Urban Wildland

Cowboys and Indians

2012-01-29T19:43:00.000-08:00

I visited the new Renzo Piano Resnick Pavilion at LACMA recently to see California Design, 1930-1965: "Living in a Modern Way", purportedly the first major study of California midcentury modern design.

The centerpiece is a replica of the steel framed Eames house (originally built in 1949 off of Chautauqua in Santa Monica Canyon) and furnished with Ray and Charles' eclectic, multi-cultural bric-a-brac. Like Gala and Salvador Dali's rambling home frozen in time at Port Lligat, Catalonia (Suquet) the Eames House re-creation is burdened with a frozen display of a decorative style typified by quick-fire, daily and even hourly changes that the design obsessed make in their immediate surroundings and depend upon for their fragile sense of self. At LACMA we see the lifeless effigy of a living process, a single frame from a movie, displayed in a painted wood sarcophagus. The rest of the exhibit is not much better, with way too many bad chairs (the Eames' excepted) from architects; but there is some interesting clothing, Raymond Loewy's great Studebaker Avanti (lent by Dick Van Dyke) and an impressive 1960's Hi-Fi (one of which is owned locally by Bruce Botnick, the audio engineer and music producer).

Fortunately, right next door was the stunning exhibit, Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, which details the culture wars that ensued after the Spanish military and political conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521 and the Inca Empire in 1532. The French historian Serge Gruzinski, quoted in Daniela Bleichmar's review of the exhibit in The New York Review of Books, February 9, 2012, has described the conquest of Mexico and the imperial regime that followed for the next three hundred years as a "war of images". She goes on to write,

"Cortes and his men marched inland from the Gulf carrying religious bannners, medals, and figures. They whitewashed murals in native temples and and destroyed local idols, replacing them with Christian icons....After the conquest, Catholic churches rose in the exact spots of pre-hispanic temples, capitalizing on the sacredness of those locations. Missionaries waged their own war to extinguish native religion, burning ancient sacred books and ritual objects as part of their effort to achieve a spiritual conquest....But despite this campaign of extirpation, there survived, into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, local cultures that were a complex mixture of native, European and colonial elements..."

Within a hegemonic Spanish Colonial state, the losers in the political battle used images as a means for staking out religious, social and cultural claims. Thus the richness of native art forms, metal work and architecture did not disappear - they were melded into a unique hispanic heritage while the appropriation of Native sacred spaces for Christian churches and cathedrals ensured the survival of these ancient power spots.

In Burn Notice and Lady of the Apocalypse I noted that, in Southern California, although native cultures were entirely subsumed by their colonial conquerors, the survival of the Spanish tradition is not in doubt, despite Spain's early withdrawal and the territory's nineteenth century annexation to the predominately Yankee, Northern European and Protestant political entity we now know as the United States. Here, a rich cultural stew exists, but one absent the spice of Native American culture.

Tom Hines, the Architectural Historian established, in his Mission Bell to Taco Bell lecture at UCLA's History department, (which I attended back in the day) the enduring appeal of Spanish Colonial architecture. This tradition was goosed, in the late nineteenth century, by Helen Hunt Jackson's novel, Ramona and has now become Southern California's signature architectural style (New Moon). While the style runs the spectrum from full blown Colonial Revival to historicist pastiche, there is no hint of native American art and culture - although it was native labor that built the mostly primitive interpretations of the style in the Missions.

These Missions and Asistencias (sub-missions), despite proselytizing goals inimical to local traditions honored them in the breach. Asistencia Santa Paula, was founded on the site of the Portola Expedition Campsite (Surf and Turf) at the junction of the Arroyo Mupu and Santa Paula Creek, north of the 126 and east of the 150 at the present location of Harding Park, a significant confluence for the Mupu Indians whose main village was sited nearby on the Thomas Aquinas campus. There is some indication that the Californian El Camino Real followed ancient native American trading routes and spirit paths. Certainly the trail established by the Spanish from Mexico City to Santa Fe, New Mexico, was overlaid on more ancient trade-routes connecting the Native Americans of the southwest to the Mesoamericans in the old Aztec Empire.

The CSU Monterey Bay archeoastronomer Ruben Mendoza has documented solstice or equinox effects at 14 of California's 21 missions. While he claims that this is a "complex blend of solar geometry and Franciscan cosmology" this is, at the very least, a remarkable intersection of Christian and native American interests and given the latter's local knowledge and key role in the construction process it is disingenuous to dismiss their role in these alignments (Space and Practice II). In 2008, Mendoza finally recorded the winter solstice illumination of the Royal Presidio Chapel of Santa Barbara after many years when cloud or fog obscured the sun. This mission played an intricate part in the lives of the local Chumash and to my eye, at least, the building has more of the rusticity of the native culture than the neo-classical trappings of the European; here surely the Chumash were complicit in the engineering of this solstice event.

Ultimately, of course, these are but the faintest glimpses of a native American past almost entirely buried beneath the over-burden of Spanish and American history. While many ancient sacred sites were co-opted by the Franciscans in the seventeenth century now the military, as the State's largest landlord has, deliberately or not, co-opted still more. California's Native American Heritage Commission (CNAHC) has a massive listing of over 170,000 sacred locations identified as either Worship/Ritual or Sacred/Power sites. Many of these are within military installations including, for instance, March Air Force Base and Chocolate Mountain Gunnery Range, Miramar Naval Air Station, North Island Naval Air Station, and Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base.

The Coso Hot Springs located on the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station were used extensively by a number of Indian tribes, primarily the Owens Lake Paiutes and the Desert Shoshones while the Coso Canyons contain perhaps the most significant collection of petroglyphs in North America (Things Fall Apart). The burial sites and village remains from scattered communities of Chumash who lived along the California coast areas are now often buried beneath coastal military installations and runways. Vandenburg Air Force base has a number of power spots sacred to the Chumash and possibly feather and paint pole shrines (Space and Practice). (Vine Deloria).

The wreckage of a culture is now hidden beneath roads, buildings, religious, educational and defense facilities and millions of acres of industrial farmland - the infrastructure of twenty-first century California. Its images are not much memorialized in museums (The South West Museum of the American Indian in South Pasadena closed several years ago, its collections bundled off to the Autry National Center, formerly the Gene Autry Cowboy Museum) nor its cultural production recognized as of equal value to the Missions in California's heritage (California Dreamin') The battle was lost on all fronts. The War of Images a non-starter. The cowboys won.

Sharawaggi

2012-01-22T14:50:00.000-08:00

In Gardens of Epicurus, London, 1687, Sir William Temple praises Chinese gardens for their intricate irregularity and coined the term 'Sharawaggi' for areas where "the beauty shall be great, but without any order that shall be easily observed". This was the beginning of the eighteenth century English School of landscape wherein, as Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe write in The Landscape of Man, Viking, New York, 1975, "Nature was no longer subservient to man, but a friendly and equal partner....irregularity was proclaimed as the objective in landscape design".

Change is afoot in the west meadow. When we purchased the property, a little more than four years ago, the area was a rough meadow having been used historically for grazing (Palimpsest) and more recently cleared by Trexon (the developers, Jim Exon and David Trudeau) in order to establish potential house sites. Drifts of woody detritus remained from their rough grubbing where the cut brush was pushed to the margins. The first owner of this new subdivision had maintained the west meadow with the intention of grazing horses. We had no immediate use for it (although we briefly considered growing grapes and then pomegranates) and it became grist for my campaign to turn back the landscape clock to sometime before 1769.

In practice, that meant leaving it to revert to sage brush, which is a stable plant community closer to the coast but here is essentially a chaparral precursor. This sage brush transformation is now well and truly in place, although an area that had lain beneath two hundred tons of rocks excavated from the building site to the east (the rocks were finally moved off-site a couple of years ago) was further disturbed recently when we conducted a percolation test (Pitch Perfect). There is some mathematical formula whereby the arrival of a back hoe on one's property translates into an area of destruction several times larger than the boundaries of its intended work. Thus two test trenches left a broad swath of desolation.

The English estate gardens of the 18th. century developed in part because their owners had sources of income apart from their land holdings. Mercantile trade flourished in this age of the burgeoning British empire. Country estates could be given over to the pursuit of pleasure rather than profit. This was a sea-change in which the encroachment of nature-in-the-raw, formerly resisted in the interest of growing crops or grazing animals was now welcomed as an idealized landscape.

It took a little editing of course, the beauty of wild nature was often manicured to create flowing spaces where groupings of trees unknown in the natural world were used to sculptural effect, but William Kent's (or was it Alexander Pope's?) dictum, that 'all nature is a garden' fundamentally changed the way nature and gardens were understood. The surrounding wilderness was co-opted as an extension of these park like estates - an illusion fostered by the use of a sunken ditch or ha-ha as a boundary marker rather than a wall or hedge.

Having had an open space forced upon us through circumstance, we are now embracing the idea of editing the west meadow. A little before Christmas we hired Alex, a student from Thomas Aquinas College (Woman of the Apocalypse) to help in this endeavor, and other trail making, weeding and clearing tasks. His eight hours of work a week have transformed our ability to make the disturbed areas of the site, those acres either formerly grazed or ravaged by earth moving equipment, into chaparral parkland, where the sage scrub is opened up to incipient meadow and views revealed to the flanking hills of ancient, sclerophytic chaparral. Chamise, ceonothus and mountain mahogany that crowd the oaks alongside the old meadow are being cleared to allow access to their canopy underworld and laurel sumac smothering the native black walnuts is being cut-back to reveal these beautiful, wayward trees.

This is our response to Humphry Repton's admonishment that farmland become parkland. He and Capability Brown carried forward the revolution in landscape aesthetics in the second half of the 18th. century begun by Kent in the first. We have linked oaks to form groves by the simple expedient of linking the clearings beneath them and liberated the humble elderberry to become a tree unfettered by swarming bio-mass. We hope, this spring, to clear a trail to Bear Creek and there create a riparian idyll.

These are not the kind of heroic gestures made by the masters of the English School who thought nothing of moving rivers, creating lakes and if necessary raising water mechanically to make rills and waterfalls - all masquerading as manifestations of wild nature. We are working with a limited palette of 'what's there' - we edit but do not add. We develop meaning out of the apparent chaos generated by the base botanical impulses to infiltrate, populate and strangle the opposition!

Even now, at the very beginnings of this process there are rewards. A wolf oak that overlooks the west meadow's putative house site has been revealed after its protective pallisade of ceonothus was removed and its canopy now provides that wonderful experience of walking into an oaken micro-climate. The leaves at its drip line descend almost to the ground (made soft by years of accumulated litter) and in a breeze make a kind of silken rustle.Yesterday, walking beneath the canopy of another oak a little higher up the hill, and with the kind of breeze blowing that topples empty garbage cans, the experience was less like being protected within an arboreal crinoline and more like being swept up in a frenetic ballroom where pulsating sunlight, sound and wind surround the senses.

We use nature as a foil to our emotions and as a salve to our existential angst. The wild, imaginative, but ultimately humanist landscape we observe in the chaos of nature quiets the soul, and gives meaning to our existence. Perhaps none of this would have been possible without the linkage forged in England in 18th. century between the garden and the wild: these are the big thoughts we sometimes carry with us as we battle the chaparral to better accommodate it.

The Way

2012-01-15T14:53:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday afternoon, Lorrie and I attended a sold-out performance of The Way at the Ojai Theater. This venerable movie house, in more or less continuous operation since 1914, opened in what was then Nordhoff as The Isis; presciently, its first screening was The Valley of the Moon based on the Jack London novel. Three years later, in a paroxysm of xenophobia as World War One drew to a close, the City Fathers changed the name of their town to Ojai, a colonial phonetic spelling of the Chumash word for the moon (New Moon).

Sometime in the Spring of 1981, the theater was showing The Great Santini, and by then was called The Glasgow Playhouse in honor of its owner Wayne Glasgow. I attended a showing of this melodrama, based on Pat Conroy's novel and starring Robert Duvall during my first evening in Ojai (Where Native Meadows Come From). By the time we arrived in town many years later to live on Blanche Street (while our house was being built in Upper Ojai) the theater was owned by Mark and Kathy Hartley who had purchased it from Glasgow's successor, Khaled Al-Awar; but overextended after the real estate crash in 2008, and after they had financed a major renovation, the Hartley's recently handed ownership back to Al-Awar.

The Way, directed by Emilio Estevez is a family affair starring Emilio's father Martin Sheen. It tells the story of four peregrinos who undertake the walk from Saint Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to Santaigo de Compostela in Northern Spain along Saint James' Way, a traditional Christian pilgrimage route for at least a thousand years. Lorrie had visited Galicia forty years ago and was anxious to see the film while I was interested because the destination of the pilgrimage is a part of a visionary geography - the name Compostela being derived from the Latin Campus Stellae, field of stars. Saint James' Way spoke to me not as a Christian pilgrimage route but as a far older, spirit path.

Compostela owes its fame to a reputed apparition and the consequent discovery of the remains of St. James. With the Virgin Mary's blessing, the apostle James left Jerusalem after the death of Jesus, crossed the Mediterranean, and arrived at Tarragona on the east coast of Spain, just west of Barcelona. Although he is believed to have failed as an evangelist, in 39 AD the Virgin Mary, although still alive in Jerusalem, appeared to Saint James in Zaragoza, in the first recorded Marion apparition. Four years later, James returned to the Holy land and was summarily be-headed by King Agrippa I. (Acts 12:1-2)

His corpse is said to have been brought to Galicia on a rudderless boat by his disciples (with an angel of the Lord as their pilot) and, after many mishaps, miraculous escapes, the help of a pagan, she-wolf Queen (La Reina Lupa), the taming of wild oxen, the killing of a fire-breathing dragon and at least one guiding star, the body was finally laid to rest in a field alongside the Queen's fortress.

There the body moldered, forgotten for almost eight hundred years, until a hermit saw angels who announced the coming discovery of the tomb. Some days later shepherds noticed an area of pasture illuminated by a strange glow. At that spot a marble chest containing a headless skeleton was discovered and identified as the remains of St. James and it was here that a small community of monks was established who formed the nucleus of the future settlement of Compostela.

None of this made it into the movie but these legends are braided into the folk history of Galicia and form the back-story to Santiago de Compostela's rise as the most significant pilgrimage destination in Europe. There is likely a far older, pre-Christian source for the spiritual resonance experienced along Saint James' Way, Santiago de Compostela and the rocky coast of Finisterre to the west. The pilgrimage route follows a far more ancient ritual road, along a spirit path tracing the arc of the sun, traveling east to west, and ending at the Atlantic on what the Galicians call the Costa del Muerte (Coast of Death), long considered to be a gateway to the afterlife - L. Finis Terrae, the end of the world.

Saint James was resurrected to serve as a locus of Christian identity around which the Iberian tribes could coalesce in their resistance to the Moorish conquest of their homelands early in the eighth century; ironically, the outlying Galicians remained largely untouched by islam, cherishing their Celtic ancestry and its nature based spirituality lightly overlain by a still Pagan-influenced Christianity. Now these traditions are all melded in the vastly popular pilgrim experience of traveling The Way.

In the Celtic tradition, witches and warlocks controlled the shamanic practice of gathering information from the spirit world and using it for good or ill in the temporal realm. Both the witch and the shaman were said to traverse the bridges of Otherworlds. They celebrated the seasonal changes of equinox and solstice in stone circles or in calibrated cave openings (Space and Practice II). But despite the universal underpinnings of shamanic practice and its survival in many parts of the world, the brutal extirpation of the Chumash peoples by the Franciscans and their Spanish military enablers, has entirely destroyed the local traditions of ley lines, vortices (power places) and spirit paths that might have created a more profoundly geo-centric cultural and spiritual gestalt in this region of California (Burn Notice).

We have forgotten the power of place. Unlike the Celtic cultures of Europe, the tribes of North America rarely constructed temples. To them the land was the sacred temple. They sourced etheric hotspots on the land, and their locations were passed on through oral tradition or perhaps were indicated by cryptic petroglyph markings. There is little record of California's sacred sites, spirit paths or places of power. In Chumash territory, Harrington is our last connection to a remembered, sacred past.

Those who currently identify as neo-traditional Chumash have no living-link with their shamanic history, but the ethnographic record establishes that Point Conception served as a portal to the Chumash after-life, Mount Pinos was the center of the Chumash world and that locally, Kahus (Black Mountain) is of geomantic significance. We know that there was a sprit path heading north straight through the hills behind Muwu (Point Mugu) and that there was a ritual and trade route up through the mountains to the Carrizzo Plain.

The tradition of building 'rainbow bridges' between sacred places is as old as myth, but looking for these lost paths in a rivened land where freeways follow economic and political exigencies rather than meridians of etheric energy poses extraordinary challenges. We do not know enough to understand exactly where these paths were trod and under what etheric influence they were pioneered. There are doubtless many 'Ways' in Southern California, but they have faded into the chaparral or been buried under asphalt and concrete.

We are pilgrims lost in a profane world, where the shards of sacred sites, and ancient geomantic, astronomical, and ritualistic alignments are hidden in a broken landscape.

The Great Predator

2012-01-06T13:37:00.000-08:00

Five or more young bucks (Odocoileus hemionus Californicus) are gathered in the chaparral: on my approach they scatter to the four winds. Two come crashing through the bush towards me, reach the path I am on then stot off into the chamise on the far side of the trail. In this neck of the woods we rarely see deer running. They jump into the air off of all four legs, land and repeat. Stotting not running, moving through a landscape of deerweed, artemesia, chamise, laurel sumac, coyote bush, sage and rock, the sort of bastardized chaparral/sage scrub that covers the land after it has been bulldozed for fire clearance or mangled by forays of residential development.

I most often see deer when they are already aware of my presence as a potential predator. So I get to see them stot, prong or pronk, but rarely walk or run along game trails, pause to graze in meadows and pick their way through oaks, cottonwoods and willows as they find their way to Bear Creek to drink - all of which I know they must do when they are in their own world undisturbed by coyotes, bob cats, mountain lions or humans.

What we see depends on more than the reaction of the observed. It depends on who and how we are, and ultimately, when we are - our place in the temporal stream of our lives where Time lurks, as we drink in experiences, as the great predator.

Georgia O'Keeffe and Andy Warhol were still alive when I arrived in Los Angeles (Ghostburb). They represented the guilty pleasures of American art. Easy to look at, enormously appealing, but, it seemed then, vacuous. In 1970 I had used my wife's red nail varnish to turn each of the 4 x 4 white tiles that lined our kitchen in Whale Beach, on Sydney's north shore, into a picture of a Cambell's soup can as an homage to one of the works (32 Cans) that ushered in the pop-art movement and which was first exhibited in Los Angeles in 1962. Warhol remained of some interest to me through the 1980's while O'Keeffe came to represent tawdry populism.

Almost ten years ago there was the Warhol retrospective at MOCA. Organized by Heiner Bastian for the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the exhibition then traveled to the Tate Modern in London before arriving in Los Angeles. Seeing the full breadth of his work for the first time confirmed to me that he was a major figure. This impression was only slightly tainted by the experience of visiting, in 2010, Pittsburgh's Warhol Museum where much of his not-so-great work is stuffed into a four story building and where his deliberate melding of art and commerce seems to have been taken as curatorial license to turn the museum into a series of multi-media entertainments where the art disappears into noisy spectacle.

No such pandering at New York's Metropolitan where the recent exhibit Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O'Keeffe, showed O'Keeffe's work in the context of his stable of early twentieth century modernist painters. Now that I am here in Ojai, I have begun to understand O'Keeffe's obsession with place. In her case, a primeval place in New Mexico called Abiquiu, where, as Christopher Benfey notes, she brought "dead things to life, both herself and the objects that came her way... like skulls and other desert detritus" (The Far-Apart Artists, New York Review of Books, January, 2012).

On New Year's Eve, at a dinner, I sat next to a woman from Golden, New Mexico, less than a hundred miles south of Abiquiu, where she and her husband raise Wagyu beef on 27,000 acres of high desert. They have recently completed a Rick Joy house which features large glass areas, charcoal stained cedar siding and a hovering corrugated roof. The parched landscape appears to flow through the center section of the building where open decks extend the living room floor beyond the glass enclosure. The siding echoes the Japanese tradition of shou-sugi-ban where cedar is charred to increase its resistance to insects and fire. The house, set on a slight rise in the midst of a thousand acre pasture where pure bred Japanese cattle forage, is a powerful presence in an austere landscape and is, she told me, under attack from flocks of crows - the insect screens are besmeared with the blood of their talons and streaked white with their shit.

Annie Proulx built her house at the bottom of a cliff in Wyoming and called the book that told the story of its building Bird Cloud. Her house was designed with bird watching in mind, and included deliberately conceived roosting spots. The vortices of avian life that swirl between the thermals of the cliff face, the river at the cliff bottom and her building remain benign in their impact upon her intrusion into this vast western landscape (Warm Breeze). Bob and Mary have been less fortunate in respect to the local bird life.

Their property contains ancient Pueblo ruins only now being excavated, and through this work they have come to know the local Pueblo Indians (or now, more correctly, Pueblo people). Short of planting plastic owls on the corners of their magnificent house, I suggested contacting a local shaman and having him conduct appropriate ceremonies of propitiation towards the crows.

Members of the corvid family have a significant place in myth and magic. On July 4, 1963 Carlos Castaneda claims he was transformed into a crow and flew, facilitated by application of a Datura salve known as 'Flying Ointment'. Those of you who have read the Castaneda books will remember that he was forever looking over his left shoulder fearing that a crow might fly over it as a harbinger of death and destruction. A crow flying over the right shoulder was an altogether more propitious occurrence.

For the last 35 years of his life, Castaneda was haunted by his experience of a crow's vision.

"I asked Don Juan what were the things that I had seen. He said that because this was the first time I was seeing as a crow the images were not clear...I brought up the issue of the difference I had detected in the movement of light. "Things that are alive", he said, "move inside and a crow can easily see when something is dead or about to die because the movement has stopped...." Castaneda asks, "Do rocks move inside?", and Matus responds, "No, not rocks, or dead animals or dead trees. But they are beautiful to look at. They like to look at them. No light moves inside them". The teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui way of knowledge, Carlos Castaneda, UC Berkeley, 1968.

Georgia O'Keeffe saw like a crow. She saw the beauty in rocks, skulls and the laminal earth forms of her beloved New Mexico, and she shared her vision with us. She brought dead things to life. But what do the flocks of crows attacking Mary's house see? Is it beauty? Is it death, or simply their reflections?

Warhol sought a kind of truth in the slick surfaces of urban celebrity and the detritus of American culture. O'Keeffe often sought beauty in the quietude of the inanimate. When they were alive I barely understood. Now these artists' work represents the pleasures of becoming fully acculturated to this strange land. I understand. I see. It takes time.

The crows, however, remain an enigma.

Miwok Meadow

2011-12-29T08:19:00.000-08:00

There hangs about Yosemite a strangely Victorian air. Perhaps it is just me, but is there not something of Balmoral in the valley, especially in the week between Christmas and New Year's? The royal holiday pilgrimage to the Highlands where the corgis can be let loose and chance meetings with stags may be interpreted as numinous experiences (The Queen, Stephen Frears, Dir., 2006), is echoed in the albeit more democratic visits to this National Park, where twenty bucks gets you in-and-out over seven days and the lobby, restaurants and restrooms (complete with uniformed attendant) of the stately Ahwahnee Hotel can be freely accessed by the hoi-poloi. The private rooms are 400-500 dollars extra a night.

Was there not a whiff of Scotland, if not a dim echo of the skirl of bagpipes, in the performance of the whistling waiter who rendered Frances Scott Keyes' 1812 anthem promptly at nine a.m. in the dining room of the Wawona, while guests breakfasted and the stars and stripes was unfurled on the front lawn? Neither the Ahwahnee nor Wawona Hotel is rendered in Scots Baronial like Balmoral (completed in 1856 and designed by William Smith with assistance from Prince Albert, Victoria's consort) but the 1876 Wawona is a classic of Victorian resort architecture and one of the oldest mountain hotels in California (Hotel California) while the 1927 Ahwahnee is a rustic pile rendered in what has become known as Parkitechture. Like Balmoral, themes from other times and other places have been incorporated into the housing of guests primarily bewitched by the grandeur of the surrounding landscape.

The best architecture I saw at Yosemite was in the redwood bark tepees provided as play-houses in the grounds of the Evergreen Lodge where we spent Christmas night through the 28th. December. This hotel has firmly plebeian roots having been developed as a work camp for the construction workers at Hetch Hetchy dam. The play houses are perfect miniatures of the winter cabins of the Miwok, who inhabited the valley floor before the arrival of Europeans in the 1830's; the native inhabitants numbered less than 500, now nearly four million people visit the park every year: none of them stays in a bark tepee.

These visitors celebrate the essential picturesque characteristics of the Valley landscape which was famously anthropomorphized by John Muir who proclaimed,

"Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic repose; others, absolutely sheer or nearly so for thousands of feet, advance beyond their companions in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike.... Awful in stern, immovable majesty, how softly these rocks are adorned, and how fine and reassuring the company they keep: their feet among beautiful groves and meadows, their brows in the sky, a thousand flowers leaning confidingly against their feet, bathed in floods of water, floods of light.... as if into this one mountain mansion Nature had gathered her choicest treasures, to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her".

The picturesque, along with the formally symmetrical landscapes of the Renaissance form the yin and yang of European landscape appreciation - there is no room in this old-world canon for the random and undifferentiated which constitutes the vast majority of Californian landscapes, including, of course, most chaparral but also its desertscapes and coastal scrublands. Yosemite is revered for its atypicality and its transcendence of the norm. Its uniqueness is, by happenstance, synchronous with European ideals of composition, intimations of godliness and formal magnificence. None were more assiduous in making these connections than that intellectual-fashion-victim of his age, John Muir.

Strikingly, it seems a significant proportion of park visitors are now Chinese or South Asian. This impression is based on my climbing of the path up to Nevada Falls - a sort of poor-mans Inca trail - where the steeper portions are stepped in crudely shaped granite blocks, and informally surveying the hordes who clambered over the lower reaches, up to Vernal Falls, known as the Mist Trail. Possessed of strikingly different aesthetic traditions, what do they make of this temple to the most heroic and romantic traditions of nature worship?

Yosemite's overblown granitic imagery is of a power to register on even the most jaded consumer of today's amped-up media barrage which, by and large, follows a globalized, but primarily North American and European sourced, formal architecture (small a). Yosemite then, key in forging a Californian and American identity (The Democratic Republic of Chaparral) now entertains a world audience as a quasi-Natural experience capable of impacting our global neurasthenia. It is, of course, a Theme Park. The Theme, forshadowed by Muir, is necessarily bombastic, rather than quietly contemplative.

Yet there is about it (Yosemite National Park) a quaintness that bespeaks of an earlier age (hence those intimations of the Victorian). Despite the Marmot, Patagonia and North Face-clad multi-cultural youth who clambered over them, the craggy walls of the valley retain some of the mustiness of an earlier age when their discovery and of the giant trees that grow in their shadow, was truly earth-shattering. It is still a little Jules Verne-ish. A Voyage to the Bottom of the Valley. An air of Bugarach hung over us. (RV III, Coyote Dream)

Within the Park, we Californians are made to feel a little like the Marginales of Europe, the dispossessed. Keepers of Museum Grade wonders, custodians of the Mighty West, we must now bow before the global imperatives of the Market in Experiential Frisson, where Nature is but a poor and rickety thing capable of producing shock and awe only in its most egregiously Baroque manifestations.

Christmas Sage

2011-12-21T17:17:00.000-08:00

Somebody brought a Cymbidium to the house yesterday. I said to Lorrie, I hope its screams don't keep us awake at night.

We are doing a Chaparral themed Holiday season again (Yuccapedia), so we are not decorating one of the 30 million victims of arboreal infanticide sold annually in the U.S. as Christmas trees. Instead, the dried husk of a chaparral yucca (Yucca whipplei) stands in the corner of the living room adorned, on its lower branches where its seed pods have already fallen, with frosted white and clear 1 1/2" glass balls from China (Sinology). Elsewhere in the house we have used sages, Baccharis pilularis, toyon and Ribes californicum in various arrangements. This level of holiday cheer is quite sufficient for us merriment minimalists.

The Cymbidium, poster child for the forced propogation of exotic flora into premature display of their sex organs, is sadly out of place and will probably end up in the guest room. We should, I suppose, be thankful that it was probably grown in California, perhaps in Ventura or Santa Barbara County, not shipped in from Thailand, the world's largest grower of Cymbidium.

The history of orchid growing in California goes back to the 1930s, when owners of large estates in Hope Ranch and Montecito began to raise them because they flourished in the Mediterranean climate. Back in those days, orchids took their own sweet time to flower - often as long as seven years after planting. Now, in the hot houses of Thailand, Holland, Australia and, increasingly, China, the plants have been hybridized to flower with 36 months of germinating and temperature and light controls are used to induce inflorescence at commercially opportune moments such as Easter, Mother's Day and Christmas. Other flower stimulating technologies, such as the application of cytokinin (6-benzyl-aminopurine), nitrogen starvation, extreme root excision and the forced feeding of phosphorous are being introduced to improve flowering synchronicity with market demand.

A couple of years ago we attended a talk by Dorothy Maclean, one of the four founders of Findhorn (Back-yard Romance) at Meditation Mount. She was introduced by Roger Collis, then executive director of the Mount. (Lost Horizon). Roger originally met Dorothy some forty years ago at Findhorn (where he also met and married his wife, Kathleen). So Dorothy, now in her nineties, was very relaxed in Roger's company and gave a charming talk on her work with plant spirits or devas. Towards the end of her presentation someone wheeled in a trolley with a large Cymbidium in a five gallon plastic pot, and Dorothy invited us to commune with the plant and then report on our findings.

A member of the audience had worked at an orchid 'forcing' green house and made trenchant comments about the floral gulag that exists in Carpinteria. It was an unfortunate moment. Dorothy was undone; perhaps she had been expecting a fresh, native Californian plant tenderly removed from the chaparral rather than the signature product of the global orchid industry; in any case, the magic of the event evaporated in the presence of this hybridized Orchidaceae.

Dorothy now counts as one of the three or four people I know of who communicate with plants (Dowsing). That's not including Prince Charles who, speaking of his 900 acre organically farmed Gloucestershire estate in 2010, noted that, "I happily talk to the plants and trees, and listen to them. I think it's absolutely crucial....Everything I've done here, it's like almost with your children. Every tree has a meaning for me." The key point here is the listening part: Margot confirms that, although scientifically trained, she still has much to learn directly from the plants within her ambit as a chaparral restoration ecologist.

Did the Chumash talk to plants? What of the other end of the spectrum - did they brutalize or hybridize plants in pursuit of aesthetic, culinary or healing goals? Were plants considered sentient beings in their cosmos? Did they practice, according to their codes, ethical treatment of the vegetal world? Only John Peabody Harrington knows for sure (alive to us today through his moldering notes, stored throughout the country and yet to be fully catalogued, in which lies the sum of his knowledge about the Chumash - for he wrote no syntheses of his notes, nary a short monograph on his life's work).

However, we can presume, that while probably not reaching the level of beatific communion with nature commonly ascribed to native Americans, the Chumash possessed a level of sensitivity to plant life that we can only imagine. For while we live in a world of written, pictorial and numeric information, they lived in a numinous universe of lithic, botanic, animal and meterological spirits where plants were revered for their multi-faceted contributions to the individual's and the tribe's well being.

Take sage. I took sage. For our Christmas decorations. I like to think that I am aware of all the local, accessible giant white sage (Salvia apiana) populations. Some are on our property, others a little further afield, but all were harvested in a careful and respectful way. James D. Adams, Jr, Associate Professor of Molecular Pharmacology and Toxicology, University of Southern California, and Cecilia Garcia (a self-styled Chumash healer) suggest that, "White sage, like any plant, should be collected with prayer. Only the amount needed should be collected. A small branch or a single leaf can be broken off for each use. Each leaf contains vital medicine for the health of the spirit." Fernando Librado (one of JPH's key informants) said that if a hunter placed white sage in his mouth he would be invisible to deer (Jan Timbrook).

This afternoon an Australian architect, Andrew Macklin, visited our house with a mutual friend and just as he was leaving we saw, through the open kitchen window, our local Monarch of the Glen (Sir Edwin Landseer, 1851), a magnificent three point stag wandering along the meadow protecting its fawn who grazed across the driveway. Our house is bedecked with sage, the four of us were at the open window, is it too fanciful to imagine that this architectural maw substituted for the mouth of the hunter? Certainly we remained invisible to the mule deer until doors were opened and gravel be-trodden.

Maria Solares (another of JPH's Chumash posse) recommended putting fresh leaves of white sage on one's head as a treatment for headache. It was also used as a purgative. More recently, those identifying as Chumash use sage for smudging - the ritual burning of compressed bundles of leaves as celebration and an act of spiritual refreshment (The Sage Gatherer). This is a plant, like so many others, that was woven into the fabric of Chumash life - offering a cloak of invisibility, various medicinal uses and spiritual cleansing. It may also have lifted the spirits of native people (as it does mine) who saw it displaying its large chalky grey-green leaves rising above an ocean of black and purple sage, competing with yerba santa, or on the edges of oak-shade - as a ghost sage wrapped in its new spring leaf - just in time for the winter solstice.

The stacks of Cymbidium piled outside of Trader Joe's are a similar sign of the mid-winter festivities but they leave my heart heavy and my spirit enervated for their waxy flowers betray the anguish of this forced display.

Shamanize or Die

2011-12-17T09:35:00.000-08:00

Last night I dreamt of a bobcat.

At first light, I saw bent grasses where deer had lain turned a cerulean blue by the heavy frost; the long tongue-like leaves of yerba santa (Eriodictyon Californica) were rimed with white and nearby the intense pink flowers of wand buckwheat, apparently untouched by the cold, pierced the grey, green and white of this chaparral winter morning.

Yesterday evening I was reading about the influence of shamanism on the poetry of Ted Hughes (1930-1998), while Lorrie sat beside me in front of an oak fire watching Werner Hertzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams on her lap top. We talked about the film, in the (cave-like) dark when we awoke, just before dawn. Later, but in the still early morning, I watched the second half of Six Generations, Paul Goldsmith's film on a Santa Barbara Chumash family. This is how my imaginative life is made - of which this blog attempts a flickering reflection. Reflections, it must be said, that become, recursively, part of my life.

I had not thought about Ted Hughes since sometime in 1964 (except in the moments that he was linked, journalistically, to Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) whose suicide-enhanced celebrity shelf-life has thus far eclipsed her husband's) until I wrote the words "in a white, 1960's 3.8 Jag Mk. II" (Ghostburb) which put me in mind of the Hughes' poem O, White Elite Lotus.

In 1964, at Farnham Grammar School (founded in 1560 during the reign of Elizabeth 1), there was a rare moment when the upper sixth car and motorcycle junkies came together with the English lit. aesthetes to celebrate both the car and the poem. I was, not quite uniquely, a member of both cliques, and for a few weeks, Ted Hughes was The Man, a great contemporary poet with an eye for winsome American girls and beautiful, racy, English cars.

During our final two years of high-school, with most of our fellow students having left at age sixteen, we specialized in three or four subjects and each of us had different schedules - only coming together in the upper-sixth study when the day began and ended. In this small room, with space for about fifteen desks we chatted, across disciplines as it were, about our shared passions. While I studied English Literature, History and Studio Art, I also joined with my fellows, and the lower sixth, several afternoons a week when we ran, jumped and threw javelin, discus and shot-put and chased, propelled and sometimes caught balls of different size, color and shape through the seasons (but in my memory, almost always in muddy fields).

Away from our studies and games, in those few weeks, when most of the world was focused on Vietnam, the Beatles or Martin Luther King being awarded the Nobel Peace prize, we spent time in our study, or the library, and continued our parsing of,

"Steel, glass-ghost
Of a predator's mid-air body conjured
Into a sort of bottle.
Flimsy-light, like a squid's funeral bone,
Or a surgical model
Of the uterus of The Great Mother of The Gods."

and so on......

Yes, we thought, that was about as good an explanation as we were going to get of the strange affinity between pressed sheet metal and the great mysteries of sex, the divine and the natural world - connections which we instinctively understood but were anxious to have confirmed. Thus we young Romantics and tender gearheads could, for a moment, gather around a single icon - Colin Chapman's completely unattainable and totally desirable little Lotus Elite.

A couple of months ago, in a room of similar size to the upper sixth's study, but in an institution of higher learning - UCLA - I met the film-maker Paul Goldsmith after a lapse of some twenty five years. He and his wife Peta had been our first architectural clients after Lorrie and I graduated from Architecture School. Scrunched into a basement room in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, where I was gathered with Dr. Jo Anne Van Tilburg and a half dozen other Rock Art volunteers involved in the publication of The Rock Art of Little Lake, An Ancient Crossroads in the California Desert, Paul arrived to discuss the possibility of including our work in his upcoming film on Alan Garfinkel's research in the Cosos. He left us with a DVD of his last film, Six Generations, shown recently on KCET, a copy of which sits in my iBook G4.

Six Generations is a singularly touching record of a contemporary Santa Barbaran woman, Ernestine De Soto, whose family history reaches back to the time of first contact between Europeans and Native Californians. She has chosen to assume a contemporary Chumash identity and in her telling, privileges the Native American fragments of her history; in a similar manner I could trace my roots back to that ancient Briton, Boadiccea. Nevertheless, this is a genuine and heartfelt channeling of lives who, from cradle to grave, fill the historical space of the colonial occupation and genocide and her story is sensitively presented by Paul.

His new work with Garfinkel will tell another story. In the world of Californian archaeology Garfinkel is a reactionary, yet he has staked out the biggest archaeological prize in the State, the Coso Rock Art Monument at China Lake (Things fall Apart). Paul, knowingly or not, is now a party to the promotion of the Garfinkel ideology.

My introduction to California rock art was through David S. Whitley's The Art of the Shaman, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2000 - a title that tells you all you need to know about Whitley's understanding of the provenance of rock art production. Garfinkel has returned to an older, largely discredited theory that maintains that the production of big horn sheep imagery is an example of an 'increase ritual' whereby good fortune in hunting is assured through the serial production of the prey's graven image. As Garfinkel coyly notes in his Paradigm Shifts, Rock Art Studies, and the “Coso Sheep Cult” of Eastern California, in North American Archaeologist, Spring 2007, "These glyphs have played a prominent role in attempts to understand forager religious iconography". He goes on to admit this 'hunting magic' hypothesis has become marginalized by the now prevailing view that sees most rock art as an expression of individual shamanistic endeavor, then goes on to attempt the older theory's resuscitation.

We at Little Lake have largely signed on to the prevailing wisdom and while there is no preponderance of big-horn sheep imagery around the lake, there are literally hundreds of atlatl motifs (images of weighted, spear throwing sticks) pecked into the basalt cliff that rises in the south east corner of the lake - motifs that are almost certainly connected with coming of age rituals overseen by the priestly class, the shamans. We have not, therefore, fully embraced Whitley's notion that these glyphs are uniquely a product of shamanic vision quests - lithic jottings as astral plane reportage; but equally, we have not regressed to Garfinkel's quaint position. We take a nuanced, wide-ranging view that admits the complex motivations for rock art production over the last ten thousand years or more.

It is, of course, the shamanic tradition that is at the root of my interest in petroglyphs. These wizards and magicians (Strange Land) are the human sinew that connect the material and spiritual planes. A role, perhaps, that poets now play. Ted Hughes explicitly links the poetic and shamanic experience and regards both as being nurtured by the romantic temperament. The shaman is usually called to duty by dreaming of an animal, often an eagle, that then becomes a 'familiar' acting as the dreamer's liason with the spirit world (Eliade). The crisis Hughes believed shaman-poets had to deal with was, as he called his essay on Eliot, The Convulsive Desacralization of the West. Once the shaman (or poet) hears the call, Hughes writes, he must "shamanize or die".

I am mindful of Hughes' admonition: but the odd appearance of a bobcat in a dream does not, I believe, rise to the level of a call.

Ghostburb

2011-12-09T08:52:00.000-08:00

I arrived in Los Angeles in September 1980, carrying two old fiberboard suitcases and wearing a shiny grey jacket - the top half of what was known, mid-century, as a sharkskin suit - which I had purchased (like the suitcases) from a 'tat' shop - and my bike, a 'fixie' (then known as a track bike). My luggage contained clothes, a few bound copies of my recently completed Sydney University Honors thesis, 'The White Unwritten Atmosphere', my bible (a new edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary) and Barry Humphries' 1979 book, Treasury of Australian Kitsch. This latter had been pressed into my hand by a wild colonial girl, (a half-Maouri New Zealander) who had delivered me to Sydney airport, along with a couple of other friends, in a white, 1960's 3.8 Jag Mk. II.

I knew a few things about Los Angeles: the address of the Tropicana Motel in West Hollywood, at the time a home-away-from-home for second-tier rock musicians; the name and phone number of a professional surfer in Malibu (given to me by John Witzig, publisher of Tracks, the seminal Australian surf magazine) and the name and number of the director of admissions at UCLA's Graduate School of Architecture, with whom I had negotiated, while completing my thesis (and working by day on an artist-in-residence conversion of an old pickle factory), over the antipodean winter.

As it turned out, that was enough. Within a few days I owned a 1971 Buick Riviera and shared a house on Waveview, at the very top of Topanga, above the marine layer that often floated below, over the beach that was to become my surf spot. The professional surfer had disparaged my choice of car; I realized that Australia was but a poor provincial out post of the world of kitsch into the ground zero of which I had so recently arrived, and I discovered too, that despite smoking a (soft) pack of Marlboro reds a day, I was still fit enough to ride my bike to UCLA from Topanga and back - late at night, with just a one-inch red reflector hanging beneath my seat, through the steep, dark and rocky canyon, the chaparral glistening in the reflected glow of Los Angeles lamp light.

Much later I discovered that notwithstanding Carey McWilliams' estimable An Island on the Land, 1946, Reyner Banham's very English gloss on Los Angeles, The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971, and Charles' Jencks' embrace of L.A.'s architectural kitsch in Daydream Houses of Los Angeles, Rizzoli, NY, 1978, (compared to which, Australia's triple fronted brick vanillas were but enfeebled cousins) the book I really needed to read had yet to be published. A book that might begin something like this,

"Dimly on the horizon are the giant sheds of Air Force Plant 42 where stealth bombers (each costing 10,000 public housing units) and other still top secret, hot rods of the apocalypse are assembled. Closer at hand, across a few miles of creosote and burro bush, and the occasional grove of that astonishing yucca, the Joshua tree, is the advance guard of approaching suburbia, tract homes on point."

A book that looked at Los Angeles through the prism of utopian communities, hucksters, debunkers, religious revivalists, political powerbrokers, trade-unions, the L.A.P.D., the Defense and Aerospace Industry, the prison-industrial complex, gangs, drugs, gated communities, the Catholic church, literature and the movies.

That book appeared in 1990: it was Mike Davis' City of Quartz, Verso, NY.

And yes, it opens with a view from the Antelope Valley, from the blank urban wildland desertscape of the Llano del Rio Colony, a socialist utopian community founded On May 1, 1914, shortly abandoned, and then, in the late 1980's, the area was "prepared like a virgin bride for its eventual union with the Metropolis; hundreds of square miles engridded to accept the future millions..." In 2011, Llano del Rio still awaits those wedding nuptuals and has become a dessicated old maid, confirmed in her status as a ghostburb. We have survived exurbia, we have outgrown our infatuation with suburbia and we now await that urban intensification which may produce, as a sincerely to be hoped for corollary, the sanctification of the wildland (Gaia Nation). Twenty years on, the world has turned and we are confronted, once again, with the fleeting truths of predictive journalism.

Sixty years ago, Los Angeles was the City of the Future. Thirty years ago, it was the city of my future. Today, it is a still sprawling conurbation become a great Latin city struggling, as a child of the twentieth century, with its vision for the twenty-first. For me, it has retreated into the landscape of the past. I see it now from the outlands, from Upper Ojai, possessed like the Antelope Valley, of its own utopian flotsam (here the wreckage that has drifted ashore from Annie Besant's sea of dreams), where it provides a perspective from the wild towards the now ebbing urban frontier.

From this urban wildland ecotone, this edge-place (Edge Times), I see mostly the chaparral in front of my nose. My guides are Uncle Milt's Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains, 1996; Qinn and Keeley's Introduction to California Chapparal, 2006 and still, 'Red' Head's The Elfin Forest, 1972. It is at once a smaller world, but one that also promises access to the infinitude of the Universe through communion with the wildland. As I peer through the thickets of chamise to the valleys beyond, I realize that I am writing, post by post, the guide book; this blog a Baedeker to the Ojai spiritlands.

Strange Land

2011-12-02T20:42:00.000-08:00

With just a few weeks to the winter solstice, the fiddlenecks, goosefoot and peonies are in full leaf: I am tireless (and some might say tiresome) in my heralding of gwanwyn, of spring in the chaparral after summer's deathly heat (The Winter's Tale).

This topsy-turvydom is familiar territory to me having lived for over a decade in the antipodes where the strangeness of the fauna and flora, and the seasonal mirroring of the northern hemisphere, was much commented on during the colonial founding of Australia. In my day, many would-be British immigrants, (whingeing poms) never did get used to Christmas on the beach and would return after a few years, in whimpering confusion, back to the poor grey island of their birth. Here in California, despite the overwhelming presence of chaparral in the wildlands, it is quite possible and indeed probable that one's life be lived out in ignorance of the unique characteristics of this eco-system's adaptation to the extreme Mediterranean-type climate which predominates in the southern part of the state. We have arranged, through the artifice of irrigation, to surround ourselves in our cities and suburbs with old-world, exotic flora that faithfully conforms in its habits to the traditional seasonal calendar.

Other evidence of the apparent strangeness of the State has long been recognized. Charles Nordhoff writes, in the opening pages of California for Health Pleasure and Residence, that pean to this Pacific state that did so much to brand it (Hotel California), "California is to most Eastern people still a land of big beets (Muwu) and pumpkins, of rough miners, of pistols, bowie-knives, abundant fruit, queer wines, high prices - full of discomforts, and abounding in dangers to the peaceful traveler". He goes on to suggest that so little known is California that for Easterners it might as well be the flying island of Laputa that floats somewhere above the Pacific in Swift's early 18th century satire, Gulliver's Travels.

I have written of California's history of being identified as (and here compared with) an island (An Island on the Land, Independence Day). While often believed literally over several centuries, this connection has, of course, proven to be mythical. One of the first expressions of this fantasy is contained in Garci Ordonez de Montalvo's Las Sergas de Esplandian, Seville, 1510, where he locates California "on the right hand of the Indies...very close to the side of Terrestrial Paradise", and where the Californian black Amazons rode into battle on griffins led by their mighty Queen Calafia.

Swift knew of California, in the highly approximate way of the geographers of the 1700's, for he locates the Island of Glubbdubdrib, "somewhere east of Japan and west of California", as a place of sorcerers and magicians. In the skies above, the King of Laputa cruises over his dominions punishing rebellious behavior by his subjects through the simple expedient of parking his island, held aloft by a giant loadstone magnet, over the insurrectionist state, thus denying it rain and sunshine. Swift explains, "the island is made to rise and fall, and move from one place to another. For, with respect to that part of the earth over which the monarch presides, the stone is endued at one of its sides with an attractive power, and at the other with a repulsive." Thus we have transportation by magnetic levitation foretold, as used now in the high speed Maglev rail system.

Glubbdubdrib, we are informed, "is about one third as large as the Isle of Wight, and extremely fruitful: it is governed by the head of a certain tribe, who are all magicians. This tribe marries only among each other, and the eldest in succession is prince or governor". Swift then, by placing this phatasmogoric floating island and the lands beneath it somewhere between Japan and the Californian coast, establishes the region as a never-never land, unknowable and thus infinitely malleable in his literary imagination. Nordhoff references Laputa as a synecdoche for this same frontier of the strange and fantastic - qualities many believe California continues to uphold.

The gold rush miners, immigrants from Europe and the east coast, refugees from the dustbowl and emigrees from all over have, over the last one hundred and fifty years, attempted to make their new home on the west coast out of the vocabularies of the old. Their continued failure to achieve any plausible replication of their homelands and native customs is a tribute to the fun-house mirror that is provincialism. Papering over the local eco-system with exotics has resulted in such bizarre west coast landscapes as Lotusland in Santa Barbara, and, more locally, Taft Gardens (Return to Bear Canyon). These are extremes of a spectrum (and possessed of very different aesthetic impulses) that extends to the planting of eucalypts and beyond to generic palm trees and petunias that is supposed to anchor us in the known but all the while confirms the enduring strangeness of our fantastic land.

Abbot Kinney pioneered the growing of eucalypts in California and was also responsible for the failed attempt to evoke the ancient trading city of Venice by digging ditches through a homely stretch of partially drained coastal wetland in Los Angeles. On both counts, he was transplanting icons from alien cultures, and while his adventures in canal building were merely a folly, his contribution to the introduction of Australian gum trees has caused massive disruption to the state's emblematic eco-systems.

The gum tree was long considered strange by Europeans, for how could such a stately tree offer almost no shade, shed its bark instead of its pendulous leaves and they, in turn, be more blue-gray than green? E. and R. Littel note in the The Living Age, 1884, that for Joseph Banks, the botanist on board the Endeavor on Cook's round-the-world voyage of exploration, discovering the flora and fauna in Botany Bay (now a part of Sydney) in 1770, "must have been like finding one's self for the first time on the surface of a new planet".

No such overt strangeness greeted the first Europeans to explore California. The Spanish monte bajo is very similar to our chaparral (Suquet). Lynx, wolves, bears, foxes, boars, antelope, deer and elk still roamed Europe in the sixteenth century. The only animal in California capable of surprising the Spanish was the mountain lion, but that too was well known by repute for it was a familiar heraldic animal. Cabrillo first came ashore in San Diego on September 28, 1542. Venturing further north, the San Salvador and Victoria put in at the Island of San Miguel. Here indeed was a civilization of magicians and sorcerers (for who can doubt the profoundly astrological and animistic basis of Chumash culture?). On this weird, Glubbdubdribian island Cabrillo broke his leg and later returned to die after storms and heavy seas turned his ships back from Point Reyes. It would not be until 1910, when John Harrington began his study of the local native American culture, that the profound strangeness of Chumashian esotericism was slowly revealed to the modern world.

Sir Francis Drake floated the storm-damaged Golden Hinde into a harbor at Point Reyes (Drake's Bay) in 1579 and was so reminded of the south coast of England that he named the region Nova Albion (Albion). Like Cabrillo, he remained blind to the exotic weirdness close-by. Not so far away, the stange and wonderful giant redwoods would eventually be discovered by Europeans in the 1850's, establishing a kind of botanical freak show that would totally eclipse the mild arboreal eccentricities of the eucalypt (The Democratic Republic of Chaparral).

Surf and Turf

2011-11-24T21:13:00.000-08:00

In WTV, I suggested that my 'home turf', for the purposes of this blog, consists of the Ojai and Upper Ojai valleys and portions of their watershed which feed one of two rivers, the Ventura or the Santa Clara which, in turn, wind their way to the ocean and, taken all together, delineate a comprehensible turfdom. If you drive up behind Ventura City Hall, along Brakey Road (named for a successful Ventura house mover, Robert E. Brakey, a City Trustee in 1916-17 and owner of a large portion of the hillside between Oak Street and present-day City Hall) and leave the car where Brakey threatens to run over the escarpment that tumbles down to the flatlands below, and then walk up to the eucalypts at the top of the hill, you should be prepared to comprehend, and be dazzled by, a view of said turf.

Once, somewhere in South Wales on an English fortnight's holiday with my parents, my father read from a guide book and winced when he spoke, "sweeping estuarial vistas lie before you". It was estuarial that got to him. Now his son is guilty of taking all kinds of adjectival liberties and estuarial does not rise (for me) to the level of embarrassingly prim or excruciatingly pretentious: it falls within the broad range of the acceptable. In memory of my father, however, I will desist from using it to describe this view, although, at first blush, it would seem to be mighty apposite.

The fact is, my concern for geographical accuracy offers me an out: for what lies before you, to the north, is a delta, the Ventura River delta. The river feeds the ocean with fresh water, silt and cobbles whilst threading through alluvial debris; this is echoed, to the south, by the Santa Clara delta. Strictly speaking, an estuary is a deep, fan shaped sunken mouth of a river valley whereas a delta is a depositional alluvial mass through which the mouth of the river flows shallowly and unpredictably. An estuary is deep, stable and possesses gravitas; a delta is frivolous and changeable.

There is an easy mnemonic. Delta is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet and is used, in its upper case form of a triangle, to signify change in mathematics, or physics. What we have before us (since you are along for the ride) are two deltas (of the watery, unstable kind) about three or four miles apart that describe the base-line of a quadrant that, in my mind (I won't burden you with this mental bric-a brac) has its origination point in my back yard.

At the mouth of the Ventura River, as an article in CCBER (see below) notes, wetlands occur seaward of the coastal dunes and berm and here the substrate of the intertidal and subtidal habitats is characterized by sedimentary cobble transported to the river’s delta during major storm events, and sorted by ocean waves, tides and currents. This cobble ranges in size from three inches to three foot boulders, and is derived from a wide variety of inland sedimentary rock formations, from the Pleistocene (geologically recent) to the Eocene, as well as several granitic and metamorphic rock types (The Dance of Time). The cobble substrate, which extends over a mile along the shoreline of the Ventura River Delta (visible from the 101 driving south) is intermixed with fine sediments derived from river flows and the long-shore littoral current. (Mark H. Capelli in UCSB's Cheadle Center for Biological Diversity and Ecological Restoration Newsletter, CCBER, June 2010).

J. Garnett Holmes and Louis Mesmer in their Soil Survey of the Ventura Area, 1901, write that,

"In the remote northern and eastern portions of the county the mountains are of granite and volcanic rock, but the hills and mountains surrounding all the cultivable land are sandstone and shale. Santa Clara River runs from the east and flows in a westerly direction to the ocean. Piru, Sespe and Santa Paula Creeks enter from the north. These tributaries, coming as they do from areas of different geological formations, make the sediment of Santa Clara River of complex character and produce the Oxnard types of soil."

The two rivers then, differ in their depositional character. The northern delta dumps roiling rocks onto the beach (when in spate) for the river is funneled by the narrow Ventura River Valley pinched between the ridge from whence this view unfolds, and the northward upslopes that reach toward Red Mountain where the hillside is, for the most part, riddled with oil development; although a broad swathe of many hundreds of acres has recently been developed as citrus orchards by a local rancher. Thus constricted in its flow, the river, in flood, increases in velocity and shoots seaward spewing its sand, silt and cobble upon the littoral.

The more languid Santa Clara River has, over the ages, created the broad Oxnard Plain, the State's richest agricultural soils. Between them there is the sprawl of Ventura fatally bifurcated by the 101 and the agricultural flats (Camarillo Brio).

US 101 is arguably the most historic highway in California. It follows the route the Spanish explorer Juan Gaspar de Portola established in 1769, which later became El Camino Real, the King's Highway. This historic road connected (more or less) the twenty-one missions of California and served as the main north-south road in California until the 1920s. In 1926, Route 101 was established which faithfully followed El Camino Real and was only slowly up-graded from two-laned blacktop, through the 1940's and 50's, to a mostly four lane highway. 1959 saw the completion of four lanes up and over the Conejo grade and ten years later the two local towns of Camarillo and Ventura were riven asunder by the extension of this divided highway, now dubbed the Ventura Freeway. In 1992, the last traffic signal at Santa Barbara was finally removed and now State Street dips elegantly beneath the freeway thus preserving the towns primary connection to the ocean. Ventura's Main Street runs parallel to the ocean and thus enjoys no such grand terminus at the Pacific.

Major roads (State Highway 33 and the 126 Freeway) run alongside the course of the two great, mostly wild rivers which bookend the City, but development is terraced into the Ventura Hills running in-line with the surf. As I pointed out in An Island on the Land, California, through the Mission period and during its annexation to a newly independent Mexico into the 1840's, was both explored and peopled along a north-south axis, up and down the coast - by sea or land. Only towards the end of the nineteenth century did local east-west traffic develop when a stage line was established, to and from Los Angeles, via the Simi, Conejo and Santa Clara Valleys which then travelled out to Ventura through the Ojai Valley and up the coast to Santa Barbara, thus taking advantage of terraces forged by both the local east-west rivers - as would the 33 and 126 in the twentieth century (Saturday Night Special).

I stand here (now) above Koenigstein, my out-stretched arms encompassing about 30 degrees and imagine my finger tips straining to reach the two river deltas somewhere over Sulphur Mountain, over the trackless wildlands (unless, somehow, the meridians briefly align with Canada Lago or Aliso Canyon Roads), over the chaparral, the oil lines, the nameless oil roads and the canyons, streams, arroyos, seismic faults and game trails and proclaim it as my turf, as my home.

Valley of the Blue Moon

2011-11-18T21:18:00.000-08:00

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended,
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Wordsworth was having a tough day. He writes, apropos the composition of Intimations of Immortality, "I could not believe that I should lie down quietly in the grave, and that my body would moulder into dust". In his poetry he gets very close to suggesting some kind of reincarnation, or at least the immortality of the soul - "life's Star".

Heaven here is the Magic Kingdom of God, whence we trail "clouds of glory" like so many spangled rainbow beams, into childhood. He wrote this many stanza'ed ode in 1804, long before the terrestrial paradise of the Tibetan Shangri-la had been widely publicized in the West where his intimations of reincarnation might have found a better poetic home. While his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge plundered the East for his Kubla Khan, (Xanadu is the location of Khan's summer palace in Mongolia), Wordsworth's was a classical heaven, influenced by Greece as well as a Christianized Rome and the territory of his poetry remained, for the most part, the windswept landscapes of the Lake District (The Sage Gatherer).

Too bad. Today, Virtual Tibet (the realm created by Western imaginings) has become a kind of free-floating sacred space within the desecrated world of the modern West (Lost Horizon), a magic kingdom that is host to our spiritual longings. Xanadu became a cult movie and a Broadway musical. Intimations of Immortality is stuck in the canon of English Romantic poetry out of which it resolutely does not threaten to break. Location, location, location.

Despite its real-world occupation by China, Virtual Tibet is often seen as the last surviving treasure-house of a primordial wisdom, as the crown-jewel of the Mahayana (the path of seeking complete enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings); as an idyllic land hermetically sealed against all the contaminations and pathologies of modernity. But historically, as Harry Oldmeadow notes in his paper, The Quest for Secret Tibet, it has often been viewed as "a feudal and Oriental despotism pervaded by a degenerate Lamaism in which base superstition, devil-dances and (yak) butter statues, mummery and black magic" are endemic; and yet, since the earliest European incursions in the 17th century, Tibet has become a focus of European desire and fantasy.

The earliest sustained visit to Tibet was undertaken in 1716 by the Jesuit Ippolito Desideri who walked from Delhi to Ladakh and across western Tibet to Lhasa, where he remained for five years. A hundred years later, Csoma de Koros, a Magyar nobleman and philologist in search of the roots of the Hungarian language, arrived in Ladakh. Under appalling conditions, he devoted himself to the study of the Tibetan language. He made the first English-Tibetian Dictionary while living at Zangla Monastery in Zanskar which was published in 1824 (Wikipedia). In 2001, as part of a Where There be Dragons trip, in often only slightly less demanding conditions, my then 16 year old son spent six weeks trekking in this same area. Between times, Blavatsky who claimed to have visited Tibet, Alexandra David-Néel who certainly did (mostly on-foot), and the German expatriate, Lama Govinda, author of, The Way of the White Clouds (1966) - all contributed to the Western fascination with the area.

Ironically, several of the most influential writers to contribute to the fantasy of the magic kingdom based their work entirely on secondary sources rather than first hand knowledge. Oldmeadow claims that, "...despite the legend which she and her hagiographers propagated, Blavatsky never stepped on Tibetan soil...... Whilst Isis Unveiled (1877) was based on heterogeneous Occidental sources, her second major work, The Secret Doctrine (1888), includes elements that clearly derive from the Vajyarana" (Buddhist Tantras which claim to be the teachings of the supreme personification of the state of enlightenment). He suggests that Blavatsky possessed both considerable intellect and an omnivorous mind, such that the task of deconstructing the work she fabricated out of a synthesis of western occultism and 'Oriental wisdom' has consistently confounded her critics.

The best-selling books on Tibet in the 20th century were T. Lobsang Rampa's "autobiographical" trilogy: The Third Eye (1956), Doctor from Lhasa (1959), and The Rampa Story (1960). Lobsang Rampa was, in fact, the pen-name of Cyril H. Hoskin, the lightly educated son of a British plumber. He claimed, however, that he was born into an aristocratic Lhasa family closely associated with the thirteenth Dalai Lama, and that at the age of eight was given an arcane surgical procedure to create "the third eye", thus releasing various clairvoyant powers and the ability to discern auras. His books continued to sell well into the late 1960's and I assisted in that process whilst employed as a sales clerk at The Bookmark - Edmonton's finest independent bookstore. The 'Spritual Literature' section was second only to the 'Canadiana' shelves in popularity and I established myself as both the go-to-guy for the former and unmatched in my ignorance of the latter.

The greatest popularizer of the Tibet mystique was, arguably, James Hilton. His 1933 book, Lost Horizon, turned into a movie by Frank Capra four years later, promoted the idea of Shangri-la as the quintessential mystical, pre-modern mountain valley. Hilton never claimed to have visited the Himalayan kingdom and took most of his information directly from Joseph F. Rock an ethnographer, linguist and botanist who operated in North West China and Tibet in ways comparable to John Harrington's obsessive recordation of the lingering traces of Chumash culture and the plant material which played such a large part in their shelter, clothing food and medicine (Yuccapedia). Rock published nine articles for National Geographic Magazine from 1922 to 1935, illustrated by his own photographs, and from these Hilton created his Shangri-la.

While the precise location of this mythical valley based, in turn, on the older, Buddhist mythology of Shamabala is unclear, an area in northwestern Yunnan province, where Rock conducted much of his Tibetan borderland exploration and research, re-named itself as Shangri-la in 2001 in order to promote tourism - an act of blatant opportunism reminiscent of the naming of our mountain valley as Nordhoff in 1874 (Hotel California).

As I pointed out in Lost Horizon, Tibet, and more generally the Himalayas (The Dance of Time) have played a key role in the development of esotericism in Ojai and the town's reputation as a spiritual hot-spot. That Shangri-la is an entirely fictional confection and the mystique of Tibet often founded in self-serving romanticism does not fully negate their power. Our visions of Shangri-La ultimately originate in the Buddhist Tantra of Kalacakra and if we choose to ignore the shadow of destruction that hangs over the idyllic community of Shamabala, (to be substantiated in the year 2425 through a massive assault by demonic, barbarian armies) then we can reasonably equate it with Ojai, similarly filled with glittering (green) palaces, and populated by beautiful and healthy dwellers whose age, like Hilton's romantic lead, a seemingly young Manchu woman, Lo-Tsen, is a mystery (until the novel's epilogue).

If Wordsworth had been privy to the Tantric Buddhist notion of Living Nature where there is...

"no independent or separately existing external world; where the inner and outer worlds are the warp and woof of the same fabric in which the threads of all forces and of all events, of all forms of consciousness and of their objects, are woven into an inseparable net of endless, mutually conditioned relations" (Oldmeadow)

...then perhaps this understanding would have entirely transcended his need to write poetry. We would have been denied the sad romance of his struggle with what Thomas would later call the 'dying of the light' and the rare nobility of his fierce determination to find in nature the glowing embers of "the vision splendid".

The Dance of Time

2011-11-11T17:42:00.000-08:00

The Upper Ojai Valley, fringed by the Santa Ynez - Topatopa mountain range (still uplifting at the rate of human finger-nail growth) and defined as an upper valley by the seismic shift impelled by the Santa Ana fault - which runs around the base of Black Mountain at the bottom of The Grade - is a gently rising plateau that exists in the quiet center of a rambunctious geomorphic stage.

The over-folded Topatopas, in which, like Bugarach (Coyote Dream), the oldest rock has risen to the top, are old: Eocene old, their antiquity expressed in the crinkles of enfoldment, the fissures of stress and the spalling of rock faces taken to the point of fracture by the shifting pressures of subterranean continents - plate tectonics. During the Eocene, 56 to 34 MYA, the global system of plates underwent a general reorganisation. The shape of the west coast of the continent we now call North America was forged by this subterranean realignment. The Sespe formation consists predominantly of sandstones and conglomerates laid down in a riverine, shoreline, and floodplain environment between the upper Eocene (around 40 MYA) to the end of the Oligocene Epoch (around 24 MYA) (Wikipedia). Within its anticlines (or simple folds) we now seek oil.

Sulphur Mountain, that other piece of the valley's geomorphic furniture, is a Sespe formation anticline, with its newest rock on top and the oil producing strata within, sometimes accessible by a horizontal tunnel as Josiah Stanford discovered in 1861. Using mostly Chinese labor, tunnels were dug throughout the 1860’s, and crude oil was hauled by horse-drawn wagon to Ventura and shipped to San Francisco for distillation into lamp and lubricating oils. Cloaked in oak meadowland, Sulphur Mountain plays yin to the Topatopas yang where the rugged ridges rise above the relict bigcone Douglas firs (Pseudotsuga macrocarpa) and chaparral below and feature sandstones unevenly weathered and fractured in creams, reddish-browns, maroon, and grey-greens.

On the upper valley floor: alluvial fan deposits (Holocene - the current geological era) from mountain canyon streams, with depositions via debris flows, mud-flows or braided stream flows, of poorly bedded sandy clay and gravel. In the foothills: alluvial fan deposits of semi-consolidated, poorly sorted gravel, boulder, sand, silt and clay and this organized in drifts around the pre-existing Coldwater sandstone (late Eocene) composed of akosic sandstone (consisting of grains of feldspar and quartz cemented by a mixture of quartz and clay minerals) with siltstone and shale interbeds. To some this may seem academic. Here in Upper Ojai, we live the reality - geology impacting the location of our houses, septic systems and the nature of the landscape that surrounds us.

After a day of blustery off-shore winds, driving down the north south canyons (astride one of which our house sits) the sun began (as I sat scribbling these thoughts) its descent into the region of wispy cloud blossom massed to the west. Here the sun's intensity is diffused by the water vapor and the dust that is suspended in our shallow atmosphere. It becomes weak and watery, an elegy for the dying day and the passing of seasons and a presage of winter storms, one of which is promised for the weekend. Later, the evening dissolved into halloween crimsons and oranges as the westering sun hit the red, kodachrome spectrum.

The colors of chaparral are muted at this time of year. The rocks are often sombered too, by the overcast. Looking at Sulphur Mountain through a veil of rain, as I do now, one could be excused for describing the landscape as drab. It occupies a range of greys and greens that sometimes, depending on the luminosity of the skybowl, is barely beyond monochrome. Whatever its hue, it is never less than elemental. Indeed, its somber cloak under leaden skies is particularly effective in transmitting the writhing energy of the lithic mantle. The hills really are alive: but their movements are traced on a geologic timescale.

These notions of the elemental, the chromatic, and the deep, tectonic choreography that instructs the geomorphic furniture that surrounds us are gathered together in a spirit that, I hope, suffuse this blog: of a creative gestalt; or, expressed in the idiom of the day (or is it yesterday?) a mash-up. This is, of course, one of the informing principles of twentieth century art - the aggregation of forms and media. So, as I drag this segue kicking and screaming across the page, it is time to mention Pina Bausch.

While Lorrie and I were in Brooklyn recently, Wim Wender's new film, Pina was showing, for two sold-out performance, at BAM. We missed it, but the film, as devoted fans of both artists, was now firmly on our radar. Serendipitously, we were invited, last week, to the L.A. premiere. It was an opportunity to see fragments of four of her works, 'Sacre du Printemps', 'Cafe Mueller', 'Vollmond' and 'Kontakthof'. Each, as presented by Wim, showcases the Bausch obsessions with color, movement and the elemental.

I see much of the world through the scrim of my favorite ecosystem; through my experience in the urban wildland, and through the formal taxonomies of shape, texture, color and movement. Lacking formal botanical, geological or zoological training I see the world first through my senses and in making 'sense' of these impressions I validate them (or not) with an intellectual structure. Pina Bausch raises this sort of methodology to the level of great art. Her chosen medium is theatrical dance - a medium intrinsically temporal and ultimately evanescent. Wim has enshrined her work in an invigorating 100 minutes of 3-D film which has become, following her death at the start of production, a memorial to her intemperate talent.

Is there a connection between dance and landscape? Absolutely - in its appreciation. As I suggested above, they share many characteristics if approached through the senses. What of narrative you ask? Theater represents a compression of time in which themes are explored that, beyond the proscenium, unfold in a broader temporal landscape (so to speak). The natural world takes its own (sweet) time, but the stories are there, and your humble scribe attempts to reveal these narratives in the compressed format of a 1250 word blog piece - trivial work compared to Pina's one new dance piece a year, but both ultimately spring from the same human urge to elucidate the sublime.

Lost Horizon

2011-11-08T06:00:00.000-08:00

In Red Soil and WTV I contemplated the sources of Ojai's mystical reputation. I spent some time delineating the impact of Theosophists on the valley and that of Alice Bailey, firmly in the same tradition, but cast out of the Theosophy camp by her great rival Annie Besant. On Saturday, I attended a talk by UCSB Professor of Geology Edward Keller, sponsored by the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy and held at Matilija auditorium, on the geology of our area. Almost the first thing he said was that Ojai was undergoing a rate of geologic uplift that was only rivaled by the Himalyayas. Ohmmmmm, I thought.

While I was in New Suffolk on Long Island's North Fork attending Kate and Rob's wedding (Waterland) we met some of her cousins and cousins-in-law who hailed from Halifax. There may be other reasons for Americans to relocate to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, but the primary one is the maritime community of Buddhists who travelled there as a sort of diaspora after the world of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, his Regents and successors blew apart in Boulder and Ojai as an HIV sex scandal besmirched the authority of the guru. And so, I learnt as I talked to them, it was.

Enlightenment dawned. Almost all of the spiritual traditions upon which Ojai's reputation as a mystical hot spot are based can be traced back to the Himalayas, and to the esoteric Buddhism of Tibet. Might Ojai's unique appeal to Tibet's mahatmas and their envoys possibly be this connection between the geologic morphology of our valley and the Himalayas?

There have been several waves of Buddhist influence to wash over Ojai's shores. The first can be dated to The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky's 1892 seminal text in which she recounted her travels in Tibet and her initiation into the most arcane practices of the Lamas. This book formed the basis for the Theosophist Society which eventually made its way to Ojai in the shape of the Krotona Institute in 1924, closely followed by Besant and the boy-god, Krishnamurti, in 1927. In the sixties and seventies came exiled Rinpoche direct from the Lamasaries of Tibet. In between there was Frank Capra's 1937 movie, Lost Horizon.

This somewhat creaky flic has now been supplanted as the most famous Ojai movie, for the moment, at least, by Easy A, but for a long time, the idea of this fictional Shangri-la was inextricably conjoined with the valley, certainly well into the time that I first became aware of Ojai in the 1980's. Having watched a restored version recently, I can affirm that very little of the movie as it survives today appears to have been shot in Ojai, and the film's sweeping shots of an edenic high valley in no way resemble Ojai's majestic mountain panoramas. Nonetheless, the mere association of the film and the valley had, for a long time, turned the latter into my personal pictorial backdrop to memories of James Hilton's 1933 book, which I had read as a schoolboy.

Sue-Ellen Case, an Ojai friend who briefly covers this material both more expertly and elegantly in her book, Performing Science and the Virtual, Routledge, NY, 2006, notes that,

"In the nineteenth century Mme. Blavatsky created a paradigm of imaging Tibet, or the region of the Himalayas, as the seat of avatars and esoteric learning.....Recalling the nineteenth century investment in the Himalayas as a spiritual region, the twentieth century moved Tibet into virtual versions of it, from Hollywood films to the diasporic settlement of its spiritual practices."

Once thus transformed into a virtual spiritual place, Tibet was free to land - anywhere. But having relinquished the real it appears as though the masters and mistresses of its virtual reality were drawn ineluctably to a simulacrum of its actual geologic home (but with a more hospitable climate).

Crazy Wisdom, premiered at Santa Barbara Film Festival earlier in the year, and which opens soon to wide release, follows the story of Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. Much of his Dharmic stream now resides in Ojai having flowed through his Vjara regent (the troublesome Ösel Tendzin, born Thomas Rich in Passaic, NJ) to Patrick Sweeney, now resident in Ojai and president of Satdharma—dedicated to the transmission of Trungpa's teachings. Hagiography, from all reports, it ain't. Tendzin's wife, The Lady Lila Rich and Sweeney have attempted to heal the rifts caused by her husband's irresponsible behaviour and Trungpa's tacit acceptance of it: nevertheless, former students of Trungpa, 'the bad boy of Buddhism', are spread to the four winds of Ojai, Boulder and Halifax, Novia Scotia and beyond and pursue their practice in the shadow of his troubled legacy. Can't wait!

I have identified the various institutional centers of Ojai's connection to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as The Krotona Institute, The Krishnamurti Center on Mc Andrew Road, Meditation Mount and the Happy Valley property in Upper Ojai and it is here that The Ojai Foundation was established in 1975 by Liam Gallagher and dedicated to exploring the interface between science and spirituality. In 1979 in fulfillment of a prophecy she had been vouchsafed while working with Joseph Campbell, Joan Halifax assumed the position of director. As an anthropologist and a practicing Buddhist she took the foundation in a new direction and in 1986 held the infamous symposium, Awaken The Dream: The Way of the Warrior, Ancient Tradition and New Thought from Six Continents. This controversial program included not only a native American syncretist medicine man, martial artist and Zen Buddhist, Harley SwiftDeer Reagan, an Australian aboriginal leader, Guboo Ted Thomas but, inevitably, a Tibetan Buddhist Lama named Chukua Tulku Rinpoche.

The ambitious Halifax has since moved on and was replaced by Jack Zimmerman who introduced the practice of council and took The Ojai Foundation in a gentler, ecological direction. A couple of years ago William Perkins Tift took over, but the current economic downturn has led to deep cuts in funding and staff and now the organization is led by an interim executive director, Barrie Segall whose primary strength is in financial rather than spiritual leadership.

In 1979, Joan Halifax swept into the valley with the belief that both she and Ojai had been chosen, as fate made manifest, to receive the message of prophecy, initiation and millenium. This eerily reflects the megalomania of another very short-lived resident, Annie Besant, who conferred upon Ojai the responsibility of nurturing a future world civilization.

Trungpa and his Vjara regent Ösel Tendzin taught that an absence of ego and a glimpse of the abhidharma could reveal an eternal wisdom: but while seeking these timeless truths their personal failings were very much a reflection of the immediate, temporal environment in which they lived and in which ignorance flourished.

Trungpa felt the call of Ojai's geologic uplift, the wild energy of its geomorphological creation with its echoes of the lost horizons of Tibet, and his crazy story played out, in part, in the shadows of the Santa Ynez mountain range. Perhaps Besant and Halifax were similarly tempted to overplay their hands in the great geomythic theater that is Ojai. (Legend)

Waterland

2011-11-03T09:38:00.000-07:00

I have been visiting the Urban Waterland of the East Coast. Not all of it. Three islands: Long Island, Manhattan and Shelter Island. Lorrie and I stayed with friends or family and joined others, during our ten days away, for meals and a chat - trading news from the left coast, and our experiences in the Urban Wildland, for their stories of living in the Urban Waterland. That's my spin. Those are my characterizations. Here's my rationalization.

I was musing lexically, in a discursive kind of way, riffling through some words that might encapsulate our east coast trip when I turned up 'waterland'. When I pre-fixed it with 'urban' it was a mild epiphany, a lower case omg moment. It happened in Manhattan.

The story of our picayune travels (primarily undertaken to attend a wedding in New Suffolk, North Fork, Long Island) was then subjected to this procrustean schema - forced to hang, comfortably or not, on the three island waterlands of our itinerary.

My first landfall in the United States was at Staten Island, in 1967, back before containerization, when it was host to the tramp freighters of the world, including the Ferndale, an ancient 10,000 ton Norwegian ship headed to new owners in Florida and upon which I served as engine-room boy (Bodies of Water). From Staten Island it was a ferry ride to Manhattan and my first experience of the watery edge of the United States (although our entry into the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, resplendent on her own little islet, should have prepared me). I have been back many times, but this fall trip was the first time my travels were overlaid by this newly minted apercu, useful or not, of 'Urban Waterland'.

How does this change things? First of all, I get to blog about New York in a way that connects it to my experience of the Urban Wildland. If we allow the applicability of the prefix 'urban' to both places (it is a distinction of magnitude not kind) then we are down to the disparity between water and wild. Both constitute edge conditions, they operate as limits, and, to some extent as the 'other'. It is unthinkable that the urban can exist in the wild - they can abut one another but not co-mingle. Similarly, waterland speaks, to my mind, of a chimerical, evanescent, shifting world where the primacy of water and land are in conflict. The tidelands. The shifting sands of beach and river bank are inimical to urban development, they are unsure edges that give on to the further insecurities of the ocean. Even shored up - transformed into embankments, piers and wharves - the edge remains between the solid and the watery.

In 1984, Graham Swift's novel Waterland was published in New York by Poseidon Press. Half a dozen years later, I read the paperback and I suppose it was at that time that the title lodged in my brain. There it hibernated until awoken by the watery bastion of end-of-days capitalism that is Manhattan. This island is a rock riven from the mainland by the Hudson that rises at the melodramatically named Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondacks and flows on to create the cultural, geographic and bureaucratic gulf between New Jersey and New York.The East River is actually a tidal estuary but performs a similar role in fending off Long Island. It is then the Harlem River to the north that transforms, what at first blush looks like a peninsular jutting into the Upper Bay, into an honest-to-god island.

'Waterland' was, I thought, all mine - until I googled it. On re-aquainting myself with the book I realized I had filched more than its name. Its narrator is a history teacher living in the Fens (that reclaimed marsh around England's Wash, a broad bay that defines the northern edge of the rump of low lying eastern Counties configured to the south by the serpentine Thames Estuary). This marsh or fenland, holds a watery history of locks, rivers, and eels all scoured by the malignant east wind from "its birth in the Arctic Ocean, north of Siberia.... round the northerly tip of the Urals'' and which in turn, holds the secrets of a long-ago murder that is at the heart of the novel. Swift lingers over dense thickets of arcane natural history that become warp to his narrative weft. (Words to blog by).

I have acknowledged my debt (White-Out) to W.G. Sebald who, in his novel, The Rings of Saturn, 1998, covers similar ground to Swift as he documents a walking tour of the eastern coast of England; but in Sebald's world a strange dreamlike quality inures and makes possible a series of learned, but bizarre excursuses. Both men opened up a space for the notion of sampling or pastiching fragments of reality in essays and novels - now made dangerously easy by the advent of Google. (Mea culpa).

We left Manhattan in a cab and then rented a car at JFK for our journey to Long Island's North Fork. New Suffolk sits on Great Peconic Bay and forms the western arm of Cutchogue harbour. We dropped in on the incipient bride and groom before motoring on to Greenport and taking a ferry to our quarters on Shelter Island which appears as a morsel about to be consumed by Long Island's crocodile jaws, the North Fork the upper jaw and the South Fork the more muscular mandible. (Lengthy excursus on the Crocodile, the ultimate beast of the waterland, has been redacted - ed.)

The wedding (a part of the somewhat threadbare narrative weft of this piece) was held at the 'Galley Ho', a hundred year old scallop-packing shed, latterly converted to a restaurant (long-failed) and currently owned by a local non-profit preservation group. Amidst a century's turmoil, its various owners had neglected to provide either heating or insulation but its prime water-front location was sufficient compensation. It was a beautiful ceremony which I watched while keeping a weather eye on the rising ocean which seemingly threatened to engulf the fragile building; and what began as rain lashing the single paned windows that lined the seaward side of the structure changed texture right about the time that vows were exchanged (did I really hear 'for warmer or colder'?) and assumed the soft granulations of wet snow. But the seas failed in their efforts, as they have for five score years, to wash away the scallop shed; the snow abated and wedding guests slowly warmed the space with the glow of their good wishes and the bride and groom hastened off, at some point, for the cosy 19th century New Suffolk cottage they will share together.

We, in turn, ferried across to the storm tossed island called Shelter. Here were the gentle undulations of one-time sand dunes now host to pine barrens, post glacial, pre-lapsarian (the fall here considered as the drop of the woodsman's axe) hardwood forests of maple, beech, and red, black and white oak. In the center of it all, the seventeenth century manor house of its first European settler, Nathaniel Sylvester (1610-1680) still stands. He it was who acquired the land from the indigenous Manhanset Indians and used it as an entrepot for the shipping of West Indian tobacco, sugar and rum back to England (the same destination, incidentally, of many of those brined and barrelled New Suffolk scallops).

While fully one-third of the island has been preserved by the Nature Conservancy - over which we rambled for a couple of hours one day - and functions at its edges of bog and tidal creek as a primordial waterland, the other 65% is an outpost of the City, where the 1% have summer houses and those that serve them have their more modest, middle of island, residences.

But the island transcends its socio-economic numerics and in places (and not just on the Mashomack preserve) it is as if the last four hundred years never happened: Urban never happened. On a early morning run I looked over West Neck Bay, just down the road from where we were staying, and saw several snowy egrets swoop down through the mist and alight on the dawn grey waterland. The (almost imperceptibly) Urban Waterland.

Legend

2011-10-25T20:56:00.000-07:00

The Arthurian legends and their precursors, the ancient Celtic tales of Ireland and Wales, have been a central part of Western mythology for at least two millennia. Avalon, the magical apple isle where Arthur may have lived and been buried is generally thought to mean Glastonbury, a name derived from the Saxon glastn (green like glass); but California, greening up nicely after the early October rains, and definitively believed to be an island before the mid-18th century (An Island on the Land), might also rank as a contender.

A soft fringe of grasses pushing through the hard pan heralds spring. The chaparral spring that is (The Winters Tale). How glassy is the sky? It is a crystalline infinity smoked with milky clouds coddled, towards evening, by the warm autumnal glow of a saffron sun. This could be Avalon, and yonder the limestone bluffs of Cadbury Hill (Camelot), rising out of the schlerophytic mantle like Excalibur reflecting the rose tints of the dying day (RV III).

The puddle of mist that seeps into Upper Ojai these fall mornings laps at the base of Bear Mountain (Kahus) which stands (as an echo of the tor of Glastonbury) at the western end of the valley. The mists melt away by mid morning, just as the ?antap (Chumash astrologer/astronomers) traditions of story, song and stars vanished before the onrush of the Spanish conquest. In an earlier age, the fog that gathered on the low-lying marshes of Avalon similarly dissolved as the pagan world of fairy and Druid was upended by a Christianized Britain under sway of the passion relics gathered in a wattle sanctuary built on Glastenbury tor in the first century.

In both cases, we are left with scant fragments of myth, history and archeological artifact. Locally, we have been cast adrift from the mother lode of mysticism that, through slow accretion, was laid down as a metaphysical strata in the land of the Chumash. We are disassociated it from it, rent from the traditions of the land, and denied a glimpse of its visionary geography.

In Europe, the story of Arthur has metastasized into the enduring strangeness of the Grail mysteries (Red Soil); the defining Arthurian mythology of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, Tennyson's The Lady of Shallot, enshrined in our imaginations in the pre-Raphaelite imagary of its illustrators; into T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone - grist for impressionable, pre-Harry Potter minds and of course, Disney's mill; The Mists of Avalon; the Druidic Mordred, Arthur and Merlin and beyond - way beyond, to the boundaries of para-normal speculation practiced by (for instance) Richard Leviton (RV III) who believes that Glastonbury, like the area around Rennes le Chateau hosts a landscape zodiac, mirror to the celestial universe and embodying the hermetic principle of As Above, So Below.

The 16th century Elizabethan astrologer, scholar, and occultist Dr. John Dee, wrote of what he called 'Merlin's Secret' around Glastonbury,

“The starres which agree with their reproductions, on the ground do lye on the celestial path of the Sonne, moon and planets...thus is astrologie and astronomie carefullie and exactley married and measured in a scientific reconstruction of the heavens which shews that the ancients understode all which today the lerned know to be factes.”

Leviton, and others, suggest that this zodiac is laid out upon a thirty mile diameter circular portion of Somerset with Glastonbury (possibly the physical site of the fabled Celtic Avalon) at its center and is evidenced by such prosaic landscape features as rock formations, ancient roads, streams and field boundaries. Its genesis, he believes, and that of the many other landscape zodiacs that have been 'discovered', exists in the geomorphological creation and consolidation of the Earth. These zodiacal effigies are components of the planetary grid matrix which includes the Oroboros (dragon energy) lines, and other pathways of etheric energy - operating like terrestrial chakras.

Druids, the Grail Knights and other geomantically attuned individuals can, Leviton suggests, use the 'Somerset star temple' as "a geomythic theater for the purification and transmutation of the individual under the aegis of a mythopoetic symbolic system and mediated by the energetics of a landscape astrological matrix". Is that clear? This would, perhaps, be of limited interest to me had I not come across a curious parallel in the writings of one Millenium Twain, who wrote, in the The Ojai Post, of January 16, 2011,

"The whole greater Matilija-Ojai Valley region is a StoneHenge, ‘Hanging-down-from-the-Sky’ sacred site, home to tens of thousands of subtly, and not so subtly, Giant Carved Stones, and mountains. faces, effigies, profiles, figure-sculptures, ranging from a few feet in length to hundreds of meters in length. Much of the pantheon of Todas Las Cosas, all our relations, including the Sky Deities, Pacific Ocean life, and more, is found here. On top, or underneath, that are tens or hundreds of millions of smaller effigy and sacred stones, once held in the pouches of astronomer/astrologer/healer/rainmaker shamans, grandmothers, leaders, and all peoples … or kept in front of their homes, or at sacred sites, or kept on necklaces, or buried with them in ceremony. The Stone People speak, sing the tens of thousands of years of Stone Age oral tradition, and art, culture, and ‘architecture’, and are here as an infinite outdoor museum and university of the sacred wisdom ways of humans-kind, the harmonies of all spiritual traditions, of all times …".

Never mind that the Chumash are not known to have carved giant stones, nor created geo-glyphs. The wisdom in this passage is not in the details but in the general sense that there existed, and perhaps still exists, a psychogeography, a localized geomantic mapping of consiousness and its connections to an eternal sacred wisdom and that the exegesis of this knowledge occurs through the medium of terrestrial star maps (or zodiacs). This region, he (she?) suggests, transmits the wisdom of the ages through its geomorphic StoneHenge, and its potentized rocks (Owlish Avatar).

Merlin was Arthur's master astrologer, Qabalist, and 'Star Worker' and was the Druidic mastermind of the Round Table and Grail Quest. Merlin, Leviton writes, dispatched the Grail Knights to,

"specific (terrestrial) star centers where their silent meditations and intuitive access might illuminate both their individual nature and aspects of the cosmos as well. Their visits were often coincident with important astronomical events such as eclipses, equinoxes, solstices, full and new moons. Merlin’s intent was to help each knight cast off the impediment of planetary, zodiacal, and elemental influences so that their consciousness could live freely and operate without obstruction. The cultivation of this unimpeded human consciousness was the Grail Quest itself".

Leviton concedes that this notion presents some epistemological problems, namely that most people do not credit Arthur, Merlin, and the Grail Quest with any historical authenticity. Here in Ojai, however, we have an academically authenticated parallel in the activity of the ?antap for whom the importance of the astronomical coincidence of the Shaman's vision quests is amply inferred by the archeological record (Space and Practice II). Unimpeded human consciousness - acquired through a transmutative process - was at the heart of Native American shamanistic practice. While this clarity of consciousness was sought through running, psychotropics (locally, Datura) and the sweat lodge, perhaps all these means were but a prelude to the profound engagement of the landscape - the shaman's ultimate goal, perhaps, to merge the spiritual with the geomantic, to find enlightenment in the geomorphic mimesis of the universe.

The ?antap were astral magicians who guided Chumash vision questers in the timing of their incursions amidst the earthly, geomorphic representations of the celestial sphere laid, a priori, over this magically treacherous land where self is sacrificed in the quest for enlightenment and where the individual disappears into the mythic grandeur of the universe.

This Ojai pulses with etheric energy and is imprinted with lithic impressions of the celestial canopy. This heavenly Ojai, our Avalon.

Warm Breeze

2011-10-16T14:33:00.000-07:00

At six o'clock one morning early in the week the waning gibbous moon was bright and still high in the western sky. Venus, like a faithful acolyte, was subtended below. To the east, the sun had yet to climb over the rim of the world but was already brushing the clouds that hung above the silhouetted ridge a deep apricot....

The October full-moon has been an powerful presence. At night, the gravel pool terrace is washed a pale grey and the moon lights the chaparral trails on my morning run. The days have been hot; Tuesday it was 108 degrees farenheit mid-afternoon - the warmest day of the year. Already the sun has made a great deal of progress on its journey south and these autumnal heat-waves make a mockery of the passive solar strategy we incorporated into the house: sun ventures into the southern windows three or four feet by the middle of the day and then streams in obliquely as it moves west later in the afternoon.

If we were in Wyoming, that heat would be welcome, here in Southern California it just adds to the cooling load for our HVAC system which kicks in around 2:30 and stays on until 5. Wyoming? you say. I've just read Annie Proulx's new book, Bird Cloud, about the adventure of building a house at the foot of a 150 foot cliff in the Wyoming rangelands. Based on an early revue, I wrote about it in Pitch Perfect. Over a couple of days this week, I consumed the whole thing.

We have long complained that Ojai has no new book store. Back in the day (the mid nineties) there were two: Elio Zamati's 'Local Hero Bookstore and Cafe' (In Search of a Shaman's Lair) and Mitnee Duque's 'Ojai Table of Contents', from whom I would order books while teaching at Oak Grove High School. To fill the void, Bart's, the well-known, and famously outdoor used book store, has now opened a new book section (in one of the enclosed rooms). It was there Lorrie saw and purchased Proulx's new book.

Proulx's major environmental challenge was the cold. Her architect, Harry Teague, a widely acclaimed and environmentally sensitive Colorado professional working in an up-dated vernacular style is customarily a very 'safe pair of hands'. The house he designed for Ms. Proulx, however, is a leaden lump which looks in my imagination and with some accounting for scale, like a pile of the maimed and crumpled buffalo which were, in centuries gone by, driven over the precipice by the local Ute Indians. Perhaps that was the intention, but the house also suffered from his lack of attention and was cobbled together by a local band of closely related builders and landscapers Proulx dubs the James gang. The interiors can best be described as highly redolent of the 1970's.

Teague does provide the requisite south-facing windows and specified hot water radiant heat in the concrete slab. The client does not complain that the house is cold, although the temperature can drop into the minus thirties in Wyoming, but she does mention it being sometimes uncomfortably warm in the summer. There is no mechanical cooling. In Wyoming all that south facing glass pays dividends from late August on, and the radiant slab seems to do the job. As I have noted (Cool Morning, Full Metal Jacket), the long lag times inherent in radiant heating make it a poor match for Ojai's very changeable winter temperatures.

Her story of the building of the house and its shortcomings take central place in the book but Proulx is, above all else, a writer informed by the rhythms of the natural world and her observations of the bird life on her 637 acre ranch provide a constant coda to the primary narrative. Prairie falcons, bald-headed and golden eagles, ravens, vultures and pelicans are some of the larger birds that she watches wheel and glide in the thermals of the cliff-face. Our lives at Rock Fall are similarly enriched by the cross stitch of birds that weave in and out of the chaparral and the hawks, vultures, crows and ravens that trace looping threads across the sky.

The evening and night skies in Upper Ojai are populated by night raptors, but they are largely hidden from us. Dawn and dusk provide the best opportunities to see them. Earlier in the week, as the light was beginning to fade and the evening had taken on that ashen monochrome that hints at the coming darkness, three owls squabbled in the sky directly above me. Two great horned owls called to each other as they flew in close formation harrassing the third, which I took for a screech owl. The smaller owl tumbled away finally recovering its equilibrium close to the ground where it fluttered off towards tree cover.

The next evening, arriving home in the dark and stopping the car low down on the driveway to close the gate for the night, I heard the whooping of a great horned owl and saw that it was perched atop the last power pole on our property before the supply goes underground. There is no love lost between owl species; perhaps the great horneds are muscling in on their fellow strigiform, the screech owl, to whose nocturnal warbling we have become accustomed.

Proulx sees mountain lions, elk and bear on a regular basis, and has located her house on a site rich in archaeological evidence of Native Americans: the foundation slab excavation uncovered charcoal evidence of an ancient fire-pit and by presumption a pit-house. In my primordial dreams.

There is no indication of ancient settlement on Rock Fall. The closest known Chumash settlements are Sis'a, located along Santa Paula Creek, in the area now occupied by Thomas Aquinas College (Woman of the Apocalypse); ?Awha'y, on the lower north facing slopes of Sulphur Mountain in Upper Ojai (The Land Speaks for Itself) and Sitoptopo (literally, the carrizo (giant rye) patch) - somewhere north east of Ojai, and presumably in the Topatopa foothills. There are no lithic scatters on our chaparral patch, no debitage, and no points, hand-axes, metate or manos.

But this morning I saw a herd of a mule deer, ten or more, take flight over the old honor farm pasture, a noble stag silhouetted against the dawn sky. Yesterday, in downtown Los Angeles, I ate lunch at Mas Malo, a Mexican cantina in a glorious domed space which formerly housed Clifton's Silver Spoon Cafeteria. In the interests of architectural research, I went up to the mezzanine where Seven Grand, a hip whiskey bar, is outfitted in huntsman plaid and features a score of stag's heads on the wall.

They look better on the hoof. At dawn. With a warm breeze blowing across the mesa infiltrating the morning's chill, and a still bright moon high in the sky.

Muwu

2011-10-09T15:36:00.000-07:00

Despite the presence of two competing stores across from one another on the main street of Santa Paula advertising Ropa Vaquera, the age of the hispanic cowboy is long gone. While one in three cowboys in the mid nineteenth century was Mexican, and more locally (where, of course, it was Mexico until 1848) the droughts of the 1860's decimated the great Southern California cattle herds and destroyed the viability of the vast Ranchos; now these faux vaqueros are more likely to be seen, in their Sunday cowboy-best walking to church on a Sunday or, of course, driving a truck or car. While the ergonomics of riding the once emblematic horse undoubtedly played some role in developing the basics of cowboy clothing - denim jeans a checkered long sleeved snap-buttoned shirt and a brimmed felt or raffia straw hat - these icons of western wear have now become the uniform of the field workers on the Oxnard Plain.

The area that is now Oxnard was originally developed by the Spanish in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s as the bread basket to feed the local Mission personnel, their Military support and the newly missionized Chumash at San Buenaventura. The bulk of these Native Americans came from the Mugu lagoon area which was the site of at least three Ventureno Chumash villages (Muwu, first amongst them). For the indigenous people, the lagoon represented the richest and most diverse food resource in the region. Avoiding the lagoon, the Spanish introduced the European cultivation of wheat and cattle ranching in the bordering grasslands.

In 1899, Henry Oxnard, owner of the The American Beet Sugar Company, began growing beet in the area and opened a processing plant. Demand for laborers followed the factory’s establishment and drew 1,000 Japanese farm workers to harvest the sugar beets and live in a tent-city near the fields. Poor working conditions, low wages, and exploitation by the contractors, led to a historic strike of the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association (JMLA) in 1903. It was the first large multi-ethnic agricultural labor strike in California. At the time, the JMLA comprised of 500 Japanese and 200 Mexican workers and was representative of the ethnic mix of the field workers in the first decades of the twentieth century. There was a thriving Japantown along what is now Oxnard Boulevard.

The sugar beet harvest was seasonal work, Japanese laborers, referred to as buranke katsugi (blanket carriers) for moving camp to camp with their blankets, were contracted to other areas to pick fruit, dig potatoes, and harvest a variety of crops for the balance of the year. By the mid-1930s, Issei immigrants in Oxnard began their own vegetable production that was shipped to the Los Angeles market. By 1940, there were approximately 40 Japanese farms with 1,500 acres yielding a variety of produce, such as cauliflower, cabbage, celery, cucumbers, bell peppers, tomatoes, lettuce, peas, and carrots (California Japantowns). A similar mix of agricultural production continues across the plain now augmented by strawberries, of which Oxnard is the world's largest producer.

The Japanese easily out numbered Mexicans in the early years of sugar beet production, but the Mexican revolution of 1910 prompted many Latinos to migrate north to California both to escape the violence and improve their economic situation. By the 1920s, Mexicans had become the predominant farm laborers in the region and remain so to this day. After 1942, when the Japanese were interned during WWII, Asians more or less disappeared from the fields replaced by Mexicans who also took their place as merchants along Oxnard Boulevard. Thus within a generation, the labor, business and cultural presence of the Japanese was almost obliterated in the area (Downtown Oxnard Historic Resources Survey Final Report).

Although there remains a small Japanese community in Oxnard, a Buddhist temple, several Japanese restaurants and still, one or two Japanese gardeners, there is no more Japantown. Just off Oxnard Boulevard, however, on A Street, John McMullen, the Japanese antiquarian, who lives in Ojai and for years did business out of Los Angeles, has located his remarkable store and warehouse of Japanese antiques. We have bought a number of pieces from him over the years.

Along with the removal of the Japanese, and with Pearl Harbor as the same root cause, the Oxnard area saw the development of the Naval Construction Battalion Center, Port Hueneme, the first of a series of military installations along the Ventura coast. The CBC was established to train, stage and supply the newly created Naval Construction Force "Seabees" responsible for shipping supplies and equipment and more than 200,000 men in support of the war effort. More construction supplies and equipment were shipped from Port Hueneme than from any other port in the United States. This base is now augmented by the 146th Airlift Wing of the California Air National Guard located adjacent to the Point Mugu Naval Air Station. Their logistical mission is to provide global military airlift capability (primarily the Lockheed Martin turbo-prop C-130 Hercules) to a full spectrum of state and federal agencies.

This brief historical sketch goes some way in explaining several primary characteristics of early twenty first century Ventura: a plurality of Latino field, construction and service workers; a dominant agricultural sector and a skein of military installations, testing and and communications facilities knitted along the coast and coastal hills. When I set out to write this piece the main thing on my mind was to describe this latter phenomenon as a follow up to the investigation of civilian airliner overflight in Red Smudge. But scratch the surface around here and most likely you will end up with Cabrillo landing at Pt. Mugu in 1542, or the arrival of the Kelp Road voyagers who landed on Santa Rosa Island thirteen thousand years ago and became the first Californians (Hoop Dreams). In this case, it was the Japanese fish camp at Pt. Mugu (see Cabrillo, above) which started the unravelling. For it was the destruction of the camp that was the precursor to the military taking charge of both sides of Calleugas creek where once was, and may still be, some of the best fishing along the coast.

As early as 1884, portions of Calleguas Creek, which drains directly into the Mugu Lagoon from the Oxnard Plain, were channelized to accommodate farmers, who wanted to limit damage from the creek’s floodwaters. As such, the area around the lagoon became a sump for the surrounding agricultural lands (Wild and Free, Bowls). In the 1920’s the Pacific Coast Highway was extended north far enough for hunting and fishing enthusiasts to reach the Mugu Lagoon and many hunting clubs and fish camps sprang up in the area.

In 1930, the Mugu Fish Camp was established as a collection of huts located on the sand spit between the lagoon and the Pacific Ocean, and included a bridge across the lagoon and roadway through the marsh connecting to the Pacific Coast Highway. By the mid-1930’s a small Japanese fishing community was also located near the bridge. Early in 1942, the open area around the lagoon became the focus for Seabee training, and slowly the military removed or built over the Fish Camp. By 1950, all civilian activity in the area ceased. ( From Spanish Land Grants to World War II : an overview of historic resources at the Naval Air Weapons Station, Point Mugu, California, Mark T. Swanson, Tucson, Ariz. : Statistical Research, 1994)

Today, when you stop to look over the wetlands at Mugu, there is a fence barring entry to this one last wild place on the Ventura coast sandwiched between the SeaBee firing range to the south and Port Hueneme to the north. Yesterday, driving back from Montecito (don't ask) we stopped at Carpinteria and threading our way through the town to avoid the street closures precipitated by the California Avocado Festival, parked close to the town beach. I was curious to explore the other patch of wetlands close to Ojai, the Carpinteria Salt Marsh, restored between 2004 and 2008 to "provide better wildlife habitat, opportunities for scientific research, and ways for the people to visit and learn about the coastal environment" according to the Land Trust for Santa Barbara, under whose auspices the restoration was undertaken.

While laudable, and certainly preferable to its being drained and developed, the fate of most of California's wetlands, it represented to me another step towards the commodification of the wildland. Certainly our experience of it was less than exhilerating: I still await the opportunity to enact a recurring daydream - to jump the fence at Mugu, and swim through the shallow estuary towards the sea and then lie exhausted on the dunes in primordial reverie.

Red Smudge

2011-10-02T10:01:00.000-07:00

Wilderness areas are defined, to some extent, by their lack of roads. But the United States Forest Service makes a clear distinction between what it calls 'Inventoried Roadless Areas' and 'Wilderness' and affords a lesser level of protection of the former. Off-road vehicles, for instance, are permitted in roadless areas but not in designated wildernesses.

Provided they fly above 20,000 feet, there are no limitations on commercial airlines overflying either area. We back up to the Sespe Wilderness, while off to the west, as I look across the valley, there is a vast tract of roadless territory to the east of the 33 signaled by Nordhoff Peak and the ridge from which it springs. Commercial airlines, flying north to south, barrel straight on through. Sometimes there is the distant roll of thunder as the sound waves from their engines radiate down to earth: perhaps leaves tremor, the chipmunk's heart beats a little faster than its customary 400 beats per minute and the coyotes' ears prick, but I register it as nothing more than a faint heavenly rumble. Having grown up with the drone of benign aircraft overhead in the back yard I regard the sound as almost comforting in a 'God 's in His heaven—All 's right with the world!' kind of way. My parent's had different memories, and were adept, they told me, at distinguishing the drone of English Spitfire and Hurricane from German Stuka and Messerschmitt while the Battle of Britain raged overhead in summer skies.

Nevertheless, the intrusion of commercial aircraft into the Sky Bowl that sits above the rear of the property, particular in the evenings when the air traffic above the Topatopas seems particularly busy, is of some slight annoyance to me. This is a petulant complaint and just as I assuage my chagrin at heavy traffic on the 101 by reassuring myself that it is a sign of life in what otherwise seems like a pretty dreary economy, so the flashes of red off of a passing plane tail (Southwest airlines perhaps) indicates a busyness that, at year's end, may be reflected in the nation's GDP.

Were I a lone bear-hunter or oil-prospector in the mid nineteenth century, in a clearing hereabouts, and chanced to see a trail of dust kicked up by a passing stage as it reached the top of the long haul up from the Santa Clara floodplain and prepared to pull in at the station at the Summit, I might have pulled out my pocket watch from my leather vest and in a palaver of whisker tugging and mouth wiping pronounced to an un-hearing world on the punctuality or otherwise of said stage; but passing planes offer no such satisfaction to the present day me.

And while, in a rare breathless early morning, as I lay in bed as a child, I might hear the distant rattle of the 'milk-train' as it whistled through the still dark, and could thus count on another hour's sleep, the passing of anonymous, pressurized cigar-tubes at a height of six miles and a distance perhaps of ten or twenty miles tells me nothing about my condition or theirs. They are an exogenous phenomenon. We do not appear to impact one another. They travel on a schedule completely unknown to me, their passengers and crew secure in the belief that the jet engines and the aluminum monocoque structure that envelops them will defy the laws of gravity for at least one more flight, hosted by Alaska Airlines, Air Canada, American Airlines, Allegiant, or other carriers lower down the abecedarian food-chain who ply this route.

Any or all of these passengers, were they to look down from the starboard side of the aircraft, might glimpse the wilderness below and, in a meadow of deerweed and grasses, see the westerly sun glint off of a metal roof and shimmer off of a pool. That, for many of them, will be as close as they ever get to wilderness, although the real thing is actually showing on the other side of the plane, on the port side - where the Sespe wilderness gives way to the Cuyama Badlands, then to scrub punctuated by Soda Lake, shards of Bakersfield suburbia (like Weedpatch, Valley Acres and Oildale), and then dissolves into the distance, at horizons edge, into the vastness of the Mojave. In other words, the kind of mostly trackless (or roadless) landscape you see out the window on almost any flight in the United States - where some kind of US Forest service categorized wilderness or lands lightly administered by the sink-hole that is The Bureau of Land Management consume the ground plane below you.

For me, on my first few flights across the country, that view from the airliner window was a defining experience of this country, and it is why I sleep at night beneath that metal roof and swim in that pool and live in the thrall of the urban wildland. I wanted to be a lonely smudge of infra-red in the heat sensing goggles that surveyed the endless darkness of 'Night-Flight USA', or imagine myself intrepid and sufficient in the tree shadowed, sunlit exuberance of bio-mass that fills in between the sparse, etiolated and mostly coastal or Mississippian conurbations of this great land.

Now, amongst the containered passengers that troop across the upper portion of our north facing window glass, in smidgins of silver that move remorselessly north west to south east across the strip of sky that sits above the Topatopas, or at night, glide amidst the lower reaches of the stars, distinguishable from them only by their dauntless commitment to move from A to B, and, let it be said, an equal commitment to staying aloft that this movement helps ensure, there may be others who dream of being red smudges or intrepid pioneers in the wilderness.

We, for now I am corralling those others who share the dream, are contrarians; for the great global story of our age is one of urbanization, of flight from the countryside, of an abandonment of the bio-mass for the non-organic massif of the city. As an edge dweller, with a foot in both camps, I have not entirely abandoned the City, nor fully embraced the wilderness. I am looking out the starboard window, where the wilderness is afflicted with a kind of psoriasis where patches of residential development appear, and then over the Sulphur Mountain ridge the towns of Santa Paula, Oxnard and Ventura signal the beginning of a suburban trail that flows along the 101 and meets that great floodplain of urbanization, Los Angeles.

WTV

2011-09-26T18:21:00.000-07:00

Is it too early for me to declare Imperial, New York: Viking, 2009, as a truly great work of California History? I should explain, I'm only 200 or so pages into a 1300 page tome. I have had some truck with its prolific author, William T. Vollman, by which I mean I belong to that fairly exclusive club that actually consumes his work. He writes faster than most people can read. At 50, he is almost crippled with carpel tunnel syndrome and can no longer use a keyboard. But the true logorrheic will find a way: I imagine him tapping away with his thumbs on his i-phone, as indeed was I as I waited outside Courtroom number 47 in Ventura County's Hall of Justice (an appellation that strikes me as slightly Stalinist). This is what I thumbed, (as I waited for Jury selection to commence).

'Tennis Leg continues. So, I walked my short run this morning. There was a marmalade sky to the east and dark thunder clouds to the west, it was preternaturally warm. At around four a.m., still in bed, I had heard coyotes - two or three perhaps - engaged in a desultory harmony. A few nights ago, I thought I had heard the strangled howl of a lone coyote, its voice cascading down as though funneled into some chaparral sink-hole or rabbit warren. That was it. I lay very still trying to sort out the noises that rose above the thick blanket of insect thrum that covered the land. I heard a bark or two - but these were, I suspected, domestic animals responding to their feral cousin. Is Coyote back? (Coyote Dream)

No wildlife sightings on the walk this morning, but at this slower pace, I was able to review the scat arrayed before me on the path. Berry seeds, pits and tightly bound animal hair told a story, no doubt, but not one I can understand, handicapped as I am by ignorance of, well, the word that comes to mind is scatology. A word, in the form of scatological, to whose neural location the English speaking world more usually beats a path when confronted with such dubious sallies such as, 'my neighbors dogs' produce more shovel-ready-jobs than Obama ever has', a small, coprological gem from last night's Republican Party debate.

Coyotes, mountain lions and foxes are the primary chaparral faunal carnivores, while the black bear is omnivorous, and judging by its scat at least, more likely to eat berries than meat. So yes, I know my bear scat - great mounds of berry seed pudding - but cannot distinguish the poop of the other, more similarly sized meat eaters. The coyote is flexible in its dietary habits, as befits a scavenger, but given the superfluity of rabbits at the moment I cannot imagine they are packing away many manzanita seeds.'

Back to the computer, and at the speed I type, at little risk of carpel tunnel syndrome. Yesterday I met with Roger Collis, erstwhile executive director at Meditation Mount, at his recently purchased land deep in the hills behind Montecito, ground zero in the Tea Fire of two years ago. The land is still deeply scarred by the fire and now further disturbed by the relentless pace of new construction. Santa Barbara County is liberal in its allocation of permits to re-build 'like for like', and the evidence is all around - a very motley collection of residential buildings all essaying various nods in the direction of fire-safety. The chaparral in these hills was already highly compromised by close to a century's history of planting exotics and the ferocity of the Tea Fire was almost certainly exacerbated by the number of mature Australian natives that towered over what little remained of the elfin forest. Now faced with the need to protect themselves from their neighbors gaze, long used to a jungle-like density of highly irrigated and ill-chosen plants, homeowners in their newly built homes will, no doubt, make similar wrong-headed choices and move apace to recreate the fire hazard from which they so recently escaped (although over two hundred houses were destroyed, there were no fatalities).

Roger gave me an abbreviated history of Meditation Mount and I realized, as he talked, that I was remiss in not including it in my concise history of the Theosophical Society's (TS) influence in Ojai in Red Soil. On the World Service Intergroup website, 'An International Network of Ageless Wisdom Groups', there is the following blurb which seems to encapsulate Roger's precis:

“The impulse that guides and sustains Meditation Mount had its beginnings back in the 1950s when Roberto Assagioli (the Founder of Psychosynthesis) accepted the challenge given by Master DK to his students, to establish a “united world group given to unanimous and simultaneous meditation upon the work of preparing the world for the new order and for the jurisdiction of the Christ [and] to establish the knowledge of and the functioning of those laws and principles which will control the coming era, the new civilization and the future world culture…”

The pieces of context the critical reader needs to know are these: Master DK is a Mahatma - an ascended Tibetan Master by the name of Djwhal Khul and it is he who dictated the two dozen books of esoteric teachings to Alice Bailey who in turn, in part from the profits from these works, was able to set up the Lucis Trust which financed the development of Meditation Mount. Madame Blavatsky had channeled Master Koot Hoomi in her writings at the end of the nineteenth century, and the TS is confidently awaiting another amanuensis to complete the trilogy of wisdom passed down from the ascended Masters from their ashram somewhere on the spiritual plane. Alice A. Bailey (AAB) was expelled from the TS because she attempted an end-run around her nemesis, Annie Besant (AB), by re-focusing the Society on the teachings of Madame Blavatsky (HPB) with whom she felt a direct lineage as a chosen conduit for the teachings of the Masters.

Roberto Assaglioli was sponsored in his work in California by Laura Huxley, wife to Aldous and writer of the This Timeless Moment, London : Chatto & Windus,1969, in which she documents her husband's death and her part in administering massive doses of LSD at the end. Huxley was a co-founder of the Happy Valley School with Krishnamurti (Red Soil). When the Happy Valley School was considering new names, my son was very supportive of 'Huxley High'. In the event, it was called 'Besant Hill' but in true TS acronymic style, it might better have been call AB School.

Roger is aware that elements of the Meditation Mount back-story are, in his words, a little woo-woo. Many institutions in Ojai have been touched by the TS brand, and while each of them shares core notions of the innate inter-relationship of humankind and the cosmos that transcend the esoteric tradition, it is the latter that inevitably attracts both messianic devotion and a fair amount of ridicule. It is worth remembering that the Theosophical Society grew out of Spritualism, the late nineteenth century movement that promised communication with the dead but that has subsequently been shown to have been riddled with fakery and deceit (in some of which, it has been suggested, HPB took part).

I have never felt particularly comfortable on the Mount (Peace Walk). My unease does not rise to the level of that which I experienced at Rennes le Chateau (Red Soil), but the land, it seems to me, has been ravaged in a way that is not conducive to meditative thought. Building atop a knoll, of course, is never a good idea. It destroys the earth form and at the Mount, this offense is compounded by the scraping of the hilltop to establish a parking lot and the gardens associated with the center. This year almost fifty rattle snakes were removed from the property by the local fire department. The snakes are there because of the rampant irrigation that is necessary to preserve the mish-mash of exotic landscaping that sprawls inelegantly across the site. Lured from their native chaparral habitat by the presence of water, the snakes are then bagged and dumped, who knows where, but inevitably they are separated from kith and kin. It has become a snake pit with unhappy viperous outcomes. Bad karma.

Imperial attempts the personal, poetical and historical evocation of the eponymous county that sits in the south eastern corner of California and on the Mexican border. The land is given life by the Colorado river. Vollman has cast this bio-region in the role of historical protagonist - the land and its soul have an enduring persona that impacts all who come within its thrall. You know where this is going. I began Urban Wildland from the perspective of my own backyard but my horizons have stretched over the months, and now years, to include most of the Ventura County watershed - to take one more or less coherent description of my bio-regional purview. My home turf consists of the Ojai and Upper Ojai valleys each of which feeds one of the two rivers (the Ventura and the Santa Clara) that, reaching the ocean, describe a comprehensible wedge of land. Within it, I have identified various fringes of Urban Wildland, psycho-spiritual hot-spots and areas of human, historical, archaeological, anthropological, botanical and zoological interest.

It is reputed to be the novelist Madison Smartt Bell, writing (anonymously) in a New York Magazine review, who berates Vollman for his, "clumsy sentences, the digressive digressions, the gratuitously creepy metaphors, the never-ending sarcastic exclamation marks. I found myself wishing that he would redirect some of the massive energy.... to the less obviously heroic, more social challenges of writing: synthesizing, pruning, polishing."

I am a dim, flickering blogging bulb compared to the extraordinary wattage of Vollman's literary beacon. (There is, indeed, some subterranean whispering of a Nobel). He is an extraordinary force of nature.

It is my honor to share some of his faults.

Coyote Dream

2011-09-18T21:29:00.000-07:00

It's become a game. Between the two of us. Looming mound, hill or mountain elicits the response....ahhh Bugarach. Driving up the PCH the other evening Santa Cruz was back lit by the setting sun. We saw it at Zuma, on the horizon in an orange strip of clear sky between ocean and cloud. Ahh....Bugarach Island. Up on the old County Property at the top of Koenigstein there was Santa Paula Peak ....ah, you get the idea.

At 4,040 feet, the volcanic Bugarach peak is the highest summit in the Corbières mountains. It is also reputed to contain an entrance to the underground world of Agartha - or a UFO garage, depending upon whom you believe (RV III). At 8,847 feet, Mount Pinos is almost exactly twice as high, and was considered by the Chumash to be the center of their world, or Liyikshup - the point where everything is in balance.

Santa Paula Peak stands at 4,911 feet. David Stillman is a local who goes where I write about - and takes pictures. He describes his hike up the local Bugarach thus,

"the trail winds steeply up a ridge via a series of burley switch-backs. It leads over, around and through grassy hills, chossy crags, and dense chapparal. It ends in a scramble up a forty degree field of scree. The summit is small, with sheer cliffs on two sides. The view to the west is remarkable, staring down on upper Ojai Valley. To the northeast lies Bear Haven. To the north is Devil's Gate, the Sespe, Topatopa, and Santa Paula Gorge."

To save you Googling, I will tell you that 'chossy' means a climb/cliff/mountain/crag composed almost entirely of choss, and therefore only suitable for climbing if you are (a) insane, (b) suicidal or ... and that choss refers to loose rocks. It's a specific piece of rock-climbing argot equivalent to the less specific 'sketchy' and has some kinship to the urban inflected 'ghetto', as in 'pretty ghetto'. David climbs rocks, and has the vocabulary to prove it. I run, an activity a little light on specialized vocabulary, although I will tell you that right now I have a strained gastrocnemius which is annoyingly called 'tennis leg'. Thus my experience of Santa Paula peak, this morning, was from the seat of a bicycle. It was generally clear, but the mountain was garlanded with a light haze that had an almost spectral aspect. As David points out, it has a small summit and steep sides and can masquerade effectively as an extinct volcano.

On the old County Property, which I believe was an honor farm back in the day, but is now privately owned, there is a track that leads to the Silver Thread oil leases. On its west side is a meadow that runs most of the way to Koenigstein and upon which cattle sometimes graze. At the moment it is given over to tar weed and turkey mullein (Eremocarpus setigerus) - neither, I'd guess, of much bovine nutritional value. On the east side, it is chaparral with views of the Santa Paula ridge and peak; immediately beyond the fence there are the occasional oaks tangled with the usual under-scrub and it was there that I saw two bushy tails snaking through the leaf litter, fallen branches and poison oak.

A few weeks ago, driving down the 150 early one morning I saw very fresh road kill in the middle of the road and flashing by, I thought for a moment it might be a bobcat. The next morning I rode down on my bike. Someone had had the decency to pull the mangled animal off to the shoulder and I was able to identify it as a grey fox. Its innards were exposed and they were attracting flies and wasps, but its mangy tail, reddish ears and short snout were clues enough. The two tails I spotted this morning belonged to altogether livelier specimens. I got off the bike and walked back quietly to where I had seen them and, sure enough, they hadn't gone far: I was rewarded with a beautiful vulpine silhouette as one of the pair trotted along parallel to the path, beyond the oak, with the rising sun behind it.

I dreamt last night of a coyote being attacked by an evil looking hyena not much bigger than it. I haven't seen a coyote since last spring. I miss their howling, I miss their guilty faces as they lurk along the side of Koenigstein. I even miss their ill-mannered squabbling over freshly killed rabbits. To dream of coyotes, apparently, means there is a part of your soul that feels desolate, fearful, and lacking support; (or it could just mean that you miss seeing coyotes). Mark Twain famously described the coyote as a "long, slim and sick-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakeness and misery, an evil eye and a long sharp face..." The grey fox, that for the moment must stand in for the missing coyote, is certainly less needy looking, is more wraith-like and crepuscular than the canine, and has the enormous charm of a fluffy tail.

I think of the coyote as a fringe-dweller, it is the true spirit animal of the Urban Wildland and has generally prospered as residential areas have pushed into chaparral hillsides and canyons. The Chumash, like many native American tribes, saw the animal as a trickster: a shape-shifter, living between order and chaos, in liminal space, between the human-world and the wild. As tricksters, capable of metamorphosis (without losing their essential character or soul), they are un-killable, both mythic survivors and perpetuators of their own myth. They'll be back. This year is just a down year. It occurs to me now that they are, perhaps, the faunal equivalent of laurel sumac (Skimmer).

If we (Lorrie and I) see Bugarach in every passing hillock, tumulus and knoll it is because we recognize its essential character or 'soul' in local earthforms. We have absorbed its mythic portent and in the kind of intellectual 'making-do' or bricolage that Levi Strauss ascribes to mythical thought, we see Bugarach re-created in the lumpy landscapes of Ventura County. Maybe.

Like Gary Snyder, the poet, essayist and environmental activist, who has studied native American coyote mythology, I can only read the coyote myth as a white Californian male. I make no pretense at a visceral connection with a Chumash understanding of their sprit animals. Snyder claims that coyote is a symbol of the American west and reflects an interaction between myth and a sense of place. Now that is my kind of intellectual leap out of the soup of primordial mythology.

In the name of Claude Levi Strauss, in the spirit of bricolage, of making do, of appropriation, I am claiming coyote for the Urban Wildland, as a creative spirit rooted in the love of the land - but currently it would seem, at least in his material incarnation, he is on sabbatical.

Skimmer

2011-09-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

Enough beating about the bush. Enough of the Euro-blogs. I have traveled in the land of the Cathars, the Visigoths, the Merovingians and the Catalans (born of the Proto-Celtic Urnfield people, the Phoenicians, Carthaginians and the Romans; once ruled by Charlemagne and, unforgettably, Wilfred the Hairy). Now I am back in Upper Ojai where human history is recent but the primal energies of the land run deep. I have been toying with these questions for far too long: what constitutes a mystical landscape and just how soulful is Ojai?

I am working, first raking the detritus of this spring's clover from beneath bunch grasses and deerweed, collecting the skeletal stalks and grey seed balls into soft piles of kapok - then across the meadow, I pull out laurel sumac stems from the dark, dead carcasses of the trees that were cut down a couple of years ago. The stumps are dead but the roots, sometimes as much as twenty feet deep into the ground are alive and well and, having supported a tree fifteen to twenty feet high have all the energy in the world to send out shoots and saplings with trunks as much as an inch thick in a frenzied attempt to re-colonize their patch of chaparral. I cut them back, push over the bigger stems with my foot, which often snap, and if they do not, a tug pulls them, and bits of white root (blushed with red at the base of the stalk), clean out of the ground.

It is about ninety degrees farenheit. Today is cooler than usual, hence the opportunity to do a little work. I attack the task with manic rushes of energy and then fall back and rest a while on a rock. Rocks are everywhere and laurel sumac (Malosma laurina) likes nothing better than to emerge from beneath, within and around these great, fractured sandstone boulders. The tree is relentless, its life-force is awesome. Around me, the wind is caught in my flapping shirt and drying my sweat. Above the Topatopas rolling cumulus clouds are massing, puffy, bright and white against darker smoke-like vapor. A storm is brewing, at around 6,000 feet. All I experience is the ariel sturm und drang and the gathering wind: the sun is hidden for a while and by about five, the temperature has dropped into the low eighties. Later, there is a stunning sunset with washes of grey and orange like some improbable, amateurish water color.

This land is raucous, loud with elemental energy, fierce in its beauty and pungent in its scents; yes, but is it mystical? I get back to the house reeking of laurel sumac. I shed my heavy Carhartt denim work trousers and damp shirt and go for a swim. The water is dark from the brooding sky. Sky Bowl, Lorenz calls it. This is a site that is only partly of Ojai, it transcends its locale: it speaks of some universal wildness, it resonates with the raw beauty of primitive places. Living here affords the opportunity to wrestle with the chaparral's intense life-force, and then slip into the pool and shake off its dust, its smells, its hard, spikey, sclerophyllitic leaves and wrap oneself in the sensuality of crystalline water. These are not the conditions for evaluating mystical content - this is the life of a sybarite rather than an anchorite.

Laurel sumac sucks the oxygen out of its room - few other plants even consider setting up shop anywhere near the dirt floor where this priapic root system shoots off its sap quickened stalks. But in clearing the plant from the landscape around the house - it is notoriously flammable - I was aware, this year, that sawtooth goldenbush (Hazardia squarrosa) appears to be a companion plant, happy enough, at least, to lurk beneath laurel sumac and eke out an existence in its shadow. It flowers in the late summer. When not flowering it looks a lot like a dwarf coyote brush (Baccharis Pilularis) and for some time I also confused it with California brickellbrush (Brickellia californica). Margot set me straight.

Early this morning a woodland kerfuffle woke Lorrie; the open doors of our bedroom give onto the oak grove that sits up on a rocky knoll above the east end of the house. Still half asleep she came into the kitchen where I had closed the windows and doors against the morning chill. She invited me to contribute an analysis of what the heck was going on 'out there'. We opened the sliding door and listened. Somewhere in the mix was a great horned owl hoo-hooing, and what sounded like a cat-like mewl. Triumphant owl and cowering bobcat? Peterson's Field Guide to Western North American Birds 4th. ed., New York, 2010 was a likelier source of explanation than yours truly, and so it was. We were hearing a young owl begging its mother for a share of her kill, vocalized as a plaintive squawk or mewl. When it was light I walked up to the trees to see if there was any evidence of this domestic drama but there was none. Across the seasonal creek were the piles of laurel sumac I cut yesterday. I could still smell the sap. The leaves have already begun to pucker. The goldenbush appeared alone and altogether heedless of the chlorophyllic carnage that lay about it.

There is in England an outfit called Research into Lost Knowledge Organization or RILKO. Here is collected many of the geomantic fringe-dwellers and tenured academics dabbling in out-of-area arcana in one foundation dedicated to the meeting of mind and topography, of land and soul. One of its founders is Keith Critchlow, a respected academic specializing in sacred space and associated both with Prince Charles' failed school of 'traditional' architecture and now his Foundation for the support of same. They should know something about mystical landscapes. A leading luminary, Paul Devereux, writes,

“The approach to the forgotten knowledge of the past must involve the most comprehensive and inclusive attitudes of which we are capable. There is room for all approaches, orthodox archaeologists, geometers, mathematicians, folklorists, occultists and geomancers. All these approaches can provide valuable perspectives on ancient understanding".

I have conducted a very light gloss on the shamanic practices of the Chumash; Sarah Munster has done a little dowsing over the land while I have remained alert to faery's, will o' the whisps’ and woodland elementals but none have appeared before me. I have spoken to bobcats, called to coyotes and cursed at bears, whispered to screech-owls in the night and cooed to quail in the morning but none have answered me. I have searched the land for ancient painted rocks but know it is highly unlikely that I will find them. I have not experienced that 'flood of ancestral memory' that Alfred Watkins experienced when looking at an Ordnance Survey map of Herefordshire and realized that there were a series of alignments between ancient monuments, burial mounds, cross-roads and pre-historic earthworks - what he called straight tracks and later became known as ley lines (Stoned). I have written of old Chumash spirit paths, and I believe, run on them, but have not mapped them or established their beginnings and ends.

What I should be doing (apparently) as Devereux urges, is

"exploring a wide range of topics based in and around archaeology and anthropology, such as archaeoastronomy, archaeoacoustics, sensory archaeology, the prehistory of mind, modern discoveries of mind-body interaction with sacred places, ritual, magic, shamanism, rock art, folklore, mythology, ethnobotany, the phenomenology of landscape and of time, and more".

Instead, I swim in the shallow pools of the present, I am beguiled by the now, I am, God help me, fascinated by the new. Is it any wonder that the 'doors of perception' remain mostly closed to me? Oh, and I do not ingest Datura. I dabble in chaparral, in archaeology and rock art. I refer to my book on Chumash ethnobotany and have Milt Mc Auley's Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains on the breakfast table at all times. I return from runs with pockets of hastily picked botanical specimens. These, perhaps, are eccentricities enough. I write my blog. Parsing mystical (or not) landscapes is, as they say, above my pay grade.

Richard Leviton, author of Geomythic Earth. Readings and Field Notes in Planet Geomancy, iUniverse, Lincoln, NE, 2006) and the founder of The Blue Room Consortium (A Cosmic Mysteries Think Tank for Earth Energies, Mapping and Interaction) in Sante Fe writes,

"Pilgrimage destinations, holy places, power points are all names given to places of heightened presence, or quite simply, sacred sites....I use the term 'visionary geography' to describe a planet filled with geomantic nodes"

He travels the world seeking geomantic engagement and penetration of the Earth and its mysteries. I walk, or run the surface - I survey the mantle - rock, dirt, water and bio-mass. I lift my head to the sky and study the vaporous canopy. But I penetrate neither. I am unable to plumb the soulful depths.

I skim.

RV III

2011-09-10T19:02:00.000-07:00

Ojai, spiritual hot-spot (Stoned, Albion, Red Soil): Krishnamurti sitting beneath his Peruvian pepper tree in the East End, mainlining enlightenment (and meeting, on the astral plane, Maitreya - the Buddha's second coming, and Koot Hoomi, the trans-Himalayan, ascendant Mahatma). Recto verso. Here in the Languedoc, on the other side of the page, there is a kind of wee-fee (the charming French way with wi-fi) hot-spot that links directly with the mysteries at the center of the Universe.

Elizabeth Van Buren, scion of the eighth President, the one-term, 'Martin Van Ruin', 1833-1837, who succeeded Jackson and had the misfortune to preside over an economic depression, has installed herself here and become a leading light in the cottage industry (industrie artisinale) that feeds on the ancient riddles surrounding Rennes-le-Chateau, Rennes-le-Bain and Mount Bugarach. The latter, a limestone lump that, we are given to understand, resonates with the etheric fourth and perhaps even the fifth dimension.

Cue the Topatopas: mysterious escarpment towards which the feet of Native Americans were pointed when buried and upon whose flanks (the mountain's that is) shaman perched, inhaling the perfumed smoke of the local brugmansia, the seriously phsychotropic Datura and upon whose sandstone was painted cryptic records of their astral voyaging. (In Search of a Shaman's Lair).

The density of myth, rumour and mystery surrounding this spalled rock face does not approach that of the impenetrable stew of arcana which pertains to Bugarach (and the two Rennes), and for that we should be grateful. Locally, the south west facing Topatopas are known primarily for the 'pink moment', which describes the few minutes when the evening sun dips towards the horizon and their textured face is flushed with the orange-reds of sunset. One local realtor promotes herself by proclaiming suggestively that you let her find your 'pink moment'...no talk here about geomantic pentagrams, Argatha (see below), or etheric temples in time that are a part of the lingua franca of the new-age pilgrims who flock to Languedoc-Rousillon. I could do without the crassness of the rosaceous apellation - it is a phenomenon that is often more golden than pink - but the effect is of sufficient amplitude to warrant much scrutiny were it to occur in this south west corner of France where for instance, the reflections from stained glass windows are intensely parsed. Sitting beneath the Topatopas, the rock-face reflection is but a pleasant side-dish to the spectacular sunsets that dissolve the blue sfumato into pinks, reds and oranges on an almost nightly basis.

The brooding cone of Mount Bugarach is the gateway to the Corbières, a region notable for its limestone outcroppings and lowland garigue, a Mediterranean plant community akin to Catalonia's monte bajo and California's chapparal. At higher elevations the garigue gives way to more heavily wooded areas that surround the peaks, which, like Bugarach are often topped with natural spires of rock almost indistinguishable from the now crumbling ruins of visigoth fortresses built amongst these lonely pinnacles.

The labyrinthine limestone caverns and smoldering internal fires of this hulking volcanic mountain fuel both the hot springs of Rennes-les-Bains and the imaginations of visitors. Science fiction writer Jules Verne who is said to have holidayed on the volcano's flanks based The Journey to the Center of the World, Paris, 1864, on his experiences there. I bathed my feet at the old Roman hot-spring which disgorges into the river Sal - which really is salty - while the spring waters are reportedly highly radioactive. My blisters (from running in flip-flops) were soothed and they had healed by the next day. Coincidence? You decide...

While Elizabeth van Buren (thin and ever-so-slightly haunted looking on her You-Tube videos) has located her portal to the reputed secret underground city complex (known as Agartha) in the landscape zodiac she has discovered within a ten km. radius of Renne-le-Chateau, others believe, perhaps more plausibly, that it is Bugarach that holds the secret way into the underground world. Here, it is advertised, is a safe haven from the apocalypse confidently predicted for December 21st. 2012, the date upon which the Mayan calendar ends.

While I plan to take my chances in the Topatopa foothills, many of Europe's most gullible marginales are living in the gulches and ravines that thread through the Corbières and whose presence is occasionally signalled by a mail box stuck by the road in an otherwise apparently uninhabited area. The mail (presumably pension and unemployment checks) must get through. They have put their trust in Bugarach surviving the apocalypse either through its revealing its access points to the underworld or in the timely manifestation of the alien depot believed to be installed deep within the mountain - currently evidenced (it is said) by a low mountainside hum. Either way, this motley crew of end-of-the-worlders believe they are well situated to survive Armageddon.

The Topatopas do not merely loom over our particular urban wildland haven; they provide a signature rock face on the northern ridgeline that defines, along with Sulphur Mountain, the Upper Ojai valley. From the town formerly known as Nordhoff (having latterly misappropriated the name Ojai from its neighbor to the east (The Land Speaks for Itself)) it is similarly prominent and more instantly recognizable than the other mountain bowl landmarks such as Chief's Peak, Black Mountain Summit and White Ledge Peak. Travel out beyond the coastal plain to the spit of beach that protects Ventura Harbor, stand on Surfer's Knoll and look landward (north) and there is Topatopa, crowning the coastal mountains.

Like crowded teeth, the ranges are arrayed across the landscape one upon the other. The Santa Ynez Mountains, the Topatopa Mountains, and the Piru Mountains form the northern boundary, the Santa Susana Mountains the eastern boundary, and the Simi Hills and the Santa Monica Mountains the southern boundary. Closer in, there are the Ventura Hillsides girdled with housing developments but breaking through at their higher elevations to reveal mounding hills of unique Venturan coastal sage scrub.

What zodiac constellations might be revealed amidst these peaks and valleys, knolls and canyons, rocks and water, chaparral and coastal sage scrub? What alignments, cromlechs, ley lines and dolmens exist along their Chumash trails? What mysteries exist in the painted caves, pecked rock faces and buried grave goods of their aboriginal inhabitants? What temples of light, temples in time, or etheric domes embracing valleys forged for the gods might be conjured in the soft coastal air or the harsh thundery climes of the inland valleys? What mysteries are encoded in this densely configured landscape? Who, at last, will be our Elizabeth van Buren?

Count me out. The Chumash possessed powerful esoteric knowledge (Space and Practice II) derived from millenia of close observation of the natural world out of which they constructed a supernatural cosmos that melded the prosaic and temporal universe to an explicated past and a fully fathomed future. Our only first-hand conduit to that knowledge, John P. Harrington (Yuccapedia), secreted his notes in a thousand boxes of data many of which still sit mouldering in warehouses and storage depots waiting to be deciphered. His data remains, perhaps, our best hope for understanding these mysteries, but it presents a tedious academic challenge unlikely to appeal to new-agers impatient to address their need for answers NOW - or at the vary latest, by December 21st. 2012.

Red Soil

2011-09-04T17:52:00.000-07:00

In 1875 in New York City, Helena (Madame) Blavatsky, H.S. Olcott and a few other fin de siecle occultists founded the Theosophical Society to promote a synthesis of spiritualism, Masonic lore, eastern religious mysticism and a belief in the 'Mahatmas', time travelling wise-ones with whom adepts could comunicate on the astral plane and to whom the leadership hierarchy of the movement ultimately paid obeisance. This organization has been the central reason for Ojai's reputation as a spiritual center. It can be debated, of course, whether there was (and is) is some innate spiritual resonance in the area to which the Theosophists were drawn.

Certainly the three important early twentieth century Theosophical colonies in California were all situated in areas of profound natural beauty: Lomaland, a collection of grandiose structures that made up the 'White City', founded by Katherine Tingley as a center of Theosophical belief, was located on the long, windswept finger of land that points south to Mexico and protects the bay on which San Diego sits. Here, at the extreme southwestern point of the United States, Tingley created a community that blended New World confidence, Victorian morality, a love of antiquity, Indian spirituality, occultism and a featured a mash-up of Greco-Mughal architectural styles. Frances LaDue, a.k.a. Blue Star, founded the idyllic Theosophical community just south of Pismo beach, called Halcyon. Her partner, Dr. Dower, established a hospital and sanitarium, which, along with The Temple of the People (triangular, domed and colonnaded), formed the institutional core of this idealist village set in beautiful Arroyo Grande overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

In 1889, Annie Besant (Class of 2010), was converted to Theosophy upon a single reading of Madame Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine. Two years later the cigar-chomping Russian mystic was dead and Besant quickly assumed a leading role in the Esoteric Section. She accompanied Charles Leadbetter, the Society's intellectual muscle and noted pedarast, to India in 1909 and there they 'discovered' Jiddu Krishnamurti (K), a 14 year old brahmin, son of a family living in genteel poverty and thus amenable to seeing Jiddu annointed as the 'salvation of mankind' and taken, with his brother Nitya, to perform on the now global Theosophical stage. In the early 1920's and afforded some independence from his handlers, Krishnamurti took his beloved brother, deathly ill from tuberculosis, to Ojai where, in the warm dry climate that Charles Nordhoff had promoted in the second edition of California for Health, Pleasure and Residence, he hoped for a cure (Hotel California).

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, the oldest of California's Theosophical colonies had been established in the Hollywood hills by Albert Warrington between 1911 and 1919 and many of the Moorish influenced buildings still stand. Warrington, a colleague of both Olcott and Leadbetter had, as his spritual guide, Annie Besant. Warrington was led by the Mahatmas, and on the material plane encouraged by his friends the Rev. Robert Walton and Mary Gray (with whom Krishnamurti and his brother originally stayed on the arrival in California) to visit Ojai in 1924. This precipitated the moving of Krotona to Ojai that same year - a move no doubt hastened by the quickening development of the Hollywood Hills; a year earlier, a giant sign had appeared above the Krotona community announcing HOLLYWOODLAND (later truncated to read HOLLYWOOD).

By 1927, the stars had aligned such that Besant arrived in Ojai, at the urging of K who accompanied her on the trip, and she confirmed that the valley would be the future world center for the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti. This was both a spiritual pilgrimage for Annie Besant and an opportunity to consider the acquisition of prime real estate where the Esoteric Section's ultimate goal of nurturing the next step in human evolution, the sixth root race (don't ask) could be founded.

On a winter's day early in 1927, they left K’s home at Arya Vihara (now the Krishnamurti Library on McAndrew Road in the East End) to see the land on the west side of the Krotona property, land that ultimately became the venue for Krishnamurti's annual 'talks' and later, the site for the Oak Grove School (where I taught from 1995-1998). They were unimpressed. K persuaded Besant and the group to look at the Upper Ojai region where there was also a large tract of land for sale. They liked it very much and bought 465 acres, plus the oil rights. This property was later expanded and became The Happy Valley Foundation, putative site for the future of mankind.

Clearly the big-sky country of Upper Ojai appealed to Annie Besant's vision, which to date has been manifested only in a small private high school, founded in the 1940's by Krishnamurti and Aldous Huxley, originally dubbed Happy Valley and recently re-named Besant Hill. It remains a magical property and is close by the small Chumash village that gave its name to Ojai (The Land Speaks for Itself). When asked for her reaction to the land, Besant wrote “I find that your valley has an atmosphere of peace, tranquility and spirituality that is most reminiscent of India in these respects than any other part of the globe that I have visited.”

In Languedoc, in the south eastern corner of France, recto versa, on the other side of the page, peace, tranquility and spirituality have been hard won. In the early middle ages the area where we stayed, between Perpignon and Carcassonne, was prized for its cabbages and its saffron. Now it is a kind of Bermuda Triangle (with the third corner being Andorra) - an area depopulated in the thirteenth century by the Albigensian Crusade, again in the fourteenth through successive crop failures and the Black Death, and currently with a population density less than the Sahara. Our adventurer host Anthony Hyde, who spends much of his time in Africa calls it, quite simply, France's Chad. At Grànes, close by Anthony's home, the Moulin à la Bordaisse, there is no bread; there is no cheese; there are no people - other than the English, who jet in from Liverpool on Ryan Air and, should they decide to stay, live in one or another of the picturesque stone villages shadowed by ancient visigoth ruins on the hills, where they find that it is more economical to become alcoholic than at home and, quite possibly, marginally more chic.

The Albigensian Crusade was initiated by Pope Innocence III in 1209 against the heretical Cathars of Languedoc, lands that then spread from Catalonia east to Provence. The Cathars were dualists; their simple, spirit good/flesh bad beliefs, inevitably positioned Jesus, who was of the flesh, on the wrong side of the ledger. Although they denounced procreation as extending the evil of the world they nevertheless became a highly prosperous region of traders, bankers and farmers. Hi-jacked by the royalist north, whose knights did most of the fighting, the Crusade proceeded with devastating brutality and was used as cover to conquer the southern lands where the heresy had spread.

The Treaty of Paris 1229, between Raymond VII of Toulouse and Louis IX of France officially ended the wars with Raymond conceding defeat to Louis IX. Based on the terms of the treaty, Raymond's daughter was married to Louis' brother and Languedoc became a part of France in the kind of national aggregation that eventually occurred in all major European countries (Suquet); but the Cathars were not entirely eliminated during this twenty year holocaust. The Inquisition was developed by the Catholic Church as a tool to render their total elimination during the remainder of the thirteenth century. Malcolm Barber notes in his paper, Albigensian Crusades: Wars Like Any Other?

"........(The wars) marked a qualitative degeneration in behaviour for those involved, for they engendered and strengthened hostile attitudes towards those who were different from the perceived norm and opened the way for the development of an ingrained superiority towards those who did not follow the banner of Christ as interpreted in the Latin West. These enemies find their lineal descent in the demonised peoples of the New World, whose behaviour showed that they were not of the same species as their conquerors and therefore need not be treated as human beings at all."

And so, in the red soil of Grànes, colored, perhaps, by ferrous oxides but in my imagination by the blood of the Cathars, there was again this glimpse from one side of the page to another: from the parochial Cathari holocaust to the almost total destruction of the native populations in the Americas.

A corollary to the Cathari belief that Jesus was fully human is the presumption that the resurrection didn't happen. Instead, it is claimed that the rock closing off the cave where Jesus' body was left for dead was removed in the night and that he and Mary Magdelene along with the chalice shared at the last supper (a.k.a. the Holy Grail), escaped to Europe and through their daughter Sarah, their bloodline continued for 400 years as the Merovingian dynasty of the Franks. Jesus, it is claimed, died an old man in France, where he fled with his family to escape prosecution from Peter and the Apostoles, and was buried at Rennes-le-Château - a three mile run from Le Moulin!

This story was supposedly kept secret for two millennia by the Priory of Sion, a mysterious sect that is said to have also founded the Order of the Templars and is the basis for Dan Brown's popular novel, The DaVinci Code. But wait there's more....The secret was accidentally discovered by Beranger Sauniere who became Rennes-le-Chateau's priest in 1885 and grew unaccountably wealthy. Upon these fantastic stories the hamlet in turn has grown rich; it is reputedly overrun with tourists and they support the local book store, two restaurants and a hotel.

When I ran up through its quaint streets it seemed an uncomfortably hollow place, notable for its views but little else. The Church was locked, the shops closed and the streets empty. It was a little after 6 a.m. It is a strange hill-top village in an area where memories of Celts, Romans, Visigoths and Cathars are imprinted in the limestone crags, fortress ruins, the roiling waters of the Aude, the caves amidst chesnut, oak and ash, and the red soil, but here those memories have been scrubbed clean under the intemperate gaze of a thousand tourists, the wonder of the place vanished into the digital pixilation of their cameras and the delicate mysteries, be there any, coarsened by their rude curiosity.

Suquet

2011-08-22T06:18:00.000-07:00

....Sitting in my tin can / far above the world....Hopping from one entrepot of globally branded luxury goods to another, in transition from Southern California's chaparral to the Costa Brava's monte bajo - the stunted olive trees and thorny brush of the hills above Spain's rugged north east coast line. While the major part of this transatlantic recto verso was conducted via a Boeing 777 and an airbus 320, (which occasioned the brush with glossy materialism show-cased at LAX, LHR and BCN) the finer points of locational detailing were achieved, at both ends, via that old stand-by the automobile and, at the finest grain, by shank's pony.

Cap de Creus: where the shoe is on the other foot. The New World species, Agave and Opuntia, colonizing the Old World: the other side of the page. The monte bajo begins to grow in ernest in the rocky, sandy soil in the hills just beyond the old stone towns of Catalonia: it is the urban wildland, the brush where the resinous Estepa negra (Cistus monspeliensis) forms a sticky carpet (in mid-August the tiny spring roses are now browned to a crisp) and gives way at its edges to Euphorbia, fenel (Crithmum maritimum) and Eryngium maritimum. This plant community is pristine, indigenous and intact, and, like chaparral, is disturbed only by man and endemic wild fires. As a Mediterranean adaptation it is as finely attuned to climate, soil and circumstance as our elfin forest; in these hills summer rain is rare but morning mists and swirling clouds - fog-drip - sometimes brings relief to the parched, rocky soil.

The hills that surround Cadaqués, a town on the central meridian of the Cape, are terraced with walls dry-stacked in the local schist: a medium grade metamorphic rock that has been geologically flattened into sheets that split slate-like. The huge earth and stone works that remodeled entire sides of mountains were undertaken to facilitate grape production. Cadaqués was long a wine producing area beginning, perhaps, with the Romans. A Royal decree enabled its port to trade with the Americas in the eighteenth century and its wine found favor in the New World.

Phylloxera, the devastating vinicultural disease that crept down from France in the nineteenth century ultimately destroyed the local Xarello and Garnatxa (Garnache) grapes but not before this part of Spain had the opportunity to supply the north with its wine and enjoy a late-century flush of prosperity. Once the vines succumbed in the early 1900's, the newly impoverished community sent its strong sons to Cuba. Many of these migrants were financially successful in the New World and returned to Cadaqués as wealthy 'Indianos' and expressed their wealth by building grand neo-classical houses that continue to stand in the town amidst the simple stone row-houses of the fishermen.

Monte bajo is as self-effacing as chaparral. Not showy, its parts not necessarily worthy of individual display (viz. the dried, boot button roses), the aesthetic power of the landscape is dependent on its overpowering thematic repetition: its underlying mat of Cistus (Monspeliensis blanca) with rosemary and lavendar (Lavandula stoechas) in motley patches; Daphne gnidium, in bloom and heavy with its ingratiating lily of the valley scent, stands of Erica arborea and higher up, the tiny leaved thyme (Thymus vulgaris). In damp areas, close to spring water seeps, the local oak, Garric (Quercus coccifera) forms groves. Closer to the ocean, pines bend to the wind. Sempreviva borda, the local everlasting (Helichrysum stoechas) was gathered in great bunches by Gala, Dali's wife and strewn throughout their rambling home in Port Lligat, following local tradition. The vineyards above Cadaqués are no more but their terraces endure and Olives (Olea europaea) now flourish in the soil where once grew grapes.

Originally founded by the Greeks - visited by Phoenicians and later the Romans, infiltrated by the barbarian Visigoths and preyed on by Barbary pirates - Cadaqués was long an isolated fishing village, impacted, at the margins, by the politics of Catalonia. The Cape was conquered late by the Arabs and liberated early by Charlemagne and the Franks, then briefly an independent ducal territory. From the XII to the XV century Catalonia and Aragon formed a common kingdom and Catalonia prospered until the Black Death halved its population in the XIV century.

The union of Ferdinand and Isabella (1479-1516) established Spain as a proto-nation uniting Castile and Aragon and ushered in its great period of colonial expansion culminating in the discovery of the New World. It was to Barcelona that Columbus returned from his epic voyage and lay before his royal masters the treasures of the West Indies, including captured native Americans. Ever remote, Cadaqués did not suffer the wild swings of boom and bust driven by Spain's extraction of New World gold and silver. Fish, until the recent over-fishing of the Mediterranean, has proved a more reliable currency for the town. Now tourism pays the bills but Cadaqués' dance with the Americas continues and the permanent population of the town is fully one third South American, primarily from Bolivia and Ecuador.

My Catalonian holiday was an opportunity to absorb something from the other side of the page: to conduct a pas de deux with the Old World. Almost exactly 519 years ago a fleet of three vessels set sail from the small Spanish harbour of Palos on Spain's Atlantic coast. Believing that he had found the Indies, Columbus dubbed the indigenous people Indians - a name that was eventually attached to the aboriginal peoples of the entire American continent and is only now, after half a millennium, fading from use. Columbus' arrival in the Bahamas set in motion events that would lead to the conquest of California in 1769 and to the ultimate destruction of the 'Indian' people on the West Coast, the culmination of a genocidal trail that spanned the continent and endured for four centuries.

In Barcelona, a 200 foot tall monument of Columbus standing atop his column, map in left hand, his right pointing westward, is located at the lower end of La Rambla, the City's famous pedestrian mall now over-run by a new generation of Visigoths: Northern European tourists who arrive on behemoth cruise ships and carouse drunkenly through the medieval streets. Built for the World Expo in 1888, it stands on the spot where Columbus was debriefed by Ferdinand and Isabella and their courtiers after his initial, epic voyage in 1492. A further decade of increasingly troubled transatlantic voyaging lay ahead of him, but the die had been cast after this first fateful journey beyond the edge of the world.

The social, cultural and biological ecologies of New World and Old have become increasingly co-mingled over the centuries. My life stands as testament to that trend while our chaparral garden in Ojai is ranged in defense against the drift towards global botanical homogeneity. The monte bajo - the Catalonian elfin forest - is similarly threatened by development on its urban wildland borders and anthropogenic wild-fires, yet still retains its integrity as one of the world's five distinct Mediterranean climate plant communities. The view from this side of the page, then, is remarkably similar to the other: in this bouillabaise (in Catalan, suquet), this mash-up of global sameness, some of us are are called to the Crusade: to overthrow the Disneyfication of the planet and retain the unique character of particular places.

Cross Quarter Day

2011-08-07T18:42:00.000-07:00

We sometimes see a mackerel sky here, flecks of high cloud that resemble the scales of the fish: it is usually a sign of unsettled weather; but last evening, we saw a salmon sky. Dark dollops of cloud, trailing driblets of their flesh across the sky - the undersides a creamy, golden salmon color, turning richer as the evening progressed and ultimately melding with the dark meat above and disappearing into the night. Then appeared the slimmest possible crescent of the new moon fading in and out of sight as the clouds moved across it. What do these spawning clouds portend? What will the August moon bring?

The first sighting of this crescent moon is the signal for the beginning of Ramadan, the lunar month of fasting in the Muslim world, where it serves as a time of spiritual rejuvenation. it is believed to be an auspicious month for revelations, for it was the time when the first verses of the Qur'an were revealed to Muhammad. It is the Wort Moon, the Wiccan celebration of the first harvest moon, one of the Great Sabbats or pagan moon festivals of the year. It is Lughnasadh or Lammas Eve, Lady Day Eve or Feast of Bread. It is the moon of the Tea House, it is the moon that will flood the upper valley in the warm nights of August - when the fluttering song of the screech owl rises above the ringing thrum of cicadas. It is the Barley moon of wisdom, logic and dreams. It is a time of mooncakes.

It is a time when connections are made to the root world, the Underworld. It is a time, it is said, when Harvest Spirits enter the earth to give their energy to the nourishment of life-giving grain. But if we pull back from the classical and pre-classical worlds, these traditions evaporate. Here, in Southern California, those ancient harvests and their moonshadows are an alien, distant, phenomenon. But there is a link.

In the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East, over-gathering and over-hunting during the beginning of the Holocene (+/- 10,000 B.C.E.) resulted in a pre-historic food crisis, driving the human population to move from hunting-gathering to herding-planting. Traditional foods once lightly gathered in meadows were subjected to intensive grazing and quickly subsumed by highly aggressive anti-pastoral species. The prime characteristic of such colonizing plants is thorniness, and a high proportion of these spiny plants developed in the Middle East where the switch to farming originated. They became common contanimants of grain crops. Similarly, alien pathogens took up residence in sedentary agricultural populations which, although more reliably fed, risked sickness from greater co-mingling and poor sanitation in villages.

In the mid 1820's, European alfafa was imported into California containing yellow star thistle (Centaurea solstitialis) seeds. Finding a favorable Mediterranean climate the thistle began its New World colonization and now commands ten to fifteen million acres of California's wildlands. It exists as both a threat to our local ecosystem and a living reminder of the ancient grain cultures of the Mediterranean basin.

Neither the local Chumash, nor their predecessors, made this switch to farming, relying instead, on an astonishing range of naturally occurring foodstuffs. The seemingly benign environment was nonetheless frighteningly unpredictable, with famine a constant threat. Stress levels in Chumash society stemmed from periodic, and often serious, droughts. Brian Fagan notes in Time Detectives, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1995,

"Instead of living a relaxed existence in paradise, the Chumash lived conservatively, well aware of the unpredictability of their environment. Canoes, fishing spears, nets, acorn-grinding technology, everything and everybody became geared to the efficient exploitation of seasonal foods. Some villages stored large acorn crops each fall. Others harvested thousands of anchovies, while a few miles away their neighbors hunted sea mammals."

This was highly organized foraging and progressively more sophisticated fish harvesting - not farming. From the earliest times of their island occupation (Hoop Dreams) native groups relied heavily on wild seeds and shellfish, moving from place to place. As island and mainland population densities rose, the Chumash ate more and more fish. When the tomol (canoe) came into use, about 2,000 years ago, allowing people to fish farther offshore, settlements became more sedentary, and the Chumash developed a complex society of fishing villages. Their trade networks extended inland as far as the Southwest and helped ease local food shortages (Fagan).

An increasing dependence on protein-rich fish did not protect the Chumash from the kind of health decline that occurs when hunter-gatherers settled down to farm. Crowding into larger settlements, living in familial groups of up to fifty in their domical grass houses (Primitive Hut) and encountering people and their diseases from many miles away, cost coastal groups the good health they had known for thousands of years as mobile hunter-gatherers.

Inland, Southern Steelhead trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) supplemented the diet of the native peoples but did not threaten the acorn as the primary food staple. Chia (Salvia columbariae) seeds were highly favored and nutritious, but the fields of chia in Chumash territory have long been in decline, due in part, "to the introduction of new plant species by European colonists, and from the supression of Chumash grassland burning practices in the late eighteenth century" (Timbrook). Thistles would be high on the list of likely suspects in suppressing the native chia: I saw one rare stand on Shelf road a couple of years ago but have not been back recently to see if it survives (Mining Gravel). Its harvesting season began in late spring and continued through early summer. By August it was done. The Chumash periodically burnt the chia fields to increase productivity. Burning a stand of chia today would result in its extirpation - to be replaced by noxious weeds.

Does August have a purpose in the Chaparral winter (The Winter's Tale)? Many believe that it's a great time to leave the wildland to the withering heat (Cool: Very Cool). It is not a great time for weeding, but I have already eliminated the star thistle from our meadows and consigned them to land-fill where their 30,000 seeds per square meter can do no harm. Bats fill the sky in the evenings. Last night around 2 a.m. I was awakened by the shrill buzz of a lone cicada, it continued its vibrational courting song for some time then, to reference an ancient technology - it was as though the gramophone needle had been abruptly snatched off of the vinyl. A bat had struck. I went back to sleep, arose around five, made a cup of tea and drank it while noting that the pale morning light does not appear until it's almost six. The sun is heading south.

August 1, Lammas Day, now a week ago, a cross quarter day, the halfway point between summer and fall.

Cool: Very Cool

2011-07-29T06:16:00.000-07:00

The deerweed is aflame. Not literally - it has assumed the ruddy hues of autumn in late July. Like Joseph, and more locally, poison oak, it has a coat of many colors. A few weeks ago it was a bright green carpet and a little before that it was covered in its yellow blossoms; now it is at its most flamboyant - featuring rust, carmine and orange with a faint green under-glow. As the sun rakes across it, morning and evening, it is extraordinary.

When the crew from Ventura County Fire Department Station 20 arrived to do its inspection of our property, Lorrie explained that the bowl that surrounds the pool terrace at the back of our house was covered in deerweed, a plant used by the Chumash to thatch their sweat lodges because, she emphasized, of its fire-resistant properties (Saxon Hall and Edge Times). They signed us off. When I was researching this piece I Googled 'deerweed' and 'sweat lodge' to confirm a source for this information. Inevitably, in the echo-chamber world of Google, my recent Urban Wildland entries were first up followed by....not very much.

As I mentioned in Owlish Avatar, John Peabody Harrington is the only game in town with respect to ethnographic data on the Chumash, so it was a fair bet that he was the source of the information. In the event, I checked with an ink and paper source, Jan Timbrook's Chumash Ethnobotany, essentially a compendium of Harrington's botanical notes, and there, on page 118 was the quote: "ya'i (the Barbareno word for deerweed) was the only plant the Chumash used for thatching sweat-houses, said Fernando Librado, (a Harrington 'consultant') because it was not flammable."

Fernando Librado, born in 1839, was one of Harrington's oldest consultants and may have spoken with surviving elders of his tribe whose memories went back to the eighteenth century, but it is doubtful that he had personal experience of Chumash sweat lodges. Edward S. Curtis, the ethnographer and photographer of native peoples writes, when referring to the Southern Californian Shoshone, that the distinct culture of the Channel Islands and lands to the north was comprised of "the now all but extinct Chumash family", The North American Indian, Vol. 15, Southern California Shoshoneans et al, Whitman Bennett, NY, 1926. Half of Harrington's consultants were dead by the early 1920's, but he produced, right at the beginning of the twentieth century, a large quantity of ethnographic material (Yuccapedia) from sources which, just a few years later, had faded from the scene. Entirely lacking in data and pictorial material, the energetic and inquisitive Curtis thus makes no room for the Chumash in his encyclopedic review of native peoples.

Apart from holding our new slope together - entirely unbidden, for it volunteered for duty amidst the hydro-seeded grasses - deerweed, Lotus scoparius (broom shaped) provides food for hummingbirds, bees, butterfly larvae, and, of course, deer. It also provides cover for bobcats. While traditionally assumed to take up their hunting position on a low promontory or a rock (and I have seen them behave thus) they employ other strategies. A couple of evenings ago we were treated to a little cat and rabbit entertainment. A mature bobcat, variously taking cover in deerweed or bunchgrasses, stalked a rabbit which sat, for the most part, frozen in the middle of the driveway. The rabbit occasionally responded to flanking maneuvers by the cat with a quick scoot to another driveway position where it would again assume the frozen demeanor of a garden ornament. This went on for half an hour or more with the cat eventually losing interest. I wrote of a similar but shorter and less entertaining predator/prey action in Return to Bear Canyon.

The next morning, turning the corner of the house I glimpsed a young bobcat strolling along the pool coping and then bound into the deerweed towards a clump of rocks where late in the winter we had seen several bobkittens playing (Bobcat Magic). This specimen was likely of that litter now grown to juvenile status. As is common with the breed, it was remarkably brazen once it had established what it considered to be a reasonable social space between us - meeting my gaze eyeball to eyeball.

Like Mountain Lions, Bobcats are territorial and solitary. But because their ranges are so small - they are essentially homebodies - their densities are much greater. Male home range sizes average 4900 acres, about seven square miles and female ranges average 2900 acres or about four square miles. As with the lions, female ranges are smaller than male ranges, so a male has access to two or more females in his range with which he can mate.

Home ranges are elliptical in shape and boundaries often follow roads, streams, or other natural contours. Boundaries, as well as range sizes, shift seasonally. For instance, males tend to expand their boundaries during the breeding season in order to maximize the opportunities to find a mate. When rearing young kittens, females often appear to use less area because of the need to tend to their litter. (Bobcat Ecology)

What are we seeing? Certainly a litter of young bobcats, and perhaps the mother. We have seen at least two different adult bobcats recently. One with very exaggerated jail-bird leg striping and the other with a curl at the end of its tail. What is very clear is that statistically, we are far more likely to see a bobcat than a mountain lion, for they outnumber them something like twenty to one.

Similarly outnumbered (by deerweed), but still a mid-summer star, is Tarweed (Deinandra fasciculata), usually found, here at least, amongst bunchgrasses and favoring areas of winter moisture. It is also a 'broom' plant and was used as such by the Chumash. It also produces black seeds used in a flour or as a pinole. By Harrington's time, Timbrook tells us, this had gone out of favor and it was only tenuously remembered as a foodstuff by his informants. It is worth repeating that Harrington lived at the ragged edge of a distantly practiced culture: those pupporting to represent Chumash culture today do so not as a remembered tradition but as an invented gestalt of pan-American Indian syncretism.

Tarweed blossoms are intensely yellow, the green foliage small and overpowered, visually, by the brightness of the flowers. The blossoms too, are small and achieve their impact by their profusion on a substantially skeletal plant. Dried, the flowers last through the year and retain almost all of their intensity of hue.

Late July in the chaparral: bleached grasses, rusty orange deerweed and the fluorescent yellow of the tarweed. I asked Laurence Nicklin (Return to Bear Canyon) what his favorite time of the year was - he answered spring and fall. He did not ask the question of me: had he done so I might have suggested high-summer: intense color; intense smells; early morning mists and the powerful drone of cicadas at night; my senses aflame. Hot? No, cool. Very cool.

Contiguous Places

2011-07-24T12:34:00.000-07:00

When Hemingway was asked to write a novel in half-a-dozen words, he responded with, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." I now submit, "A mountain lion is on the prowl." O.K. Seven words. These novelettes contain worlds of potential meaning: we may parse them any which way, but both send a shiver down the spine. What Margot texted me (thus prompting this abbreviated work of fiction) was more like 'Field Notes from a Chaparral Ecologist': "Possible mountain lion sighting this morning - young, big head, light tan, long tail, no bobcat colorations. Tail more than the long tailed bobcat :)."

Consider this formal acknowledgment of the source work. I cannot get those seven words out of my head. I have memorized my novel. I could probably recite it backwards. It has the awful ring of truth. By the pricking of my thumbs, something predatory this way comes.

Lorrie and I did our own field notes the other day. They were not as neatly typed as Margot's. They were not as scientifically precise. They involved pyjamas (Return to Bear Canyon). But they revolved around the same issue: big bobcats (Lynx rufus) and small mountain lions (Puma concolor). You have to go down the check list. Striped pyjamas, by the way are almost certainly an indicator of a bobcat. Length of tail is critical: the animal we saw had a tail of maybe twelve inches long, it was one of Margot's "long tailed bobcat(s)". So, with some confusion over the tail and its ears not definitively tufted - it all came down to the markings.

When we visited the Natural History Museum recently in Santa Barbara (Hotel California), we wandered through the California diorama hall, partly prompted by a friend who had visited us recently and mentioned that one of his first jobs out of college was working on these displays. I love dioramas. There's actually a good one in the Ojai Museum of the Sespe wilderness environment with local animals, including, I seem to remember, a mountain lion (confirmation needed). The dioramas in Santa Barbara date back to the 1930's and many feature fine plein air paintings by Roy Strong, (1905-2006). They have separate settings for the bobcat and mountain lion. The mountain lion is small and has some mottled dark markings. What's that word when two species converge? (Wikipedia responds: "Similarity in species of different ancestry that is the result of convergent evolution is called homoplasy").

So, even frozen in the taxidermist's art, the bobcat and the mountain lion are easily confused. We are quite clear however, that as of this writing, we have not seen a mountain lion on our property, but there are regular bobcat sightings. As I have mentioned in Cats and Dogs, my definitive mountain lion sighting was in the Berkshires when a large specimen ran across my running trail, briefly and shockingly visible as it emerged from the tall grass cover through which the trail threaded.

I texted Margot in return: "Where Exactly", and received the reply, "Northeast corner of my place heading down to the creek". In other words, moving towards our place, perhaps, although if the lion kept to the creek and its banks we would not see it. Bear Creek is deeply shrouded in riparian woodland as it winds along the western edge of our land and is further separated from the house by the central rocky spine that shelters the west meadow from our view.

The previous evening we had had a small dinner party, and although we were told when we arrived in Ojai that the subject of gophers inevitably got an airing at all such events we managed to avoid it; I do believe, however, that the talk briefly turned to mountain lions and bears. With a native wildland restoration ecologist and a landscape architect at the table a brief review of the table decoration (tar-weed and Acourtia) also ensued. I was accustomed to calling Acourtia by its old name, Perezia, as indicated in the late Uncle Milt's Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains, but now I understand that Acourtia is named in honor of the amateur English botanist Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Catherine Gibbes A'Court 1792-1878. I think I have the new genus name firmly handled: there is, in the showy mauve flowers that transmute into puffs of white seed after picking, some redolence in my mind, of Ms. A'Court, in full Victorian expeditionary attire.

We spent this Friday evening in the company of about two hundred and fifty others celebrating the acquisition, by the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy, of the Hollingsworth Ranch, which includes about a mile of Ventura River frontage and most importantly, a natural holding pond for steelhead trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss), (Nymphs and Naiads). As part of the show and tell we had the opportunity of viewing a 24" steelhead and a smaller twelve inch fish in this pond which functions as a refuge for the trout in even the driest of years- which this most certainly isn't - the body of the river was still flowing briskly in the center of its broad bed. Two state agencies, Fish and Game and the Coastal Conservancy kicked in the majority of the acquisition funds but the arduous task of maintaining the property and developing its educational potential is left to the OVLC. The Ranch represents prime habitat for a wide range of native fauna, mountain lions and bobcats almost certainly amongst them.

OVLC director, Greg Gamble stressed the value of cultural preservation and my mind turned to the possibility that there was a native American village site on the 70 acres. But no, he was referring to preservation of the 1930's cottage with its charming stone walls and steel mullioned windows and original, green tiled showers and green bathroom fixtures. Lorrie made a cogent point: can you still get green plastic toilet seats? Perhaps Liz at Liz's Antiques on La Brea could help out. While preservation of the stone cottage may be sentimentally desirable, and even financially and beaurocratically beneficial, let's get real: a cultural monument it ain't.

The stone ranch house does, however, take us back to a time, before the 1950's, when 5,000 or more steelhead trout spawned in the Ventura River. That number is down, recently, to less than 100. Similarly, mountain lions were once numerous enough in Upper Ojai, we can presume, for the local Chumash to name an area at the west end of Upper Ojai situkem, in the Ojai dialect of Ventureno, for the animal. This name is now memorialized in Lion Creek which runs through Black Mountain Ranch.

The Chumash hunted mountain lions and there is pictographic evidence that they were a part of their mythyology - the story telling in which animals play their roles in explanation of the cosmos. Soksouh, an evil spirit in the shape of a mountain lion with the sun in its mouth, is depicted in the painted cave on the Tule Indian Reservation in the San Yoaquin Valley - Yokuts territory. The Chumash, however, formed a significant diaspora during and immediately after missionization and they headed north and east - into territory where they already had trading relations and here their culture survived well into the nineteenth century and was reliably remembered into the twentieth. Although the mountain lion has an extraordinary range, from northern Canada to the southern tip of Chile, it is not found in California's Central Valley - thus adding support to the notion that the soksouh pictograph is of Chumash origin.

Like the steelhead trout, mountain lions have been decimated in Southern California - primarily due to habitat loss and fragmentation of their range, - which for males extends to 150 square miles and females forty - by roads and urban development. Additionally, they are threatened by secondary poisoning from feeding on animals like coyotes that have consumed poisoned rodents, although their primary diet consists of mule deer.

Mountain Lions' extended perambulations are likely to have more to do with finding a mate than hunting prey because the reduction in their numbers, and a truncated hunting season, have resulted in a superfluity of deer. Genetically, lions in the Santa Monica and Topa Topa-San Rafael mountain ranges are at the southern end of a larger population that extends northward to Big Sur. Their long-term survival depends on their ability to move between regions via wildlife corridors to maintain genetic diversity. "A mountain lion is on the prowl." is not a horror story (unless you are a young mule deer) but a romance - for when mountain lions go on the prowl they are looking for love in contiguous places.

Bodies of Water

2011-07-19T20:07:00.000-07:00

My remembered life began by a pond. A small lake. Comprehensible in size, even to a very small boy, but large enough to contain places of mystery - the south end where it petered out in reedy marsh and the tiny island to the north where my sister abandoned me to my fate one spring morning before my howling brought rescue from my father.

Originally created as a stew pond, Frensham Little Pond was was built in 1246 (Nymphs and Naiads). It was used to supply fish to the Bishop of Winchester's court when visiting the nearby Farnham Castle. Drained during World War II to obliterate a potential sign-post for the Luftwaffe en-route to London, it had been re-filled a couple of years before we arrived - my father, in a mid-life career crisis, to build the dinghies that were to be rented to visitors and my mother to serve teas in the cafeteria. A small bungalow, boat-house and dock were part of this, from my perspective, very sweet deal. Scale: I remember I wasn't much taller than the seats of the dining chairs; a Little Pond; in a small country; with a large history.

I first saw the Mediterranean when I was twenty. It was the sea of my dreams. Blue. Warm. Continental. Crystalline. The wellspring of Civilization. Another pond perhaps, comprehensible in scale to a young man, but large enough to contain almost all of the History that I thought mattered - Mesogeios, the inland water of Ancient Greece, Mediterraneum Mare, the Roman Sea. I made a bee-line for Nice in the South of France, a site, I now know, of one of the oldest human habitations in Europe. Here was a narrow beach with torpid water lazily lapping at the sea's northern edge. It wasn't until I threaded my way around the coast (relying, as a hitchhiker, on the kindness of strangers) and arrived in Yugoslavia, somewhere along the Dalmatian coast between Split and Dubrovnik, that the shimmering blues and greens refracted out of crystal clear water confirmed the reality of my Mediterranean vision.

I continued east and south and eventually broached a world that owed nothing to the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean but a great deal to the British Isles. Begun in the mid-nineteenth century the Indian, but British engineered and financed, railway system reached its apogee in 1929 and by the late 1960's was still sufficiently intact to allow impecunious travelers to journey the length of the country, from Lahore to Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu, by staying one step (or railway car) ahead of the ticket inspectors. At the southern tip of the sub-continent, a ferry could be taken to Mannar, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the traditional port of arrival for Indian Tamils upon whom the Ceylonese have relied for labor for at least four thousand years.

A long train journey to Colombo followed - the track, it seemed, forever in danger of being swallowed by the mangrove swamps as it skirted along the coast. In Colombo, plans were made to visit Kandy, the ancient religious capital in the center of the island but the real purpose was to secure work on a merchant ship, and this I achieved in my first few days in town and was signed up as Engine Room Boy on the Ferndale, an ancient 10,000 ton Norwegian tramp-freighter bound for the United States. The trip to Kandy remains, forty four years later, still on-hold.

I was in Colombo long enough to experience surf. At night. Not quite understanding what I was hearing. The Indian Ocean: here at last was a sea that roared, crashed, breathed and spewed wild spray into the night air. I made a mental note.

Two years later, I arrived in Sydney, having committed, in return for my paid ticket, to stay in the Land of Oz for two years. In the event, I paid taxes for eight then relied on the generosity of the government once again to attend Sydney University to study Architecture. By the time I left to come to UCLA, my real Pacific purpose had been achieved - a significant part of each of those eleven years was spent surfing and I had become intimate with that great body of water.

Sometime in the early 1970's I would watch surf movies at the cinema in Avalon, a small surfing town along Sydney's north shore. These were the days before Endless Summer, a 'crossover' surf movie that found an audience beyond hard core devotees - when surf movies were raw, plotless, with wave after wave presented against a sound track of pounding psychedelic, jam-band rock. I remember one, out of the endless many, that was shot at Rincon: (The Sage-Gatherer) back-lit waves in the evening glass-off, a moment when the wind dropped and the waves assumed a pure unruffled, velvety power. This was Rincon filmed at eight to ten feet, one of the world's great waves. Many years later, In 1998, that wettest of winters, when storm after storm barreled through Southern California from January to May, I watched Rincon one mid-winter evening, while a handful of professional grade surfers shredded ten foot waves that seemed to arrive with a machine-like regularity. Around the corner from placid Bates Beach, a straight shot from Ojai on the 150, is a Pacific beach, that when provoked, can create majestic surf. I need to know this.

Otherwise, perhaps, I would have to find solace in Lake Casitas, and dear reader, is that even remotely plausible? Could I, would I, find a soul to respond to? It is undeniably, a body of water. I remember, when we lived in town during construction of our house on Koenigstein, that I would run the trail north of Shelf road, off of Gridley, variously called Cozy Ojai Road or Forest Route SN34, and as I approached Foothill Road, I would catch a glimpse, or a glisten of the great reservoir, and it gladdened my heart. Because it was all downhill from there? Please. A close reading of this blog will reveal, in any case, that I actually prefer to run up-hill. No. It represents a moment of topsy turvy. The sky reflected by the earth. The earth become sky. Created in 1958, and stocked with bass, catfish and rainbow trout it is a stew pond that rivals Frensham Little Pond in every category except age: not until 2663, will Lake Casitas be as venerable as that Surrey Pond was when I lived there.

Perhaps by then, it will have acquired a patina, it will have mellowed into the chaparral and earned its place in my pantheon of ponds. A body of water to be reckoned with. But by then, will anybody care?

Cosmic Wordplay

2011-07-16T06:06:00.000-07:00

When I suggested that the ruling trope of the universe is irony (Beep-Beep) I should really explain that I interpret the evidential minutiae of the cosmic operating system in ways that support my predeliction for oppositional duality - in other words this is me responding to the apparent machinations of the universe not the other way around. Although we like to believe, especially in Upper Ojai, that we ask and the Universe responds, the magic of intention, I suspect, works within the confines of our own will rather than by beaming our purpose to a breathless cosmos waiting, in the void, to respond to our every whim. Our conversation with the Universe, I'm suggesting, is limited to a microbial influence at the farthest margins of the swirling infinity of an ever expanding cosmos. Our impact: not so much. Our solace, perhaps, is that there are worlds enough within our immediate experience with which we can meaningfully engage. These worlds can stand in for the larger, omniscient, reality - not as a poor copies but as truths in their own right.

Sometimes these worlds collide, they compete in their ability to represent our notions of how our reality is constructed; one global metaphor against the other. The Country and the City, by Raymond Williams, Chatto & Windus, London, 1973, is a book that has haunted me for a quarter of a century - and I have yet to fully read it. But at Sydney University in the late seventies, I knew about it - understood that it talked about how the bifurcated environmental reality as I had come to experience it represented two world views; one the dark mirror of the other. Which represented light depended upon your temporal and geographical location and your position in the social hierarchy. Here was an explanation of all: good and evil; heaven and hell; each existed on earth in the simulacrum (as Beaudrillard would put it) of the Urban and the Rural. These were the classic dualities of western thought, the yin and yang of the east.

A central Deconstructive argument holds that, in all the dualities of Western thought, one term is privileged over the other. Derrida argues, in Of Grammatology (translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and published in English in 1976) a moldering copy of which still sits on my bookshelf, that, in each such case, the first term is classically conceived as original, authentic, and superior, while the second is thought of as secondary, derivative, or even "parasitic." His examples include:

* speech over writing

* presence over absence

* identity over difference

* fullness over emptiness

* meaning over meaninglessness

* mastery over submission

* life over death

I am indebted to Orientalia for providing a no-nonsense summary of Deconstruction. Orientalia is a vast web site that looks to have been abandoned around 2005, it now exists in the ether, slowly disintegrating as random glitches begin to metastasize in the soft-ware and its empire of meaning frays like a cheap carpet from the Tehran souk (open everyday but Friday). Orientalia is now, it seems, forever closed, its cadres of contributing academics working, perhaps, on their Wikipedia entries.

The philosophers of Deconstruction often held the most tenuous grip on meaning over meaninglessness; their work veered into the inaccessible and eccentric, but it was built on the solid foundations of Levi Strauss' Structuralism; and for Levi-Strauss, the contradictory dyad was also central to cultural understanding. The great structural-anthropologist believed that the device of binary opposition was found in all cultures (not just in Western culture) and that it was fundamental to meaning. The notion was even celebrated in the title of one of his many books, Le Cru et Le Cuit, (The Raw and the Cooked), Plon, Paris,1964. Somewhere, he suggests, between the contradictory impulses of binary opposites lies the central dynamic of a given culture - in the tension between contrary notions exists the generative flux of social exchange: in the Country and the City or, wait for it......the Urban and the Wildland.

I have chosen to live in a place of paradoxical conflation, of inherent irony and binary opposition: the Urban Wildland. Is it a cosmic joke, or a willed resolution of a long-standing internal conflict, the Country versus the City? The fact is, I have spent most of my adult life in two major Cities and short periods in two or three more; but I was born in the country (in darkest Surrey which, while not quite a place where giant oaks, "their branches intertwined, seem to form but a single mass, an immense and indestructible edifice, under whose vaults reigns an eternal darkness" (American Genesis) was still a place where dapple predominated). The City was first represented by London. Not the London of today, but a darker, blitzed Metropolis whose rows of Georgian and Victorian buildings stood as blackened teeth, begrimed in coal dust, their ranks punctuated by the empty spaces of fallen comrades - the rubble still piled on weedy lots. Into its maw I would occasionally travel as a child to visit maiden aunts to sight-see or to shop.

As a Post-World War II, Dickensian ruin, London had a certain appeal. It echoed the root world of river bank willow and gnarled oak in the illustrations of Arthur Rackham (1867-1939). Dark, buttressed underpasses, ancient niches where beggars lurked and the great railway halls, like Waterloo, where sooty panes of steel mullioned glass shed a sepia tint on the teeming masses of travelers below made a world where sorcerers might dwell as plausibly as within "the navel of this hideous wood,
Immur'd in cypress shades". I was working on conflation from an early age: the grim urban underworld and the dark Surrey understory, beneath oak, chestnut, beech and ash offered parallel worlds of stygian gloom.

It was not until I visited Vancouver, at the conclusion of a year or two of traveling, in the late 1960's, that I understood that there could be Cities of Light, at water's edge, that exist as crystalline rejoinders to the tenebrous woods (here represented by the soaring redwoods of Stanley Park). After brief sojourns in Edmonton, Toronto and then back in England, I began forty years on the metropolitan shores of the Pacific, in Sydney and Los Angeles; where broad swathes of wildland crouch at the edges of the urban infrastructure and where there truly are margins of Urban Wildland but whose urban centers are bathed in the full light of day and the aqueous sparkle of the ocean is never far distant.

As my readers will recognize, I have come to privilege the wild over the urban, the country over the city and, ultimately, the dark over the light. I have retreated from the sheen of Los Angeles, Valley of Smoke, where dawn and dusk are so swiftly banished by either the bright white haze of day or the tracery of artificial light that lies over the endless city grid, to the very edges of the civilized world. Here darkness provides succor to the animals of the wild and we humans can be swiftly immured in chaparral's shadow and slip into reveries of cosmic wordplay.

American Genesis

2011-07-10T16:21:00.000-07:00

Here, on the Urban Wildland frontier, we play at Civilization versus the Wild. Daily, we recreate the circumstances of the birth of America - for it happened at the fringe of a feral continent, the first cabin a European statement of urbanity, a reproof to the unfettered fecundity of the natural world. Inside, the human frailties of the pilgrims were contained in the flimsy trappings of European civilization and religious conviction.

The Urban Wildland represents the collision of this continent's aboriginal state of grace with European industrial capitalism and religious expansionism. This is not Hotel California. This is American Genesis. Urban Wildland is its simulacrum. Here is its precinct, and in it we have created a minimalist barn in which we conduct our twenty-first century, secular lives - but when we look out of capacious windows we see the wild where was birthed America.

These are the kinds of paragraphs you write after you read Beaudrillard. It's a disease. A bad case of the sideration blues. Star-blasted America; planet-struck California. For Jean Beaudrillard was, as Geoff Dyer writes in his introduction to 'America', New York, 2010 (originally published in Paris, 1986), "a superstar of the simulacrum, a shaman of the virtual, an evangelist of the hyperreal". Beaudrillard's take on chaparral? Well, he's a visitor, so in California he only sees urban sprawl, the desert and the sea. The interstitial wildland eludes him. California's signature eco-system passes him by. Los Angeles, he sees as a mobile desert - like Death Valley, where, he writes, "Fire, heat, light: all the elements of sacrifice are here". In Los Angeles he sees "no monuments and no history", only a kind of ritual death.

The single most stunning statement ever made about Los Angeles is contained, I believe, in its aboriginal name which translates as Valley of Smoke - variously attributed to either the Gabrielino Shoshone or the Malibu Chumash. When I first read it - in the lobby of the Transamerica building in an exhibition of Los Angeles Pre-history in the mid-nineteen eighties - I immediately beheld a vision of camp fires across the basin as a kind of pre-echo of the twinkling lights one experiences when flying in at night to this most crepuscular city; and rising from those fires the resinous smoke of burning chaparral - for such was the available firewood.

Here was evidence of the continuity of a human presence - and the inversion layer - backwards in time, stretching back far enough to link up with the ravening mega fauna now closeted in the La Brea tar pits, that other pre-historical factoid that made up a part of my Los Angeles amulet (the rune stones that connected me to the deep aquifers of humanity and nature that run through this strangest of cities). Only one human skull was ever recovered from the tar-pits amidst the bobcats, sloths and sabre-toothed tigers; but there was an existential human connection - in that primeval smog of a thousand camp fires was the smoke from some very large barbecue.

For those attuned to these layered complexities of the State, the crashing presence of its nodality is overwhelming. But for Beaudillard, "The mythical power of California consists of extreme disconnection and vertiginous mobility captured in the setting, the hyperreal scenario of deserts, freeways, ocean and sun. Nowhere else does there exist such a stunning fusion of radical lack of culture and natural beauty...." Jean Beaudrillard (and earlier, Gertrude Stein) fail to find the facticity of California, the thereness of it all - or as D.H. Lawrence writes of Taos, N.M., "When you get there you feel something final. There is an arrival."

There is a sense that the spirit has long dwelled here; but to experience that you have to kick a few rocks, get tangled in some chaparral and watch the waters of a stream, flush with snow melt, bubble over rocks and catch in the low hanging branches of bay, willow, cottonwood, sycamore and oak. Or, even more directly, perhaps, see the petroglyphs and pictograms on rocks strewn along the littoral, where the Kern river forsakes its usual gorge and flattens and spreads over a flood plain, slows to a meander, and afforded the native Kaweah people an opportunity to live with its placid waters (Song of Life).

Locked in his rented, convertible Mustang - Beaudrillard recreated on his windshield the California he understood from the movies - framed in hard plastic and edged at the top with pressed painted metal, this was his filmic simulacrum of America.

De Tocqueville never got much further west than Detroit, but in 'Two weeks in the Wilderness', 1831, he 'gets it' in a way that completely eludes Beaudrillard.

"A majestic order reigns above us, when the midday sun bathes the forest in its light, one often hears from its depths a long moan, a plaintive cry that carries a long way. This is the last gasp of the dying wind. Everything around you then subsides into a silence so deep, a stillness so complete, that the soul is gripped by a sort of religious terror. The traveler stops; he looks around. The trees, pressed one against the other, their branches intertwined, seem to form but a single mass, an immense and indestructible edifice, under whose vaults reigns an eternal darkness."

De Tocqueville has the advantage of actually meeting with native peoples and is acutely aware of their imminent demise. he writes,

"An ancient people, the first and legitimate master of the American continent, is melting away with each passing day like snow in the sun, vanishing from the face of the earth. In the same location, taking its place, another race is growing with even more astonishing rapidity. Through its handiwork, forests fall and swamps are drained while lakes as big as oceans and immense rivers vainly oppose its triumphant march. Wildernesses turn into villages and villages into cities. Americans, who witness these miracles daily, are not surprised by any of them. To them, this incredible destruction and still more surprising growth seems as if it were the immutable order of nature."

One hundred and fifty years before Beaudrillard drove his rental car across California, De Tocqueville broached the Urban Wildland at the frontier of America. We are now that frontier. Heirs to that home-grown expansionism, that 'immutable order of nature' that we have taken so to heart: wreakers of destruction by the simple fact of our being here.

In this one hundredth posting at Urban Wildland, I continue to play at Civilization versus the Wild. This Valley of the Moon is my sanctuary: the reification of a dialog; the blog an exploration of the conflation that is its masthead.

Return to Bear Canyon

2011-07-04T16:19:00.000-07:00

"There were voices down the corridor, I thought I heard them say...'Welcome to the Hotel California'".

I am aware that the writers of these lyrics (Felder, Fray and Henley), were referencing the Camarillo State Mental Hospital (Camarillo Brio) where a friend, reputably, had been incarcerated for drug related manias ("....'Relax,' said the night man, 'We are programmed to receive. You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave!'..."). This information merely shuffles the elements of the State's iconography that I proposed in Hotel California.

Meanwhile, in the back country, we are busy building the Urban wildland myth - determining what exactly makes up the essence of urbanwildlandishness. Wow. It doesn't take much: take last night. A bobcat, two rabbits and the blue sfumato of mountain ridges becoming progressively paler in the increasing depths of atmospheric haze; the whole topped with a ruddy smear of sunset smog. Target locked.

I walked out the front door last evening and saw the two rabbits frozen, marooned in the no-rabbit's land of our gravel driveway. A moment later I saw a youngish bobcat with striped pyjama legs crouching on the verge amongst the deer weed. It was confused: the rabbits had disappeared - by freezing their movement they no longer registered on the bobcat's visual apparatus. Both rabbits escaped and the cat slunk off in the elegantly disdainful way they have - even the young and inexperienced. Rabbits are everywhere this year because the coyotes have gone missing. Two wet years have seen a spike in the tick population and perhaps the coyotes have succumbed to the many tick-borne diseases to which they are prey (just saying).

That morning I had run up Bear Canyon and the trail was regularly spotted with berry laden bear scat. In the coolth of the canyon, spring was still in the air. Prickly phlox in pink, foothill penstemon (rose violet), the blue of larkspur, yerba santa and ceonothus, yellow of mimulus, coast wallflower and buckwheat, the whites of sage blossoms, yarrow and the towering florescence of chaparral yucca made up the exquisite early summer floral palette. The bright spring greens of bay, cottonwood, big leaf maple, sycamores, oak, and sheltering beneath, the discreetly flowering coffee berry, shadowed the path. The return trip, down Bear Creek, from below the spring outlet, featured blackberry vines, mugwort, giant rye, Indian tree tobacco, and poison oak beneath the canopy. The sound of the creek fills the bottom of the canyon - until it doesn't. The creek dips underground for half a mile or more and leaves the birds and the insects in full control of the aural accompaniment. Here the rocky creek bottom is white with mineral sediment from the winter run-off. (White-Out).

That's chaparral mixed with a little riparian woodland. What more could you want? If you're John Taft then it's necessary to have three ecologies in one thirty acre garden with the potential to study the comparative evolution of three mediterranean climate communities - California, South Africa and Australia. The garden has been charmingly laid out by Laurence Nicklin, a South African expert in protea who was tapped by John Taft, while still living in his homeland, for the task. He has since married the boss's daughter, Jenny Taft, and has been an Ojai resident, for at least part of the year, for some twenty five years.

The remainder of the 300 acre spread off of Baldwin Road a little way past Rancho Matilija, is essentially given over to the fire protection of the garden - with results that are more pleasing than one might imagine. Laurence and his gang of four full time gardeners have grubbed out acres of chaparral - leaving the oaks - and sown native stipa and fescue grasses (from S&S Seeds (Where Native Meadows Come From)), essentially creating oak-meadowland which forms a low-fuel fire buffer. He has cut the bunch grasses short and the hills, even this late in the season remain green. He battles the same invasives that plague the meadowlands up on Koenigstein and like us is not totally averse to the sparing use of chemical agents in his attempts to roll back the clock (Manichean Plant Order).

We picnickers, for it was an alfresco, early afternoon meal that was the occasion for our visit to the Taft Gardens, strolled over the Californian hillsides with Laurence and visited his favorite knolls. The landscape is blessed with many springs and ponds that sit in hollows fringed with native rushes, reeds and grasses. Only a very few eucalypts mar the edenic, native aspect of this back two hundred and seventy acres which stretches to distant ridgelines and beyond to unseen canyons. Away from the gardens, the landscape is intelligently managed and, from my perspective, evinces the appropriate politics. Only the very naive believe that gardening can be anything other than a political act, but Laurence wears his politics lightly and lets his work persuade.

In the Gardens, his work celebrates the circumstances of California's climate and, with minimal irrigation, pushes the geographical boundaries of its endemic plant communities to include a range of redwoods from Northern California and, of course communities from the antipodes and the southern tip of Africa. To this extent, he is a non-isolationist, believing that we will benefit from this creative mixing of plants from other Mediterranean climates in his own and other gardens. I'm O.K. with that: just keep them out of the hinterland.

My first experience of beating back the exotics came in Australia in the late 1970's when I was involved in clearing an area of Sydney's native bush of lantana (Lantana camara) - an erstwhile harmless Victorian house plant that was devouring acres of native habitat. Ironically one of the gnarliest invasives in Australia is Oppuntia, the native Californian sage brush cactus. The commonality of climate across Mediterranean species is no guarantee of respectful behaviour once a species is loosed on another continent.

By far the safest strategy is one of isolation - but, as I am often reminded, that horse has already left the stable. Laurence has little tolerance for the kind of historicist exotica that plague so many residential and public gardens. His plant choices demonstrate the range of adaptation in this climate type, broadly characterized by warm dry summers and wet winters, and offers visitors an in-your-face botanical experience with some mild educational benefits.

The pleasures of unadulterated chaparral are not so easily appreciated: they are revealed best, it seems, to those with a nativist committment, and a desire to learn the local plant vocabulary. That the discreet charms of California's signature plant community be better understood is essential to its preservation: are Taft Gardens a distraction or an ally in the pursuit of this goal?

Hotel California

2011-07-01T20:58:00.000-07:00

A few evenings ago, we walked down State Street in Santa Barbara, an often questionable activity. In the last twenty odd years the street has been comprehensively malled. Rents have increased, turnover has had to respond and now retail formulae that work in youth-oriented markets dominate - their brands escutcheoned at the cornice line declaring their engagement of the glabrous hordes. The locals avoid the street like the plague.

But this night was different; it was the evening of the Summer Solstice festival. There was a sense in the air that the lords and mistresses of misrule had been let loose - that the machinations of globally branded capitalism had, for the moment, been swept away in a return to the pastoral debaucheries of - well, less than two hundred and fifty years ago. For then the Chumash village of Syuxtun would erupt, at summer's solstice, into a night of promiscuity as the usual proscription against adultery was relaxed and males were free to mate with a willing female of their choice.

Yes, the Uber conservative streets of Santa Barbara are, for one-night only, given up to the licentiousness of the mob, or so it seemed as face-painted carousers careened down State Street. And there, in a doorway, a woman of dark, Indian features was packing away her box of remaining cascarones, confetti-filled eggshells that are traditionally broken over the head of a boy or girl the egg-breaker wishes to favor. The streets were strewn with the tiny pieces of colored paper - business had been good.

We headed east one block to a bar where we had a drink before walking over to the Presidio (Independence Day), where we had dinner reservations at Julienne on the corner of Santa Barbara and Canon Perdido Streets. From the restaurant's windows could be seen the exposed adobe of one wing of the presidio quadrangle unceremoniously sacrificed on the alter of an orthagonal street grid. A little west of the restaurant the other quadrangle limb has been similarly truncated. I deplore this act of amputation, but applaud the decision to reveal to the world the nature of both the adobe construction and the deed by leaving the wounds uncauterized, for the cut through the sandy brown building material remains unpainted and thus stands out against the white-wash of the surficial adobe.

It was for Lorrie's birthday that I had planned this weekend of urban delight, where we could walk to our chosen entertainments. We stayed at The Upham Hotel which proclaims itself to be the oldest continuously operating hotel in California having been established in 1871. Shortly after it opened, the celebrated writer and commentator Charles Nordhoff took a room while exploring the region in 1872. We stayed in the original Italianate building in a room on the second level with the stairway to the signature belvedere immediately outside the door. The conceit grew in my mind that Nordhoff might have chosen this same end room with windows to the south and west because, before the program of irrigation that has now forested the town, it would have offered a view of the ocean.

However, Nordhoff, it seems, was no great fan of ocean breezes. Despite (or because of) spending his youth at sea, he writes of Santa Barbara, "there is a good hotel there (The Upham, then called Lincoln House, for the builder was a cousin of the President), and another is a building, but neither of them stands in a pleasant situation, and both are near the shore, where the air is less dry than in the higher parts of town." Even at higher altitudes (and he suggests Montecito), the air is now uniformly more moist than in Nordhoff's day, a product of exotic arboreal transpiration and rampant sprinklering.

Nordhoff published his seminal work, California: For Health, Pleasure and Residence in 1874, and spoke glowingly of the State: in a very real sense he invented twentieth century California. The book promoted the State at a time when it was increasingly accessible to easterners via the transcontinental railway finally realized, a few years previously, in 1869.

In an act of brazen opportunism, the village that would become Ojai (New Moon) was named Nordhoff in 1874 - the year that his guide was published. A close perusal of the work reveals not a word about Ojai, although a later edition does mention it, the writer being lured, perhaps, to his eponymous town by an understandable vanity.

Meanwhile, and by this I am referencing the intervening 137 years, Nordhoff's stock has declined to the point that he is frequently confused with his grandson Charles Bernard Nordhoff, co-author of Mutiny on the Bounty with James Hall, published in 1932. The Upham Hotel shills not Nordhoff but Aldous Huxley as its most famous guest (he spent the winter of 1960 in residence). To add insult to injury, the town of Nordhoff abandoned its Prussian name in 1917 for Ojai, a moniker filched from the valley of the moon, ?Awha'y (The Land Speaks for Itself) a community some eight miles to the east now known as Upper Ojai.

In a week that saw Monaco initiate its royal wedding festivities on Thursday night with a free concert given by The Eagles, earning them a jolt of rejuvenating publicity on every celebrity web site on the planet, I wonder what it would take to rehabilitate Charles Nordhoff, the inventor of California Dreaming. The latter is long dead - but I sense an emerging synergy: the Eagles, Nordhoff and that Italianate Hotel in Santa Barbara.

Santa Barbara, a paradise that lies at the foot of a torqued mountain range, uniquely canted west, so that the town faces due south thus avoiding the "harsh and foggy north and north west winds, which make the coast north of Point Conception disagreeable..."(Space and Practice) is the essence of Nordhoff's California. It is part of a dreamscape initiated in 1874 by his guide and to which every resident of California is now heir.

Room 14 at The Upham: June 26, 2011. Was it real or just my imagination... "There were voices down the corridor, I thought I heard them say, 'Welcome to the Hotel California'...."

Skotos

2011-06-22T14:18:00.000-07:00

The ultimate luxury is natural darkness.

What would it take to achieve it?

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

What's up with the dark in Upper Ojai?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beep-Beep

2011-06-18T16:04:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Song of Life

2011-06-15T07:16:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Albion

2011-06-09T16:57:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Owlish Avatar

2011-06-03T14:52:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Space and Practice II

2011-05-20T20:48:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Space and Practice

2011-05-13T21:46:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manichean Plant Order

2011-05-04T18:25:00.000-07:00

The Good:

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

The Bad:

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

The Argument:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am one such Californian attempting to hold the line.

Death Comes to Koenigstein

2011-05-02T15:43:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nymphs and Naiads

2011-04-24T13:56:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Land Speaks For Itself

2011-04-11T21:18:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Moon

2011-04-02T11:10:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nightjars

2011-03-19T12:07:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saxon Hall

2011-03-04T22:01:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hoop Dreams

2011-02-26T10:08:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bobcat Magic

2011-02-21T18:53:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edge Times

2011-02-13T12:07:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal Entombment

2011-02-07T08:14:00.000-08:00

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

Tech N9ne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Island on the Land

2011-01-30T10:06:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pitch Perfect

2011-01-14T10:04:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burn Notice

2011-01-09T18:46:00.000-08:00

The Missions in California represented one side of a distinctly asymmetrical culture war with the native peoples of the region - the Chumash world was changed forever while the interaction left barely a mark on the Church.

Little has changed in this equation. Despite being built on the site of the ancient Chumash village of Sisa, the architecture of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel, Thomas Aquinas College (Woman of the Apocalypse) primarily reflects the classical past of the old world. While it makes an almost imperceptible nod to the Mission tradition there is no gesture whatsoever to the form or symbol-making traditions of the people who were its first Californian converts.

While hybrid religions have proliferated throughout the world blending traditions from Asia, Africa, New World and Old, Roman Catholicism has remained largely immutable since its own hybridized development out of an ancient Middle Eastern monotheism (viz. The Old Testament) via the pagan traditions that flourished throughout the Roman Empire. Vatican II, 1962-65, however, opened the way for the inculturation of the Roman Catholic liturgy. Pope John Paul II explains in his encyclical #52, (1990) that "By inculturation, the Church makes the Gospel incarnate in different cultures and at the same time introduces peoples, together with their cultures, into her own community".

In the eighteenth century, the number of baptisms performed on the Chumash people was the measure of the Missions' success (and is one of the few records against which the size of the native population can be gauged) but it was achieved not by making concessions to the local culture but by Franciscan zeal and Spanish military hegemony.

Only the original adobe bell tower and Mission bell survived from the St. Bartholomew’s Chapel on the Luiseño Rincon reservation after the Poomacha Fire in North San Diego County in 2007, but remarkably, a new Chapel has been built on the site of the old that incorporates both Native American and Catholic symbols and metaphors.

Fires pose a near constant threat to Southern California's wildlands. Rick Halsey points out that their frequency has undergone a dramatic increase over the past century and that nearly all fires in the region are caused by human activity (Fire, Chaparral and Survival In Southern California, Sunbelt Publications, San Diego, 2008). The Poomacha fire started as an anthropogenic structure fire on the La Jolla Indian Reservation and spread, over the next days, throughout the Pauma valley on the edge of the Cleveland National Forest fueled by 100 mile per hour Santa Ana winds.

The Luiseño did not have contact with the Spanish until the expedition of Gaspar De Portola in 1769. Three decades later, their culture was terminally impacted by the establishment of the San Luis Rey Mission in what is now Oceanside. As head of the Franciscan Mission, Fr. Peyri allowed the Luiseño to remain in their traditional villages visiting them in situ to perform baptisms, mass and marriages. Times were harder after the secularization of the Missions in 1834, but they were not finally displaced from their lands until 1848 at the conclusion of the Mexican American War and the transfer of California to the United States. In 1875, however, the Luiseño La Jolla Reservation was established by executive order of Ulysses S. Grant.

There are now twin Luiseño reservations, La Jolla and Rincon. Both were ravaged by the fire but their ability to recover has been fundamentally shaped by their gambling interests. The Rincon reservation is funded by royalty payments from Harrah's Casino and Hotel built on reservation land. To the east, The San Diego Union-Tribune (November 5, 2007) reported that the La Jolla reservation must rely on state, federal, and insurance funds to effect renewal. The reservation's chairman is quoted as saying, "We are a non-gaming tribe". Not for the want of trying.

The North County Times reported on August 26, 2010 that the La Jolla Band of Mission Indians is proposing to build a casino and hotel on its Palomar Mountain reservation with a projected completion date of 2012. This comes after an aborted attempt in 2004, to build a 35,000-square-foot casino with 500 slot machines, a restaurant and 150-room hotel. In 2002, the band successfully opened, but later closed, a 30-machine slot arcade in a convenience store next to Highway 76. The new proposal calls for a 480,000-square-foot gambling and hotel facility with 200 rooms with six separate villa suites and a parking structure. Nice.

In the metaphorical shadow of their casino (undamaged in the fire), and without apparent concern for irony, the Rincon Luiseño ordered up a new chapel that would reconnect with the spirit of traditional Indian culture: of living lightly on the land. The Chapel utilizes a significant amount of site harvested building materials; the signature element being the massive rammed earth walls that flank the sanctuary, each nearly 60 feet long, 18 feet tall, and two feet thick. Symbolically important, these walls are built of 120 tons of sacred reservation soil. A local three ton boulder was crafted into the baptismal font and slabs of wood hewn from reservation oaks are used in furniture pieces. A thin film Solar PV system, high thermal mass construction, carefully oriented glazing and deep overhangs contribute to the Chapel's sustainable credibility. It is expected to earn LEED gold certification.

Using the notion of inculturation, the architect Kevin De Freitas incorporates a specific element of Luiseño iconology, the Wamkish, into the plan. Wamkish were the traditional ceremonial enclosures of the Luiseño built in the form of semi-circular enclosures woven from thicket. The distinction between being inside or outside the enclosure was a key feature of the ceremonies. In St Bartholomew, an abstracted Wamkish in white stone forms the north and south (liturgical east and west) walls of the church. These wall sections define two significant moments of the church: the entrance moving from convex to concave, relating to the traditional ritual use of the Wamkish, and the concave enclosure of the sanctuary on which hangs the corpus, or representation of the crucified body of Christ. (Locus Iste)

In Luiseño culture the Wamkish was used for the most critical rites of passage, in particular, boys' and girls' puberty ceremonies. In The Religion of the Luiseño Indians of Southern California, 1908, the anthropologist, Constance Goddard DuBois, describes it thus,

"In the main place the sacred enclosure of brush, the wamkish, is built in a circle to about the height of a man. On the ground inside are placed the sacred ceremonial objects: the tamyush or sacred stone, toloache (jimson-weed, Datura meteloides), bowls, feather head-dresses and eagle-feather skirts; and the paviut, the sacred sticks (wands) with flint (crystals) in the end."

Typically, after several weeks of drug-fueled ceremonies the Wamkish, made of willow twigs and other chaparral brush, was ritually burned.

The old St Bartholomew's Chapel was un-ceremoniously burnt to the ground during the Poomacha chaparral fire of 2007. A new chapel has arisen on the site of the old: but by invoking the spirit of the Wamkish in its design it is inviting its sacred destruction by fire - an act to be initiated not by a Luiseño shaman but by the next cycle of chaparral fires that swirl through the Pauma valley - an inculturation not wholly anticipated, perhaps, by the Councils of Vatican II and Pope John Paul II.