exists under a floating and flat roof (supported on freestanding steel columns)  in a sheltered, topographic universe. There is ‘un-conditioned space’ – that is areas that are shaded but part of the common air (and its disturbances) and enclosures that are glazed or solid as their use requires -   all supported on a structural concrete floor.

This floor responds to the underlying topography of the site and to a topography of utility. A pool impinges on this scheme and is thus partly shaded. There are sit walls, ramps, steps, half walls and full walls. Enclosures are ceilinged, but a space exists between ceiling and roof protected from nesting creatures by stainless woven-wire fabric. Conditioned air is distributed in the space between ceilings and roof by a branching of duct work fed from a mechanical room.

This is an architecture not of object (a rock) but of anthropology (a cave). It is our next house. It is in the savannah.

We live, for the moment, in a box that is rendered translucent to the north and south in three of the six 16’ bays. The conceit is that the landscape flows through it. Grading and fire clearances have assured that we are surrounded to a distance of 100 feet or more by a rock-strewn weed patch. Slowly, we are attempting to turn this area into a pre-1769 grassland. For California is remarkable in once possessing native, prairie-like grasslands that supported herds of artiodactyls and the predators (including humans) that fed on them.

A few weekends ago we watched with friends as a young doe scampered across the tilted plain that is our front lawn and took off up the slope to the east. Jokingly, I said,

"now let's watch for the mountain lion right behind Bambi",

immediately over the ridge came, not a single mountain lion but two coon hounds slavering in pursuit of their supposed supper. I called their owner, Peter Jump, and told him that his dogs were heading east and would shortly be in Santa Paula. His wife Harriet had, sometime previously, showed off pictures of a mauled (and very dead) coyote that was the handiwork of the hounds. They would make short and wet work of the deer. I understand that the doe outlasted them and the dogs returned home exhausted and still hungry. They clearly had not been trained in the art of persistence hunting by which, according to recent theory, our aboriginal ancestors had succeeded in catching faster prey - human 'doggedness' ultimately triumphing over the swifter sprinters. By such episodes are our atavistic memories of the chase reawakened.

Driving north recently, California's deforestation is much in evidence for those aware that the rolling hills of alien grasses, mustard and the occasional oak are not the primeval landscape of the 'golden' state. Nevertheless, they do represent a kind of bastardized nature that stands in opposition to the urban, suburban and exurban development of the last century or so that otherwise lines the 101.

There are the missions, mission bells (those glyphs that line the road and never peal) Taco Bells, military bases, medical facilities and monuments of incarceration; and scattered campuses of tertiary education that feed these various beasts. In between is an industrialized agriculture; at the interstices are the premium outlet malls that represent the cutting edge of bricks and mortar merchandising in the 21st century. Scattered along the arterial roads and off across the plains and up into the hills are housing units.

Driving by: an abandoned military base; housing that seems at first abandoned but signs of life processes - of washing strung along a line or cars and trucks nestled against the wooden walls - suggest inhabitation; farm towns lost in time; farm-workers still inhabiting the world that Dorothea Lange documented but with newer cars; Gilroy's garlic, the cabbagelands of Monterey County; grapes - clinging to trellised armatures and to the drops of moisture borne inland by marine layer mists.

And then, Palo Alto - signs of enterprise, of intellectual activity amidst the gnomic names of applied digital technology companies.

Returning from San Francisco on the 5, we turned off at the 119 and joined the 33 at Taft then drove to Cuyama and down to Maricopa, Ventucopa, through the Los Padres National Forest (skirting Pine Mountain, center of the Chumash world) to an elevation of a little over 4000 feet and then a long and winding descent into Ojai.

To the north of Cuyama is the Carrizzo Plain occupying what in contemporary terms is a dead zone between the 101 and the 5. This is the area west of the Sierras but east of the 101 given over to ranching, oil and parkland after briefly being the breadbasket of the state when large scale mechanized grain farming attempted to take advantage of the prairie-like plateau.

Dryland grain farming and ranching developed in the late 1800's; in 1912 mechanized agriculture brought scale to the endeavor. Rusting harvesting equipment still litters the grasslands and stands as testament to the unreliable rains of California.

Before the arrival of the Spanish, the Chumash, Yokuts, and other Native Americans hunted and traded on the Carrizo Plain and the Chumash memorialized a vulva shaped rock outcropping with richly painted motifs. I visited the site a couple of years ago and found it much vandalized but still a magnificent presence. The graffiti had a history of its own going back at least 100 years. This so-called 'Painted Rock' is at the far north of the plain located between the Caliente Mountains to the west and the Temblor Range to the east with Soda Lake just to the north. The area is now administered by the BLM (U.S. Bureau of Land Management) and, running north-south sits squarely atop the San Andreas fault.

An essential node of pre-Columbian civilization in mid-coast California where gatherings connected the peoples of the coast, inland valleys, desert and forested highlands, the Carrizo Plain is now a wasteland, the empty heart of a State whose arterial system is composed of concrete roads, cell towers and fiber optic cable rather than the ley lines of ancient culture that connected community to community and all to the psychic beacon of the Painted Rock.

Fire Lands

In notes for a Chaparral blog piece I wrote the following bullet points:

• Lacking apparent order or hierarchy 
• Adapted to fire, much of the bio mass exists underground 
• Hard shell leaves, dwarfish forms 
• Chaparral is inimical to human habitation 
• Fire is the great regenerative force 
• The vestibule of Hell 
• A sensual ecology 

One afternoon last summer the wind changed and the smoke from the Guiberson fire along South Mountain darkened the sky. The charred smudging of the sky, the warmth of the air and the smell of the smoke were, for a moment, enough to suggest that here was no paradise but instead the vestibule of hell.

It can be a fretful experience moving through hard chaparral. There is almost always something tugging at you. As Rick Halsey suggests (verbal communication, 2010), If you emerge without scratches and blood then it must have been coastal sage brush or soft chaparral!

This is no ordinary landscape. It is at once a sea of gasoline and intricate habitat to a thousand things that flutter, crawl, shimmy, slither and sidle their way through the almost impenetrable skein.

Learning to love chaparral involves giving up the half a millennium of post Renaissance landscape appreciation classes to which we in the west are heirs. There is no orderly foreground middle ground and back ground; no objecthood - just a frantic gestalt of schlerophytic plant material.

In areas of riparian habitat there appears to be greater order yet this too quickly dissolves into an entanglement of oaks or elsewhere, as now, a leafy blizzard of alders, cottonwoods and sycamores. Just north of the park gate on Sisar there is a stretch of oaks by the Creek that sets up a kind of treed cage in which Great-horned owls (Bubo virginianus) swoop and jink. One afternoon Lorrie and I saw a blue heron (Ardea herodias) glide through the area. Another morning I startled a pair of grey foxes (Urocyon cinereoargenteus): one ran west up the bank, the other darted towards the creek but stopped 10 or 15 yards into the undergrowth, as I passed we locked eyes. I continued, the fox stood its ground. These are rare moments of objecthood inserted into the field theory painting where the matrix of greys, browns and almost greens mess with our minds. This why most people stick to the trail.The yellow strip of sandy track organizes the chaos. it also vitiates the experience of plunging into chaparral that sings to our lizard brain.

There is a mesa that sits between Bear and Sisar canyons which is buttressed to the east of the creek by a steep escarpment. As you scramble down it towards the creek and once within ear shot of the roiling water there is a shelf of head high California sagebrush (Artemesia californica). Passing through it is to inhale air heavy with the scent of the plant and have your face gently lashed by the feathery leaves: this is sage surfing - like being tossed in the ozone-rich foam of a broken ocean wave. Such moments of extreme sensuality may not be experienced by those who stick to the trail!

At some point in the very recent past the mesa above fell victim to a strategy of fuel reduction. It is now mostly low chamise amidst rocks that have been displaced and scarred by heavy equipment. Last year I watched the cutting of a swathe of chaparral along the Foothill trail just east of Stewart Canyon in a futile, but State funded attempt to reduce the flammability of the wildlands as they encroach on suburban settlement.

Rick Halsey, Fire, Chaparral and Survival in Southern California, Sunbelt Publications, San Diego, 2008, points out that the bush ecology is not fire dependent, but fire adapted. Yes, it can be a regenerative force but not one on which the survival of the chaparral is dependent. He points out that, on the contrary, the frequency of mostly anthropogenic fires threatens the survival of the ecosystem. He also argues that the evisceration of the wildlands to which I was witness early in 2009 along the Foothill trail is not the answer. It is self evident that a reduction in the flammability of structures that impinge on wild areas makes more sense than any attempt to reduce the flammability of the wildlands.

In five days last September, the Guiberson fire scorched 17,500 acres along the ridge of South Mountain and down its flanks to the edges of the irrigated farmlands below. One out-building was destroyed. Driving along the 126 last week I looked across at the fresh mantle of green that now covers the old burn areas. I was encapsulated in 4000 lb. of speeding steel, plastic, glass, rubber and cow hide and at a distance of perhaps two miles from the ridge, nevertheless I felt a faint frisson of connectedness to the regenerative powers of the natural world.

It's not all sage-surfing but neither do most of us wildland/urban interfacers spend long in the vestibule of hell although I heard tell, over the weekend, of a Montecito family that lost, amongst its members, five houses in the fires of 2008. Bullet point number four: Chaparral is inimical to human habitation.

Full Metal Jacket

Houses are not consumed by Chaparral fires, but by house-fires started by Chaparral fires.

That may seem like a fine distinction, but it has real consequences when planning for a fire safe residence. There are three modes of attack by these fires on buildings:

• burning embers

• heat radiation

• flame contact.

The CSIRO (an Australian government funded research organization - and full disclosure - with whom I worked for a couple of years in the 1970's at their Canberra Black Mountain Computer Research Laboratory) have generated significant data in their analyses of "How Bush Fires Attack". They conclude that ember attack is the most prolonged and persistent mode of attack, commencing before the fire front and persisting for several hours afterwards. Radiant heat is at dangerous levels for perhaps 5-10 minutes before and after the flame front passes. Flame contact may impinge on the building for just a few minutes. Strong winds associated with fires exacerbate the effects of all three.

We know from anecdotal evidence from those who have seen the fires ravage Upper Ojai that the fire line moves quickly and literally sweeps over structures. In our recent fire-safe building design, we have responded to all areas of vulnerability to fire, but have focused particularly on ember attack.

The re-model across the street that Lorrie and I (operating professionally as dba) designed for Margot is complete except for the fire screens which are to be installed at all glazed openings. Our thinking on fire screens/shutters/doors has evolved since they became one of the drivers for the design of own house on Koenigstein (and is reflected in their evolving nomenclature!). As it turned out, our fire doors were not installed until six months after we moved in and during that time we designed and re-designed the door and track system.

Our house was built with the line of glazing pulled back four feet from the face of the house. The fire doors pull across these 16' wide recesses (three to the north and three to the south) to create a hard shell designed to be impervious to the wind driven embers which can precede the actual line of the fire by up to a mile and arrive with a ballistic force capable of breaking the two layers of tempered window glass now mandated by the California Building Code in high fire districts. When the interior begins burning a house typically explodes in flame and ignites the landscape around it. It is in such a manner that structures - whether the fire line reaches them or not - can actually generate satellite fires that run ahead of the main fire line.

We had initially envisioned all-ipe fire doors for the house. We were early adopters of this tropical hardwood that has the same fire rating as concrete although we had used it for many years, beginning in the mid 1990's, primarily for its natural beauty and structural properties - 3/4" of ipe spans 24" as effectively as a 1 1/2" piece of redwood. Its advantages derive from its amazing density, but the weight of the wood is problematic when being used in a track hung door. Our 16' x 8' doors using a 2x frame with 1x infill would have weighed 800 lb. each.

Concerns with the logistics of hanging these doors and the structural consequences of supporting over a ton off of each side of the building led us to consider lighter, but still fire-resistant alternatives. In addition to their function as a hard shell to deflect embers, the doors also potentially function as barriers to heat radiation. In this latter role it seemed as though a cool roof material could be effective since a material designed to reflect solar radiation would also reflect radiant heat generated by a chaparral fire.

In the event, we chose a 24ga. sheet metal soffit panel in a 'cool roof' finish identical to our standing seam roof. The panels were attached to ipe strips laid into a 1/4" x 3" x 3" steel angle frame. They hang from a continuous galvanized track attached to a 1 x 6 ipe ledger. They are a handsome addition to the building and sit against the stucco facade awaiting their call to action - which we sincerely hope will never come.

Margot's situation, being a re-model of a conventional ranch-style house with a variety of glazed door and window conditions, is very different and requires a more flexible system of fire shutters. In addition, she has the ear of the L.A. County fire chief who has come down on the side of the radiation heat shield function being critical in the design of the fire shutters. Too bad: we were ready to adopt the Aussie notion that the key function of the screen is to deflect burning embers and perforated sheet metal or a wire cloth membrane is sufficient to the task.

The CSIRO addresses the radiation issue and provides experimental data on its impact on the building envelope. They note that at peak levels, radiation can crack and distort windows, doors and cladding materials, allowing breaches of the building envelope and ember attack on flammable framing members. Flame contact can cause building ignition when exposed materials, dried and prepared by sustained wind, ember and radiation attack, are contacted directly by flames.

In Margot's house we have tried to address these issues by using stucco, ipe and flame and ember-proof attic vents as well as installing double glazed tempered glazing at all new windows and doors. Her front door, eaves, decks (including their support structure and the side cladding) are solid ipe. Under floor venting - a typical weak point for raised floor structures - is protected by the ipe deck that wraps the vulnerable portions of the building.

The re-making of Margot's home, which was initially built with flagrant disregard for fire-safety and featured flammable fiber board siding, exposed rafter ends and plywood eave soffits, was an exercise in abating the inherent weaknesses of the existing building fabric.The fire screens will be the final piece of this defensive strategy.

Their design is complete in terms of the sliding mechanisms. We have opted for operable screens; most of the time, they will be parked above below or to the side of the opening they are designed to cover when there is a threat of fire or the house is left unattended. In Australia there is a trend to install fixed mesh screens that attempt to tread the line between view maintenance and fire protection. We believe that the problem is pieces of flaming debris dense enough and moving quickly enough to break through the window glass. We are less concerned, since we are confident in the fire resistive materials we have installed, about wind driven sparks.

Choosing to live in the wildland/urban interface requires a commitment to co-existing with endemic natural cycles of flood and fire. Our goal is to design structures that can endure - in an ecology in which fire is an occasional presence - like the oaks (Quercus agrifolia) that envelop Margot's house and bear the scars from past burns. We continue to wrestle with the precise nature of the fire screen infill.

Today, with temperatures hovering around a breezy 85 degrees, is a reminder that the season which mightily favors that occasional presence is fast upon us.....

Camarillo Brio

Camarillo is three legs of a 'z' from Upper Ojai: south east to Santa Paula, west to Ventura then east to Camarillo. After cascading down the 150 alongside the Santa Paula creek, the last two legs dodge around the west end of South Mountain and travel along Oxnard Plain - the old sea bed and now the richest agricultural land in the state.

Tucked into the eastern end of the plain, where it backs into the western tail of the Santa Monica mountains there is one last alluvial reach, beyond the Calleguas creek and almost surrounded by low rocky hills covered with antic drifts of cactus (Opuntia species). Here, in 1936, the largest mission revival complex in Ventura County was built to accommodate the Camarillo State Mental Hospital.

A Mexican land grant to Jose Pedro Ruiz created Rancho Calleguas in 1837, in the area that is now Camarillo. The town which sprang up in the early part of the twentieth century to serve the local farms grew to cater to the surrounding military and naval installations during World War II and then to support the area's largest employer, the mental hospital. In the 1950's it was split asunder by the 101 freeway leaving its north and south lobes forever isolated; remnants of 'old town' cling to either side of the freeway's embankments. In the mid 1990's work began on a huge outdoor suburban mall which now spreads over formerly agricultural land to the south of the freeway and includes acres of up-scale, designer outlets.

In 1996 Governor Pete Wilson announced plans to close the hospital and at first it appeared as though it would be converted to a prison - but with timely community activism and interest from the California State University system that fate was avoided, and in 2002 the first classes of the new Cal State Channel Islands (CSUCI) were held in the renovated buildings.

The campus maintains an exemplary stylistic cohesion thanks to its re-use of the mission revival buildings from the New Deal era, but at its heart is now a new three level 137,000 square foot library contiguous on three sides with the existing architecture and planted on the site of the hospital's mortuary.The library is, as one might expect from its architect Norman Foster, a bravura exercise in exquisitely engineered glassy minimalism.

A vast flat roof covers the building and, as in some steroidal gas station from the 1940's, it floats out to the west over the entry forecourt which is anchored by a large circular reflecting pool. Formally, the building is a donut, with three levels of offices and stacks surrounding a vast central space that is a reading room  illuminated from an extensive saw- tooth roof skylight system.

30 feet high, the space is reminiscent of a grand railway hall from the late nineteenth century or perhaps one of Foster's recent airports, but here there is calm and quiet with but the faintest of taps and beeps emanating from the students' lap-tops and a low sussuration from the air handling system buried in vertical metal ducting within the stacks.

Foster's design is in the British engineering tradition which stretches back to Paxton's 1850 Crystal Palace and beyond. Nurtured in the leaden skies of northern Europe, its practitioners remain obsessed with day-lighting and Foster has made a lucrative side-line of creating glass conservatory spaces to encase parts of the Reichstag, the British Museum and other monumental spaces.

Here, in southern California where the delightfully thick walled and small windowed mission revival style usefully shelters interior spaces from direct sun, such phototropism is massively inappropriate. Both Tom Mayne's glass skinned office block for Caltrans which sits behind a protective perforated steel skin and the massive wall architecture of Moneo's L.A. Cathedral (two recent architectural favorites) are appropriate to the harsh sun of southern California. Foster's building is blithely indifferent to the local climate - its genesis as a northern european design staggeringly evident as it sits on the edge of the sun washed Oxnard Plain.

Clearly impacted by budget, many of the service spaces are utiliarian in a typical institutional fashion but the building has the virtue of possessing a 'big idea' which survives un-compromised by value engineering. But despite its floating roof, etiolated steel columns, reflecting pool, and vast central hall surrounded by glassy 'servant' spaces, the John Spoore Bloome Library (named after a local rancher who provided the seed money and nominated the architect) is at best an average example of Foster's turn-of-the-century canon and one clearly beset by environmental challenges.

Yet nested into the glories of an intact campus of 1930's mission revival architecture it manages to become something quite extraordinary and a wonderful addition to the small collection of worthwhile contemporary architecture in Ventura County.

Weed World

When we first moved to the property, after an intense 16 months of securing the lot, designing the house and having it built, mustard (Brassica species) was threatening to smother the cut and fill areas where we had hydroseeded as well as dominating the 'weed patch' meadows that line the driveway down to Koenigstein. After destroying a couple of shovels with shallow thrusts at the mustard's tap roots - and hitting rock - Lorenz Schaller advised using a Pulaski.The switch to a fire-fighter's mattock increased the mustard mortality and had the added advantage of its being a tool that appealed to my then seventeen year old son. Together we got the weed under control, and this season there has been very little sign of it - so far. This has enabled me to transfer my weeding energies to erodium.

Walking up the drive recently, I saw some yellowish mustard-like plants growing in some profusion amongst the annual grasses in the disturbed areas to the east of the driveway. Checking with Uncle Miltie, (Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains, Milt McCauly, Canyon Publishing, Canoga Park 1996) I was delighted to learn that they were common fiddle necks (Amsinckia menziesii) which is a native and common to burned or disturbed areas. The flower springs from a spiral raceme and its hairiness gives it the appearance of a coiled caterpillar - with small golden yellow flowers sticking out from its back. Like the larger and later flowering perezia (Acourtia microcephala) it is basically a fire follower but, at a pinch, will become a devotee of back hoe disturbances and has thus found much to like on our land.

Mustards, thistles and filaree (Erodium species) are the current focus of my weeding efforts. The last was likely deliberately introduced into Baja California as sheep forage and was perhaps the first of the exotics to become established in Alta California. These three genera, along with the exotic grasses like wild oats (Avena fatua), ripgut (Bromus diandrus) and foxtail chess (Bromus madritensis) were able to move into the chaparral in the 18th century because the land had been prepared to receive these colonizers by the native american practice of burning the brush. This activity had developed after deer became a primary focus of their hunting with the extinction of the megafauna, such as the mammoth, which occurred somewhere around 11,000 years ago.

Pure stands of chaparral did not support a large population of artiodactyls (deer, goats, antelope and bighorn sheep) until burning opened them up to areas of herbaceous browse. This native practice was clearly built on observation of naturally occurring fires and the complex mosaic of habitats that now exists is the result of this burn history together with more recent anthropogenic fires. This at least, is how Richard Halsey tells it in his pyrocentric natural history, Fire, Chaparral and Survival in Southern California, Sunbelt Publications, San Diego 2008. As dedicated followers of this blog will know (anyone?, anyone?...), others have mused that it was the introduction of Iberian cattle by the Spanish that broke up the ancient soil crust and thus allowed the exotics access. Rick concedes that widespread cattle ranching in the mid nineteenth century exacerbated the situation and he points out that the droughts of the 1860's created a perfect storm for the native flora: overgrazing, the presence of exotic weeds and highly disturbed soil crusts put much of the native habitat into a death spiral.

I am hampered in my efforts at focused weeding by my lack of knowledge. Now, is this a native clover included in the very expensive seed mix or some brutish Trifolium interloper? My rule of thumb is that anything I recognize from my childhood is a non-native. Walks with my parents constitute my early informal education in natural history. I knew, at the age of nine or ten, the common name for most of the west Surrey wild flowers and weeds. Later, an un-tutured appreciation for Australian bush was developed in a few courses at Sydney University to the point where I recognized the invasives such as gorse, lantana, blackberry and bracken amidst the gums (as the Australians call eucalypts), banksias, melaleucas, callistemons and acacias. And now there is my current bout of autodidacticism brought on by owning too many acres of chaparral in Upper Ojai and landing next door to a biologist who specializes in native habitat restoration. Backgrounds in the flora of Europe and Australia, however sketchy, turn out to be useful in California.

The water greedy eucalypt is a particularly vilified non-native and yet barely 100 years ago pioneers such as Abbot Kinney were lauded for their efforts at introducing examples of the vast eucalypt genus to southern California. Whatever home-sickness I suffered when I arrived on these shores in 1980 was usually assuaged by visiting the Huntington Gardens where I could again gaze on a ghost gum. Later, when we moved to Santa Monica Canyon, walks in the Rustic Canyon Park eucalypt grove established by Kinney were again salve to that little piece of antipodean soul that pined for the Australian bush. Gum leaf stencils continued as a motif of interest for me for a few years, and Hank Koning, the Australian born Los Angeles architect for whom I worked in the mid-80's, picked up on the idea and impressed gum leaves into the concrete fireplace hearth of his Santa Monica home.

Chaparral is more enigmatic then Sydney's bush which, while predominantly a shrubland, has glorious discontinuous stands of gum trees providing an open, lacy canopy. But they share the visual confusion they present to the casual observer and both require study to elicit their full charm. Both ecosystems are under threat from (mostly european) weeds and invasive species.

As I look out across the valley from our perch below the Topa Topas, I see meadows in the spaces ripped out of the oak canopy that otherwise covers the north facing damp slope. Here and there is a house or ag building; some horse properties with barns and fencing; at meadows edge some ragged gums (Eucalypt species); lining driveways, rows of cypress (Cupressus sempervirens).

Here, surrounded by chaparral, the emblematic plant community of California, the clearings in the echoing hills of Southern Oak Woodland across the valley - studded with exotic trees, the meadows comprised of exotic grasses -  confirm my attempt to restore our property to something approaching its native state.

Cats and Dogs

Last week I thought I had a boil on the back of my neck. There was a hard swollen area that was sore to the touch and what felt, perhaps, like crusted puss at its apex (euwh!). After a couple of days and no improvement I asked Lorrie to take a look at it. It turned out it was a wood tick, not yet engorged, burrowing its way down to my blood supply. She was able to remove it and still alive we put it in a plastic baggie in case it was needed to id any strange after effects. The back of the neck is a favorite haunt for ticks as anyone with dogs knows. It turns out, that at just about the same time, a larger creature with a penchant for attacking necks was on the loose in Upper Ojai.

Clarissa Cornwell, our neighbor across the way, found pieces of deer vertebrae strewn about the hillside below Sulphur Mountain; later her dogs discovered the deer carcasses which were then inspected for telltale heamatomas and puncture wounds around the neck. The Mountain lion asphyxiates it prey by clamping its jaw around the neck. Their range is typically over 100 miles. The evidence was on the Sulphur Mountain side of the 150. South of the ridge, a little above the Cornwell's house, Wheeler Canyon drops down into Santa Paula and then the alluvial Oxnard plain stretches out beyond - unlikely terrain for a mountain lion. The south facing foothills on our side of the 150 back up to the Topa Topas and thence to the outskirts of Bakersfield in uninterrupted wildlands. The cat came from the north. Its wilderness corridor extends, just within the Los Padres National Forest, to north of San Luis Obispo and if we take its limits as the freeways then it and its ilk can roam west of the 5 all the way to the 580 that runs east west between San Jose and Oakland.

California still offers a remarkably open environment for a rich array of flora and fauna. It is not completely removed from its primal past. By way of contrast, Britain is one of the most extensively re-worked lands on the planet. Effectively deforested during the Roman occupation, and, after a six or seven hundred year respite known as the Dark Ages, consistently patchworked on an ever expanding scale as farmland from the medieval 'strips' of serfdom to the factory farms of today; be-ribboned with transportation networks from Roman roads to motorways, canals, railways and flightpaths; increasingly urbanized from hamlet, village, market town, city to conurbation; industrialized from Cornish tin-smelter to the coal mines and dark satanic mills of the industrial revolution to the present post-industrial age of nuclear power plants, hi-tech clean rooms and the office sprawl of financial services, Britain is a land entirely re-made from its arboreal beginnings. Perhaps it is some sort of atavistic imperative that impels the English, in significant numbers, to flee their patchwork land and find their bliss in Ojai and, more broadly, southern California - for this is a land upon which the hand of history has rested lightly.

The great threats to wildlife rangelands in California are freeways and exurbia. We on the Wildlife/Urban Interface don't help much either. As a top-predator, the mountain lion is key to the survival of southern California as one of the most biologically rich natural landscapes in the world. Because of the pressure that rapid growth has placed on its habitat, southern California has also been the focus of pioneering research into the science of habitat fragmentation and wildlife corridors. Richard Halsey of the California Chaparral Institute, (www.californiachaparral.com) spoke eloquently on the issue in his talk at the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy recently entitled, Chaparral, Grizzly Bears and Condors, the Secrets of Ojai's Remarkable Shrubland Wilderness, February 20, 2010.

Richard is on a mission to raise Chaparral awareness and has now dedicated his professional life to its study, preservation and advocacy. A former fire fighter and high school Biology teacher, he is both an amusing and erudite champion of the elfin forest. His goals include the re-introduction of the grizzly to southern California (please tell me you were serious Richard) and the re-naming of the National Forests in the area to National Chaparral Preserves. He understands that his description of the landscape as a 'shrubland' while technically accurate, can be seriously misconstrued by those of us familiar with the Monty Python's use of the word shrubbery in their Holy Grail movie.

The state of California began working toward identifying priority conservation areas when Assembly Bill 2785 (Ruskin, 2008) was signed into law in August 2008. AB 2785 requires the Department of Fish and Game to identify and compile a database of California’s most critical areas for maintaining habitat connectivity, including wildlife corridors and habitat linkages. It's a start. Locally, Highway 150 is the southernmost of the state highways that currently imperil the mountain lion in its range from Ojai to Bakersfield. To the north is the 166 which runs between El Camino Real (101) at Santa Maria and the 5 at Bakersfield.

I believe I saw a young mountain lion one winter in Will Rogers State Historical Park in Los Angeles. I most definitely saw a full grown specimen outside of Great Barrington in western Massachusetts when it emerged from tall grasslands to run across the trail a few yards ahead of me.They are large animals. I am accustomed to seeing deer carcasses along the 150, killed by passing trucks. I do not want to see a mountain lion similarly destroyed.

Between the mechanical gauntlet that the these two highways represent, any number of hysterical, armed citizens imperil the big cats; and Department of Fish and Game Wardens are understandably risk averse when it comes to 'protecting' local human populations. As we saw with the Signal Street Bear, they err on the side of euthanasia. Upper Ojai Chaparralians live at the southern end of this grand wildlife corridor that supports a creature upon whose broad shoulders rests the health of our entire chaparral eco-system. This is both a privilege and a responsibility.

Clarissa has sensibly put her safety in the hands of her Kangal, the Turkish breed of dog renowned for their ability to mix it up with the big cats.

California Dreamin'

When I taught American History to solipsistic high school juniors I got it half right. I had thrown out the text book - whose cover eerily presaged the opening titles of The Colbert Report, a riot of gilded eagles, stars and stripes - and replaced it with The Peoples History of the United States, Howard Zinn, Harper Collins, New York 1980. Just about mid way through the second semester when Zinn's relentless catalog of the feisty underclass's brilliantly orchestrated demonstrations of people power against their imperial masters began to pall, I introduced the class to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, J.P. Jewett, Boston 1852.

This can be construed as a primary document in the history of slavery in the United States, albeit one crafted within the comfortable confines of the ecclesiastical middle-class. It certainly fomented anti-slavery sentiment and as Lincoln remarked, "started this big war!" The book is, in its nineteenth century way, an absolute page-turner and is an effective vehicle, I believe, in which to grapple with the very emotional issues of slavery.

And the half I got wrong? I was teaching to a generation for whom books, as a medium, are largely irrelevant. But in our neck of the woods what are the opportunities for hands-on experiential learning for the student of American history?

The kind of experiential learning afforded by mid-coast California has to do with the the unique history and circumstances of this state. 'America' to most young Californians is a foreign land. The state owes its name to this concept of separateness, this island-ness. The myth was established in a novel in 1510 where the Island of California is populated by Amazonians, and was duly sought out by subsequent voyagers.

In 1705, the Jesuit missionary Father Eusebio Francisco Kino proved that Baja California was a peninsula by walking from New Mexico to California. But the cartographic error was persistent enough to warrant Ferdinand VII of Spain issuing a formal decree that California was a part of the mainland in 1747. It remains an "Island on the land" as Carey McWilliams called it, a once and perhaps future, rump state.

In fourth grade, California mandates that school children learn the history of their state. Hands-on learning? What parent hasn't been complicit in the glorification of those damned picturesque missions through the production of scale models? (Tip: carefully separate the top layer from a corrugated board and apply red poster paint to simulate clay tile).

In truth, fourth grade maybe a little soon to introduce the darker side of our history. But given that this is the only time designated for learning about California the end result is that kids graduate with a completely false view of our past based on a romanticized view of the Spanish Imperial adventure; at best a vague awareness of the genocide that, by the mid 1860's had killed more than 90% of the states indigenous peoples; and no awareness whatsoever of the environmental degradation visited upon the state by the Iberian cattle herds introduced by the Spanish and then enshrined in a system of vast ranchos the Mexicans developed through land grants to political insiders and military veterans. By the start of the Mexican-American War, 26 million acres were controlled by just 813 ranchers. The beloved golden hillsides of alien weeds and relict oaks are the entirely unsustainable result.

The one novel that addresses many of these issues is probably not suitable for any but the most precocious of fourth graders, and as previously discussed will be spurned by many older students. Nevertheless, Ramona, Helen Hunt Jackson, Roberts Brothers, Boston 1884, is truly California's Uncle Tom's Cabin and demands to be read by any serious student of our history.

The irony is that although Jackson undertook this 'Romance of the Ranchos' as a serious indictment of the treatment of mission indians and as a study in the race hierarchy of the state - and it can be still read as such - when first published it became a tool of local boosters who populated Southern California's landscape with new, Ramona-related tourist attractions and ultimately inspired another layer of the romanticized history of the state.