The Waste Land

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

A collective sigh of relief riffled through the corridors of power around the world. The Great Disrupter had been brought to heel, whether by his own insecurities, the deep-state, Mad-Dog Mattis, or Jared Kushner, no one knew. In one act of petulant gun-boat diplomacy the world was restored to its customary axis and America to its past.

The U.S. had returned to fighting the last war. The one great moral force in the world was appalled at the release of low-grade, bath-tub variety Sarin gas and caused five dozen largely ineffective Tomahawk missiles to be lobbed at a remote air-field (back in service days later) and the Russian Bear’s nose to be tweaked. A masterstroke of nineteenth century diplomacy (by other means)!

Meanwhile, its Empire continued to be roiled in real and consequential ways by the blow-back of over one hundred and fifty years of the burning of fossil fuels, the sixth extinction, acidifying oceans and great clouds of turbid toxicity settling over Asia. And its profoundly reactionary leader, to no great surprise, had prepared his response: the nineteenth century be damned, his environmental policy would be guided by attitudes forged in the seventeenth: North America, nay the Planet, the gift of the Great Provider to her chosen people – exists to be raped and pillaged at its God-given pleasure.

The Acourtia lies prostrate across the single track trail; wild cucumber entwines itself amongst the flanking shrubs and crisscrosses the path at around neck height. Progress involves triage: something has to give. It’s spring in the chaparral. Blue dicks (native hyacinth) are rampant. Virgin’s bower (native clematis) is running riot, poppies and popcorn flower are popping up all over; and solanum and lupin bloom in blue profusion. Bush sunflowers are radiant.

It rained this year. The drought doomsters are perplexed at this entirely predictable turn of events. A cursory review of the rain fall records is all it takes to be assured that Southern California’s drought was fully within historical norms. Don’t be conflatin’ (with global warming that is).

Even in the chaparral, historical perspective is useful. Both the wisdom of reflection and the judgement of time are denied by the primacy of the moment where we become transfixed by the jet stream of trivia generated by the 24-hour media news-cycle - or blinkered by a few years of minimal rainfall. The slightly above average rainfall of 2016-2017 has everyone rejoicing – and me mourning the end of a five year holiday from weeds in the broken edges of the urban wildland. Natives are bred to drought, weeds from temperate Europe much less so.

In Washington, decision making happens in a place where its obsessions with a golden past deeply color its obsessions of the moment. There is a precedent. The Whig interpretation of history is a precursor to what some now call presentism: the predilection for focusing on what’s happening NOW. If all of history is tending towards its culmination in the present, then it is indeed the present that demands attention - the past serving as mere prelude. But the triumphalism of British mainstream historians in the age of Victoria who tended, as their great de-bunker Herbert Butterfield, wrote 1931, “to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present” was surely the result of their satisfaction with the contemporaneous state of the world with Britain as its Imperial Master. They were blind to the impending decline of British hegemony - blind to threats of greater historical gravitas than those so ably batted away by the Foreign Secretaries of the day who relied on the rattle of the saber and the explosive shell, just as the Lord High Executioner and his Ministers rely on the brute force of the Tomahawk missile and drone delivered ordnance while seemingly unaware of more existential threats to their world.

In among the invasive grasses, those heralds of spring, peonies and goosefoot, still nestle. Deerweed, artemesia and sage show up as sage-scrub slowly re-establishes itself in the soils disturbed by residential development and before that of ranching and mixed farming. Soapweed sprouts in clusters, casually seeded by Chumash Indians who used its poison root to stun steelhead trout in Bear Creek. Native bunch grasses survive, but are crowded by introduced annual grasses. This morning, mist lay heavy in the valley, but rising above it, in the lee of the Santa Paula Ridge, the sun almost over the mountains, I spotted my first owl’s head clover of the season. Moments later, I saw fiddle neck still tightly curled but about to bloom.

In rhapsodizing over the emergence of vernal flora I am a consumer of the natural world situated, ideologically, somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century. Pursuing transcendence through transference, moving the ego aside and accessing what Jung calls the ‘voice of God’ (or at least, wallowing in an aesthetic reverie sufficient to submerge my quotidian concerns) I am following in the footsteps of Wordsworth, Emerson and Thoreau. Mine is a Romantic vision where I find profound aesthetic and spiritual value in the chaparral wilderness that surrounds me on the wildland edge of Ojai, California.

This reactionary excursion, from a position of little influence is, I hope, reasonably harmless. It is a step away from the present where we live in an age of ecology, our consciousness of the natural world informed by notions of complex and inter-related systems and shadowed by an understanding that civilization has impinged on these systems in profoundly irrevocable ways.

Our President meanwhile, from a position of some considerable influence, has retreated to a way of valuing the natural world prevalent at the very beginning of the European conquest of North America: when wilderness was worthless (unless to serve as terrain for the testing of one’s Christian faith); when wilderness was without intrinsic value until transformed by colonists and when its indigenous peoples had no rights to ownership precisely because of their failure to cultivate the land. By common law exegesis (or spiritual alchemy) land became property by virtue of its exploitation by Europeans.

As Jedediah Purdy outlines in his recent book, After Nature – A Politics for the Anthropocene, 2015, America was colonized by men and women resolute in their belief in this providential vision whereby the land existed only to serve human needs, its bounty a God-given gift to those who dared to make the land productive. In his pledge to Make America Great Again!, the President has embraced this vision which serves as divine justification for the mercenary exploitation of the environment. Within this pre-modern world view its protection would be tantamount to an attempt to turn the environment to Waste, a word, as Purdy notes, which in the providential vocabulary suggested wilderness - a place devoid of value.

Amy Davidson writes in a recent New Yorker, that in attempting to restrict the work of the EPA in controlling greenhouse gases, our President is guilty of “reckless endangerment”. The truth is this country is founded on exactly that ethos – ask any Native American even mildly cognizant of his people’s history.

It’s as almost as if all of History is trending towards the seventeenth century. Despite his Twitterish presentism, the baleful one has returned to the world of knee breeches, doublets and ruffs to find justification for an intensified extraction of the world’s resources. Yet there is a neo-liberal twist, a shard of the twenty first century inserted into his providential vision, for the environment will be fully monetized and the market will manage its inexorable decline.

Perhaps, as the earth trembles under the impact of its missiles, the earth’s air stultified by its toxic emissions, its rivers poisoned again by industrial waste and its over-fished seas swollen by its heedless carbon emissions, our land will, in the twenty-first century meaning of the words, be truly laid to waste……while its people (and their Representatives) remain comatose, (to continue our nature story) like so many stunned steelhead trout.

Boom and Thump

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

The catalyst for the development of the human species is climate change. Nowhere is this more obvious than amongst the first peoples of California; their arrival by land and sea was predicated on a long retreat from the deep freeze of the north, from northeastern Asia to a potentially warmer continent that spanned the northern and southern hemispheres of the globe. They followed the mega-fauna across the tundra, or chased pinnipeds amidst the kelp on their long coastal voyage, but within a few thousand years they were forced to adapt to the dramatically warming climate of the Holocene when populations of mammoths and elephant seals were both in rapid decline and oaks were replacing the pine forests that had flourished in the Pleistocene.

Up into La Broche Canyon it was possible, this morning, to get above the ocean of fog that had rolled into the valleys overnight. To the west, only the dark, oak-clad ridge of Sulphur Mountain was visible, while to the south the telecommunications, satellite tracking and radar paraphernalia bristled above the fog on Point Mugu Ridge and the jagged peaks of the Boney Mountain State Wilderness appeared as islands in the milk sea. Eastward, into the rising sun, the chaparral clad flanks of Santa Paula Mountain and its foothills were obdurate in the brilliance of the morning.

I was following a trail that was established, perhaps, as an exploratory oil road; was an old trading route between the Chumash villages of ‘Awha’y and Mupu, or was a part of an ancient spirit path that eventually led to a mountain peak. In its current incarnation, it is a little used track (by me, evidence of a lone horse, faint markings of a quad-bike, and recent mountain lion spoor) that ends, inconclusively, just to the west of Santa Paula Canyon. This palimpsest, this overlaying of intentions over time reflected in markings on the land, is but a tiny and almost lost fragment of the human-environmental history of the area that spans 15,000 years - each morning of which fully sentient beings have awoken to subtle or not so subtle changes in the weather.

It must be said, that this morning and every other time I take this particular trail, my HOKA ONE ONE PRO2 Lite’s leave very little in the way of evidence beyond my confirming the pre-existent path through my footfalls limiting new plant life along the single track. Mine is a very faint imprint on the already mostly blank record of human impact in this particular part of the canyon.

The wider (but still local) record of ancient, pre-contact inhabitation is similarly sparse. Through every development of the Indian presence - characterized by the 1984 Chartkoff model as Paleo-Indian (15,000 – 11,000 years ago) with an economy based on mega-fauna; Archaic (11,000 – 4,000) marked by a diffuse economy and the colonization of new ecological niches; and Pacific (4,000 – contact) evidenced by an increasing range of foods - their intimate, immediate and essentially co-dependent relationship with their environment produced little in the way of permanent monuments or even non-degradable artifacts. Archaeologists consequently obsess on enduring items such as chipped stone tools, grinding implements (metates and manos) and pounding tools (mortars and pestles), shell fish-hooks and shell money. Local Indians were basket weavers not potters, their houses fully biodegradable woven rush structures, not adobe brick and their diets were only evidenced in middens by the remains of shellfish, fish and animal bone - not the great quantities of seeds, roots and berries that made up much of their sustenance.

The archaeological record of the ancient coast line has been entirely expunged by post glacial rising sea levels and what is left in the always less inhabited interior seriously devalued by bioturbation (the action of burrowing animals). We are thus confronted with nothing much more than minimally informed conjecture.

The record of climate change is a little more substantial. Every hundred thousand years or so, the planet retreats into the ice. The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) was 21,000 to 18,000 years ago. Sea level was almost 400 feet below current levels, and great sheets of ice covered much of the Sierra and Klamath ranges. At lower elevations vast lakes covered inland areas to the south and east while the present coast line at Ventura was as much as twenty miles further west. The northern Channel Islands were one connected whole. Temperatures were 12-14 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than today and thickly coated mega-fauna, such as sabre-toothed cats, wolves, bears, mastodons, mammoths, deer, elk, big-horned sheep and the ground sloth thrived. They continued to flourish for several thousand years as the Pleistocene gave way to the Holocene inter-glacial and their world slowly warmed.

Around 15,000 years ago, amidst the melting ice, the Paleo-Indian occupation of southern California began. Wielding hafted projectile points that were chipped along their edges to make serrated (or fluted) cutting surfaces, they hunted megafauna for their meat, fat, fur, teeth, tusks, antlers, horns and sinew. The general trend of a warming climate was briefly interrupted by the so-called Younger Dryas which signaled a return to a near glacial climate between 12,900 and 11, 400 years ago and this interregnum may have extended the viability of the large herd and pack animals of the Plesistocene which favored the open tundra.

When the warming trend resumed, however, the megafauna’s vulnerability to a changing ecosystem was quickly established as afforestation began to limit their rangelands. The replacement of patchy conifer forests with dense stands of oaks, the disappearance of pluvial lakes and overhunting by native populations all contributed to the local extinction (paralleled throughout North America) of some 35 genera of the continent’s large animals by 10,000 years ago.

Many local people, it seems, adapted to their new environment by hunting rabbits and deer and developing a millingstone culture where manos and metates rang with the sound of grinding seeds. Others moved into coastal areas where Paleo-Indians, who had arrived via the ’Kelp Road’ (the coastal route from north eastern Asia) some 13,000 years ago (Erlandson), had long established fishing and gathering shellfish as a part of their subsistence – skills now central to their own survival and adopted by this influx of climate refugees. Thus Paleo-environmental change inevitably forced accommodations to an altered resource base and, as Glasgow, Gamble, Perry and Russell point out in California Prehistory, Ed. Terry Jones and Katherine Klar, 2007, these adaptations greatly impacted the cultural evolution of local tribes. Such subsistence models represented a break with the past and allowed for ever larger coastal and near-coastal populations. We can imagine then, that the Ojai valley hosted Indian communities from at least 6,000 years ago subsisting on hunting and trapping and the local superabundance of edible seeds and berries which provided a surplus for the acquisition of fish, shellfish, and pinniped steaks traded from the coast and the Channel Islands.

By about 4,500 years ago, there is evidence of mortars and pestles in the archaeological record, indicating the human utilization of a greater variety of crushable plant foods. A higher frequency of projectile points is also discernable in this era, indicating an increased emphasis on hunting, and this is also suggestive of a gender-based bifurcation of food acquisition. By about 2,000 years ago there is evidence of a switch to pulpy foods such as acorns, islay (the red berries of holly-leafed cherry) and the edible portions of the chaparral yucca, all of which were processed in mortars by the action of a percussive pestle.

After contact, some eighteen hundred years later, William Bryant Logan writes in Oak, the Frame of Civilization, 2005, that “early European travelers came to recognize how close they were to a village by the boom and thump of women driving pestles into mortars to grind acorns into meal”. That sound had hung in the Ojai valley for at least two millennia. For the Chumash (the name archaeologists have given to the dominant group of regional tribes at contact), acorn meal was an essential part of their diet and central to their culture. Its importance was demonstrated in their careful tending of the oak forests that thrived amidst the creeks that threaded through the bottom lands between the Santa Ynez and Sulphur Mountains – the site of present day Ojai and Meiners Oaks.

The East End of Ojai is still watered by a number of tributary streams that flow out of Senior and Horn Canyons and feed into San Antonio Creek whose confluence with the Ventura River, just to the east of Casitas Springs, is marked by a tangle of cottonwoods and sycamores. It was along these streams, in the shade of oaks, that the Chumash congregated in tribelets, essentially extended family groupings, and lived their lives in the valley of the moon. That they pounded acorns into flour is quite certain. Yet evidence of this activity is less than emphatic. Occasionally, there is an ancient oak limb bent unnaturally low to the ground forcibly manipulated to provide an opportunity for woman and children to easily pick the tree’s acorns. This we know was an aspect of Chumash arboriculture, but such trees are rare and slowly disappearing.

Bed rock mortars are sometimes associated with rock art sites in the Sespe Wilderness, but the agricultural clearing in the East End, beginning early in the last century, has obliterated all such evidence, but just recently a friend in the area unearthed a pestle – a smooth cylinder of stone rounded at each end – one of which was distinguished by a pronounced wear edge. This pestle had seen much service, had produced much acorn meal and had resounded, we can presume, with much ‘boom and thump’. As I held it, the realization slowly crept upon me, that for a moment, I had a physical connection to the primal subsistence of a lost people. They had inhabited their immediate environment in ways that fully reflected the productivity of the land and the limiting factors of the climate; they understood the ever evolving dance between the two and made that understanding the basis for an enduring culture.

We have broken this tradition: destroying, in the process, all knowledge of living mindfully on the fruits of the earth. We, in this ignorance, prepare (or not) for the mild vicissitudes of a cyclical drought and the looming horizon of ice-melt and a rising ocean carelessly initiated by one hundred and fifty years of anthropogenic global warming.

The pestle is a totem: an emblem of dietary fortitude in the face of environmental limitations. This particular stone implement has now been re-hidden beneath the roots of an olive tree – ironically, an example of the exogenous biota introduced by conquering Europeans. Holding it, I was offered a glimpse into a world where stone, wood, bone, animal skin, sinew, earth, and cellulose defined the material limits of the universe and where the natural world was composed of a web of intensely intimate relationships with food of which the local Indians were fully a part: it was a glimpse which loomed with both hope and despair.

Dog Star Rising

Now also at urbanwildland.org

Oceans of marine layer fog lap at the mountain shore lines of the lower valley and the Oxnard Plain. The cities of Santa Paula and Ojai have disappeared beneath roiling water vapor. Up above the fog line in La Broche Canyon the morning sun has just risen above Santa Paula Ridge illuminating the east facing sandstone escarpment along which I run. To my left, the twisted limbs of Manzanita, tenaciously anchoring themselves in rock fissures, flush red; along the track and at moraine's edge, gnaphalia, dried yucca and the clouds of Acourtia seed atop tobacco brown stalks are sepulchral: a patchwork of the chaparral's ghostly summer shroud.

There is, or at least I imagine there is, a profound stoicism in the chaparral plant community: in the many thousand years old succession of plants, soils and weathering rock, the rains have always come and the plants have endured. The wildlands hereabouts are littered with the woody remnants of shrubs and perennials, of dead sage, artemisia, laurel sumac, and chamise : their armatures dried grey in the sun and waiting, quiet as the grave, for wildfire to return their nutrients to the soil. Fallen oak limbs and split trunks dot the dry land, elephant bones in the chaparral ossuary.

We live in a canyon through which we can reasonably expect fire in our lifetime. Hence the elaborate precautions in the two built structures on our wildland spread made to increase their chances of survival in a bush fire. We expect the fires to return (evidenced in our yard by fire-blackened oak trunks), and we expect, too, the balm of heavy rains. Like most southern Californians, we maintain a level of pragmatic preparedness in the face of natural disasters.

While providing an anthropomorphized example of stoicism, the plant community also serves as example of Aristotelian telos. The philosopher maintained that every living thing, whether plant, animal or human, acted according to its nature and for all these beings that inevitably included living in community with their fellows. Cycles of birth and death, dormancy during drought and revival after rains and fire-scorched earth and subsequent regeneration from within ash enriched soils, are intrinsic to the chaparral plant community and it is these processes which formed the environmental setting for the human groups that lived within it.

For fifteen thousand years, the Chumash and their forbears, such as the people of the Oak Grove Horizon and before them the first Paleo Indians settlers who voyaged down the coastal kelp-road or trudged across the Beringian land bridge valued community as their guarantee of survival in these lands of uncertain rains and randomized fire events. Seeds stored in woven baskets were insurance against a lack of game or a dearth of fresh plants. Equitably shared resources promoted the welfare of all. Like most indigenous peoples, the Chumash sourced all their food, clothing shelter and tools directly from their local environment, and the weather played an integral part in either sustaining or pauperizing their communities. To voluntarily attempt to live outside of the community or to be banished from it was to court death. Survival was a cooperative endeavor. Individuality was of little value, for to consistently express it was life threatening.

Tribal and peasant cultures have always relied on high levels of cooperation, community and shared values (albeit ones sometimes forged in the brutal furnaces of oppression). Elite groups, in turn, shared values based partly on the exploitation of the under-classes. In either case, anomie, Durkheim’s term for societal alienation, was mostly unknown in pre-modern times. The overbearing extremism of the European aristocracy eventually shook loose the elaborate social structures that had arisen out of Feudalism (which exhibited some levels of shared welfare and responsibilities within its hierarchies) and prompted the political revolutions of the late eighteenth century (including ours) as well as the more generalized European liberalizations of 1848.

It was at this historical moment that increased levels of population, food production and industrial infrastructures (all based on new energy inputs derived from fossil fuels) provided a social and financial environment in which individualism began to have value. Voltaire, Locke, Hobbes and John Stuart Mill, amongst others, provided the philosophical underpinnings of this new liberalism. Yet Locke’s notion that humankind should live in a “a State of perfect Freedom to order their Actions…as they think fit…without asking leave, or depending on the Will of any other Man” runs entirely counter to the lived experience of our species for the roughly two hundred thousand years of its existence prior to this pronouncement.

Liberalism’s intimate connection to new forms of energy production, dependent on exploitation of the planets crust, should come as no surprise. These new values better served those who were beginning to benefit from the shift in the sources of energy wealth. As Ian Morris points out in his recent book, Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, 2014, tribal cultures (such as the Chumash), who made a living foraging or hunting and gathering adopted social structures that were substantially egalitarian: they included strong norms of sharing and exhibited very limited inequalities. The brief interregnum of farming societies (in the long scheme of things), enabled the rise of Aristocracy, because their hierarchies were based on the ownership of land which tends to aggregate into the hands of the few (who then justified their ascendance by linking it with Divine Will). This complex system of values, norms, expectations and cultural patterns that supported the Divine Right of Kings was then systematically undermined by liberal philosophies that privileged the individual and emphasized humankind’s supposed freedoms.

Fossil fuel societies have proved to be highly tolerant of wealth inequalities. Their implicitly technocratic foundations correlate highly with liberal ideologies which foster values such as competition, quantifiability, majoritarian rule and efficiency. As Morris points out, liberal, individualist values have come to define Western ideology (what he elsewhere calls “a pack of lies from which someone benefits”).

Rousseau offered a warning at the birth of modern liberal society, in the late eighteenth century, when he observed that competition would create a society riven with “Jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve and fraud”. A hundred years later, Thoreau, a great reader of Jean-Jacques, observed that it was a wise thing to “cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage…” while noting that “the civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage”, eschewing, by inference, wealth, vanity and culture for the profound pleasures of a primal relationship with the natural world. Now, neoliberalism is a kind of metastasized, cancerous liberalism that feeds on the sugars secreted by the polluting organ of capitalism. Wealth inequality is symptomatic of this condition and leaves (to continue flogging the oncological metaphor) a vast societal sore that is the disaffected middle classes.

Sometimes, there’s really nothing to be done but to take a walk in the chaparral. Even here, your experience may vary. A couple of weeks ago an oil storage tank set deep in sage scrub, exploded about half a mile from our house. A plume of black smoke rose into the still air. Prompt response by the local fire brigades prevented the fire spreading beyond the immediate confines of the pad. The last significant wildfire that began in the area, less than a hundred yards from the entry to what is now our property, occurred in December 1999, raged for five days, involved over 1500 fire fighters, scorched nearly 5,000 acres and threatened multiple structures and two private schools. It was caused by fire crackers stuffed in a mail box. The explosive impact of the oil storage tank was far greater but was thankfully vitiated by the almost total lack of wind. It is ironic that the chaparral landscapes that produce so little that is of material value to modern society conceal, in places, vast reserves of fossil fuel.

At other times, the ‘tonic of wildness’ is more reliable. One recent early morning, looking over the steep, rocky bank of a seasonal stream (dry now for three years) I watched the single panoptic eye of a rabbit crouched in a crevice a few yards away. Shyest of creatures, I have only seen rabbits freeze when a bobcat is stalking them. This animal remained comfortably immobile as my attention was drawn to a fluttering brown bird spiraling up slope from the dry stream bottom. It circled towards me (I remained as still as the rabbit) and alighted on my arm. Feeling a little like my notion of Saint Francis, I looked down on it and took note of its whitish cream breast, orangey brown (rufous) plumage and darker, herringbone patterned tail. Over breakfast, I learnt from Sibley’s Field Guide that my visitor was a Canyon wren (Catherpes mexicanus).

Of Alchemy and Earwigs

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

I walk out of the house at first light and the enveloping ridge to the east wraps me in its lithic embrace, enfolds me in its darkling biomass and whispers to me of its ineffable secrets. For a moment, my consciousness is permeable, unguarded and malleable. For a moment, in that early morning, my anthropocentrism is capable of being dented by dawn’s hammer. I am fleetingly aware of a greater consciousness, the etheric charge that flows through the earth and into its every being - modern-day humans mostly excepted.

It is the search for such moments of enfoldment into a greater consciousness, of reconnection with the primordial generative spirit that has brought me, like so many others, to Ojai. Many are not even aware of the deeply mystical vortex that has pulled them into the Valley of the Moon, but once ensconced, begin to experience a slowly emerging but inexorable expansion of consciousness. It is here that we begin to feel a reconnection with the cosmos, a limbic reawakening that echoes with memories of the dream time, when we emerged out of nothingness as flickering points of awareness.

It begins, quite simply, with the place. As David Abram notes in The Spell of the Sensuous, 1996, certain mountains, canyons, streams, boulder–strewn slopes and groves of trees have “a particular…. expressive potency and dynamism with which they present themselves to the senses”. The landscape becomes complicit in our construction of meaning - as an animate partner in our sensory world. Abram suggests that it is both the City (where nature is mostly marginalized by the man-made) and the written word (composed of an entirely abstract alphabet divorced from its originating glyphs that related to the natural world) that has distanced us from our co-creators of reality - other beings, plants, earth forms and hydrological expressions on this planet and the solar system beyond. Words and buildings have overwritten a more fundamental text to which we now have diminishing access. Ojai represents a particularly vibrant portal into this lost world of embodied meaning. It represents a showing forth of the earth.

Within this generalized notion there are exquisite examples. Another morning late in May, as I was picking my way down the steep slope that runs down to Sisar Creek from the mesa which spans eastward (more or less) back to Koenigstein, I saw a yellow Mariposa lily. Pink, lilac and purple spotted varieties abound on the dry hills, but a yellow one is unusual in these parts. On the scramble down, my senses alerted, I noted other springtime flowers nestled into the chaparral undergrowth and at the base of lichened rocks (now arrested in their long-ago journey towards the bottom lands). There was yellow pincushion, deerweed, monkey flower and tarweed, each vibrating spectrally somewhere between yellow and orange to create a golden heralding of summer.

It is fire clearance time on the property: raking, weed-whacking and plain old hand weeding the chaparral margins which run along the driveway as it careens down to the road. Mustard, tocalote, clover, erodium, mallow, rye, broame and oats cleared amidst the favored deerweed, sage brush, tarweed and native bunch grasses. Crows gather as I uncover rotting vegetation beneath which earwigs lurk. Fearless, one oily feathered, carmine gulleted, beady eyed specimen lurks close to me hopping awkwardly over newly raked terrain, occasionally beating its wings half-heartedly to clear rocks and debris. Taking a break, I walk downhill towards some east facing boulders one of which offers a particularly comfortable angle against which to recline. I neglect to mention my intentions to the crow. Slouched against the rock, straw hat pulled low over my eyes I settle in for a few minutes repose. Coming out of the east, flying low over the newly cleared landscape comes my crow heading directly for me. At the last moment, as I throw up my arms to protect my head, it veers south and lands on a rock a few feet away and takes a shit: inter-species communication at its most elemental - an avian showing forth. Appropriately, I have no words.

Attempts to broaden ones community of sensorial correspondents (an effort to enlarge the class of species with which a dialogue can be established and in which intimate knowledge can be mutually embodied) have a long history - mostly disparagingly codified as magic, mysticism or alchemy. It is into this realm that Jessica Cornwell, daughter of our neighbors across the hill, ventures in her celebrated first novel, The Serpent Papers, 2015, and in this realm a place is never, as Abram writes, “ just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It is an active participant in those occurrences”. He goes on to suggest that, “the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there.” For Jessica, that place is Barcelona.

Cartheginians established an outpost on the coast of Catalunya half a millennium before Christ, and the city has had many subsequent colonizers in Pheonicians, Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, Moors, Franks, and finally neighboring Iberians whose leaders outlawed the local language in the interests of establishing the hegemony of Madrid, and of Castilian, over an homogenized Spanish nation whose cultural, economic and political influence is still resisted by many Catalonians. As Cornwell writes, the city has been “Scraped and scraped again. Written and rewritten”. Inserted into this protean city, she spins her many layered tale of esoteric knowledge, codes, secret books, murder, mutilation and the present-day survival of the horrors of the Inquisition and its concomitant witch hunting.

Yet at its heart the book deals with the historical search for the relationship between meaning, the written word or glyph (represented here as an ouroboros, a nightingale and a golden moon), the processes of nature and those whose lives are dedicated to the uncovering of shadowy supernatural powers that exist in the liminal space between science and spirituality. In true alchemical tradition there is a sense that time is folding in on itself and the novel successfully creates a palimpsest of history, place and human agency. The nexus that exists between Barcelona and Mallorca and their related esoteric traditions is set against the seemingly more benign folkloric pageantry of Catalunya.

Here in Ojai we have our own esoteric traditions upheld by the Krishnamurti Library, the Krotona Institute, Meditation Mount and the Ojai Foundation all of whose followers, knowingly or not, are dabbling in ancient occult practices. Here, our modern history is underlain by fifteen thousand years of Native American inhabitation whose arcane attempts to harness the power of the universe were practiced locally, most sophisticatedly, by the Chumash ‘Antap (Real Suspense). The secrets of those adepts are now lost, although many in southern California still cling to remnant liturgical aspects of syncretic native American animistic practices, heavily influenced by the showy paraphernalia of the Plains Indians, that emerged along with the Ghost dance towards the end of the nineteenth century. Of the Chumash, lacking a written language (and undoubtedly more thoroughly embedded in what we would now call the bio-diversity of their environment absent the distancing abstractions of the written word) there remains little but faded rock paintings, vestigial spirit paths now claimed as hiking trails, burial poles, and the testimony of the last of their tribe gathered by the early twentieth century ethnographer, J.P. Harrington (Trunk Show).

More commonly, the remaining mystical rituals (founded in south Asian and European traditions) practiced in the valley run the gamut from highly athleticized forms of yoga to a variety of monotheistic liturgies. In between, pantheistic rites are enshrined in the institutions of occult knowledge mentioned above and more generally by anyone who ever sat and watched the pink moment as the setting sun washes the spalled face of the Topatopas in its warm light.

I cling to my own protestant roots and seek direct communion with the chaparral, the crow and even the repellent earwig (Forficula auricularia) absent liturgy, rites or holy books (excepting, perhaps, Milt McAuley’s magisterial Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains, 1996).

Little Boy Lost

Now also at www.Urbanwildland.org

In the time I have spent living off of Koenigstein, there have been three births, two deaths and now, a small boy found somewhere along the road. Sammy Evans was discovered at 7p.m. on Monday, after he was reported lost some six hours before, having last been seen on Tree Ranch Road. He was located by a bloodhound named Roscoe and Michael Grossman of Ventura County K9 Search and Rescue. "He's a wonderful kid who got confused and got scared and they found him," his father Steve Evans said. "The gratitude we have is unbelievable."

In the early evening, as the wind dropped, the search-dog picked up Sammy’s scent and led his handler up Koenigstein Road. The prescient mystic, William Blake, has most of the details right:

“Then they followed
Where the vision led,
And saw their sleeping child
Among tigers wild.

To this day they dwell
In a lonely dell,
Nor fear the wolvish howl
Nor the lion’s growl.”

Sammy was found, according to media reports, in a wooded area about a mile east of where he was last seen. No mention was made of finding mountain lions, coyotes or even foxes in the vicinity, although, on occasion, all three roam these parts. The media was mute too, on the exact nature of the woods in which he was found. I should add that young Sammy was apparently awake when discovered and spoke with his human rescuer. No word on his interaction with Roscoe, the bloodhound.

I am an essayist not a journalist: a quick check with local scribe Chris Wilson suggests that he is not following the story – he referred me to the Ojai Valley News’ intrepid Misty Volanski who after a cursory report in the local rag has moved on; fellow blogger and esteemed Ventura reporter, Kit Stolz, is missing in action, hiking the Pacific Crest trail somewhere along its more than twenty five hundred mile length; Urbanwildland is therefore attempting to pick up the threads in its author’s amateur, essay-ish kind of way.

The story, as I have outlined it, is based on news reports. As a long-time historian manqué, however, I understand the value of original research. So it was that I drove the length of Tree Ranch Road hoping to detect some latent, psychic echoes of the parent’s panic on discovering the loss of their child or perhaps of Sammy’s desperation in attempting to flee the family unit. Note that I am discounting the notion that our boy wandered off unintentionally and became disoriented and lost. Ending up on Koenigstein involves traversing the County divide separating the Ventura and Santa Clara River watersheds, and requires a serious intent - a concerted effort to put distance between oneself and one’s nearest and dearest. Was there some inkling on Tree Ranch of what made Sammy run? (Ancient reference: What Makes Sammy Run, the 1960’s Broadway musical based on Bud Schulberg’s story of the rise and fall of Sammy Glick, archetypal Hollywood Jew – stereotyped as smart, ruthless, savvy and crude). Our Sammy is black, ten years old and four feet tall, but he too has demons that impel him to run.

Tree Ranch Road is mostly horse-properties. Not of the Kentucky blue grass, white fence, lush meadows kind, but the dry, dirt and dust, metal corral, hard-scrabble Ojai kind. It appears to be mostly a street of pick-up trucks and horse trailers casually parked in front of one story ranch houses; but as you drive north, across intermittent speed bumps, something changes. The 12700 block, where Sammy was reported missing, is composed of mostly two story structures of dubious architectural provenance and irrigated grounds that have aspirations (mostly unrealized) of achieving estate status. These gardens cling to some European ideal while their northern aspect is dominated by south facing native chaparral hills that rise up to Fuel Break Road, running along the near ridge, as it heads over to High Winds and Boccali’s Ranch. Lush exotics and schlerophytic natives are thus poised in a Mexican stand-off - nature and nurture unresolved and unresolvable.

Sammy most likely stuck to the road, eschewing what for him were probably the unknown pleasures of bush-whacking over to Sisar, and then going cross-country to Koenigstein. Let’s face it: the kid was in escape mode, out Tree Ranch, east on the 150 then up Koenigstein - terra incognita – until he decided that a rest was in order and he hunkered down among the oaks on our property up the hill (favored hang-out, too, of recalcitrant Thomas Aquinas students, who chug beer and wine while enjoying the westerly views of the Upper Valley and the shade of our ancient live-oaks). I don’t mean to be proprietary, just saying that Lorrie and I are the chumps that pay the Ventura County property taxes on the only ‘wooded area’ directly off of Koenigstein. In other words, “Whose woods these are I think I know”.

I am delighted to have played host, albeit unknowingly, to runaway Sammy. But it was the trees and their shade that appealed to him. It’s an old story: as William Bryant Logan points out in Oak – The Frame of Civilization, the genus is intimately involved in the recent development of humankind; as he says, “People stayed and went where the oaks were. There is some basic sympathy between oaks and humans.” Sammy was seeking comfort from Quercus agrifolia, the Coast Live Oak, the same tree that helped nurture ten thousand years of successive Native Californian cultures, finally ending with a constellation of balanocultures (oak and acorn societies) epitomized by the Chumash. As Logan notes, these were the last cultures on earth that continued to rely on the fruits of the oak where once they were a mainstay of the temperate belt that girdled the Northern Hemisphere after the end of the ice age.

When he was nine, William Blake saw “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars”. In Martin Frederick’s, The Life of John Clare, 1865, he recounts that Clare had a favorite place where he would write his poetry. “it was the hollow of an old oak. Inside this old oak, John Clare used to sit in silent meditation for many hours together, unmindful even of the waning day and the mantle of darkness falling over the earth”.

How long did Sammy sit under the oak and what did he see? By the middle of August it is dark not long after eight. Was Sammy mindful of the waning day? What did he plan for the night? A few hundred yards to the south of his resting place are the trampled depressions (now mostly covered by chaparral) of the house sites for a small band of Chumash who lived on the banks of Bear Creek. Foxes begin to snarl as the light fades. Spirits of long dead Indians may still haunt the oak woodlands. Owls hoot and bats jink and fade as the sun drops into the westerly haze.

Enter Roscoe: slobbering over child and foreshortening the night of his young life. Safely back in the bosom of his family, under the now ever watchful eye of his parents our Little Boy Lost may yet be planning his next great escape. May Blake’s arboreal angels watch over him…..

Blue Dicks

Now also at Urbanwildland.org

Sometimes a Blue Dick is just a Blue Dick. But these native hyacinths, appearing after a storm of ceanothus blossom has blown through the chaparral, are a harbinger of spring. We have arrived at that time of the year, at least in Ojai, when we are again reminded by the creaking of the seasonal gears that all of life is transitory - that nothing lasts forever. The entire planet is date-stamped.

Heading into the holiday season, what passes for our winter – an occasional cold snap or rainy day – held a firm grip on my imagination: Spring was not even the palest glow on the edge of the event-horizon. Six weeks later, I am inclined to believe again in the reliability of the celestial clockwork.

Another spring is also heralded by the sickening candy-pink of prickly phlox flowers, often alongside more demure corn-flower blue solanum and white, wild cucumber blossoms. Crinkly leaves of soap plant are emerging from the hard-pack and goosefoot (Chenopodium californicum) is in full leaf. Poison oak gleams malignantly from its shiny new foliage. The native peonies are almost done, true denizens of the topsy-turvy world of the chaparral where plants flourish in winter and begin to wither and die in spring. High on a hill, California poppies nod toward the south. Owls head clover have appeared in the meadows. Lupins are flowering and blue Ceanothus spinosus, which blooms a few weeks later than the white varieties (whose massed polar clouds are now diminishing), is freshly in evidence.

It’s that time of the year on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills when spring and summer collections are on display in the flagship stores of international brands that the line both sides of the street between Santa Monica Boulevard and Wilshire; (within too, a courtyard mall that worms its way into a surrounding block and along a street that wriggles through another section in the development parterre).

Just a week ago, walking along these bastions of early twentieth-first century global-consumer capitalism (sound track supplied by Maserati and Lamborghini as their pilots trawled the gold-paved streets) deep in the maw of our profoundly ego-centric culture, I was reminded how different is the experience of living apart from such displays; of how my psyche has been split asunder living in Upper Ojai where the portal that yawns before me leads not towards Ralph Lauren’s new spring/summer collection, but directly into the World Soul.

Lorrie and I were headed to a restaurant to meet friends: Chinese tourists bustled past us clutching their newly bought fashions, equally available in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong - and perhaps other Chinese cities of which I remain unaware; but here at the heart of the American dream, their goods come branded with the unique frisson of having been purchased on Rodeo Drive (on a warm winter’s afternoon). Here too, global brands are richly burnished by the triple imprimaturs of the eponymous Hillbillies’ town, Los Angeles and Southern California. Rodeo Drive represents, for the out-of town, lustful consumer, a quadruple threat.

Cloistered beneath the crumbling face of the Topatopa bluffs, I daily face a similarly multitudinous threat to the erstwhile sanctity of my ego. That’s a good thing. Jung re-established the eternal truth that the earth is more than matter, it is spirit. It is that spirit that now erodes the primacy of my ego, nurtured in some of the most consumer-centric cities in the world – London, Sydney and Los Angeles. Walking down Rodeo Drive represented a mannerist mirror to my past, a ghastly, glittering apparition of the road not taken. For in each city, despite being lured by their urban surfaces polished by desire - by the continuum of fashion-driven development over the ages - I have also found some refuge in more elemental circumstances: the woods and downs of darkest Surrey, the beaches and bush of Sydney’s North Shore and the bay beaches and chaparral edges of Los Angeles. Now in Ojai, I am able to fully allow what Jung called the ‘conditioning of the mind by the earth’.

David Tacey, in Edge of the Sacred – Jung, Psyche, Earth, Daimon Verlag, Zurich, 2009, explains. The history of human spirituality has been divided, he suggests, into two broad streams: the sky-pointers who see the heavens as representing the sacred realm and the earth-pointers who understand that the sacred inheres within the earth. These two distinct spatial heirophanies are represented on the one hand by the major monotheisms and on the other by polytheistic animism. This spatial mapping of the sacred is reflected, in Jungian terms, within the human psyche.

For Jung, the psyche included both conscious and unconscious psychic processes. How the elements, or forces, within these processes are resolved results in individuation. The ego exists at the center of the field of consciousness and stands guard at the border of the inner and outer worlds. The unconscious is the repository for all past and future thoughts and repressed emotions which are not being experienced in the moment. Within the unconscious there resides the shadow, an underworld that aggregates the parts of ourselves we most fear as well as the intelligences that reside in the collective unconscious, or group mind, and ultimately, is attuned to the World Soul. For Jung, it is the shadow to which the earth speaks.

In the global north, at least since the Enlightenment, and arguably since the rise of patriarchy and monotheistic religion, the ego has enlarged its domain within the psyche at the cost of the shadow within the unconscious. Thus the earth has increasingly gone unheard.

The shadow world of the subconscious, what Jung calls the chthonic portion of the psyche, was fed by the ancient religions of pre-modern humanity. Jung notes that ‘dark powers, witches, magicians and spirits’ represented the forces of the earth and these archaic forms held sway over an emasculated ego in primitive humans. But this form of magical thinking was undermined by the rise of science; Jung writes,

“This was the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. One step followed another: already in antiquity the gods were withdrawn from mountains and rivers, from trees and animals”.

Jung posits, in his Terry Lectures from 1940, that the dominant, modern form of thinking leaves us bereft: in a spiritual and emotional wasteland where the earth has become desecrated, desacralized and is plundered to satisfy our gross egotistical desires. Thus he predicts the psychic roots of our growing environmental crisis.

Yet spirit still inheres in the land. The spirit dynamics of the earth can overturn and replace the aspirations of the ego. Material desire can wither and die as connections are made with the natural world. The shadow can rise again and fully inhabit the unconscious creating a base of spiritual profundity that can heal the individual: in society, such a realignment might heal the planet.

Here, where all is sky and bio-mass, damp earth and trickling streams, is a world that calms - a world that subtly shapes one’s psyche. On a meadow, just up the road, blue dicks rise out of the grasslands, or sometimes push out of sun-splashed rocky soil. Violet blue, their flowers are the color of the heavens: but they direct our attention not towards the empyrean, but to the spirit earth, where primordial forces may one day link again with humanity and bring an ecological order to the planet.

For the Chumash, this plant they called Shikh’o’n was a valuable food source. Their bulbs were roasted in communal lily (brodiaea) roasting pits (Timbrook). It was a beloved plant that featured in their tales of Coyote trickery: it was deeply rooted in their magical thinking. It helped sustain, as did all things of the earth, their psychic balance within a world of enchantment. More than a harbinger of spring, it represented a complex spirit essence; it spoke to the deep chthonic streams within Chumash psyche.

This early spring, it spoke to me.

The Long March

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

In Blood Meridian (1985) Cormac McCarthy writes of the Sonoran desert,

“…here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.”

In such wildlands, he seems to suggest, individual consciousness and even morphic distinctions evaporate beneath the Universe’s gaze. In these landscapes too, something similar happens to time. It expands to become the eternal now. Left behind in the cosmic dust are such pettifogging notions like: the future is unknowable, the end is near and the past is a foreign country.

Moment to moment, experience is immediately consigned to the past but is used, in that moment, as a guide to the future. It is in these realms of memory and of conjecture that most of us, in our daily lives, reside. Despite our best intentions of being present, we exist in a netherworld where our thoughts structure our experience - their surge and back wash constituting our notions of the past and the future: the present consigned as nothing more than grist to its mill. Thus it is that we are trapped temporally within a current flowing between past and future, urged on by the Time Lords, remorseless in their dedication to vanquishing the present.

In the world of the Chumash, enmeshed in their wildlands, fully present in their animist universe, there was an escape from the smothering folds of past and future into the knife-edge of the now. It’s a hell of a way to live, but perhaps the only way to be fully alive.

Early in January, I drove into the Chumash territory north and east of Santa Barbara. Perhaps more accurately, I drove north into Chumash Casino territory, for it is this palace of fine dining, entertainment and gambling that is the most visible symbol of those who claim a genetic link to the native American tribes that shared similar languages and cultures from Malibu in the south to Ragged Point in the north, along coastal plains bound by the Santa Monica and Santa Ynez Mountains and, beyond, by the San Rafael Mountains and the Santa Lucia Range. The forbears of the Santa Ynez Band, who now look to the casino for their wealth, were effectively exterminated, along with all of their Chumash brethren, by the Franciscan brothers, ably led by Junipero Serra, with mop-up operations conducted by Americans who flooded into Southern California in the mid nineteenth century. So it was that the tribe’s eternal now, which lasted for at least 13,000 years (Erlandson), was effectively ended by the beginning of the twentieth century.

While Indian consciousness may have endured in a state of immediacy, the people ever receptive to the sensory impulses of a constantly numinous world, their physical setting was undergoing massive change. As the climate warmed at the end of the last Ice Age, sea levels rose dramatically along the southern Californian coast - by as much as 400’ north of Point Conception along more exposed coastlines. During the melt water pulses of 13,500 and 11,000 years ago the rate of rise was between six and thirteen feet per century (Masters and Aiello, Postglacial Evolution of Coastal Environments, 2010) inundating vast areas of the coastal plains that had originally been inhabited by California’s first settlers.

Much of the evidence of these Paleo-Indian people is thus buried beneath the ocean, along a now submerged coast. It is at least partly because of this buried archeological treasure that there is now growing support for the designation of the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary to fill the gap with sanctuary protection between the Channel Islands and the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuaries.

Meanwhile, I was far in-shore, ensconced for a few days in Los Alamos, originally part of the estate of La Purisima Mission. In 1839 the land was granted, under Mexican rule, to Antonio de la Guerra as Rancho Los Alamos. By the 1860’s it was a popular stagecoach stop en route to San Francisco. The Union Hotel was opened in 1880 on the main street (Bell Street) and survives still as a kitsch curiosity, rivalled only by a truly hideous 1864 Victorian mansion which stands close by and is now operated as a themed room bed-and-breakfast. The town was a stop on the narrow gauge Pacific Coast Railway which ran from Los Olivos to San Louis Obispo from the 1880’s through the early 1930’s as both a passenger line and a freight line servicing the agricultural and oil industries. A former freight shed still stands in Los Alamos and now houses an antique mall. When I first visited fifteen years ago, the town seemed to echo with a death rattle as semi-trailers rumbled past lots left vacant since a devastating 1893 fire and empty storefronts.

Long ago, a Chumash village sat amongst the cottonwoods that run through the valley. As its population was impressed as newly baptized neophytes in the early 1800’s they quickly succumbed to the diseases, depredations and the enforced labor required by the Franciscans at the nearby mission. An 1840’s small pox epidemic struck the last of the Indian population and by the mid-1850's only eight natives were left in the valley.

The town is in the process of being resurrected from this forlorn history as the northern outpost in the food and wine triangulation of the Santa Ynez Valley, anchored by Los Olivos and the town of Santa Ynez. The Chumash Casino is a meretricious outlier to these bastions of the haute bourgeoisie and their junior acolytes, hirsute and inked hipsters. Withal, the jewel encrusted dead hand of hyper-capitalism, here conjured by the twin cities of gold, Los Angeles and San Francisco, lies over the lean and racy wines and the field fresh food of this clustering of new restaurants, delicatessens, bakeries and tasting rooms.

The Spanish arrived in California determined to develop feudal estates around their mission system using the native population as serfs. Even as late as the eighteenth century, Spanish colonial rule harkened back to the feudal but here in California the model collapsed in a plague of introduced diseases and famine. The intended broad base of compliant laborers died in mission, field and their erstwhile villages, in an unintended genocide.

Around Purisima, the land then passed into the Rancho system where remnant Indians and low-caste Mexicans served their aristocratic masters (many newly minted) and thus replicated, slightly more successfully, the medieval economic system. Feudalism was then engulfed by the gold rush that opened up the 31st. State to mercantile capitalism before agriculture, oil, shipping, real estate, banking, tourism and entertainment finally moved California into a mature capitalist system.

Contemporary cultures, driven by neo-liberal capitalism, have now fully abandoned the present: they are, instead, consumed with the future. Los Alamos has been shaped over the last one hundred and fifty years by competing visions of transport – from stagecoach to railroad to the original route of the 101, and is now being revived by notions of how we might eat and drink in an idealized future where artisanal practice somehow trumps the pervasive world reality of industrially produced food and beverages. The past is fetishized by re-purposing the town’s buildings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as emporia of twenty-first century boutique consumption.

This morning, a still sea of mist lay over the Santa Clara River in a faint visual echo of the roiling melt waters that first carved the valley. Far above, in the chaparral canyon which funnels a tributary towards the river, the heavy scent of ceanothus blossom hung in the air while the sound of my breathing, my footfall and bird song further occupied my senses. For a moment, I escaped into the now. I eluded the Time Lords, whose rule began in the waning days of the dark-ages when hunters, gatherers, woodsmen and fisher-folk were first organized into a laboring under-class to serve the aspirations of the rich and powerful: the first step in our long march to the future. Under their unrelenting tutelage, we have consumed the present.

Good Vibrations

It was only ten years prior to the publication of Francis Hitching’s seminal text, Earth Magic, that radio-carbon dating was fully accepted within the archaeological community. The first American edition of the book was published in 1977. I own a copy with a pristine dust-jacket that I happened upon recently at that excellent addition to Ojai’s community of retail establishments, Book Ends. I first came across (and then devoured) the book in paperback in Australia in 1978 or 1979. My relationship to carbon-dating, to the extent that it has ever been established, began in 2007 when I began volunteering at UCLA’s Native American Rock Art Archive which is housed in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

So, we have the publication of a book, my reading of it; my rediscovery of said work thirty five years or so later (and my re-reading of it) and the attendant birthing and maturity of a dating technique that arguably has revolutionized Archaeology – along with my incidental exposure to that revolutionized academic discipline starting some seven years ago.

What does all that add up to? Well, in my personal history quite a lot, but as a writer, I believe I am charged with a generalized responsibility to make matters of personal import of some wider interest to my imagined and occasionally real audience. It is a reflection of my perversity that I believe that what interests me in the narrow ambit of my home in the chaparral will resonate, when crafted into a blend of my own sensory and intellectual experiences, with the select few…..

In January of 1977 I began an undergraduate degree in Architecture at the University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. In my second year of studies I discovered my mentors: Dr. Terry Purcell, a psychologist who taught a much derided course in man-environment studies, and Marr Grounds, an environmental artist who had somehow found employment, in those more liberal days, as a lecturer in design. These two academic outsiders, neither architects, guided me through what ended up being a hugely formative experience in which I discovered an interest in the primal qualities of the Australian landscape and landscape in general - interests which ended up completely dominating my antipodean education.

It was against this backdrop that I picked up Earth Magic in the University book store and in reading it I connected back to my childhood in the English countryside and my adolescent interest in the occult, the practice of which, in its literary re-telling, usually involved settings of ancient mystery and foreboding –ruined abbeys, stone circles, lonely moors and the like. I was readily susceptible to the genre’s facile production of chills and tingling spines. Looking back, I can re-frame the appeal in terms of an interest in making contact with a universal energy – which, it was implied in the books that I read, possessed the bi-polarity of good and evil.

I continue to be fascinated with the apparent tributaries of etheric energy which adepts, both ancient and modern, have found ways to channel to their purposes. In Earth Magic, which details the endeavors of megalithic man to focus and amplify these energies by building a system of stone nodes and nexuses, I understood an archaeological aspect to my childish proclivity. Although this was well before Bruce Chatwin had written The Songlines (1987), I also possessed a generalized awareness, sharpened by Marr Grounds who, in his environmental art-making, worked extensively with aboriginals still pursuing a traditional life in the Northern Territories, that I was living in a country where there existed primitive lines of force that had once bound together a far-flung and never large population of sentient beings. I vaguely understood that I was living, at that moment, at the tail end of two centuries that had seen the almost complete destruction of an elaborate human exegesis of primal forces that is the aboriginal culture of Australia, developed over perhaps 50,000 years.

Now, lurking at the fringes of the chaparral wilderness, amidst strewn boulders hailed down from the Topatopas in some fracturing event of the Pleistocene, I wonder whether the rock marks made by California’s earliest people were an attempt at a lithic ordering that privileged some stones over others. Within the antic geology of the land, they might thus have recorded the same lines of force that intrigued megalithic man and the Australian aborigine which, in the ritual and physical marking of such networks, bound their societies.

Within the discipline of Archaeology, the study of peoples who failed to create significant artifacts beyond their language and belief-culture is of a limited appeal. If you have any interest in advancing your career you will not stay long in the ghetto of American Indian cultures. At UCLA‘s Cotsen Institute there are five full professors of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and not one in North American Languages and Culture. Within that ghetto, Rock Art represents the darkest, most underfunded and ill-regarded neighborhood. Jo Anne Van Tilburg, who directs the Rock Art Archive, has not ascended beyond Research Associate despite holding the prestigious post of Director of the Easter Island Statue Project where the excavations at Rano Raraku, the primary moai quarry, are her life’s work. David Whiteley, perhaps the most renowned archaeologist currently studying the rock art of Californian Indians has no academic affiliation whatsoever. Similarly, until very recently, those who study the works of megalithic man have also been side-lined. What that means is that the field is overrun, instead, with odd-balls, amateurs and speculative historians. Fine company.

Ironically, the general popularity of these areas of archaeology has never been higher, as evidenced in the last week or so by the blanket coverage, from National Geographic to the Daily Mail of the new discoveries at Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England. The work, by archaeologists from Birmingham and Bradford Universities and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in Vienna has also been awarded the ultimate middlebrow accolade of a two-part documentary series on BBC-2, titled Operation Stonehenge: What Lies Beneath.

I do not know whether this title is the BBC’s homage to the Hermetic notion that the microcosmos reflects the macrocomos, but the new information appears to solidify the monument’s significance as a major ritual center that is likely linked, in ley line alignments, to other such centers like Avebury and beyond, perhaps as far North as the massive Neolithic temple complex at the Ness of Brodgar in the Orkneys (recently uncovered using the same ground-penetrating radar used at Stonehenge).

The incised rock art of Californian Indians has been dated back to somewhere beyond 15,000 years ago using a controversial dating system developed by the geomorphologist Ron Dorn. Known as  cation-ratio dating, the method uses the leach rate of elements from the desert varnish (accumulated atmospheric debris) which covers the rock motifs, to deduce their age. Carbon dating, as the name suggests, is only useful where there are organic elements such as bone or charcoal which are adjacent to and, by implication, of a similar age as the artifact under study. There are very few examples of rock art panels conveniently buried under such material. The imprecision of dating pictographs may go some way to explaining the disfavor in which they languish in the academic world. These artifacts exist in an uncomfortable zone where neither accurate dating nor any certainty of meaning or signification is possible.

Megaliths were sometimes placed over burials, and therefore capable of being accurately dated but inspired amateurs such as Francis Hitching remain free to speculate on matters of signification. He argues that the major monuments of megalithic man which, like Stonehenge, are dated to between four and five thousand years ago (and continued in use beyond the beginnings of the Christian era), were concrete realizations of both astronomical abstractions and subterranean electro-magnetic currents. Both notions are broadly supported by scientific evidence.

In the 10,000 years prior to the great age of megaliths, Paelolithic humans had, it seems, been mostly focused on representing hunting totems. Similarly, the oldest rock art in North America attempts the representation of mega-fauna such as long-extinct camelids. While that tradition continued with drawings of, for instance, big horn sheep, well into the historic period there is also a coherent tradition of abstract symbols that appear to tie in with the geomantic and astronomical concerns of the makers of stone circles, dolmens and standing stones. In southern California, there are several instances of solstice alignments in caves and ridge notches as well as incised spirals and concentric circles that likely reference energy vortices.

In Ojai-speak, we might consider these ancient glyphs as denoting currents of rhythmic life-energy. The notion is in common currency - Conde Naste Traveler magazine references Ojai’s “famous magnetic vortex", and Ojai’s “storied electromagnetic forces” in a recent article about the appeal of the area. The Chumash preferred painting to pecking rock and their surviving designs clearly reference astronomical events. But is it possible that the vigor of the life force that runs through these valleys left no need for lithic amplification or painted signification? That the local good vibrations could be exalted in a kind of heedless hedonism whereas in the gloom of Europe, for instance, heroic effort needed to be expended in the production and tracing of a feeble charge -  a quavering echo of the universal life force which courses so strongly through Ojai?

Tip-toe Through the Killing Fields

On a warm August evening a super-moon had just risen above Sulphur Mountain and the grey and golden grasslands of Happy Valley were framed by the silhouette of the distant Nordhoff range (softened in the gloaming); the Topatopa bluffs (which glowed faintly with the day’s last remaining light) and Sulphur Mountain’s oaks (massed into a dimpled, darkling terrain). Cleared of their native oaks, then later cleared of serried ranks of European walnuts (grafted onto native root-stock), the grasslands now conjured, over their 400 odd acres, a faded pastoral idyll.

 The place resonated: and it was into the unearthly timbre of this dream-like landscape that the audience was pitched as we left the Zalk theater after a stunning performance by Chankethya Chey, late of the Royal Ballet of Cambodia.

Now resident in the United States (after earning a degree in choreography at UCLA) she appeared as a part of the Ojai Playwrights Conference having work-shopped her piece, My Mother and I with a director and a dramaturge. Over the course of the evening it became clear that the notion of her mother included her birth parent, her dance master (a woman) and her Country. All four dramatis personae survived the rape and murder of the failed Khmer social revolution (and its aftermath) and Kethya’s attempted reckoning is communicated through the stylized gestural language of the Royal Ballet overlain with antic influences of modern and urban dance.

Released into the heady rapture of that summer’s eve, my thoughts immediately turned to the miracle we had witnessed: a classical art-form, preserved and re-energized, that had somehow survived Pol Pot’s program of cultural genocide. The ironies unfolded more slowly.

As Eric Hobsbawm details in The Age of Extremes, A History of the World, 1914-1991, the Khmer Rouge were part of a tide of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutions that swept Africa and Asia in the 1970’s. The U.S defeat in Indochina reinforced the advance of communism and socialist regimes were established in all of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. He notes that in the latter case, under the leadership of Pol Pot, there arose “a particularly murderous combination of Paris café Maoism…and the armed backwoods peasantry bent on destroying the degenerate civilization of the cities”.

Pol Pot’s attempt to root out the effete cultural traits of urban intellectual life had a horrendous impact on such institutions as the Royal Ballet where, of the 190 ballet corps and principals, only forty survived. More generally, of Cambodia’s estimated 380,000 artists and intellectuals, just three hundred, by some counts, escaped the genocide. Removed from power after the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, the Khmer Rouge, under Chinese and American patronage, lived on in camps along the Thai border and remained a force in Cambodian politics - their flag flew in New York City, as sanctioned representatives of their country to the U.N. - until 1993. Kethya was born in 1985.

Mythology (as limned on the carved surfaces of the great tenth century temple and palace complex of Angkor Wat) attributes the beginnings of Cambodia’s dance tradition to a time when warring gods and demons churned the cosmic ocean, and celestial dancers called apsaras emerged from the froth (Brian Siebert, NYT). In Angkorian culture the human manifestations of these mystical beings became handmaidens to the court of the Empire (802-1431).

Most of the great monuments of the ancient and medieval worlds were built using forced labor. In the twentieth century, the Soviet and Chinese gulags, along with the labor camps of Nazi Germany, supplied much of the human energy required to create massive infrastructure projects. The great temple and palace monuments of Angkor Wat were similarly built by conscripted peasant labor and slaves captured from neighboring territories.

The complex has come to symbolize the country but it also represents the millennium of impoverished serfdom suffered by Cambodia’s peasants up until the declaration of the Republic in 1975. In a fiercely hierarchical society, court dance served the divine aspirations of the ruling family: as a State sponsored cultural expression, an aspect of its mission was to shore up the spurious mystical foundations of princely privilege. It was this privilege, along with the support provided by an urban, educated and cultured upper-middle class, that Pol Pot set out to destroy.

The almost-annihilation of Cambodian classical dance was a profound example of the collateral damage he inflicted on the country’s traditional arts: and it was the ghost of an apsara, nurtured in centuries of aristocratic co-option, that danced with Kethya that balmy August evening, remaining haughtily composed despite the alien influences of the globalized dance stylings with which Kethya surrounded her.

It is, perhaps, a matter for debate as to the extent to which the oppressed can authentically use the tools of an oppressor in their attempted overthrow. Or, as with Kethya, use a language of oppression to critique the history of a revolutionary force intent on that language’s destruction. It’s complicated. But certainly not lacking in irony.

Here in the United States we are long removed from our killing fields and long indoctrinated to ignore their dark shadow. The last vestige of Native resistance to the implacable forces of American imperialism was acted out in dance. As I suggested in Hoop Dreams, the development of the Ghost Dance, a mash-up of the Plains Indian round-dance, spiritual revivalism, end-times prophecy, trance states and incitement to destroy the white race was, as much as anything, a loose aggregation of stress symptoms. The movement originated in areas of profound spiritual and geographic dislocation - the Indian Reservations - where the survivors of the holocaust lived lives that were a macabre caricature of their authentic nomadic being.

James Mooney (1861-1921) was a self-taught ethnographer with the Bureau of American Ethnology from 1885 to 1921. His most notable work was in the study of the Ghost Dance. In 1894 he made a series of recordings of songs associated with the movement. Amidst the scratch and hiss of the recordings, a late nineteenth century American brogue is discernible droning Native American incantations - for these are his renderings of the anthemic Indian chants.

The Ghost Dance was once and forever ended with the killing of Sitting Bull at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. His are renderings after the fact. He sings in remembrance - in the voice of the oppressor.

In whose voice does Chankethya Chey speak?

Ancient Super Seed Secret

In The Three Sages, I wrote about three local salvias –black, white and purple - no mention of chia, Salvia columbariae (the most important sage to the Chumash) the seeds of which are now consumed daily in our breakfast cereal, bread and health drinks. Dr Oz (among others) proclaims it to be an Ancient Super Seed Secret. It was a staple in the diet of many indigenous peoples. Referencing C.L. Bard’s A Contribution to the History of Medicine in Southern California, Southern California Practioner, August 1894, Jan Timbrook notes,

“Perhaps the most widely used phrase in California Ethnobotany is Bard’s assertion that one tablespoon of chia seeds was sufficient to sustain for 24 hours an Indian on a forced march".

More than a century later, the hyperbole continues.

My goal in The Three Sages was partly to raise awareness of this species that thrives on the fringes of the chaparral and to encourage a minimal sage literacy. How then could I ignore columbariae? The simple fact is that until a few days ago I had experienced but a single chia sighting, on Shelf Road, some four years ago (In Search of a Shaman’s Lair). All that changed on a recent hike up Horn Canyon.

Was it a Thacher lacrosse field that lay to my left on the way up to the trail head? Young athletes lounged on the field, their sophisticated ball catchers sprawled around them, mostly unaware that this game had derived from a geographically alien culture (East-coast woodland Indians) and were they to participate in simulacrum of a local indigenous sport then on-line poker would be infinitely more appropriate (the Chumash were gambling-mad). Unless, that is, they were interested in achieving an altered state of consciousness, in which case ultra-marathoning might appeal to these louche wannabe Spartans. Fueled by the ancient super seed, local Indians performed prodigious acts of mind-altering distance-running.

Meanwhile, a young equestrian crossed my path and trotted up a nearby rise. The Spanish, agents of the Indian genocide, had, of course, re-introduced the horse to California in the late eighteenth century after the original Asian immigrants had hunted Equus ferus ferus to extinction at the end of the Ice Age some ten thousand years before.

Best not, perhaps, to trouble these young minds with the difficult paradoxes of pre-history. I passed by, intent on broaching the wildlands that beckoned beyond.

Yellow-gold petals from bush poppies were sprinkled along the trail. The rocky path was shaded by cottonwoods, bays and oaks as it followed Thacher Creek. Horticulturally, it was a quiet beginning: the usual suspects of lupin, mimulus, vetch, blue dicks, eriodictylon, occasionally woolly painbrush and, of course, the bush poppy grew along the clearing in the dominant chamise chaparral.

As I climbed beyond The Pines camp site at 3250 feet, the vegetation grew more interesting – dodder, wooly blue curls, manzanita, bush oaks and then………..chia! It grew, demurely, on either side of the trail amongst the companionable blue blossoms of blue dicks, black sage, and yerba santa: a few florets still clung to the seed heads which, in a week or two, would be ready for harvesting.

I imagined that long ago forbears of these annual plants had been seeded from spillage from burden baskets carried by Chumash women (secured with a tumpline - a broad strap supported by the woman’s brow) as they returned from the legendary chia fields at the foot of the Toptopa range. As M. Kat Anderson explains in Tending the Wild, 2005, Chumash grassland burning practices encouraged the growth of selected seed crops. The cessation of this practice, combined with the inroads made by introduced plant species has caused a drastic decline in the abundance of chia (Timbrook). It is now grown commercially from Kentucky to Argentina, but here in the erstwhile happy gathering grounds of the Chumash, it is increasingly rare - easier to find on supermarket shelves than in the wild.

Thus the commodification of the wildland continues at a cost to the authentic experience. Goji berries promise to provide the longevity of Himalayan Tibetans while chia seeds guarantee the endurance of the Tumarahara and Chumash trail runners (In Search of a Shaman's Lair). Context is everything. I can assure you that your endurance will improve if you regularly climb out of the valley to about 5,000 feet and harvest your breakfast cereal and then carry it back in a Juncus rush burden basket, mix some with a little spring water and knock it back. Similarly, the sparse diet of the traditional Tibetan, with or without goji berries would almost certainly prolong the lives of the WEIRD (Jared Diamond’s acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic). Dr. Oz’s medicine show promotes Chia pudding, Click here for the complete recipe, but absent the primitive life-style of the indigenous people your health benefits may vary.

Authenticity in Landscape, Life and (Lacrosse?) is hard won. Edward Abbey, whom I have only recently begun to read, represents someone who, although fundamentally WEIRD (but never Rich and as an Anarchist, questionably Democratic),  possessed an inviolable authenticity. He writes, in Desert Solitaire, 1968, that his aim, as he begins a summer as a park ranger in Moab is to,

“confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock that sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities.”

Farley Mowatt, the Canadian writer whose death at 92 was announced today had a similar ethos: he adopted the diet of the Artic wolves he was studying (eating wood rats and other rodents) in order to understand their true nature. He later fictionalized his researches as Never Cry Wolf, 1963. Peter Matthiessen, who died earlier this year, never wavered from his fierce advocacy of the wildlands and its creatures. His first book, Wildlife in America, 1959, was published three years before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and initiated a half century of researching and writing about endangered species. In The Birds of Heaven, Travels with Cranes, 2001, he writes,

“In this brilliant winter light, against black tree trunks and white snow, the red-crowned crane moves and turns like the quick heart of life, as dark evergreens, in their impenetrable stillness, breathe the imminence of the great mystery looming behind.”

Such lyricism can be the reward for an authentic immersion into the natural world. All I’m saying is a life in Ojai demands an engagement of its wildlands. A friend who lives on a lane off of Thacher Road mentioned that in her ten years of living in Ojai, she had never seen a deer. I suppose it would be possible, immured in Manhattan, to never see a yellow cab. But can either life be considered authentic to the place where it is lived?

Shell Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ancient Bestiary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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