Being Local

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

"As we move into a connection economy, where the tool that matters most is the one that we can carry with us, the idea of geography fades very quickly. How do we juxtapose that post-geography with the post- industrial to create actual value?"

Thus spake Seth Godin, in conversation with Jedediah Jenkins in the 2016 issue of Wilderness Magazine. Godin is proclaimed in the article's title as The True Master of Intentional Living. In reality, he is an accomplished marketing huckster - selling books, courses and seminars on “relativity, productivity and ideation”. He has found his niche within the world of the gig-economy where its participants surf the planet seeking the next wave in an endless summer of rootless short term employment opportunities, buoyed only by the relational networks built on past performances and where one's self-belief is supported by a variety of psychological, spiritual and physical routines conflated into 'life-styles'. He is, in short, the product of end-of-days capitalism and the reductio ad absurdum of Rationalism. He, and others of his ilk, pursue their trade in the slop of spent waves, where broken dreams meet disillusionment and deracination: where the tool that matters most, your brain, is almost entirely disconnected from the body's physical setting - where uprootedness is endemic.

This condition of anomie can be traced back to the 60's and 70's when a grassroots youth-driven movement (pioneered by the Hippies) that demanded greater personal authenticity, creativity and empowerment within a hierarchical and sexist corporate employment sphere was taken by those ossified corporations as an opportunity to increase employment flexibility (as a sop to those demands) and simultaneously to reduce job security and benefits. Thus ended what the French call Les Trente Glorieuses, those thirty post war years when income disparities diminished, a functioning social safety net existed in most western economies and, in America, the dreams of a burgeoning middle class were largely realized.

This process confirmed, particularly amongst young wage earners, the rootlessness already well established in America, by privileging those willing to relocate to secure employment. Home town allegiances were increasing usurped by placelessness and the beginnings of Godin's post-geography world. Employers and entrepreneurs responded to the attacks on corporate capitalism for its bureaucracy, inflexibility and uniformity by presenting new justifications based on self-actualization, freedom and authentic community for young people to buy-in to the capitalist system in the post-industrial world. Thus Godin both expresses and propogates the values that Luc Boltanski & Eve Chiapello describe in their book, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 2005, by which the prevailing system of oppressive consumption and production successfully coopts new generations of willing victims.

Values of craft, artisanal production, third world travel and organic agriculture are now being added to the inducements by which twenty-first century hipsters are drawn into the capitalist maw. Wilderness Magazine is complicit in this process; and now, Collective Quarterly has published their Topa Topa issue, focused on the triangle between Santa Barbara to the west, Ojai to the east, and Ventura to the south, in an almost perfect celebration of local centers of this new, artisanal spirit of capitalism. Marketed across the United States (the copy I saw was purchased in Brooklyn), it promotes localism as practiced (in the first seven issues) in Marfa, Texas; the Absaroka Mountains, in the Montana Wyoming borderlands; Topa Topa, Ventura County, California; Mad River Valley, Vermont; Pisgah National Forest, North Carolina; Penobscot, Maine; and the Mojave Desert, California. It represents a movable feast of intense regional hipster-lifestyle irruptions often consumed, I would guess, by the haute bourgeoisie of urban, coastal enclaves as place porn.

Committed to placelessness by the demands of a global economy, where one place provides the same divertissements and services as another, there is, nevertheless, an intense interest in the mystique of rootedness, but very little commitment to the slow aggregation of geographic connection that results from staying put. As Godin will tell you, the establishment of networks is necessary for the securing one's next gig and demands both social and spatial fluidity: the establishment of deep, enduring local roots will likely lead to exclusion from the ranks of peripatetic, successful network builders. It is thus that the power of place has been usurped by the power of real and virtual linkages spread across the world’s array of urban nodes bound within an electronic web. Weekend voyeurism or, at a remove, printed or electronic simulacra of particularly charismatic places, is the necessary antidote to a world where material reward lies in movement not stasis, in temporary residence not deep connection.

Building those profound connections is a necessarily slow process and is rewarded with nothing much more than the intellectual and perhaps spiritual frisson that comes from an understanding of the relationship between time and place. The uncovering of the natural, cultural and geologic layers that constitute the genius loci, or spirit of a place, may take years: but it is an endeavor to which I am currently committed here in Upper Ojai, the furthest, easternmost point of the Topa Topa triangle celebrated in Collective Quarterly. It involves the re-engagement of “the tool that matters most” with the physical substance of the world so that identity is no longer confined to personhood but extends outward to the material and spiritual expressions of the natural world.

Over time, we can fully inhabit our immediate world and that world may insinuate itself into our being. Our network begins to consist not of professional referrals and potential creative collaborators but of local rocks, trees, animals and earth-forms which provide conduits not to future material enrichment but to potential etheric energies – to a primitive spiritual power not pecuniary profit.

So it is that I resent time spent away from my exo-environment. It represents time spent away from who I am becoming; from time in which my authentic identity is incrementally extending beyond my physical body. Urie Bronfenbrenner, the Russian American developmental psychologist (1917-2005), founded a social ecological model which takes account of a child's development within the context of the systems of relationship that form his or her environment. My continuing development, it seems to me, is dependent on the uncovering of the layers of the natural world that immediately surround me. It is a reversion to my experience as a child growing up in a small English village where walking, playing and going to the village school was intensely bound to the hedgerows, fields, ponds, woods and common-lands that insinuated themselves into our young lives.

We all interact with our environment at a variety of scales – and gain information from it from the global to the granular, yet we remain time bound, operating within a finite life cycle: a close engagement with the natural world presents opportunities to live outside of time, to understand the larger, universal cycles and to gain information at a cosmic scale. Ironically, this can only be achieved, it seems, by focusing at the smallest level on that which immediately envelops us. Additionally, this focus can most usefully occur over long spans of time where it results in the wisdom that accrues to locals – those who choose to live their lives with a deep and constant attachment to a place. It is a choice that is increasingly becoming a luxury.

It is unlikely that the benefits of such a commitment will accrue to those who consume artisanal, craft, organic agriculture and permaculture products and the journals that promote them without dedicating themselves, at some level, in some place, to being local.

House and Garden

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

Urbanwildland is a neologism derived from the term Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) in general use by fire fighting agencies at least since the 1980’s and used to codify the expansion of urban development into traditionally wilderness areas which has increasingly brought humans into contact with wildfires. The International Wildland-Urban Interface Code (IWUIC, 2011) notes that between 1985 and 1994, wildfires destroyed more than 9,000 homes in the United States and goes on to explain that these homes were usually located in areas “where structures and other human development meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland or vegetative fuels”.

It did not require a huge stretch of the imagination to coin the word urbanwildland which rather than being focused on the wildfire issue, describes more generally the frontier beyond exurbia - the edge condition that exists where human development encroaches on erstwhile wilderness areas. It also describes the place where I have chosen to live and make a garden (at least as far as that practice concerns the relationship of the human being to his or her natural surroundings).

The area surrounding human habitation and under the influence of its presence, can never be fully wild since we, as a species, have long lost our place in the wilderness and have constructed, over the last ten thousand years or so, an alternate realm known as civilization. Thus the buffer zone that we inevitably create around our shelters is not wilderness because it has our mark on it, the mark, however unintended, of civilization. As such, this zone has the characteristics of a garden because it not only mediates our remaining connections to the natural world but also physically links us to the infrastructure and appurtenances of civilization, if only via a driveway or a path.

I would suggest that the word is also shadowed by some of the notions that inspired the very first gardens created five thousand years ago in Persia, which were created to symbolize the four Zoroastrian elements of sky, earth, water and plants. This is true at least to the extent that the interstice between the two contrasting realms of urbanwildland can serve as a meditative or even transcendent space in which can be explored our relationship to the unknown, or spiritual powers of the universe; a space in which these ancient garden elements can be transformed into a powerful symbolic language that has the potential for revelation.

Hence urbanwildland, in both the meaning of the word, in describing a place or an ecological condition, and in this blog, there is license to reference both the wild and the civilized (or urban), as well as, and perhaps most importantly, the point at which (somewhere between the middle ‘n’ and the ‘w’) they come together and, as I have argued, create a garden and, potentially, a place of spiritual repose. In other words, the two sticks, labelled ‘Wild’ and ‘Urban’ when rubbed together have the ability to make fire - the characteristic to which the Wildland-Urban Interface terminology is directed. They can also make, by that same process of friction, and with a similar level of inevitability, a garden - and that is precisely the propensity that I celebrate in my writing.

So, after all these years, I find that I have been writing a Gardening Blog. Just recently I have had Russell Page and his autobiography, The Education of a Gardener, 1962, at my side. While I burble on more or less in real time as my experience of the urbanwildland unfolds, he had the wisdom to write a single career capping book. Doris Lessing wrote of him in her blurb, “Did you know that we have living among us a master gardener as great as any of those of the past?”

In his youth, Page was a follower of Gurdjieff; later he studied Sufism and his work was profoundly influenced by the principles of Islamic design. Just a few pages into his book a reader becomes aware of his uncanny spatial sensitivities: he suggests that every object “sends out vibrations beyond its physical body” and that there is “interplay between objects”. He believes that the artful arrangements of elements can produce a kind of magic, and can thus elevate a garden to being a work of art. Despite his mystical leanings, the bulk of his book lays out the very straightforward principles that inform his design work, which quickly spread from his pre-war work in England to Europe, immediately after the war, and eventually, to major commissions in America.

His book has led me to question the ways in which the few rough acres that surround our house, which consist of a mix of slowly regenerating chaparral, coastal sage scrub and oak meadowland, can be considered a garden, and in what ways the land is marked by ‘civilization’ or, at the very least, human intentionality. There is an easy answer supplied by the title of M. Kat Anderson’s book, Tending the Wild, 2013, which deals with all the ways that California’s indigenous people impacted the landscape in their quest to find food and shelter, and while I have indeed been occupied in tending the native landscape (for primarily aesthetic reasons) there have also been, in the intrusive act of placing a house on the landscape, a rearrangement of objects (and their emanations) that fits fully within the Pageian definition of a garden.

He writes, “most houses need anchoring to their setting” and benefit from being sited on a level area of ground. He disparages structures that are perched precariously on a hillside (and certainly not a hilltop) or appear to grow out of vertiginous terrain. He is a designer of great simplicity and common sense. When initially confronted with our newly purchased acreage of mostly sloping, rocky and heavily vegetated land, our first act was to select a site for the house around which the existing plantings, rocks and major trees might plausibly become the bones of its garden.

Half way up the dominant north-south slope, which is cradled between a steep eastern rise of chaparral and a minor, rock-strewn spine scattered with walnuts, mountain mahogany and holly-leafed cherry, we settled on a location just below a stand of oaks that rises out of a rocky bank. Although beguiled by the substantial shade of the oaks which make the mound and its trees corporeal - a giant in the landscape - we were not unaware of the view upon which this arboreal colossus gazed: but our primary attention was rooted to the spot. Page warns of the tyranny of the view in which “one’s interest is torn between the garden pattern with its shapes and colors in the foreground and the excitement of the distant view”. The mounding trees possessed a primal rootedness that spoke to a notion of what our future house could become.

In the nineteenth century a path, Page notes, was customarily built around the perimeter of the house and in his judgement this leaves it “high and dry and destroys any possible relationship between house and garden”. But elsewhere he extols gravel or stone terraces leading from the house out into the garden and the borrowed landscapes beyond. In our situation, ever mindful of living in both the urbanwildland and the Wildland-Urban Interface, there was a requirement to remove the house from the vegetative fuels that comprise our found garden. Thus it sits on an entirely graveled bench – the flat area between cutting and filling the slope. This level area is contained by the new, steeper slopes produced by cutting to the north and filling to the south (which were hydro-seeded with a mix of native grasses and forbs), to the west by the aforementioned spine and to the east by the oak mound. We did follow one of Page’s rules by introducing an element of pattern to the gravel: immediately bordering the house we used ¾” crushed rock and separated by an embedded ipe 2 x 6, finer crushed rock for the field. Paige might have used a mix of split and saw-cut local sandstone which he notes “fits well in a very informal garden”. Our garden is formally ordered only to the extent necessary for circulation and fire protection while retaining most of the informality of the surrounding chaparral. While local sandstone is plentiful, its cutting is now prodigiously expensive.

Page fully understands the elemental, Zorastrian power that water plays in garden design. He writes, ‘water seems to course on the planet’s surface as blood through the body”. Even a contrivance such as a swimming pool can be effective in referencing this fundamental source of energy and life. Formally, a simple rectangle of still water can make a powerful garden boundary. We chose to place our pool three steps above the surrounding terrace, parallel to the house and backed into the up-hill slope. The horizon lies far above it, dancing along the Topatopa bluffs, but the reflective pool water brings the sky down to the ground and integrates it into the other garden elements of water, earth and plants.

There is, after seven years, a seeming inevitability to this composition of gravel, water, oaks, sage-scrub meadows and borrowed views of true chaparral wilderness. As Page writes of one of his creations in Piedmont, “it is, in one sense, a synthesis and a symbol of the nature and essence of the place, its earth and air and water and what I must call the humanities – the house, its period and its builders”.

It is, above all, a garden.

Pastoral Rooms

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

Lawrence Buell (The Environmental Imagination, 1995), writes that Thoreau practices the embedment of pretty pastoral rooms within a radical critique of urbanism and chastises him for turning away from social confrontation "for the sake of immersion in a simplified Green world". The environmental movement is predicated on a similar tendency to valorize the wild and to pillory the urban for whatever faults it sees in our world now or in an imagined future. Here at Urban Wildland, I attempt a fluid analysis of our predicament which privileges neither urban nor wild and indeed, neither past nor present: our shared future is the river in which these temporal and physical tributaries come together. Our individual consciousness is influenced by similar complexities of time and material circumstance, and in the black and white textual rooms to which I fully admit to retreating, there continue to be useful revelations pertinent to an understanding of the process. Hence this week’s Book Report.

Joan Grant was an extraordinary English writer who wrote the global best seller Wings of the Pharaoh, a historical romance, in 1937. She first visited the United States in 1914 aboard the Lusitania (yes, the very same ship that was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland in 1916 and became the proximate cause for America's entry into WWI) and returned in 1964 with her third husband Denys Kelsey (known to her as 'K', like Krishnamurti, in what is unlikely to have been an entirely unconscious conflation) on the Queen Elizabeth to visit the center for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach where she and Denys would lecture on Reincarnation. Now, her granddaughter Nicki Bennett (a recently widowed, treasured friend in Ojai), is returning to England on the Queen Mary II to take up residence in Edinburgh.

There is, between these several voyages, a fascinating tale which I will leave Nicki to weave. But before she left, I took a shrink wrapped copy of A Lot to Remember, 1962, Grant's travel memoir re-issued in 1980, beautifully cloth bound in a pale sage green, no dust jacket, but instead a purple imprint of the author's mesmeric eyes and bewitching eyebrows on the front cover, from a carton of same before placing the box in a storeroom of the Ojai house which Nicki has now left.

The book concerns the author's time in the Dordogne, and focuses on the architectural and scenic splendors of the towns and villages along the river Lot and on life amidst the Lotoise, particularly those involved in what we would now call the hospitality industry. It is, to be frank, a slight volume both in heft and literary pretension, but it is enlivened by Joan's psychic relations with what she calls 'spooks' which inhabit an alternate plane of reality to which she is acutely attuned. The region's history is drenched in bloody dynastic and religious rivalries and grotesqueries lurk in ruined manorial piles, chateaux, abbeys and fortifications scattered amidst the now placid countryside. Eternally damned torturers, murderers and fallen priests are sent on the way of reincarnation by Joan's sensitive analysis of their plight and her powers of love and forgiveness - expressed in Christic epigrams, presumably delivered in her fractured French.

At other times, she fully inhabits her role as a prototypical upper-middle class bohemian Englishwoman dispensing gobs of noblesse oblige over the French countryside. Accompanied by her second husband and later by her third, gallivanting, gourmandizing and practicing what she calls her Far Sight, she is at once entertaining and annoyingly precious. The couples’ choice of steed is carefully selected for their progress along farm tracks, minor ‘D’ roads, rustic Rue Principales and Routes Nationales, the system of ‘N’ roads which largely follow ancient Roman routes; for it is an Armstrong Siddeley, perhaps a Sapphire, which has as its hood ornament a sphinx, adopted as the company's logo in 1912 after a journalist described an early model as ‘as silent and inscrutable as the sphinx'. One of Joan's alter egos (or more accurately, previous incarnations) is Sekeeta, the daughter of a Pharoah and heroine of her first book. Joan enjoyed many lives in Egypt, recollecting them in another three Far Memory books, Eyes of Horus (1942), Lord of the Horizon (1943) and So Moses was Born (1952). Looking across the long-hooded car, the sphinx imperiously leading the way, the French countryside is deconstructed beneath her penetrating gaze.

Jonathon Bate's exhaustive biography, John Clare (2003), is my current sleepy-time, lights-out soporific. ‘The peasant poet’, was one of a cohort of British Romantic poets in the early nineteenth century, which included, most famously, Keats, Byron, Cowper and Tennyson. Clare, briefly famous in the 1820’s, saw his work begin to gain a new level of popularity in the 1980’s and his work continues to be discovered by readers charmed by his poetic descriptions of the English countryside and galvanized by his outrage at the injustices of the Enclosure movement which restricted the rights of landless peasants in a process by which highly profitable monocultures replaced small scale arable crops and common-land grazing. Much of the land of which he writes is simultaneously under the threat of creeping Industrialization. Reading him is to experience our world foretold, of nature scarred and compromised and society riven by ever increasing economic injustice.

Ironically, the impoverished Clare, who made almost nothing from his infrequent publications, was supported by members of the aristocracy and for a while became a literary mascot to several of the noble houses which surrounded his humble cottage on the edge of the fens in what is now Cambridgeshire. Briefly feted in London, he risked being integrated into high society but his manic behavior saw him, instead, institutionalized first in a private hospital in Essex and then in a public Lunatic asylum in Northampton where he wrote perhaps his most famous poem, ‘ I Am’, which ends with a fine, transcendentalist howl,

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

He longed to retreat, in other words, from padded cell to pastoral room. Turned solipsistic in his dotage, he abandons his social gaze and is transformed into an admitted “self-consumer of my woes”. Perhaps, a nineteenth century incarnation of Joan could have helped him, for Joan practiced psychotherapy with #2 Charles Beatty and #3 Denys Kelsey in Britain the U.S. and France. Employing a kind of regression therapy, she believed that diagnosing unresolved issues from past lives could assist in the treatment of the patient’s neuroses in their present incarnation. Clare’s hold on his identity was always tenuous – he identified with Byron to the point of re-writing that aristocrat’s poems and on occasion believed that he was Shakespeare. He explained, with admirable candor, “I‘m John Clare now. I was Byron and Shakespeare formerly”.

One of the appeals of Clare’s work is that it is the expression of a true rustic. He knew of what he wrote in a way that Wordsworth, for instance, did not. Clare was a participant in nature, Wordsworth an observer. The nature they both wrote about was part of a pastoral tradition: a land tamed over the ages for the benefit of its human inhabitants. Enclosure represented an extension of pastoralism not its beginnings. Thoreau’s ‘simplified green world’ was, in the case of Walden, an island of second growth forest in a largely deforested countryside. Joan traveled through a similarly compromised environment, but it was exactly the human imprint to which she was attracted, for in that lay the psychic reverberations which were her true subject. Her pastoral rooms existed as traps for superannuated spooks.

My pastoral rooms, to quote Thoreau, “are made out of Chaos and Old Night”. They are not pastoral at all – they are wild, “not mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, not waste-land” - but primal chaparral. This week has been warm and the winds strong. The other evening I arrived home to find that a dead Deerweed plant (Lotus scoparius) had blown up against the front door. It was largely spherical - perhaps three feet in diameter - and it glowed a fiery orange in the sun’s last rays. It appeared as a burning bush, heralding the presence of the wild within the precinct of our home.

My green world is aflame: it is a threat, not a comfort - and there is, I realize, no turning away from the Urban Wildland.

Between the Mountains and the Sea

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

It is not in the books, by which I mean Milt McCauley’s painstaking catalog called Flowers of the Santa Monica Mountains and Wildflowers of Orange County and the Santa Ana Mountains, by Robert L. Allen and Fred M. Roberts; yet it flourishes in the canyons of the southern California cismontane, in the lands between the mountains and the sea; locally, it grows in the upper reaches of Bear Canyon, along the La Broche Canyon trail and alongside the now dry, spill-over washes of Sisar Creek that run down towards State Highway 150; it has even grown in our neighbor’s yard in a patch of south sloping oak meadowland; but it is a flower, now in pink-purple bloom, for which I know no name. It is, in Hawaiian pidgin, da kine (I’m reading William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days, A Surfing Life, 2015), a whatchamacallit or as a botanist might gamble, probably a part of the Asteraceae family (just because this is the largest flower family on the planet).

Its foliage is spikey like an artichoke plant and colored a silvery spearmint green. From a base of incised leaves it sends out sprays of stems to which the one inch diameter flowers are closely attached on short stems bracted along their length. Each of the leaves from which the flowers subtend is a single miniature version of the mess of mostly withered foliage closer to the ground. In spring and winter this foliage alone is remarkable, its silvery color unusual amidst the chaparral drab of sandstone, and the mix of golden and chocolaty soils strewn with dead leaves and twigs beneath the leathery, deep rooted chamise, ceonothus, mountain mahogany, scrub oak and red berry; it favors rocky escarpments and dry stream beds but somehow I had never previously seen it in bloom. At this moment in late summer, its pinkish, purplish ray (or ligulate) flowers dotted along its gracefully arching wands are truly startling.

Get close to the ground at this time of year (when removing tumbleweed perhaps) and another startling vision appears: tiny red and black diamond patterned beetles scuttling around in the dry soil. They too, despite a little desultory web research, remain for the moment, nameless. Barely a quarter of an inch long they demand close-up inspection, and such hands and knees investigations reveal black diamonds on red, crisp, deck-of-cards-like graphics genetically painted onto the hardened–for-battle, heraldic wings of the little creatures.

At another scale, but with the same intense graphic quality, our big rock (ours, because we claim it as a profoundly dense moon anchored in frozen orbit, forever mocking the precarious enfoldment of space that is our house) sitting a hundred feet west of the front door, is this evening a black silhouette against a livid blood-orange sky. The composition is completed by a piercing point of light in the pale grey just above the color wash at the horizon: Venus appears, as the sky darkens, laggardly following the sun into the southern hemisphere, somewhere over the raggedy mountains.

These Santa Ynez Mountains are a famously transverse range on a continent characterized by great north-south cordillera – the axial north-south mountain ranges such as the Rockies, the Andes, the Sierras, the Cascades, and the local coastal ranges such as the Santa Monica and San Bernadino Mountains: running parallel to the Pacific shoreline, these ranges shelter vast, biotically productive plains, watered from their slopes. The Ojai Valley, idiosyncratically, is formed between the tail end of the transverse Santa Ynez range and the parallel Sulphur Mountain ridge.

The lower valley is not squarely between the mountains and the sea, as in archetypal cistmontane, but is instead the terminus of a gently sloping flood plain spread beside the Ventura River and its major local tributary, the San Antonio Creek; it is a valley that points towards the ocean. The upper valley is similarly situated although dramatically bifurcated at the Summit where the focus of its rain shed is split between the Ventura and the Santa Clara rivers. On Koenigstein, our oceanic connection is through Santa Paula which stands at the head of the vast Oxnard Plain, and is a city shaped geomorphically by the transverse South Mountain, the Santa Paula Ridge (last gasp of the Santa Ynez Mountains) and the terminus of Sulphur Mountain.

Surface run-off has but this one route to the ocean from our property – down the hill to Sisar Creek thence to Santa Paula Creek where the co-mingled molecules make their way to the Santa Clara Estuary just north of Point Mugu and into the Pacific. We can replicate this route – more or less – by car and be at Point Mugu Beach in about an hour. Alternatively, we can head west on the 150 and follow (again, more or less) Lion Creek, to San Antonio Creek to the Ventura River and thence to its estuary hard by the County Fairgrounds, where, just a little to the north is Emma Wood State Beach bordered by the South Pacific Coast Railroad and the old Pacific Coast Highway (now usurped by the 101); to the south is C street, Ventura’s in-town surf beach where the eleven year old William Finnegan learnt to surf.

A third beach-bound option is to continue west on the 150, and cross over the Ventura River at Baldwin Road rather than parallel it along the 33, and wind through the hills past Lake Casitas and on towards the 101 just shy of Carpinteria where Rincon’s famous point break awaits a few hundred yards to the south. Santa Barbara is another dozen miles to the north and here, at East Beach, just last weekend, I experienced one of those epiphanies that abound in the natural world and which constituted the third in this late summer group of talismanic black-on-red vignettes.

Standing on the sand, late in the afternoon, bemused by the assortment of shorebirds busy on the beach (curlews, sand pipers, plovers and gulls) I was transfixed by a group of perhaps half a dozen ungainly Black Skimmers (Rynchops Niger) lurking on the periphery. Every so often one of their number would wheel into the sky and swoop over the waves bordering the beach and dredge, with the lower half of its beak, through the water - hoping, presumably, to catch small fish. Back on the beach after each brief foray, the bird lost its aerial grace and assumed its earthbound awkwardness. Most remarkable about this strange group was their oversized and mismatched bills, the lower mandibles being noticeably longer than the upper maxillas and the color of their beaks: brilliant red, tipped with black as though they had been dipped in squid ink, or perhaps in the oil that bubbles up in seeps along this coast.

From January 1970 to early in the 2000’s I too lived ‘A Surfing Life’, rarely living far from the beach and almost always aware of the local surf conditions – a pale reflection of William Finnegan’s whole-hearted commitment and performed athletically at far below his level of skill, which was at an almost professional standard. Having started surfing a few days after my twenty second birthday on Manly Beach in Sydney, I suffered through many years of humiliations before achieving a bare proficiency; then, in my fifties, I lost just enough ability for it to become untenable for me to continue this life into the new century. As Finnegan points out, no one who begins surfing much after their fourteenth birthday is ever going to be any good. He continues to surf well into his sixties but must maintain his fitness level by daily swimming a mile in a basement pool in Manhattan, where he now lives.

Much of the allure of surfing is in the close connection to the ocean it affords its participants. Standing on East Beach in Santa Barbara, I felt disconnected from the rhythm of the sea: I had become a bird-watching by-stander. My Chaparral Life, which began with regular early morning runs in Will Rogers State Historical Park on the north western edge of Los Angeles, at just about the time that I abandoned surfing, usurped the primacy of the ocean as the focus of my existence. This life continues in Ojai, where I remain consumed with trying to achieve a plausible connection to the unknowable complexities and visual richness of an alien environment; it is a life spent in pursuit of tapping in to the strange energies that eddy through the chaparral.

It is, of course, not so very different from the life I began, so many years ago, on Manly Beach.

anatomy theater

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

The smoke from the Sherpa Fire daubs the morning sky in playful streaks of apricot and the smell of burnt brush hangs in the air.

There is, in this election year, as two corrupt, compromised and, it must be said, old candidates, the one a vicious neo-Nazi the other an equally vicious neo-liberal - separated in their lack of probity only by their sex - vie for the presidency of the United States: a sense of End Times; a sense of the imperium collapsing in on itself.

The fire is a natural thing although perhaps maliciously caused, the quadrennial obeisance to Democracy a gruesome tic that now consumes the body politic.

The nation is in deep shadow: late in the day, long past its high noon of power, influence and prestige in the world; signs of environmental collapse are all consuming, and writers everywhere compulsively reflect these twin strands of apocalyptic zeitgeist. Your Urbanwildland scribe follows dutifully along. What if the Federal election was about the recovery of this country’s lost connection with the natural world - about the loss of its animistic soul?

It is at this moment that Annie Proulx’s epic novel Barkskins, 2016, has appeared: the New York Times‘s suggests that “This is a jeremiad about the loss of North America’s “monstrous pine finery,” in the author’s resonant phrase, and thus its weird, old pagan soul”. She chooses, as the epigraph to her multi-generational, 736 page book, a passage from the medieval historian Lynn White Jr.’s seminal eco-theological article, The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis, 1967.

“In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.”

In the last two pieces I have referenced David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, 1996. He makes the point that since the adoption of an alphabet we, as a species, have become distanced from our environment - now veiled by the abstractions of our written language. Where once the natural world was the co-creator of our reality, and we (in our long ago oral traditions) were fully involved in the unfolding of its sensory information, we now see it encoded in the matrices of text: imprisoned in a human construct of abstract symbols. We have lost, he suggests, the ability to hone our consciousness against the whet stone of the biosphere - we are trapped in an iterative loop of purely human intelligence.

Lynn White takes a narrower view, essentially blaming the teachings of Christianity rather than the development of an alphabet for our abusive behavior towards our world. The two are connected. Abram’s notes that the aleph beth (the first semitic alphabet) was an integral part of the Hebrew religion, where the primacy of text was acknowledged in their appellation as ‘People of the Book’. Christianity, an offshoot of this earlier monotheism, gained institutional support only when it was enshrined in the gospels – where it was made clear that divine grace was dispensed not in this world but in an abstract heavenly realm accessible only in death. A full engagement of life on this planet was made secondary to some future off-world paradise with instructions for its access encoded in the Good Book.

This evening a full moon rises over the east ridge and to the west, three brownish-purple bars streak the sky, watery vapors of dust, debris and smoke from the fire splayed across the flesh of an evening sky like striated bruises.

Annie Proulx writes,

“I am sure that wild natural woodlands are the only true forests. The entire atmosphere — the surrounding air, the intertwined roots, the humble ferns and lichens, insects and diseases, the soil and water, weather. All these parts seem to play together in a kind of wild grand orchestra. A forest living for itself rather than the benefit of humankind.”

The wild, fire-burnt sky that floats over the westerly sea is resonant with the grandly sonorous tones of an oboe.

This country’s overt linkage of Christianity with Republican politics and neoliberal economics was established in the 1950’s under Eisenhower, when our national motto, ‘In God We Trust’ and a new line in the Pledge of Allegiance, “one nation under God” were coined (Kevin Cruse, One Nation Under God, 2015). Now Democrats too, are subject to the same conflation of their politics and Christianity. Who will stand, in this country, for the pagan animism that might lead it out of its environmental morass?

For my Father’s Day treat, I was taken to Redcat, the performance space founded by CalArts beneath Disney Hall where we saw the world premiere of an LA Opera production, anatomy theater. Composed by David Lang with a libretto by Lang and Mark Dion, it is set in the early 18th century, and features the hanging of a murderess and her subsequent public dissection, ostensibly conducted for the scientific purpose of discovering where evil might reside, manifested as some deformity in her vital organs. “Where does evil lie” is a recurring refrain and it occurred to me that this enquiry might be directed towards our country’s existential electoral plight.

As we confront our contemporary choice between two white, pasty-faced, cosmetically enhanced cadavers, who will be publically dissected by the press and the citizenry over a long summer and fall before November’s voting, we may all soon harbor such metaphoric imaginings. Splayed on a dissecting table tilted towards the audience, a naked Peabody Southwell, playing dead but occasionally singing, represents the body politic: her bleeding Christian heart, and her viscera (redolent with the stench of politics?) and finally her Lady Liberty parts are extracted from her pale body, Filipino psycho-surgeon style, in a fruitless search for Evil, or more prosaically an answer to ‘where did she/we go wrong?’

David Abram would suggest that human awareness has folded in on itself, and transfixed by technology, we have short circuited the sensory connections that we once made with the earth and have thus denied ourselves the opportunity to be fully human in a world we recognize as much more than human. Annie Proulx echoes Lynn White Jr. in believing that we must come once more to revere not a universal, distant deity but the local gods of place and the spirits and sprites that inhabit the living planet and its earthen mantle. These are meta-prescriptions. Cosmic shifts in consciousness from our current position where the only demand we make of our leaders is that our society is managed to better support our acquisitiveness and that the resulting consumption is more closely aligned to the few or the many depending on our philosophy. But they are also shifts that can be initiated in tiny incremental acts of observation and reverence.

Last night, the full moon’s reflection in the swimming pool (left uncovered to let it cool it down) attracted swarms of white moths (Caenurgina erechtea). Many flew too close to the pool’s lunar illusion: in the early morning its dark water was patterned with drowned moths, their pale wings still stretched in flight.

Local

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

Thoreau threw up a hut in the woods partly of recycled building materials sourced in his local town of Concord, Mass. It was, at ten by fifteen feet, not far off of the dimensions of a hojo, and served much the same minimalist function as the zen monk's traditional cell - a place deliberating lacking in the fripperies of the age that might, whether in medieval Japan or mid-nineteenth century America, focus the mind on the deep pulse of the universe.

When it worked, this simple dwelling, often situated in rural or wild settings, enabled its inhabitant to recognize that his (for it was usually a man) own intrinsic life force was beating within the more expansive rhythms of the cosmos. The simplicity of a life lived locally, within a shelter that barely kept its inhabitant warm and dry, with a food supply foraged, hunted or grown within walking distance, only occasionally provisioned by an itinerant rice merchant (or supplemented by merchants in the local town), heightened an awareness of humankind's larger, universal context. To live small was to think large.

A life lived locally was barely possible in 1850's America. Thoreau's attempt, essentially bankrolled by Emerson, and in large and small ways dependent on the support systems of an eastern seaboard intricately enmeshed in mercantile relations with the Southern states, the Caribbean and Europe, was a conceit: he was an anachronistic artist living on the fringes of a burgeoning global economy and living within earshot of an iron-road that would shortly open up his own continent to economic and cultural despoliation.

That was then. We are now even less capable of successfully living ‘Local’. Our attempts are doomed to fail in the face of a thoroughly co-mingled planet. Any pretense at limiting our individual impact to a particular place, to our locale, can only be maintained by denying the realities of our twenty-first century world. In truth, local has not been viable since we, as a species, moved off the plains of the Serengeti in search of specialized ecological niches across the world, where plenty in some aspect of sustenance inevitably encouraged trade with other groups who produced a surplus in another. We are done with Local. It is a pre-historical fantasy, it is stone-punk: it is intellectually, practically and morally dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Mired in the metaphysics of western thought, stuck in the tar-patch of individual identity, there is little possibility of denying our global interconnections with the material world. And yet, perhaps there is a Way.

We are consumed with the impact of our agency. What if we are but shards of a greater consciousness reified in moments of perceiving the natural world? It may be that it is not so much a matter of our effect on the environment, of consuming locally, but of perceiving locally and allowing the presence of the natural world to fill the absence within us.

Turns out that these vague premonitions of the relationship between being and Nature are cogently investigated in a slim volume I purchased recently at Banyen Books in Kitsilano, Vancouver, where there were displayed several shelves of works devoted to eco-psychology and ecological ethics. Hunger Mountain, helpfully subtitled A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape, David Hinton, Shambala, 2012, is a gem. It is a remarkable primer both to Chinese cosmology as reflected in the language’s graphs (alternatively, glyphs or characters) and to one of its major works, the Tao Te Ching.

I wrote the last couple of paragraphs whilst waiting for my car’s tires to be rotated at Fred’s Tireman in Oak View. The mountains are not so much a presence here as in other parts of the valley, and as I looked around, I focused less on nature than on the works of entrepreneurial humankind, wondering at the survival of an odd selection of stores that eke out a living for their owners in the harsh economic climate of this beleaguered township. Here, in front of me, exactly in a row, as in some sort of ecological climax community of the tawdry were Donuts and More; Nails Forever; Herbs of Hope; 805 Vapes Vapor Lounge; His ‘n’ Hairs; Gold ‘n’ Essence Tanning Salon; and anchoring the eastern end of this block, the unimaginatively titled Oak View Coffee. Across the street is the newly opened Jack’s Dollar Plus. Then it’s Ojai Valley Muffler; Rte. 33 Laundry; and the about to open Ojai Valley MAMA (Modern American Martial Arts) before the stand-alone red-trimmed Ojai Valley Glass which sits next to Fred’s.

On the stretch of the State Highway from the PCH, through Casitas Springs (Bait and Liquor), Oak View and Mira Monte, the commercial presence might reasonably be considered woeful to those of bourgeois tastes and proclivities, but like the drought-plagued plants of the chaparral, the very persistence of its stores and services and the unfailing optimism of the new ones that replace the failed, against all the economic odds, possesses a kind of grandeur. Their openings and closings represent the ongoing process of transformation, in which all things arise and pass away, that is at the very heart of the Taoist understanding of the cosmos.

In his introduction to Mountain Home: The Wilderness poetry of Ancient China, Counterpoint, 2002, Hinton notes that “for two millennia, China’s tradition of rivers and mountains (shan-shui) poetry represents the earliest and most extensive literary engagement with wilderness in human history”. In Hunger Mountain, he proposes that it is the pictographic language in which these poems were written that allowed for the immediate engagement of ‘the ten thousand things’ of which the world is made because the glyphs of which the language is composed refer directly to elements within that world. By contrast, the western tradition is enabled by a higher level symbolic language that allows for the buffering of self and cosmos, or more simply, the separation of us and the natural environment.

In shan-shui, the world is not a stage for human events: the poet’s renderings of rivers, mountains and shafts of sunlight, moonbeams or enveloping mists, connote profound human connections within a cosmology where issues of being and non-being are demonstrated by the ten thousand living (including humanity) and non-living things which themselves are in constant transformation.

We are lost to that world of a pictographic language (although we tread here on a land that for fifteen thousand years supported peoples who scratched, pecked and painted on rock in ways that echoed across millennia, the voices of those ancient ones expressed in rock art, that most primal of written languages) but we can still directly engage with a primal world in spite of the remove imposed by our sophisticated means of communication. This is what Thoreau attempted. This is what we urban-wildlanders attempt, poised on the cusp of rivers and mountains in (speaking personally) our tricked-out, solar-powered huts.

The energy that flows through Oak View, along the 33, is mostly provided by the woosh of traffic that passes: drivers and passengers intent on the road ahead and casting barely a glance at the enticements offered along the commercial strip – Forever Nails passed unnoticed in a moment; but it is in the act of noticing and being present that the swirling cosmic currents that the Chinese represent as chi’i can be discerned, whether in a strip mall or a mountain trail - those tender breaths of energy that, as Hinton describes them, cascade effortlessly “through fusion-lit star-generations”.

This is what can be perceived locally: our enmeshment within the cosmos. Hinton writes of a concatenated ideogram which interpreted literally denotes breath-seed home. Time and space are woven together in the ancient Chinese notion (as in most primal cultures) of the eternal present and animated through the agency of breath, or chi'i; time is the dimension where the ongoing transformation of the ten thousand things can occur. The glyph which depicts a seed sprouting in a thatched roof denotes home and is set within this space-time continuum (which stands quite apart from the Western notion of time as a relentlessly flowing river). Taken together, Hinton writes, the cosmology represented in the glyph combination "recognizes the fundamental dimensions of the Cosmos to be our most elemental dwelling place".

In the chaparral, beneath the looming presence of the Topatopas, or wandering a strip mall in Oak view, my urban wildland ‘practice’ (to use that charged word) is as it was for the shan-shui poets, medieval Zen monks in Japan, Thoreau in Concord and David Hinton in the wilds of Vermont: to observe the empirical world as it is inflected by the chi'i storm of the cosmos. This much remains local, yet it references "the boundless breath of the planet's empty mind".

Enchanted Islands

Now also at Urbanwildland.org

A long, thin, dove grey cloud hung over the Nordhoff ridge, floating like an island in the sky. Enraptured by its color, morphology and juxtaposition I stood and watched as the water vapor slowly changed shape: a shoreline receding here, a mountain swelling there and an islet calving from the mother island's northern promontory.

In those last days of June, it was preternaturally still, unusually humid and very warm.

Early in the morning the sky is awash with a pale silver that my right, metaphor seeking brain reads as ocean and the darker, grey clouds as land or occasionally Cetacea. Come evening, the intense blue canopy has spent the day being over-written by blossoming contrails and criss-crossing wind strewn wisps of stratus (belying the thick stasis at the ground) while bright clouds have drained towards the horizon and sit glowing atop mountain ridges.

Earlier, there was bird song, swirling across the morning - in a shrill punctuation of the temporal equilibrium. The silhouettes of diving, jinking, spiraling creatures paper time and space: black or brown, sometimes with flashes of white against sky or the massed shrubs of the chaparral - they are birds mostly unknown to me, but eerily familiar. One stands out for its sleek raffishness. Almost all black, revealing flashes of under-wing white only in flight, it is crowned with a ragged, gothic crest. It has the distinction of being the only bird in either Sibley's or Peterson's Field Guide to Birds that has no common name. It is known simply by its Latin genus, Phainopepla. Our specimen is almost anorexic in its slimness, crowned with punkish head feathers - aloof, alone and attitudinal.

At last light, the sky is washed almost clean of cloud; a few vaporous bruises to the west flush with pink, Venus is a bright jewel and just above, a more reticent Jupiter; an almost full moon has risen over the eastern ridge - it's light glittery behind a last remnant of wind-frayed cloud.

A realignment of the human presence on planet Earth, such that it is symbiotic with the rest of the natural world, rather than antithetical, might begin with such an embrace, by the collective human consciousness, of the enchantments that nature offers. Theory: I am enthralled by the physical, emotional and spiritual emanations of our enveloping life-giving atmosphere and its ecosystems so there's a chance that that makes me more concerned about their stewardship – and that chance, I think, is worth propagating. So I try to be alert to these experiences, and when sufficiently moved, to write about them.

Many have written of our relationship with the natural world (of which we are intrinsically a part) by enveloping this association in myth, fairy tale or Jungian archetypes. Nature both mirrors and impacts our psychological demeanor and in literature it is routinely evoked to suggest mood: the titles, Under the Volcano (Joseph Lowry, 1947), A High Wind In Jamaica (Richard Hughes, 1928), The Man whom Trees Loved (Algernon Blackwood, 1912) and Jean Giorno's Song of the World, 1934, all denote works where natural elements have agency in shaping human destiny.

But increasingly, nature is seen as a place to establish facts rather than mood: to be experienced objectively rather than subjectively. The divide, between those who see the natural world exclusively as an arena of empirical study and those whose embrace encompasses a more pluralist range of enquiry is neatly summed up by the descriptors, Scientist and Naturalist. More broadly, the prism through which one views nature offers a spectrum that spans from science to religion. Locating its value is dependent on your viewpoint. The British Romantics and American Transcendentalists sought a universal spirit that an etheric nature might reveal while those with a more materialist bent, shaped by a rationalist intellectual tradition founded in the mid-seventeenth century, seek scientific information and biological wealth that might add to humankind’s comfort, well-being and prosperity. Both positions demand something of nature.

In calling for an ‘ecocentric spirituality’ Patrick Curry in Ecological Ethics, 2006, suggests that the problem lies with our firm distinction between the material and the spiritual, inherited from Platonism, Christianity and modern science. He writes that “We shall never be able to understand and appreciate nature until we re-learn to see it both as ‘spiritual’ subject and ‘natural’ object”. Desacralizing nature, a key feature of the modernity project, is the pre-requisite of its commodification, and to that extent resacralization is critical to any solution to the global environmental problems caused by such exploitation.

How we achieve such a thing presumably begins with childhood experience. With some friends in the Arbolada, sitting around an outdoor table, with crickets chirping and frogs croaking as sonic background to a velvety Ojai evening, talk turned to the issue of grandchildren growing up with i-phones and Androids and by extension, missing out on the self-made nature play with which we had all grown up. Richard Louv summed it up in the title of his 2005 book, The Last Child in the Woods, Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder. E.O.Wilson has developed the notion of biophilia, by which, as a part of our array of adaptive mechanisms, we are all instinctively drawn to nature.

Given such an innate predilection, only opportunity, it would seem, needs be provided to ensure continuation of this bucolic tradition. I certainly enjoyed opportunities both at home, where my father route-marched my sister and me over hill and dale and the village school where so-called nature walks were an essential part of the curriculum. My early education was thus still very much under the influence of the nineteenth century naturalist Louis Aggasiz, who insisted that children study nature not books. This pedagogical approach worked well at the local Parish school I attended where only the most precocious students learnt to read before moving on to Secondary school at age eleven. I was a veritable prodigy and mastered the art at age nine, and quickly went on to devour the entire Enid Blyton canon.

Based on my experience, early-reading might be as big a culprit as the availability of electronic media in keeping children out of the woods. The Waldorf curriculum of early childhood education developed by Rudolph Steiner, actively attempts to inculcate a sense of wonder in children by deferring reading until nine. Children are encouraged to believe in elves and other elemental spirits that then animate a mysterious natural world. Reading nature thus prefigures a more conventional literacy. Is it far-fetched to believe that this might facilitate what Curry calls “a pluralist, embodied and locally engaged ecological spirituality”?

I haven’t seen the Phainopepla these last few days. Our Houston weather (as someone described it to me) has broken and normal service resumed: a thick marine layer in the mornings shrouding the towns of Ojai and Santa Paula - we, up above it all on the upper reaches of Bear Creek - then warm and sunny days. This morning, a sea of fog lapped at Black Mountain at the west end of the upper valley, its cone shape (as seen from Koenigstein) circumscribed by the enveloping fog, creating the swirling, vaporous shoreline of an enchanted island on the land.

Pyramid Power

Now also at Urbanwildland.org

A field of flowers is a powerful thing. Heading up the hill, my vision was filled with the miniature pointillism of the alpine meadow that rose up before me. For a moment, I was lost in the celestial matrix that the tiny flowers described. Asters, phlox, and stonecrop, it seemed, reflected some heavenly order, as though in floral reification of the ancient cabalist's dictum of as above so below.

On this field of flowers there was no sign of its medieval accompaniment, the Unicorn, but once up on the ridge and heading over bitter brush (Purshia tridentata) and sage (Artemesia tridentata), the foundational shrubs of these high prairie grasslands, I saw a female pronghorn antelope and its tiny calf scamper down the track.

Alert Reader, you may have the feeling we're not in California anymore.......

The trails over the 100,000 acre ranch where Lorrie's family holds its annual retreat, are maintained primarily for the benefit of horse and rider. Searching out wildflowers involves both the recurring stench of horse manure and the proliferation of Canadian thistles spread by the horses, for whom the seed head of this noxious weed is a favorite treat.

Buffalo still graze these pastures, but as a domesticated breed rather than the rampaging herds of yesteryear. Cattle have negatively impacted the grasslands because of the constancy of their grazing within fenced boundaries; wild herds of Bison, by contrast, were nomadic over vast areas - grazing, fertilizing and breaking up the soil crust in one area before moving on, and rarely visiting one particular spot more than once in a year. The wild buffalo, despite the density of their herds, tended to have a beneficial impact on the native flora by cropping, enriching the soil and enabling water penetration.

A few short centuries ago, the high prairies were home to vast herds of these animals that, over their entire North American range, may have numbered up to 60 million. Buffalo numbers, swelled by the reduction of the native population (their lone predator) through introduced disease and systematic annihilation, were then brought close to zero after the Civil War in a frenzy of industrial-scale killing by Anglo-American 'sportsmen'.

The horse, closely associated with Plains Indians of the historic era and with ranching (and thus with our notions of the Old West), like the cow, is a non-native species, although it's remote ancestor Eohippus evolved some 50 million years ago in the woodlands of North America. It's extinction on this continent occurred about 10,000 B.C.E. suspiciously close to the arrival of north-eastern Asians bearing Clovis flint points capable of downing the mega-fauna that still roamed the land (despite the stresses of climate change at the end of the Ice Age). The horse, by then of something approaching modern-day size, was collateral damage in this slaughter, but it survived on the steppes of Eurasia and was re-introduced by the Spanish in the sixteenth century to become emblematic of the roaming cowboy lifestyle.

Now, the smaller of the above-mentioned meat bearing ungulates and the horse continue to be both the real and mythic underpinnings of the guest-ranch where the Brown family were quartered early this June in what was once the south west tip of the Archean era Wyoming Craton, formed about 2.5 Billion years ago, and which constituted the initial core of the continental crust of North America.

The passageways, over earth and through sky, in which I journeyed between Upper Ojai and this ancient, seed pearl Craton, were experienced as placeless, dead zones: Sargasso Seas wherein float the hectoring detritus of corporate America. By plane (Boeing 737) and rental car (Hyundai Accent) I voyaged across the heartland wrapped in a civilizational membrane which held me in a state of fecklessness, helpless before the assault of the meretricious and the ribbon-like erasures of Eisenhower’s Interstates: except for a moment when increasing sleepiness forced me to pull off the highway. Escaping the cocoon, I ventured where landscape and memory went unbranded, to a memorial which time had forgot - a memorial to a passageway from the past, the nineteenth century Transcontinental Railway.

Along a mile of dirt road, urged on by signage proclaiming an historic monument, the pyramid that rears up on the featureless plain is almost alien in its red-rock, Martian adumbrations. It retains, in its two-stepped form, an echo of its formal progenitor, the ziggurat. On each of its eastern and western faces, midway on the upper tier, “a shattered visage lies" and thus the monument inevitably (for me) references the collapsed edifice in the boundless desert sands of Egypt, conjured by Percy Bysshe Shelley in his poem of 1818, and on which is inscribed,

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

The land in which we voyaged was genuinely “Antique” (Interstate 80 had already broached the mighty Craton) and truly,

"Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

What, I wondered, was the source of this double-headed exercise in egregious hubris? Helpful plaques provided by Wyoming State Parks were at hand. Built in the 1880's a few years after the death of both of the Ames brothers whose bullet pocked faces adorn the upper reaches of the pyramid, and designed by the noted architect H.H. Richardson, it was financed by the Union Pacific Railway to restore the reputations of the brothers who, while achieving the goal of building the Transcontinental Railroad (originally at Lincoln's behest), did so while inflating the costs, bribing half of Congress and cheating the taxpayer.

But the relevance of what was intended to be an enduring monument beloved of those who traveled the Transcontinental Railway (it was built close to the high point of the iron road) was cut short In the 1890's when Union Pacific went broke, the railway was re-routed to the south, and the tourist town that had sprung up around the memorial withered and died. The monument itself was thus left in the almost perfect isolation in which I stumbled across it - a memorial to a proto-modern passageway, little more engaging of the world, perhaps, than today's equivalents, but uniquely capable, in the late nineteenth century, of providing a moving platform from which buffalo might be shot.

At the Ranch, I had the opportunity to speak to a group of cousins-by-marriage about Urban Wildland - both the blog and the house in the chaparral where is lived the life upon which it is loosely based. I mentioned in passing that some find the blog pieces indigestible. I have since come across a far better description of this project in lines that Virginia Woolf used to slam James Joyce after reading Ulysses ("an illiterate, underbred book") in which she characterizes the work as that "of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating"......Well, I do try.

Dawn

I leave at first light: into a world of monochrome and mystery. I attend the re-birth, the becoming. The moment when the story of our planet, over the last ten thousand, one million, two hundred million; no, four point five four billion years is re-substantiated, each morning (thus far), as the sun first washes the sky with its incandescence.

I am loathe to leave the mire, the murk, the half-light: but inexorably the earth catches fire and slowly assumes its morning colors. The chaparral is as reluctant as I am to embrace the morning light: its drab green lingering still in the darkling. The blonde thickets of dead mustard stalks and tumbleweed along the roadway are the first to reflect the early glow – skeletal non-natives seemingly crowing to the world of their colonial triumph, accompanied by the trumpets of dawn.

As the sky brightens, the pencil line of a jet contrail is drawn across the northern sky. To the east, flecks of apricot appear to float in a milky soup. The still dark Oxnard plain is wreathed in grey-blue mists and the distant Santa Monica Mountains recede in ever-lightening ranks until they become one with the heavens. But the sinews of the industrial state have begun to emerge from beneath the cloak of night. The road’s fog line, yellow double center line, the airline, the fence line and the oil pipeline reassert their Cartesian grip on the amorphous shadowings of the dark. Only the natural gas flare in the oil patch at the top of Koenigstein reverses the process of dawn’s revelations– its bright flame slowly drowned in the sun’s emerging candlepower. Meanwhile, the antic silhouette of the pump becomes ever more emphatically etched against the sky.

Yes, it’s that time of year again when Hanukah, Solstice, Christmas, New Year’s and my birthday conflate into one almighty hammer blow to my consciousness. A moment of reckoning amidst ancient symbols of light: the menorah, the lighted tree and my candle strewn birthday cake all conspiring to coax the low, southerly arc of the sun back towards the meridian (and for me, another turn of the bell-wheel towards the chimes at midnight). Running through the dawn – in re-creation of the beginnings of time, of evolution, of the triumph of civilization, of the last gasp of the culture of fossil-fueled capitalism – adds a perspective to my existence as a tiny foot-soldier of Empire. With little left to lose, but with diminishing time to act, I am slowly beginning to strain at the bonds of servitude.

I have been reading Edward Abbey. The Edward Abbey Reader, Desert Solitaire, Fire on the Mountain and now Beyond the Wall. I have also been reading some of the eighty essays included in Moral Ground, Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, edited by K.D Moore and M.P. Nelson (2010). As one might expect from both the title and subtitle, it is a high-minded tome. It also often misses the point. Writer Kate Rawles, for instance, calls for A Copernican Revolution in Ethics – a great leveling in which the human species no longer privileges its own needs over the rest of the natural world - all very laudable: yet she suggests that this might be achieved while,

“…we keep the best of the industrialized world’s education, communication, medical advances, time-saving appliances, music literature, painting, low-impact technology, and even transportation systems.”

Good luck with that. In other words, she is advocating a selective overturning of humankind’s prevailing ethos of progress, success and development based on infinite growth on this planet of finite resources. E.O Wilson, on the other hand offers his usual sage analysis,

“…We strayed from Nature with the beginning of civilization roughly ten thousand years ago. That quantum leap beguiled us with the illusion of freedom from the world that gave us birth.......(supposedly) smart people choose to remain innocent of the historical principal that civilizations collapse when their environments are ruined.”

The reliably hard-headed Derrick Jensen asks, “Do you believe that this culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living?” Referencing the behavior of Nazi doctors, many of whom attempted to ameliorate death camp conditions but never challenged their underlying premise, he suggests that we are in an analogous predicament,

“We do not question the existence of an economic and social system that is working the world to death, that is starving it to death, that is imprisoning it, that is torturing it. We never question a culture that leads to these atrocities.”

Abbey was equally tough-minded. He never doubted that environmental sanity would be hard won and most likely would entail a considerable die-off of humanity. He personally contributed to this notion by shuffling off the mortal coil at the comparatively young age of 62. He left behind twenty books in which live the flames of radical environmental action, kindled in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Such radicalism has now been suppressed by those who preach the possibility of sustainability within the structure of industrial civilization; his (and other Earth Firster’s) anarchic impulses now neutered by those comfortable with the idea of endless ‘sustainable’ growth, blind to the fact that this represents, as Abbey noted, “cancerous madness”. We have left our affairs “too long in the hands of kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners”. By Abbey’s reckoning, “Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization” of this fact and confirmed over five thousand years of human experience.

Jensen writes, when most people ask, “How can we stop global warming?” what they are really asking is “How can we stop global warming without significantly changing this lifestyle that is causing global warming in the first place?” Ending industrial capitalism is, as they say, off the table, yet it is the simplest and most complete solution to our environmental malaise: it will not be achieved by tweaking the status quo.

As I emerge from mid-winter’s orgy of celebration, gifting, and over-consumption it is time to consider how my actions might align with my rhetoric; how my reflections might inform my future behavior. How I might walk the talk. These considerations will continue to be a part of my reporting from the urban wildland.

Another day, another dawn: western sky flushed with pink, scrawled across it is an oblique ‘X’ - the contrails from two early rising military jets from Vandenberg Air Force base: our Imperial warriors in their bliss. The full moon is balanced on a distant peak of the Santa Ynez mountains, it slips out of view just as the sun begins to carpet the upper crags of the Nordhoff ridge in a pointillist tapestry of red brown and gold. The universe remains in full working order despite the earnest environmental hand-wringing on one of its lesser planets.

First up for 2015: a new location on the web. Early in the year, this site will migrate to urbanwildland.org, escaping the google blogger ghetto and reincarnate as an illustrated blog powered by Square Space.

The Scream of a Hawk

The Acourtia (A. microcephala) which bloomed spectacularly (in mauve) this year continues to enthrall in its autumnal guise of golden tobacco leaves and clouds of white seed heads. It is featured along the local trails and on patches of broken ground, where pale green golden bush seemingly cowers in its shadow. Soap plant is reduced to a brittle skeleton and the peonies are now little cabbage-like clusters of straw-colored stalks and leaves. Vinegar weed and snowy patches of Turkey mullein remain vigorous and the amazing tarweed is still, in places, in bloom (fulfilling its purpose, perhaps, as Keats’ “late flowers for the bees”).

Milk weed has recently ventured forth. Buckwheat seed-heads continue to rust into ever darker shades. Sprays of wand buckwheat (Eriogonum elongatum) splay elegantly: their single white flowers tinged with pink at the end of each chalky node.

Deeper in the chaparral all is quiet – it awaits its spring with the first rainfall of October and November. Its flamboyance is at an end: the strident ginger seed of chamise now oxidized to a shadowy brown; the brilliant red of poison oak moderated to a dull ruby. The grey-green leaves of ceanothus, mountain mahogany and scrub oak stoic against the withering desiccation of late summer.

It is, of course, as the poet noted back in the old country, the “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. Our section of valley, between the Topatopa foothills and the Sulphur Mountain ridge, is at the confluence of the rivers of fog that drift in around dawn, east from the lower valley and west from Santa Paula. I watch in the early morning as they comingle due south and below me,  a soft collision of vaporous light in the still almost dark.

But enough about me: the wild in me and the wilderness out there are one, at least on occasion; sometimes, I am my terrain. We are twinned. Marx was explicit on the matter “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive”. More recently, Wendell Berry examines these connections in Preserving Wilderness, an essay from his collection, Home Economics, 1987:

“We breathe and our hearts beat and we survive as a species because we are wild. To be divided against nature, against wilderness, then, is a human disaster because it is to be divided against ourselves”.

Harmony, he suggests, can only be achieved when there is a dialog between culture and nature and this has to be achieved locally. In a viable accommodation between us (the made, or nurtured) and our implacable environment (our biological context, or nature) is the planet’s salvation. He writes,

“We cannot intend our good without intending the good of our place – which means ultimately the good of the world”.

A product of parents who privileged a white collar over blue (my father was, for most of his adult life, an insurance clerk, my mother a typist) and an education that after primary (or grade) school - where village nature-walks were a key feature of the curriculum - was focused on classroom work, I am not by proclivity or training an outdoorsman.

Despite the protestations of Robert Macfarlane, England remains a place remarkably lacking in wilderness (The Wild Places, 2007). Deforested, initially by the Romans, the countryside has been groomed - grazed, tilled and hedged - for at least a thousand years. Ecosystems have been constructed that serve human culture rather than, in Mowat’s phrase, the call of the wild.

Growing up in darkest Surrey, there was an easy engagement with this manicured nature: hedgerows were teeming with birds, mammals, trees and shrubs that over time had adapted to an environment that despite specifically serving the needs of landowners also enriched the lives of all who encountered them; fields glistened with freshly turned soil or glowed in the pale sunshine with ripened wheat while ancient oaks, yews and chestnuts stood sentinel in churchyards, village greens and gardens. The domestication of the English landscape is its most striking characteristic. It is telling that Macfarlane finds most of his ‘Wild Places’ not in England but in what we used to call the Celtic fringe, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

In our neck of the woods, ‘commons’ remained - scrub ground left after the enclosure movement aggregated all the worthwhile agricultural land - but you could walk across these bracken and gorse lands and arrive at a country ‘B’ road in, at most, an hour: along this metaled hedge-rowed canyon there would shortly appear cottages, a pub and a few shops signifying a gentle transition to the fine web of village, market town and city that lays across the country and establishes the dominance, in this tiny island, of human culture. Wilderness skills were irrelevant. The back yard could be tamed with a push-mower, a pair of clippers, fork and spade; woods and coppices traversed along ancient bridle paths; commons walked over on well-worn tracks; rivers and streams followed along their tidy banks of willow and wild flowers.

Here, in America we are, mostly metaphorically, but at the wildland urban interface, often literally, still engaged with the frontier – the stain of uncontrolled nature, the wilderness that threatens to engulf us. Here, there are intrepid cadres of outdoorsmen and women ready to broach the wild, backpacked and provisioned ready to encounter both themselves and the other, their primal twin.

I am not one of that tribe. I lurk at the fringes.

My friend Will has just embarked on a solo two week high altitude circuit of the eastern Sierras. He will be in his element, communing, as they say, with nature - living out of a well-equipped, advanced technology backpack that is the product of a world entirely antithetical to the experience he seeks. My son Will, took a similar trip a few years back despite a notable lack of encouragement or example from his then very urban parents.

Having made the move to Ojai we are now wilderness adjacent but being close to State Highway 150 we remain linked to the vast network of freeways and surface streets that vein Southern California and thus we continue to be in the great circulatory system of the Empire, still swimming instinctively in the plasma of late capitalism.

Likewise, Thoreau’s cabin was not in wilderness but at the edge of town, about two miles from his family home. Walden Pond lay in a wood – scarcely a wilderness - comfortably within walking distance of Concord and within earshot of the then new Fitchburg railway. Thus he immersed himself, not in wilderness, but in the urban wildland. The railroad was a symbol of modernity (and the antithesis to any notion of a classical wilderness) which served as his link to a world of trade and finance, of industrial capitalism, that he mostly disparaged. As he notes,

“The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link. The men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employee; and so I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth……”

The line ran then and now between Fitchburg, north and west of Boston via Concord to North Station in the City: it was a visible symbol of Thoreau’s enmeshment in the skein of village, town and city that characterized southern New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts - and in this regard, at least, made its regional name of New England entirely appropriate.

Thoreau writes,” I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me”. Oh that I could share in his equanimity as I hear, of a weekend, the barbaric snorting of Harley Davidsons as they snake up and down the 150 below us in the valley where, in the early morning, the fog swirls in confluence.

I hate Harley Davidsons. They serve not as transport but as crude affectations - machismo appendages that befoul the air and viscerally curdle my soul. I hate the Neanderthals that ride them. I hate the regalia which symbolizes their crippled and contradictory world view: the outlaw faithfully making payments on his (or her) heinous machine while conflating his or her right to terrorize fellow road-users, and others in ear-shot, with the genuine freedoms of the Republic. If not quite "the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible" (as Wilde spoke of the fox-hunting fraternity) they are most certainly the emasculated in vain pursuit of their virility.

That said (and yes, I feel better for it), they represent a sonic connection to an urban world in the same way that the locomotive served Thoreau. While he, patently the better man, sublimates the whistle of said iron horse as “the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard” and likened the rattle of railroad cars to “the beat of a partridge” I cannot get past my blind hatred. Not usually lost for metaphor or simile, I am stuck in some primitive non-verbal place where my lizard brain is firing synapses at will and blanketing my higher thought processes with hot-lead.

But here, in Upper Ojai, despite the occasional aural assault, nestled beneath the Toptopas, "I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth" - a writer setting the planet to rights: for it is here, on the margins, in a liminal space that is, as Nietzsche said of Turin, "the first place where I am possible...."

Epithalamium (Wedding Song)

Does it mean anything that the buckwheat blossoms have turned the color of dried blood? Or, that the tarweed is thicker than I have ever seen it and is even, in places, out-competing mustard? Or, that vinegar weed (Trichostema lanceolatum) is thick on the cattle pasture just to the east of the giant gorge that splits the old County property at the top of Koenigstein (now owned by the Rainwaters)?

Is there such a thing as a vegetative portent? Is there a mechanism by which the universal mind, human consciousness and plant ecology melds into an oracular medium? Is there, in other words, a payoff in prescience to the attention I lavish on such things?

There are, I suspect, rational reasons for the fact that the mauve Acourtia (A. microcephala) was particularly spectacular this year while the inky, native peony blossoms failed to impress and perhaps, sound meteorological cause for the other extraordinary ecological phenomena referenced above.

But being of a quasi-mystical or poetic frame of mind I want more: I want transcendence – I seek the realm beyond the quotidian. The lives of Ventura’s indigenous people, and perhaps of all the tribes of the Americas, were ruled by portents, signs and omens - the divination of which was entrusted to only the most powerful members of society. Hence the secret society of astronomers (and, I speculate, floromancers and botanomancers), known as the ‘Antap, ruled Chumash society by virtue of their occult knowledge - the prescience granted to them by the stars, flowers and plants.

So, while there is, perhaps, a pre-historical precedent to the notion that the irruption, color and idiosyncratic shape of plant material have meaning beyond the intrinsic ecological circumstances of their being, these days I simply relish the powerful ability of the flowers and shrubs in the chaparral to thrill me aesthetically while reserving the right, as it were, to believe that there are shadowy messages being projected onto the cave wall of my consciousness that I am too obtuse to understand.

Of one thing I am certain: there is a brooding solemnity in the California shrublands on even the sunniest of days. So much portent (of unrevealed import); so much occluded meaning, so many flitting shadows in an incomprehensible chiaroscuro of figure and ground, can be burdensome. A few days in Brooklyn, where the arboreal and floral arrangements that intermittently decorate these brick, stone and concrete lands are clearly empty of all but the most spurious signification, comes as a relief. It is here that I can take the measure of the urban, secure in the knowledge that these once wildlands have been almost totally stripped of their adumbrations.

Back in the day (and here I speak of, say, twelve thousand years ago), the broken lands of Breukelen, were the final resting place, in this part of America, for the great ice floes that had inched down from the north pole during the most recent Ice Age (humanity’s great surge forward being entirely predicated on our occupying a brief, interstitial warm period before the next big freeze inexorably engulfs the planet) and the mild topographical features of the City reflect the dying energy of these gelid earth-movers.

Left, was a littoral riddled with tidal creeks that flowed through swampy marshlands and meadows amidst the pleasant rises now named Vinegar, Cobble, Boerum and Clinton. I am staying in Bococa – which embraces Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens where the Gowanus Canal, the remnant of the many tentacled creek that once bore into the heart of Brookland Parish, lies fetid, a superfund site awaiting reclamation.

There are splinters of waste land that run between canal and the back yard defenses of industrial plants rendered in horizontally laid, graffitied, corrugated roofing, chain link and razor wire. Where once were manufactured gas plants, mills, tanneries, foundries and chemical plants now sit mostly derelict, nineteenth and early twentieth century buildings on brown fields of inestimable value - the mighty industrial city transformed into both a dormitory suburb and a reflection of the finance, advertising, media, real estate, drinking, dining, entertainment and retail power of Manhattan: the marshy lowlands of hardwood groves, grasses, sedges, reeds and forbs reduced to mere slivers - the unaccounted, commercially inconsequential lands between the engineered canal and the platted land; between the brown fields and the glistening, infuscated waters.

But here lies the once and future past: the biotic memory of the last ten thousand years awaiting its recall; and these waste lands spoke to me of their dreams; or, perhaps I dreamt that they spoke. These weedy patches of ground do indeed function as a vegetative portent, amplified by the desperation of their marginalization - whispering of a different future.

In a grey Brooklyn dawn, the morning after son Will’s wedding to Ellen Cantrell, Manhattan loomed across the river, its sky-scrapers wreathed in a light rain: Gehry’s Spruce Street condo tower standing slightly apart, creased like a wrung-out dish towel.

Brooklyn Bridge Park runs along a mile and a half of a defunct cargo shipping and storage facility, the long fingers of the wharves still reaching into the East River, their pier sheds left intact, and wooden piles rising out of the river. It is a park (designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh) that achieves much by doing little. The greenscape is serviceable, providing pleasant havens for city dwellers but invoking almost no wildland frisson. Cleared of cranes and, of course, ships, the park offers unobstructed views across the water. South of the park, in the still functioning Brooklyn docks, beyond Redhook, is the Gowanus estuary.

The 3rd Street draw bridge over the canal was completed in 1905, a time when there was a reasonable expectation that commercial shipping would require clear passage. Today, intrepid kayakers can comfortably pass under the closed bridge and although thoroughly restored in 1985, activation of the bridge’s opening mechanism awaits the dredging equipment which will be necessary to remove and capsulize the heavy metal sludge that sits at the canal’s bottom - a terminally toxic impediment to the revitalization of the waterway as a viable ecosystem,

Meanwhile, alongside the bridge abutments, in caged waste-lands, sugar maple, beech and birch saplings wait patiently. Underneath them, rushes, reeds and invasive grasses constitute a weedy ground cover where Queen Anne’s lace blooms prolifically.

On wedding’s eve, with cumulus building overhead, I gathered armfuls of this filigreed non-native invasive and used it to decorate the tables at Frankies Spuntino, the restaurant where Will and Ellen’s rehearsal dinner was to be held that evening. Locally grown, sustainably foraged (I walked), it stood in for the lush green and cream roses that I had previously eyed at Union Market on Court Street.

The spirit of Gowanus, sachem (head man) of the local Lenape tribe called the Canarsee, would have approved (I hope) of this deeply pragmatic act of choosing the lesser evil: non-native Queen Anne’s lace from his eponymous canal verge over roses from Colombia or Ecuador, where they are grown in large production greenhouses, harvested, sorted, and flown 3,000 odd miles to Brooklyn.

The dried blood of buckwheat blossoms presaged, it now seems, the old brick of Brooklyn: the off-white of fresh blooming California everlasting (that old reliable) was a pre-echo of the blossoming Queen Anne’s lace. Our future worlds are pre-figured by our local environments. Pay attention, be present: portent and circumstance may become fluid and the tyranny of time and space collapse into a delirium of consciousness.

The confluence of a man and a woman, bound by marriage, is similarly mutable.

The Three Sages

I arrived at Easter Dinner, kindly hosted by good friends Hans and Annika, whose house at the top of Signal commands a majestic view of the valley, with a bunch of salvia leucophylla, a bottle of Prosecco and notes for a short disquisition on resurrection (this last specifically requested by our hostess).

At some point in the proceedings, after a couple of glasses of Prosecco, I pulled out said notes and began, “It is your collective misfortune that I have just read the recent history of Jesus by Reza Aslan, called Zealot”. None amongst the guests, I quickly ascertained, had read the book: reassured, I went on, “Having received today’s assignment I jotted down my understanding of the work in terms that were unavailable to Aslan, as an academic historian, but may, in my vernacular, have a greater contemporary resonance”.  I began declaiming my bullet points - what I called the nuts and bolts of the Jesus story with,

“Jesus was the leader of a band of illiterate red-necks who formed an ultra-nationalistic Jewish sect dedicated to the overthrow of the Roman Empire in Judea…….”

I soldiered on through another nine scalding notes….but although the audience remained politely attentive I was reminded of the slightly stupefied glaze that used to come over the faces of pupils in my tenth grade history classes and I was happy, at the end, to switch gears and suggest that my original intention had been to talk about the resurrection of the field of moribund black sage that sits to the west of our house, whose rejuvenation was effected by the heavy rains of late February and early March.

Had I known, ahead of time, of the bemused reaction that my first offering, the sage bouquet, would elicit I might have stuck with that initial intention. Few, even amongst the Ojai residents in attendance, seemed to understand that purple sage (named for its flower color) is a foundational plant of soft chaparral and as such is everywhere at the fringes of the wildland – just over their back yard or, in my case, very much in my front yard. At this time of the year it is a stunning cut flower, although it sheds its purple florets quite quickly - in this instance into the trays of devilled eggs that the blooms overhung once placed in a glass vase by Annika, in the center of the kitchen island. The multitude, I might have reasoned, was in greater need of enlightenment vis a vis soft chaparral than a slightly revisionist rendition of the Easter story. Either way, I was going to scratch my itch to teach!

These flowers were no exotic offering: they were merely a showy exemplar of our prodigiously rich native flora. Here was an opportunity to expound upon our three sages, their names, characteristics and favored environments. In the interests of remaining a tolerably entertaining guest, it is fortunate, perhaps, that my enthusiasm for the chaparral was, in the end, tempered with a little bible study. But here, on my blog, with its clearly stated chaparral mandate, I can let rip!

The first thing to know is that locally, there is black, white and purple sage; and maybe that is enough.

I have just begun reading Peter Matthiessen’s The Birds of Heaven (2001) in which he recounts his journeys to the ends of the world searching for the fifteen remaining species of crane. It occurs to me that we, who live in Ojai, should all take a journey in search of our three sage varieties. For some it will involve nothing more than a stroll around the garden, for others a hike into the canyons. Purple sage is in my line of sight as I write this – out of the kitchen window, where it attracts moths, hummingbirds and monarch butterflies. Our west meadow is mostly black sage with a little purple running through it, while white sage grows reliably at White Sage Rock overlooking Bear Creek which flows (even in dry years) along our western property line.

A couple of weeks ago I invited a few friends along for what I advertised as a wild flower ramble up Bear Canyon . The event was cancelled, but on a recent evening I chose to go on the walk to see what we had all missed and to gauge the difficulty of seeing the three sages along a single track canyon trail.

Now this trail, which effectively starts at the Greenberg Ranch at the top of Koenigstein, does not offer the rich cultural stew and socio-political drama of navigating the Black Dragon River in the Manchurian borderlands between China and Russia, up which Matthiessen voyages in search of his cranes, but it does offer a variety of conditions as it leaves the avocado ranches behind and heads towards the lower scree slopes of the Topatopa mountains.

The Greenbergs have lived on Koenigstein longer than any other residents, moving here in the 1960’s after having farmed for many years along Tree Ranch Road, just west of the Summit. Natalie Greenberg no longer lives in the house she and her husband built, but her daughter Emily stays there intermittently; their avocado orchards, meanwhile, are professionally managed.

The first half mile or so of the trail runs over their property and a sign warns of loose stock although there have been no cattle on the property for the five years that I have walked it. The route begins alongside a pomegranate hedge which borders their northern-most orchard. On the other side of the dirt road is scrub land where lie piles of concrete debris from the demolition of stone-faced gate pylons that used to adorn a nearby property - until the County determined that this baronial gesture had been made on their road easement.

A little further along the track, on the left, a steep drive runs down to Leo Lockwood’s avocado ranch that straddles Bear Creek. For many years the Whitman’s, our neighbors, who arrived in the 1970’s, battled Leo over his practice of diverting water from the creek for irrigation and otherwise altering the natural flow. Meanwhile the Whitmans are not entirely blameless in this regard having used the creek to fill a vast swimming pool for many years; but the Greenbergs are the most egregious offenders and even in this very dry season their ranch managers have rigged up 6” pipes to carry what little water flows in the creek to a giant 35,000 gallon holding tank complete with an overflow pond above their orchards. While the trail continues on their property, long-failed irrigation pipes litter the verge as the track heads for its crossings of the creek.

Before the first crossing there is a eucalyptus grove where abandoned trucks and two dilapidated travel trailers or caravans, tarps draped over their roofs, are casually parked. Then a western facing slope appears, overlooking the upper valley, covered in black sage (so called for the inky hue of its dried seed heads). The field of mint green leaves seems almost irridescent in the westering sunlight belying the plant's somber name. On the bank along the up-slope side of the trail there are now occasional purple sages – not yet in bloom (at this higher elevation than my front yard) but easily identifiable by their white/grey leaves.

Already I am seeing bear scat – this path evidently serves as their route to the avocadoes. On the approach to the second crossing, ancient fire-scarred oaks crowd the trail while on the eastern side, a rock face presses in on the canyon: here, at this dry dip in the road, are the de facto headwaters of the Greenberg’s illegal irrigation system. A little way to the east, as the creek bed tumbles to the foot of the cliffs, there is a puddle of water welling from the ground into which a pipe and filter have been artfully placed – this, the latest iteration in a perhaps fifty year tradition of installed, failed and then replaced pipes whose archeological evidence is enshrined in steel and plastic tubular debris.

Climbing beyond the ford one enters the narrow defile that parallels the now unseen creek. Deeper in shade, damper and less traveled, the track is over hung with bay, big leaf maple and oak. The under storey features golden current, poison oak and scrub oak. As the trail approaches the scree slopes below the Topatopas (sprinkled with yuccas and a lone group of relict big cone Douglas firs) the trees become sparse and the ground cover is dominated by white sage, (named for its whitish leaves) and yerba santa, its leathery, serrated foliage a pale green and which, at this elevation, is just beginning to display its clusters of blue flowers. Along the verges, soap plant is shooting its flower stalks skyward from a base of crumpled lily leaves. Sometimes, prickly phlox injects a bubble-gum pink into the patchwork of colors underfoot.

The trail ends abruptly when it rejoins the creek now climbing steeply towards the foot of the spalled mountain face. Clambering down the bank, I then make my way back along the creek bed, freshly scoured by the  deluge early in March, but with no water now in sight. Here mule fat (baccharis salicifolia), mugwort, California blackberry, and poison oak predominate until, as the creek approaches the ford, the dense shade gives bracken fern shelter.

Gathering these experiences together, I have re-written the final bullet point of my Easter Story so that Sage, Christ and Spring are now fully conflated:

"The rejuvenation of the sage on the two acre meadow west of our house, after its near-death experience during this drought winter, and the passion and resurrection of Christ have many parallels, not least in their relationship to the celebration of Spring - for this is the season when the natural world may offer a window into the divine - its green curtain drawn back and here, in the chaparral, the mysteries of the three sages revealed."