In 1966, the best pop song of the year reached number three on the U.K. charts and was applauded as a masterwork. Alan Freeman, a veteran British DJ of impeccable musical taste and presenter of the radio show Pick of the Pops (characteristically welcoming his audience with, "Greetings, Pop-Pickers") rated the song very highly. But in the United States, where it was recorded, it failed to make much of a dent, stalling at #88 on Billboard's top 100. The song's lackluster performance in America led its producer, who considered it his best work, to retreat from the recording studio for two years and begin a long and very public decline that continues today, 46 years later, as he languishes in the Corcoran State Prison in California, serving 19 years to life for the murder of B-movie star, Lana Clarkson.
The song, of course, was River Deep, Mountain High, by Ike and Tina Turner and its producer was Phil Spector, who is suffering through a remarkably long second act characterized by his bizarre behavior, including a predilection for gun play, and an appalling taste in wigs. His early work, however, endures (in mono).
The great song's lyrics are mawkish, but the refrain, set against a towering crescendo, recorded in Spector's characteristic 'wall of sound' mode, and potentiated by a choir of 93 female voices (into which Tina's smokey, soulful scream is stirred) has a remembered power that moves me still. But I now attach it, not as a metaphor to a love that's like a "flower loves the spring...just like Tina loves to sing", but to landscape: as a simple declarative that embraces the reach of the earth's crust - river deep, mountain high - as it flows over the territory currently demarcated as the State of California. A simple declarative rendered with all the grandeur that Spector could muster and that is, I would suggest, adequate to the task of evoking the majesty of the state's terrain.
Locally, we have the 'mountain high' reasonably covered, but it is only on rare occasions that the 'river deep' part resonates. The latter is honored more often in the breach, as it were, than the observance. I was reminded of this last week when I saw that one of the seven creeks and creeklets that I cross on my morning run, and this winter and spring one of the only two that are flowing, had mysteriously dried up.
It was Will Rogers who famously remarked that he had fallen into a California river and had to dust himself off. That remark fits with the always popular trope celebrating California's weirdness, but in Ojai it is not a particularly apposite observation. As my two out of seven indicates, the lack of water is spot on but nine times out of ten, wet or dry, you'll hit rocks as you fall (that's a statistical extrapolation from the three of four times I have actually tumbled). Running, walking or falling, the rocks, the chaparral debris and the mugwort will keep you in a continual state of inelegance as you pick your way across an Ojai creek or river. Dust tends not to be an issue, but depends, I suppose on your tolerance for sartorial blemishes: mine is set high and Will Rogers himself affected a casual western attire customarily enhanced with a little range dust.
The next day, the dried-up creek was running again, recovered from a temporary damming up-stream of unknown causation.
By Memorial Day it is usually safe to assume that we are done with the rainy season. We can now close the account on the 2011-2012 season with a low-to-middling 12.33"; 2002 and 2007, for instance, were considerably drier with totals between seven and eight inches and 2005 was the most recent 'big-wet' with close to 44". 1998 was wetter still, with an all-time record of 49". These are totals for the Upper Ojai Summit fire station where recording began in 1906. The driest year was 1924, with a little over six inches. So, we can safely establish the 100 year limits as 6 on the low side and 49 on the high with, as local farmers can attest, an infuriating inconsistency between.
Wide, shallow, riparian morphology with fast moving waters seem to work better in this semi-arid, mediterranean climate type than the deep and slow rivers of more consistently wet, temperate environments. (See Estuaries and Deltas). If one believed in geographical destiny, then a case could be made that many Southern Californians exhibit the indigenous riverine characteristics of fast, fickle and shallow, a more appropriate adaptation, I would suggest, to the twenty first century world than the antithetical characteristics of ponderous, steadfast and profound.
Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry who wrote River Deep, Mountain High in Tin Pan Alley's Brill Building, were mining a biblical vein (forged within the southern gospel tradition) in arriving at their evocative phrase - a marked lurch towards naturalism after, for instance, their run with the abstract lyricism of Da Doo Ron Ron and Do Wah Diddy Diddy earlier in the decade.
William Blake begins Jerusalem, his famous hymn, with "And did those feet in ancient times, Walk upon England's mountains green?" and goes on to ask, "...was the "holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen.." and, "did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills...?"
The short answer to all these queries is, probably not. Although the plot of Jesus - the Missing Years, has yet to be fully revealed, it is unlikely to have included a visit of the protagonist to the obscure island of Albion. Nevertheless, Blake hints at a strongly felt spiritual landscape: only its genesis was misread. It more likely originated in more ancient, pagan times when Celtic culture lay heavy o'er the grassy mantle.
Blake hopes to place Jerusalem, plucked from the Judaean desert and mythologized as a sanctuary of Peace and Love, in England's "green and pleasant land". His purpose is to provide a Christian gloss on lands inhabited by far older gods, on a spiritual landscape that owed everything to Celtic polytheism and almost nothing to the monotheism of the Middle East.
While I may imagine the phrase, "River Deep, Mountain High" as aptly describing California's sometimes green, sometimes brown land where the waters flow between the Sierra mountains and riparian gorges, Greenwich and Barry's lyrical purpose is, perhaps, to frame a deeply felt, but ultimately profane love in a spiritual landscape.
In California, as in England, the mark of the gods is on the land. The spiritual imprint is deep within the folds of the wild terrain. Our sanctuary of Peace and Love, our Jerusalem, is embedded in these deific geographies where,
"...... it grows stronger, like a river flows
And it gets bigger baby, and heaven knows..."
2012-05-28
2012-05-24
Aphrodite
"In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Oh Boy. Oh disembodied eyeball. Oh particle of God. Where does one begin? I've had a few go-rounds, in this blog, on 'Romanticism' and 'Man and Nature'. In considerations of this last dyad, no one does it better than Raymond Williams (Cosmic Wordplay). But first, I should back up and explain the latest set of circumstances that have led me, once again, into this morass.
Last Saturday we attended, with a couple of friends, a performance by Hugh Lupton and Helen Chadwick at The Getty Villa Theater. Their piece, Hymns to Aphrodite, was work-shopped during a two week residence to which Hugh and Helen had been invited, arranged to coincide with the Getty exhibition of Aphrodite and the Gods of Love that had originated at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Hugh told us tales of the Goddess, primarily sourced from Ovid's Metamorphoses, while Helen backed him up, a cappella, with songs of a lucid and haunting tonality. All well and good.
Hugh is an old friend of our Ojai chum Nicki, who first worked with him while he was nurturing his piece on the Odyssey at the Bath Literature Festival, in 2000. A few weekends ago, Lorrie drove Hugh and Helen up from the Getty to spend a couple of days in Ojai with Nicki and Will. Hugh is a professional story teller but a couple of years ago he published his first novel, The Ballad of John Clare, which tells the story of a year in the life of the young poet.
Clare is the working class antidote to that surfeit of mostly upper crust twits who form the backbone of England's Romance poets (Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth, and Shelley). As such, he better fits a modern sensibility and his work is now scoured for its evidence of a proto-green sensibility. His relevance to our current environmental angst is why, perhaps, Lupton chose to novelize a year of his life. Clare's status as an agricultural laborer put him on the wrong side of Britain's eighteenth century enclosure movement which converted common lands to private ownership - a massive transference of agricultural wealth from peasant to squire. The newly impoverished under class became fodder for England's dark satanic mills and the face of Britain's countryside was transformed - the sky, as Clare documents it, was falling. He writes,
“Fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease”
As we now understand it, t'was but a step along the road towards industrialized farming.
Got me thinking: romantics are, by definition, lovers of the past, of the old ways. But Clare's rural lament has the noble imprimatur of a worker-on-the-land. 'They', the sinister forces of mercantilism, not only messed with the aesthetics of his beloved countryside, but also his livelihood. Wordsworth et al float above it all and their engagement is spiritual rather than material. So Clare, by his involvement in the land as an economic as well as a visual construct expands our ecological understanding. He elaborated the natural world beyond the limits of the customary poetic imagination, which saw it as an aesthetic system serving as God's subaltern. Em - transparent eyeball - erson represents the nadir of such narrow posturing.
And so I have begun. Off to the races. Raymond Williams in his essay, Ideas of Nature in Materialism and Culture, Verso, London, 1980, cuts to the chase. We do not, he suggests, have a static view of Nature: it is an evolving conception shaped by history, culture and, Lord help us, consciousness. The first issue he sees is this: is mankind in or out? Are we inherent in Nature or is it a thing apart? The fact that the word 'nature' also indicates a single essence or principle around which a multiplicity of things might be mentally organized is, Williams argues, indicative of a change of consciousness: from a pagan world of multiple spirits embodying various aspects of the natural world to a singular 'nature' ministering to a singular, monotheistic god.
But the critical question remains: does Nature include Man? In the medieval conception, Man was definitely included as part of the terrestrial hierarchy - unique only in that she was the one creature to which a relationship to god might be vouchsafed. But Nature, by the seventeenth century, was seen as separate from humans so that it could be studied, scientifically, as a thing apart. At the height of this scientific analysis and an 'improving' of the natural world, in the nineteenth century, there emerged another meaning: a Nature that was fundamentally unknowable, divorced from mankind, inimical to her material nurture - a place of alienation and spiritual power, the Wilderness.
In a more general sense, Nature was seen as 'out there', separate both from humanity and the 'smoke and spoil' which signaled those areas where its resources were harvested. At the same time, Wilderness is seen as a place of healing and solace (Cue: Emerson and his pals), while down the road, sometimes quite literally, it is being eviscerated for its mineral wealth. As the exploitation of Nature continued on a vast scale, the people who extracted the most wealth from it were often those who returned, at the weekends, to their estates and country houses in 'unspoilt' Nature. Wilderness became a place of retreat both from the jungle of the City, the wastelands of industrialized mineral extraction (and later, industrialized farming).
This separation between humankind and Nature continues to be a characteristic of our predominantly urban and post-industrial society. But Williams notes that this false division between the two abstractions belies the extent to which our fates are intertwined, the irrevocable mixing of our labor with the earth, and the enmeshment of our forces with its forces. Out of these interactions we have made both a 'human nature' and an altered natural order: we have forged societies. But, Williams warns, if we alienate the living processes of which we are a part, we end by alienating ourselves. He concludes by calling for the coming together of the disciplines of Economics and Ecology in recognition of their fateful entwinement.
Back in the day, when the world was new made, the gods and the goddesses sorted everything out. Through his inspired storytelling, Hugh Lupton is bringing their mythologies back to life. His vision is adamantine: "Everything I enjoyed reading led me to the belief that all nature is supernatural, and that there’s something unseen that charges the visible world". How close is that to suggesting that our fate, ultimately and forever, is directed by other mythic actors and we are but bit players in their cosmic imaginings? Meanwhile, in this prosaic world, Raymond Williams elucidates for us the fevered philosophies of our kind, rationalizing, forever rationalizing, our tantalizingly irrational existence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Oh Boy. Oh disembodied eyeball. Oh particle of God. Where does one begin? I've had a few go-rounds, in this blog, on 'Romanticism' and 'Man and Nature'. In considerations of this last dyad, no one does it better than Raymond Williams (Cosmic Wordplay). But first, I should back up and explain the latest set of circumstances that have led me, once again, into this morass.
Last Saturday we attended, with a couple of friends, a performance by Hugh Lupton and Helen Chadwick at The Getty Villa Theater. Their piece, Hymns to Aphrodite, was work-shopped during a two week residence to which Hugh and Helen had been invited, arranged to coincide with the Getty exhibition of Aphrodite and the Gods of Love that had originated at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Hugh told us tales of the Goddess, primarily sourced from Ovid's Metamorphoses, while Helen backed him up, a cappella, with songs of a lucid and haunting tonality. All well and good.
Hugh is an old friend of our Ojai chum Nicki, who first worked with him while he was nurturing his piece on the Odyssey at the Bath Literature Festival, in 2000. A few weekends ago, Lorrie drove Hugh and Helen up from the Getty to spend a couple of days in Ojai with Nicki and Will. Hugh is a professional story teller but a couple of years ago he published his first novel, The Ballad of John Clare, which tells the story of a year in the life of the young poet.
Clare is the working class antidote to that surfeit of mostly upper crust twits who form the backbone of England's Romance poets (Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth, and Shelley). As such, he better fits a modern sensibility and his work is now scoured for its evidence of a proto-green sensibility. His relevance to our current environmental angst is why, perhaps, Lupton chose to novelize a year of his life. Clare's status as an agricultural laborer put him on the wrong side of Britain's eighteenth century enclosure movement which converted common lands to private ownership - a massive transference of agricultural wealth from peasant to squire. The newly impoverished under class became fodder for England's dark satanic mills and the face of Britain's countryside was transformed - the sky, as Clare documents it, was falling. He writes,
“Fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease”
As we now understand it, t'was but a step along the road towards industrialized farming.
Got me thinking: romantics are, by definition, lovers of the past, of the old ways. But Clare's rural lament has the noble imprimatur of a worker-on-the-land. 'They', the sinister forces of mercantilism, not only messed with the aesthetics of his beloved countryside, but also his livelihood. Wordsworth et al float above it all and their engagement is spiritual rather than material. So Clare, by his involvement in the land as an economic as well as a visual construct expands our ecological understanding. He elaborated the natural world beyond the limits of the customary poetic imagination, which saw it as an aesthetic system serving as God's subaltern. Em - transparent eyeball - erson represents the nadir of such narrow posturing.
And so I have begun. Off to the races. Raymond Williams in his essay, Ideas of Nature in Materialism and Culture, Verso, London, 1980, cuts to the chase. We do not, he suggests, have a static view of Nature: it is an evolving conception shaped by history, culture and, Lord help us, consciousness. The first issue he sees is this: is mankind in or out? Are we inherent in Nature or is it a thing apart? The fact that the word 'nature' also indicates a single essence or principle around which a multiplicity of things might be mentally organized is, Williams argues, indicative of a change of consciousness: from a pagan world of multiple spirits embodying various aspects of the natural world to a singular 'nature' ministering to a singular, monotheistic god.
But the critical question remains: does Nature include Man? In the medieval conception, Man was definitely included as part of the terrestrial hierarchy - unique only in that she was the one creature to which a relationship to god might be vouchsafed. But Nature, by the seventeenth century, was seen as separate from humans so that it could be studied, scientifically, as a thing apart. At the height of this scientific analysis and an 'improving' of the natural world, in the nineteenth century, there emerged another meaning: a Nature that was fundamentally unknowable, divorced from mankind, inimical to her material nurture - a place of alienation and spiritual power, the Wilderness.
In a more general sense, Nature was seen as 'out there', separate both from humanity and the 'smoke and spoil' which signaled those areas where its resources were harvested. At the same time, Wilderness is seen as a place of healing and solace (Cue: Emerson and his pals), while down the road, sometimes quite literally, it is being eviscerated for its mineral wealth. As the exploitation of Nature continued on a vast scale, the people who extracted the most wealth from it were often those who returned, at the weekends, to their estates and country houses in 'unspoilt' Nature. Wilderness became a place of retreat both from the jungle of the City, the wastelands of industrialized mineral extraction (and later, industrialized farming).
This separation between humankind and Nature continues to be a characteristic of our predominantly urban and post-industrial society. But Williams notes that this false division between the two abstractions belies the extent to which our fates are intertwined, the irrevocable mixing of our labor with the earth, and the enmeshment of our forces with its forces. Out of these interactions we have made both a 'human nature' and an altered natural order: we have forged societies. But, Williams warns, if we alienate the living processes of which we are a part, we end by alienating ourselves. He concludes by calling for the coming together of the disciplines of Economics and Ecology in recognition of their fateful entwinement.
Back in the day, when the world was new made, the gods and the goddesses sorted everything out. Through his inspired storytelling, Hugh Lupton is bringing their mythologies back to life. His vision is adamantine: "Everything I enjoyed reading led me to the belief that all nature is supernatural, and that there’s something unseen that charges the visible world". How close is that to suggesting that our fate, ultimately and forever, is directed by other mythic actors and we are but bit players in their cosmic imaginings? Meanwhile, in this prosaic world, Raymond Williams elucidates for us the fevered philosophies of our kind, rationalizing, forever rationalizing, our tantalizingly irrational existence.
2012-05-18
Little Foxes
They appeared just west of the clump of oaks and rocks behind the house. Nuzzling each other atop a rock, viewing the scene, looking at the house, looking, perhaps at Lorrie and me seated at a table eating supper. It was that hour before twilight, when the full brightness of the afternoon has departed - the sun having fled the scene - but there's still enough light bouncing around the empyrean for it to be considered day. The magic hour. Supper time.
Two little foxes: but first, the thought that they were feral cats, one of which I had seen earlier in the day. Then, bobcats? Until they sidled apart and displayed their tails. Tails! Baby mountain lions? By the time they sauntered off the rock, behind the toyon, brushing past the poison oak and began wandering up the path, their full, glorious vulpine nature emerged - the foxy little faces, pricked and pointy ears and silver bushy tails edged in black that seemed to float in the air behind them.
It has been a while since we have seen anything much in the way of wildlife on the property, but a couple of weeks ago I heard a very distinctive bird call one morning. A piercing run through the register, beginning with the top notes. A downhill glissando. And loud. Once heard, never forgotten. A couple of days later Margot mentioned that she had seen and heard a canyon wren....meant nothing to me, Margot sees all kinds of birds of which I am oblivious. Last week I heard the call again and saw the singer sitting on the huge boulder just to the west of our front door, a lithic mass that I sometimes think of as our 'Ayers Rock' - that red Australian monolith that features so prominently in the dreamscape of the Anangu.
Our rock is sandstone and is composed of buff tones; the little song bird belting out that glissando was a dark rust color that better matches the ruddy tones of what is now called Uluru as it glows in the evening light of the Australian outback. The bird was, of course, a canyon wren (Catherpes mexicanus) and the description of its voice, "gushing cadence of clear, curved notes tripping down scale: tee tee tee tee tew tew tew tew" confirmed the visual identity, "rusty, with dark rufous belly..." (Peterson Field Guide to Birds of Western North America).
I deputized Lorrie to be our in-house ornithologist a while ago, and she has fitfully accepted the challenge. She uses the Audubon Field Guide to North American Birds - Western Region and riffles through its pages at breakfast. Last week she identified the annoying little birds (formerly known as LBB's - little brown birds) who flutter about our eaves, as house finches. The male of the species boasts a little red on crown, breast and rump, the distaff side is a dreary, plebeian creature.
Just last Friday we attended Allen Bertke's presentation of his photographs of local birds at the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy offices. Allen is a true birder, although of fairly recent vintage, and takes remarkable photos of the local species. We, meanwhile, are flat out trying to remember the names of the basic, background avian presence of thrashers, towhees, hawks, quail and (now, we know) house finches. Occasionally, we delight ourselves by spotting comparative rarities such as the black pheobe and the white tailed kite.
Last night I woke to the sound of three owls (it seemed) triangulating across the chaparral hills - short, single hoots across the dark expanse, sonic signalling amidst the chthonic wildlands. Barn owls perhaps? We know the call of the great horned and the tremulous burble of the screech owls, these haunting calls were neither. A little while ago, returning from a meal in town, at the foot of the grade just past Boccalli's, a ghostly B-1 bomber of a bird buzzed the Land Rover and through window and then the sun-roof, we saw the white undercarriage of a barn owl gleam against the dark sky and overhanging oaks. They are out there: and last night a coterie was encamped somewhere within owl call.
Our resident family of deer are gone, spooked by the mountain lion who claimed one, at least, of their number (Love Comes to Koenigstein). The coyotes have not returned, either in my dreams or in the local chaparral (Coyote Dream). The bobcats (Bobcat Magic) have gone walkabout and even snakes are thin on the ground. We have seen a couple of racers and a baby gopher snake and last Monday while I was working in the office and Alex was weed-wacking in the back yard I received a text from him: " Five foot snake outside your bedroom, under a rock now". That got my attention.
It turned out that the rock in question was at the foot of the oak knoll as it drops down to the gravel pool terrace, placed against the slope with an excavator some three and a half years ago. While the family of gopher snakes that lives beneath these oaks was much disturbed by the building of the house adjacent to their home, the spaces beneath these additional rocks piled against the knoll have provided them with generous room additions. The snake, this recent afternoon, had indeed retreated from view by the time I got on the scene, and once I was reassured that it was not a rattler, Alex and I resumed our respective tasks.
Our lives are wreathed in bird life, framed by the chaparral and enlivened by the presence of wild animals. Our location in the urban wildland and our intention have made it thus. We replaced a home set in the suburban, beach-side idyll of Santa Monica Canyon with a rural loft - a barn-like house in the Topatopa foothills. This is a setting which I have, perhaps, fetishized. I have also made rules. Making a home here has been a design exercise and design, both architectural and landscape, is, as I understand it, enriched by the creation of bounds.
In this environment, the development of a framework in which to make aesthetic decisions, has taken on a kind of pantheist imperative. I have introduced no non-native plants onto the property and have expended time and treasure in trying to remove those non-natives that are already here. We try to make room for the wildlife, and are tolerant of it all - even rattlesnakes and marauding mountain lions. We are trying to have our wildlife experience while avoiding the traumas that this environment can inflict on callow homesteaders such as ourselves.
We are taking a Franciscan position of 'suffer the little foxes unto me', rather than the Solomonic stand of "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes...". I always thought of foxes as carnivores, but apparently they enjoy snacking on grape leaves, or at least did when the Song of Solomon was written about 1000 B.C.E.
Our raised vegetable and herb bed - a world unto itself and thus given a pass on the non-natives directive - has no vines (or lettuces). We have learnt through hard-won experience to plant only spicy greens and pungent herbs. We Urbanites are slowly learning to coexist with the Wildland.
Two little foxes: but first, the thought that they were feral cats, one of which I had seen earlier in the day. Then, bobcats? Until they sidled apart and displayed their tails. Tails! Baby mountain lions? By the time they sauntered off the rock, behind the toyon, brushing past the poison oak and began wandering up the path, their full, glorious vulpine nature emerged - the foxy little faces, pricked and pointy ears and silver bushy tails edged in black that seemed to float in the air behind them.
It has been a while since we have seen anything much in the way of wildlife on the property, but a couple of weeks ago I heard a very distinctive bird call one morning. A piercing run through the register, beginning with the top notes. A downhill glissando. And loud. Once heard, never forgotten. A couple of days later Margot mentioned that she had seen and heard a canyon wren....meant nothing to me, Margot sees all kinds of birds of which I am oblivious. Last week I heard the call again and saw the singer sitting on the huge boulder just to the west of our front door, a lithic mass that I sometimes think of as our 'Ayers Rock' - that red Australian monolith that features so prominently in the dreamscape of the Anangu.
Our rock is sandstone and is composed of buff tones; the little song bird belting out that glissando was a dark rust color that better matches the ruddy tones of what is now called Uluru as it glows in the evening light of the Australian outback. The bird was, of course, a canyon wren (Catherpes mexicanus) and the description of its voice, "gushing cadence of clear, curved notes tripping down scale: tee tee tee tee tew tew tew tew" confirmed the visual identity, "rusty, with dark rufous belly..." (Peterson Field Guide to Birds of Western North America).
I deputized Lorrie to be our in-house ornithologist a while ago, and she has fitfully accepted the challenge. She uses the Audubon Field Guide to North American Birds - Western Region and riffles through its pages at breakfast. Last week she identified the annoying little birds (formerly known as LBB's - little brown birds) who flutter about our eaves, as house finches. The male of the species boasts a little red on crown, breast and rump, the distaff side is a dreary, plebeian creature.
Just last Friday we attended Allen Bertke's presentation of his photographs of local birds at the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy offices. Allen is a true birder, although of fairly recent vintage, and takes remarkable photos of the local species. We, meanwhile, are flat out trying to remember the names of the basic, background avian presence of thrashers, towhees, hawks, quail and (now, we know) house finches. Occasionally, we delight ourselves by spotting comparative rarities such as the black pheobe and the white tailed kite.
Last night I woke to the sound of three owls (it seemed) triangulating across the chaparral hills - short, single hoots across the dark expanse, sonic signalling amidst the chthonic wildlands. Barn owls perhaps? We know the call of the great horned and the tremulous burble of the screech owls, these haunting calls were neither. A little while ago, returning from a meal in town, at the foot of the grade just past Boccalli's, a ghostly B-1 bomber of a bird buzzed the Land Rover and through window and then the sun-roof, we saw the white undercarriage of a barn owl gleam against the dark sky and overhanging oaks. They are out there: and last night a coterie was encamped somewhere within owl call.
Our resident family of deer are gone, spooked by the mountain lion who claimed one, at least, of their number (Love Comes to Koenigstein). The coyotes have not returned, either in my dreams or in the local chaparral (Coyote Dream). The bobcats (Bobcat Magic) have gone walkabout and even snakes are thin on the ground. We have seen a couple of racers and a baby gopher snake and last Monday while I was working in the office and Alex was weed-wacking in the back yard I received a text from him: " Five foot snake outside your bedroom, under a rock now". That got my attention.
It turned out that the rock in question was at the foot of the oak knoll as it drops down to the gravel pool terrace, placed against the slope with an excavator some three and a half years ago. While the family of gopher snakes that lives beneath these oaks was much disturbed by the building of the house adjacent to their home, the spaces beneath these additional rocks piled against the knoll have provided them with generous room additions. The snake, this recent afternoon, had indeed retreated from view by the time I got on the scene, and once I was reassured that it was not a rattler, Alex and I resumed our respective tasks.
Our lives are wreathed in bird life, framed by the chaparral and enlivened by the presence of wild animals. Our location in the urban wildland and our intention have made it thus. We replaced a home set in the suburban, beach-side idyll of Santa Monica Canyon with a rural loft - a barn-like house in the Topatopa foothills. This is a setting which I have, perhaps, fetishized. I have also made rules. Making a home here has been a design exercise and design, both architectural and landscape, is, as I understand it, enriched by the creation of bounds.
In this environment, the development of a framework in which to make aesthetic decisions, has taken on a kind of pantheist imperative. I have introduced no non-native plants onto the property and have expended time and treasure in trying to remove those non-natives that are already here. We try to make room for the wildlife, and are tolerant of it all - even rattlesnakes and marauding mountain lions. We are trying to have our wildlife experience while avoiding the traumas that this environment can inflict on callow homesteaders such as ourselves.
We are taking a Franciscan position of 'suffer the little foxes unto me', rather than the Solomonic stand of "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes...". I always thought of foxes as carnivores, but apparently they enjoy snacking on grape leaves, or at least did when the Song of Solomon was written about 1000 B.C.E.
Our raised vegetable and herb bed - a world unto itself and thus given a pass on the non-natives directive - has no vines (or lettuces). We have learnt through hard-won experience to plant only spicy greens and pungent herbs. We Urbanites are slowly learning to coexist with the Wildland.
2012-05-16
World of Swirl
National Geographic reports that, "Researchers have discovered astronomical calculations on the wall of an ancient Mayan site that suggest dates thousands of years beyond 2012". The find came at the Mayan ruins known as Xultun in Guatemala, where archeologists discovered a small room used by 9th-century record-keepers. In RV III, I wrote of the European marginales awaiting shelter from the end of the world (indicated in some interpretations of the Maya calendar) in the civilization they imagine beneath Bugarach mountain. Meanwhile, the fey Elizabeth van Buren is readying herself to access the underground city complex of Agartha, a portal to which she believes she has located in her landscape zodiac around Renne-le-Chateau. Now, in light of this calendric reappraisal, Science reports that, "We keep looking for endings. The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It's an entirely different mindset." Its official: the end of the world (at least in the year of our Lord, 2012) has been cancelled.
OK, the elephant in that sweaty little room, with faded murals and scratched calculations, is called Cosmogony. The Mayan world view was supported by multi-layered, cosmic calendrics. These were being parsed to establish the beginning of a new cycle of time. It was past due: by around 900 A.D., the classical Mayan world was crumbling, their jungle mega-cities, confronted with their inherent unsustainability as the diminishing returns of slash-and-burn reduced the maize yield, were collapsing back into the steamy grip of tropical rain forest.
The Mayan version of the 'hopey-changey thing' was based on prognostications of temporal renewal, of a resetting of the great cycle of time. In the event, their faith in cyclical renewal was misplaced, for their civilization, already dwarfed, was in terminal decline, defeated by environmental calamity and the intra-city conflict so engendered. Their great cities, their temples, ziggurats, canals, highway system and this little time-keepers office were swallowed up by the fecundity of the Central American bio-mass and disappeared into the leaf litter and the chlorophyllic tendrils of the endemic plant community. Theirs was an urban wildland returned to the wild, their civilization engulfed by biota.
The Irish-Spanish adventurer Juan Galindo originally stumbled upon the Mayan ruins early in the nineteenth century while fighting for Central America's independence from Spain. He led the charge against the Caribbean fortress of Omoa, the last Spanish stronghold in that part of the world, and was rewarded with the governorship of a large swathe of Guatemala. He went on to write descriptive accounts of the ruins at Palenque and Copán. John Lloyd Stephens, an American travel writer and explorer and Frederick Catherwood, an English artist and architect, popularized this re-discovery of the lost civilization in their books, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán, 1841 and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 1843. Stephens, incidentally, was sponsored in his explorations by Martin van Buren, the eighth president and Elizabeth's ancestor, and was made the United States Ambassador to Central America.
After a century and a half of intense archeological exploration (and looting), there still remain mysteries to be discovered and treasures to be revealed. A team led by William Saturno from Boston University unearthed the intricate calendar calculations on the crumbling walls of the day-keeper's room in Xultun just this month where computations about the moon, the sun and possibly Venus and Mars involve dates stretching some 7,000 years into the future. Interviewed by Bruce Gellerman, on Its Living on Earth, Saturno claims,
"The Maya calendar has no end. The Maya calendar was a series of circles. And, like a circle, one could say ‘where is the beginning of the circle, where is the end of the circle?’ Well, the whole point of the circle is that it has neither beginning nor end, and it just goes around and around and around. And for the ancient Maya, that’s how their calendar worked....."
For some cultures, and this list would include Australian aboriginal, Mayan and Chumash, time and space are woven together in a kind of Einsteinian four dimensional continuum. So it was, that for the Chumash, time does not move forward from past to future but is, instead, recursive. The 'antap were cosmic time-keepers (Space and Practice II) for the purpose of scheduling ritual and ceremony, markers within a multi-layered universe in which its inhabitants sought stasis, the steady state of an eternal now. Calendrical notation existed in this Southern California stone age world, at least for solstice observances, and this cosmic knowledge lent prestige to its recorders, who acquired their power based on the ability to prognosticate and schedule significant rituals in accord with astronomical events.
The Chumash world was a place where characters, events and spirits, that existed outside of the quotidian world, could be accessed by culturally prescribed rituals and dreams and, on a more ad hoc basis, by shaman who utilized datura to speed their journeys to this parallel dream world. But these worlds were not conceived of as separate: they were parts of a whole, enfolded, like time and space, in a ubiquitous present. Nevertheless, as Michael K. Ward notes in his Timoloqinash: Interpreting Chumash History, OCB Tracker, Glendora, Ca., Fall 1998 thru Summer 1999, the local tribes were cognizant of an origin mythology, but this genesis was understood to be a recurring phenomenon - their continued existence was perceived to be dependent on a recreation of these circumstances. "Such events occur and forever afterwards exist, on a continuous plane of subjective understanding, both for each individual person and collectively for the entire community of language speakers" (Ward).
Clearly, when considering these cosmogonies, we're not in Kansas anymore. Rituals existed, in the Chumash world, as markers measured out in a kind of paleolithic sidereal time, where the Earth is a fixed point in the universe, the stars journey overhead, and the sun continues to revolve around the planet in symbiosis only with the correct performance of ritual. Like the Maya, the Chumash were not looking for change, and certainly not an ending, unless caused by their carelessness in acts of propitiation; continuity was the ever present ingredient in a timeless world.
While the Mayan decline is marked by their increasing architectural ineptitude (viz. Tulum), and thus their civilization's collapse was very publicly recorded (albeit successfully hidden deep in tropical jungle for several centuries), the Chumash culture was evanescent rather than monumental and their decline afforded no such parallel record. A flurry of archeological artifact gathering (and looting) in the late nineteenth century has resulted only in a slim representation of their meagre material culture moldering, for the most part, in museum storerooms.
Their cultural destruction can be measured out, instead, in Spanish missions - architectural markers placed along El Camino Real - each signaling a step along a death march towards oblivion. Towards a pathetic end to a vibrant, pre-colonial, native American World of Swirl. The end date of this world has been precisely recorded. It was 1769.
OK, the elephant in that sweaty little room, with faded murals and scratched calculations, is called Cosmogony. The Mayan world view was supported by multi-layered, cosmic calendrics. These were being parsed to establish the beginning of a new cycle of time. It was past due: by around 900 A.D., the classical Mayan world was crumbling, their jungle mega-cities, confronted with their inherent unsustainability as the diminishing returns of slash-and-burn reduced the maize yield, were collapsing back into the steamy grip of tropical rain forest.
The Mayan version of the 'hopey-changey thing' was based on prognostications of temporal renewal, of a resetting of the great cycle of time. In the event, their faith in cyclical renewal was misplaced, for their civilization, already dwarfed, was in terminal decline, defeated by environmental calamity and the intra-city conflict so engendered. Their great cities, their temples, ziggurats, canals, highway system and this little time-keepers office were swallowed up by the fecundity of the Central American bio-mass and disappeared into the leaf litter and the chlorophyllic tendrils of the endemic plant community. Theirs was an urban wildland returned to the wild, their civilization engulfed by biota.
The Irish-Spanish adventurer Juan Galindo originally stumbled upon the Mayan ruins early in the nineteenth century while fighting for Central America's independence from Spain. He led the charge against the Caribbean fortress of Omoa, the last Spanish stronghold in that part of the world, and was rewarded with the governorship of a large swathe of Guatemala. He went on to write descriptive accounts of the ruins at Palenque and Copán. John Lloyd Stephens, an American travel writer and explorer and Frederick Catherwood, an English artist and architect, popularized this re-discovery of the lost civilization in their books, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán, 1841 and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 1843. Stephens, incidentally, was sponsored in his explorations by Martin van Buren, the eighth president and Elizabeth's ancestor, and was made the United States Ambassador to Central America.
After a century and a half of intense archeological exploration (and looting), there still remain mysteries to be discovered and treasures to be revealed. A team led by William Saturno from Boston University unearthed the intricate calendar calculations on the crumbling walls of the day-keeper's room in Xultun just this month where computations about the moon, the sun and possibly Venus and Mars involve dates stretching some 7,000 years into the future. Interviewed by Bruce Gellerman, on Its Living on Earth, Saturno claims,
"The Maya calendar has no end. The Maya calendar was a series of circles. And, like a circle, one could say ‘where is the beginning of the circle, where is the end of the circle?’ Well, the whole point of the circle is that it has neither beginning nor end, and it just goes around and around and around. And for the ancient Maya, that’s how their calendar worked....."
For some cultures, and this list would include Australian aboriginal, Mayan and Chumash, time and space are woven together in a kind of Einsteinian four dimensional continuum. So it was, that for the Chumash, time does not move forward from past to future but is, instead, recursive. The 'antap were cosmic time-keepers (Space and Practice II) for the purpose of scheduling ritual and ceremony, markers within a multi-layered universe in which its inhabitants sought stasis, the steady state of an eternal now. Calendrical notation existed in this Southern California stone age world, at least for solstice observances, and this cosmic knowledge lent prestige to its recorders, who acquired their power based on the ability to prognosticate and schedule significant rituals in accord with astronomical events.
The Chumash world was a place where characters, events and spirits, that existed outside of the quotidian world, could be accessed by culturally prescribed rituals and dreams and, on a more ad hoc basis, by shaman who utilized datura to speed their journeys to this parallel dream world. But these worlds were not conceived of as separate: they were parts of a whole, enfolded, like time and space, in a ubiquitous present. Nevertheless, as Michael K. Ward notes in his Timoloqinash: Interpreting Chumash History, OCB Tracker, Glendora, Ca., Fall 1998 thru Summer 1999, the local tribes were cognizant of an origin mythology, but this genesis was understood to be a recurring phenomenon - their continued existence was perceived to be dependent on a recreation of these circumstances. "Such events occur and forever afterwards exist, on a continuous plane of subjective understanding, both for each individual person and collectively for the entire community of language speakers" (Ward).
Clearly, when considering these cosmogonies, we're not in Kansas anymore. Rituals existed, in the Chumash world, as markers measured out in a kind of paleolithic sidereal time, where the Earth is a fixed point in the universe, the stars journey overhead, and the sun continues to revolve around the planet in symbiosis only with the correct performance of ritual. Like the Maya, the Chumash were not looking for change, and certainly not an ending, unless caused by their carelessness in acts of propitiation; continuity was the ever present ingredient in a timeless world.
While the Mayan decline is marked by their increasing architectural ineptitude (viz. Tulum), and thus their civilization's collapse was very publicly recorded (albeit successfully hidden deep in tropical jungle for several centuries), the Chumash culture was evanescent rather than monumental and their decline afforded no such parallel record. A flurry of archeological artifact gathering (and looting) in the late nineteenth century has resulted only in a slim representation of their meagre material culture moldering, for the most part, in museum storerooms.
Their cultural destruction can be measured out, instead, in Spanish missions - architectural markers placed along El Camino Real - each signaling a step along a death march towards oblivion. Towards a pathetic end to a vibrant, pre-colonial, native American World of Swirl. The end date of this world has been precisely recorded. It was 1769.
2012-05-08
Naming Names
Alongside the sandy track that extends Verner Farm Road into the hinterland and becomes a line scratched in the land where other roughly cut trails, oil roads and deer paths criss-cross the chaparral, in an area dotted with oil wells and forlorn houses and where there is a half-acre fenced yard that contains several rv's, and many broken down cars and trucks (in the middle of it all, an oil well), is, right at the moment, a yerba santa bush, its blossoms, under this week's deep, grey marine layer, a startling blue.
There's a lot of blue in the chaparral at the moment. Still dominant are the white mounding ceonothus bushes that cover the hillsides, but every day as the warm winds disperse the petals the snowy white drifts appear to be melting away. Here and there are the California lilacs, blue ceonothus. There's the occasional blue dick, lots of Solanum, blue eyed grass, rarely, Verbena lasiostachys and the blue blossoms of black sage (don't ask).
Few people care about chaparral, even those who espouse a concern for California's wild places. It is an un-loved plant community. Few know its signature plants - I was shocked recently when a board member of the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy did not recognize ceonothus or for that matter the only slightly less common fuchsia-flowered gooseberry (Ribes speciosum). But take the trouble to get to know the dozen or so signature plants of the chaparral and the rewards are immense.
One could argue, perhaps, that the names of these plants are irrelevant. That you can enjoy the landscape without knowing what's what. Faithful readers will know that I believe in the power of naming names. That said, I also know that common names can be as effective in staking a connection with a plant as the official genus and species. As a child, I knew many common English plant names long before I was aware of the Linnaean classification system and, in my part of Surrey, a bank, hedgerow, meadow or roadside offered a constellation of recognized plants without a classically derived appellation amongst them. I would acknowledge, for instance, the presence of blackberry, ragged robin, cow parsley, deadly nightshade, yarrow, dead nettles, stinging nettles, docks, burdocks, horseradish, daisies, campion, violets, sorrel, dandelions, groundsel, horsetail and so on amidst the hazel, oak, holly, chestnut, ash, beech, birch and alder trees. Amongst this unremarked upon congregation of plants of the Surrey countryside the special displays of bluebells, primroses, foxgloves, cowslips, poppies, dog roses, snowdrops, jack-in-the-pulpits, red-hot-pokers and forget-me-nots were seasonally noted.
In an age when entertainment is less often derived from the natural environment, and the acquisition of culture almost entirely divorced from natural history, knowing the names of plants is a peccadillo not a pre-requisite of a shared civic curriculum. Gone are the days when Willis Linn Jepson (the great Californian botanist) could reasonably proclaim that "every educated person should know, at least broadly, the native forests, shrubs and flowering plants in his own state". But is it unreasonable that Californians should at least recognize their state flower, the poppy, rather than mistake it, as did a recent visitor to our property, for a buttercup?
There's a lot of blue in the chaparral at the moment. Still dominant are the white mounding ceonothus bushes that cover the hillsides, but every day as the warm winds disperse the petals the snowy white drifts appear to be melting away. Here and there are the California lilacs, blue ceonothus. There's the occasional blue dick, lots of Solanum, blue eyed grass, rarely, Verbena lasiostachys and the blue blossoms of black sage (don't ask).
Few people care about chaparral, even those who espouse a concern for California's wild places. It is an un-loved plant community. Few know its signature plants - I was shocked recently when a board member of the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy did not recognize ceonothus or for that matter the only slightly less common fuchsia-flowered gooseberry (Ribes speciosum). But take the trouble to get to know the dozen or so signature plants of the chaparral and the rewards are immense.
One could argue, perhaps, that the names of these plants are irrelevant. That you can enjoy the landscape without knowing what's what. Faithful readers will know that I believe in the power of naming names. That said, I also know that common names can be as effective in staking a connection with a plant as the official genus and species. As a child, I knew many common English plant names long before I was aware of the Linnaean classification system and, in my part of Surrey, a bank, hedgerow, meadow or roadside offered a constellation of recognized plants without a classically derived appellation amongst them. I would acknowledge, for instance, the presence of blackberry, ragged robin, cow parsley, deadly nightshade, yarrow, dead nettles, stinging nettles, docks, burdocks, horseradish, daisies, campion, violets, sorrel, dandelions, groundsel, horsetail and so on amidst the hazel, oak, holly, chestnut, ash, beech, birch and alder trees. Amongst this unremarked upon congregation of plants of the Surrey countryside the special displays of bluebells, primroses, foxgloves, cowslips, poppies, dog roses, snowdrops, jack-in-the-pulpits, red-hot-pokers and forget-me-nots were seasonally noted.
In an age when entertainment is less often derived from the natural environment, and the acquisition of culture almost entirely divorced from natural history, knowing the names of plants is a peccadillo not a pre-requisite of a shared civic curriculum. Gone are the days when Willis Linn Jepson (the great Californian botanist) could reasonably proclaim that "every educated person should know, at least broadly, the native forests, shrubs and flowering plants in his own state". But is it unreasonable that Californians should at least recognize their state flower, the poppy, rather than mistake it, as did a recent visitor to our property, for a buttercup?
California is rich in linguistic history. Thus native plants here have their official Linnaean names, their Spanish name and their multiple Native American names (many of which Harrington has preserved for us) (Yuccapedia). Sometimes, like their British counterparts, they have common names which may provide insight into their characteristics; and only our unfamiliarity with the classical languages in which their names are expressed, obscures the often prosaic meaning of the Linnean nomenclature.
The Spanish knew Eriodictyon crassifolium as yerba santa because the Franciscans recognized its medicinal value. But it has also become known, over the years, by a variety of common names including mountain balm, bishop wort, purple betony, holy herb, bear plant, saint's herb and most intriguingly, Indian chewing gum. A company called Blue Coyote Organics sells the dried herb at ten bucks an ounce and recommends smoking it or making a tea infusion "to calm the soul". The chewed leaves are resinous and bitter. Local Chumash knew it as wishap'.
Chamise, that stalwart of chaparral, with the frothy white flowers but tough as nails sclerophytic leaves and flesh ripping twigs and branches is also known as grease wood - because it is rich in oils, and of all the many chaparral plants that burn well, it reputably burns best. Chamise is derived from Spanish chamisa, from Galician chamiça, dry brush, firewood, from chama, flame, from the Latin flamma. Its Linnaean name is Adenostoma: from the Greek aden, "a gland," and stoma, "a mouth," in reference to the five glands at the mouth of the sepals - a reflection of the botanist's cone of vision which usually focusses on a plant's sex organs. The Chumash, at least the Barbareño, Purisimeño and Ineseño, according to Harrington, simply called it na'.
With a similar economy of syllables, related, perhaps, to the plant's ubiquity, Deerweed was ya'i to the Barbareño, but more elaborately Escoba de Horno (Hearth Broom) to the Spanish and is included in the Lotus (fruit of forgetfulness) genus. Now comes word that this genus is undergoing extensive taxonomic changes, for the Linnaean classification system is subject to constant revision. All thirty species native to California have been recently moved to the genera Acmispon or Hosakia in the second edition of The Jepson Manual. Willis Linn Jepson is California's Carolus Linnaeus, the man who set out to establish a definitive taxonomy of the State's flora.
It was Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) born in Sweden and a taxonomist, botanist and zoologist, who famously lumped apes in the same category as humans and thus paved the way for an acceptance of Darwin's evolutionary theory. His Systema Naturae (1735), a great inventory of life on earth, was the first work to gather terrestrial phenomena into the now familiar groupings of animal, vegetable and mineral. He published Species Plantarum in 1753 and thus initiated a formal botanical taxonomy. Jepson (1867-1946), like all natural scientists who followed Linnaeus, built on his binomial system and in 1923, U.C. Berkeley published his A Manual of the Flowering Plants of California a 1200-page single volume tome. Commonly known as Jepson's Manual, it has become California's botanical bible. Now Bruce Baldwin, curator of Berkeley’s Jepson Herbarium, has edited The Jepson Manual: Vascular Plants of California, listing over 7,500 California plant species, subspecies and varieties, in a 1600 page volume published by U.C. Press, 2012.
While this systematized simulacrum is an enormously valuable scientific text, and of deep interest to the chaparral warrior (for to enter into the thorny world of the elfin forest is to battle the barbed enmeshments that it throws up in defense of its pristine world), it is but an intellectual exegesis of the wildlands. Yet, as the definitive namer of names it holds the key to our connection to California's landscapes: where the power of naming leads to a recovery of the sacred bond that exist between humans and plants - the magical connection we experience as children when we first lay claim to a flower, not by cutting and capturing it, but by whispering its name.
The Spanish knew Eriodictyon crassifolium as yerba santa because the Franciscans recognized its medicinal value. But it has also become known, over the years, by a variety of common names including mountain balm, bishop wort, purple betony, holy herb, bear plant, saint's herb and most intriguingly, Indian chewing gum. A company called Blue Coyote Organics sells the dried herb at ten bucks an ounce and recommends smoking it or making a tea infusion "to calm the soul". The chewed leaves are resinous and bitter. Local Chumash knew it as wishap'.
Chamise, that stalwart of chaparral, with the frothy white flowers but tough as nails sclerophytic leaves and flesh ripping twigs and branches is also known as grease wood - because it is rich in oils, and of all the many chaparral plants that burn well, it reputably burns best. Chamise is derived from Spanish chamisa, from Galician chamiça, dry brush, firewood, from chama, flame, from the Latin flamma. Its Linnaean name is Adenostoma: from the Greek aden, "a gland," and stoma, "a mouth," in reference to the five glands at the mouth of the sepals - a reflection of the botanist's cone of vision which usually focusses on a plant's sex organs. The Chumash, at least the Barbareño, Purisimeño and Ineseño, according to Harrington, simply called it na'.
With a similar economy of syllables, related, perhaps, to the plant's ubiquity, Deerweed was ya'i to the Barbareño, but more elaborately Escoba de Horno (Hearth Broom) to the Spanish and is included in the Lotus (fruit of forgetfulness) genus. Now comes word that this genus is undergoing extensive taxonomic changes, for the Linnaean classification system is subject to constant revision. All thirty species native to California have been recently moved to the genera Acmispon or Hosakia in the second edition of The Jepson Manual. Willis Linn Jepson is California's Carolus Linnaeus, the man who set out to establish a definitive taxonomy of the State's flora.
It was Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) born in Sweden and a taxonomist, botanist and zoologist, who famously lumped apes in the same category as humans and thus paved the way for an acceptance of Darwin's evolutionary theory. His Systema Naturae (1735), a great inventory of life on earth, was the first work to gather terrestrial phenomena into the now familiar groupings of animal, vegetable and mineral. He published Species Plantarum in 1753 and thus initiated a formal botanical taxonomy. Jepson (1867-1946), like all natural scientists who followed Linnaeus, built on his binomial system and in 1923, U.C. Berkeley published his A Manual of the Flowering Plants of California a 1200-page single volume tome. Commonly known as Jepson's Manual, it has become California's botanical bible. Now Bruce Baldwin, curator of Berkeley’s Jepson Herbarium, has edited The Jepson Manual: Vascular Plants of California, listing over 7,500 California plant species, subspecies and varieties, in a 1600 page volume published by U.C. Press, 2012.
While this systematized simulacrum is an enormously valuable scientific text, and of deep interest to the chaparral warrior (for to enter into the thorny world of the elfin forest is to battle the barbed enmeshments that it throws up in defense of its pristine world), it is but an intellectual exegesis of the wildlands. Yet, as the definitive namer of names it holds the key to our connection to California's landscapes: where the power of naming leads to a recovery of the sacred bond that exist between humans and plants - the magical connection we experience as children when we first lay claim to a flower, not by cutting and capturing it, but by whispering its name.
2012-04-29
Love Comes to Koenigstein
Driving down the PCH the other morning, just past Point Mugu, we pulled over to watch a pod of grey whales steam north after breeding in Magdalena Bay, Baja, Mexico. We watched the leviathans blowing and undulating their way towards their summer feeding grounds in Alaska, in the cold waters of the Bering, Chuckchi and Beaufort Seas. They were close enough to the shore for us to see the mass of barnacles on their backs. Despite massive whale hunting in California in the middle of the nineteenth century the whales have survived with this annual migration pattern intact.
A few days later, I stopped on the old coast highway above Emma Wood State Park and, for old times sake, clambered down the hill and crossed the train tracks headed for the beach where I had spent many a happy hour surfing in the late 1990's. This day, sans board, I looked south and there, about one hundred yards off-shore, I saw another pod headed north. During twenty years of consistent ocean watching from 1980 to 2000 I saw not a single cetacean from the beach. As I headed back up the track from Emma Wood I glimpsed a seal bobbing in the surf line.
In the early 1980's, returning in a light plane from our Honeymoon at the Hana Maui resort Lorrie and I watched an Orca leap from the pellucid ocean below and then put on a spectacular show of elemental power and grace - somewhere in the Kalohi channel between Molokai and Lanai as we flew towards Honolulu. The Orca is sometimes called a killer whale - a misnomer since it is actually in the dolphin family, but they do kill whales. Last week there was a story of a "pack of killer whales tearing a baby gray whale to shreds" off the Central Coast as observer groups were shepherding a wounded fully adult Grey whale towards Monterey Bay.
Our neighbor on Koenigstein, Kit Stolz, reported seeing a young condor feeding on road kill on the 150 between Upper Ojai and Thomas Aquinas College recently. He provided documentary proof in the form of a blurry i-phone picture; the silhouetted antic pinion feathers at the end of each wing, even at this age suggesting a mighty span, certainly seem to support the identification. Even closer to home, while we were away in NorCal, Margot walked a part of our property and found mountain lion scat. Following her two dogs she then found a discarded deer leg. No one has credibly seen the big cat although Lorrie thinks she might have, but it was a fleeting, distant impression rather than a definitive sighting. I walked the area last week where Margot had originally seen the scat and saw lots more - distinctive because of its size and black color, typical of the digested blood of a fresh kill. Mountain lions bury the remains of the carcass after their initial meals of blood engorged organs like the liver, kidney and heart, and return to feed off of it in subsequent days. We have put that area off limits for the time being.
These signature, archtypal creatures, whale, condor and lion each possess, one way or another, dominion over their respective element, and their lives are woven into the tapestry of human existence on a very primal level. This is a reason to live in the urban wildland, it offers an opportunity to engage with the web of life and connect with the collective unconscious, that now deeply unfashionable well of feelings that guided our ancestors and still shadows our contemporary lives.
About a year ago I wrote of two deaths on Koenigstein, and the two hilltop houses that were made vacant because of their owner's passing (Death Comes to Koenigstein). A few weeks ago I noticed a new barbed wire fence being built adjacent to the eastern boundary of our property next to the old Atmore land. I drove up to the recently purchased house and introduced myself to Josh and Meghan who run a back-country guide service in the Sespe with pack mules. The new fence, I learned, was being built to enclose a sloping meadow across the street from their house where the mules will occasionally pasture. They have opened up the house to the north and I suspect they will find it very servicable. In the mail box this Friday was a note announcing their Saturday wedding.
While we are often reminded of a vibrant natural world in this eastern borderland of Upper Ojai, it is good news indeed when the human population hereabouts tilts younger - particularly when the new additions are both locals with a thorough understanding of the local ecosystems. They come recommended by Bill Slaughter, Sheriff of Sisar, who knows them both. Josh grew up on Sulphur Mountain and attended Happy Valley School, he is determinably low tech, eschewing even an e-mail address.
Yesterday they were married at the house and early this morning several pick-up trucks were still casually parked along the corner where Koenigstein heads sharply north at the knoll where their house is perched, indicating that a very good time was had by at least those who elected not to drive back home because of the late hour or inebriation.
Josh and Meghan advertised their wedding and reception with two discreet white balloons at the 150 and a prettily painted arrow sign at Calle de las Osos, the left fork below the Bear Creek crossing which exerts a magnetic attraction to all who wander up this way not really knowing where they are going and, following the siren call of this road named for the erstwhile dude ranch at its end, subsequently get lost amongst the pinnacles and valleys of what is ultimately a gallimaufrey of dead-ends and private driveways. Some, it is said, never do get back on Koenigstein and lose their minds in this crazy land of feral emus, one hole golf-courses and ravening coon hounds.
An archetype expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors. As such, meaning oscillates between the encoded linguistic meaning and its metaphoric interpretation then resolves itself in a third place where these patterns of thought cross cultural boundaries and establish themselves deep within the human psyche - at all times and in all places. Carl Jung explains archetypal images as universal patterns or motifs which come from the collective unconscious, and are the basic content of religions, mythologies, legends and fairy tales.
On Koenigstein, we suffer a surfeit of these archetypal images: the condor and the mountain lion, as well as the viper (substantiated as the rattle snake) and the bear. Our streams run down to the ocean where whale, dolphin and seal disport themselves, while steelhead trout plash in the shallows of Sisar Creek. Now comes the mule driver Josh and his fair Meghan to live in the rickety house on top of the hill. Their mule team grazes in the meadow. Soon the hills will ring with the sound of their children and Koenigstein will be restored to its place somewhere between legend and folklore, never-never land and the faraway country of an eternal dreamtime. As your faithful scribe, dear reader, I will continue to report regularly from this place of magic, this place of archetypal surfeit.
A few days later, I stopped on the old coast highway above Emma Wood State Park and, for old times sake, clambered down the hill and crossed the train tracks headed for the beach where I had spent many a happy hour surfing in the late 1990's. This day, sans board, I looked south and there, about one hundred yards off-shore, I saw another pod headed north. During twenty years of consistent ocean watching from 1980 to 2000 I saw not a single cetacean from the beach. As I headed back up the track from Emma Wood I glimpsed a seal bobbing in the surf line.
In the early 1980's, returning in a light plane from our Honeymoon at the Hana Maui resort Lorrie and I watched an Orca leap from the pellucid ocean below and then put on a spectacular show of elemental power and grace - somewhere in the Kalohi channel between Molokai and Lanai as we flew towards Honolulu. The Orca is sometimes called a killer whale - a misnomer since it is actually in the dolphin family, but they do kill whales. Last week there was a story of a "pack of killer whales tearing a baby gray whale to shreds" off the Central Coast as observer groups were shepherding a wounded fully adult Grey whale towards Monterey Bay.
Our neighbor on Koenigstein, Kit Stolz, reported seeing a young condor feeding on road kill on the 150 between Upper Ojai and Thomas Aquinas College recently. He provided documentary proof in the form of a blurry i-phone picture; the silhouetted antic pinion feathers at the end of each wing, even at this age suggesting a mighty span, certainly seem to support the identification. Even closer to home, while we were away in NorCal, Margot walked a part of our property and found mountain lion scat. Following her two dogs she then found a discarded deer leg. No one has credibly seen the big cat although Lorrie thinks she might have, but it was a fleeting, distant impression rather than a definitive sighting. I walked the area last week where Margot had originally seen the scat and saw lots more - distinctive because of its size and black color, typical of the digested blood of a fresh kill. Mountain lions bury the remains of the carcass after their initial meals of blood engorged organs like the liver, kidney and heart, and return to feed off of it in subsequent days. We have put that area off limits for the time being.
These signature, archtypal creatures, whale, condor and lion each possess, one way or another, dominion over their respective element, and their lives are woven into the tapestry of human existence on a very primal level. This is a reason to live in the urban wildland, it offers an opportunity to engage with the web of life and connect with the collective unconscious, that now deeply unfashionable well of feelings that guided our ancestors and still shadows our contemporary lives.
About a year ago I wrote of two deaths on Koenigstein, and the two hilltop houses that were made vacant because of their owner's passing (Death Comes to Koenigstein). A few weeks ago I noticed a new barbed wire fence being built adjacent to the eastern boundary of our property next to the old Atmore land. I drove up to the recently purchased house and introduced myself to Josh and Meghan who run a back-country guide service in the Sespe with pack mules. The new fence, I learned, was being built to enclose a sloping meadow across the street from their house where the mules will occasionally pasture. They have opened up the house to the north and I suspect they will find it very servicable. In the mail box this Friday was a note announcing their Saturday wedding.
While we are often reminded of a vibrant natural world in this eastern borderland of Upper Ojai, it is good news indeed when the human population hereabouts tilts younger - particularly when the new additions are both locals with a thorough understanding of the local ecosystems. They come recommended by Bill Slaughter, Sheriff of Sisar, who knows them both. Josh grew up on Sulphur Mountain and attended Happy Valley School, he is determinably low tech, eschewing even an e-mail address.
Yesterday they were married at the house and early this morning several pick-up trucks were still casually parked along the corner where Koenigstein heads sharply north at the knoll where their house is perched, indicating that a very good time was had by at least those who elected not to drive back home because of the late hour or inebriation.
Josh and Meghan advertised their wedding and reception with two discreet white balloons at the 150 and a prettily painted arrow sign at Calle de las Osos, the left fork below the Bear Creek crossing which exerts a magnetic attraction to all who wander up this way not really knowing where they are going and, following the siren call of this road named for the erstwhile dude ranch at its end, subsequently get lost amongst the pinnacles and valleys of what is ultimately a gallimaufrey of dead-ends and private driveways. Some, it is said, never do get back on Koenigstein and lose their minds in this crazy land of feral emus, one hole golf-courses and ravening coon hounds.
An archetype expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors. As such, meaning oscillates between the encoded linguistic meaning and its metaphoric interpretation then resolves itself in a third place where these patterns of thought cross cultural boundaries and establish themselves deep within the human psyche - at all times and in all places. Carl Jung explains archetypal images as universal patterns or motifs which come from the collective unconscious, and are the basic content of religions, mythologies, legends and fairy tales.
On Koenigstein, we suffer a surfeit of these archetypal images: the condor and the mountain lion, as well as the viper (substantiated as the rattle snake) and the bear. Our streams run down to the ocean where whale, dolphin and seal disport themselves, while steelhead trout plash in the shallows of Sisar Creek. Now comes the mule driver Josh and his fair Meghan to live in the rickety house on top of the hill. Their mule team grazes in the meadow. Soon the hills will ring with the sound of their children and Koenigstein will be restored to its place somewhere between legend and folklore, never-never land and the faraway country of an eternal dreamtime. As your faithful scribe, dear reader, I will continue to report regularly from this place of magic, this place of archetypal surfeit.
2012-04-26
Sitting Ducks
The Mission Period in California has achieved a remarkably benign reputation considering the church's crushing failure to achieve its objectives and its disastrous impact on the resident Native American populations it encountered on its colonial progress through California; even the iconic buildings failed catastrophically more often than not (Faulty Missions).
This Spanish project, which, as elsewhere in the Americas combined the ambitions of church and state, begun in earnest in 1769, aimed to create in Alta California a Christian, feudal dependency. For this to be achieved, however, not only the human capital of the Franciscan Friars and the soldiers who were to protect them would be required. It was also necessary to create a population of peasants who would till the land, tend the animals and provide other manual labor necessary to support the entire enterprise. Unfortunately, the indigenous populations of Southern California, although largely sedentary, had absolutely no agrarian background and proved entirely ill-suited to the Iberian agenda.
It is only with heavy irony that I note that these populations were never consulted as to their willingness to participate in this susbstantially medieval society of which the Spanish dreamt. In California, it remained a dream unrealized. Peonage, serfdom, or to put it plainly, slavery, ill-suits humans in general and particularly those well-fed and at ease with their way of life, as were the native populations before the Mission era.
While the Spanish initially presumed that bowls of steaming boiled barley would provide a sufficient lure to entrap these sitting ducks - their proto-peasantry - they quickly learned that the native peoples had little trouble feeding themselves and preferred the bounty of ocean and chaparral to the weevilly, over-cooked European mash. Thus it was that the Colonial oppressors turned to the lash to encourage the locals to sign up, by way of a perfunctory baptism, as neophytes in the mission system; but once enrolled they proved, from the Spanish perspective, more trouble than they were worth.
As the missions, built of an adobe composed of mud, straw and oxblood, fell about them - shaken to the ground, time and again, by seismic irruptions - the Franciscans also saw their socio-religious-economic agenda quickly fall apart, victim of that old problem of too many Friars and not enough Indians. For while the Spanish ultimately had some success in corralling women and children into the mission pens (for the arrival of new technologies, gods and voracious herbivores, such as cattle, sheep and horses, soon weakened the social, economic and spiritual foundations of native cultures), once there they died with a truly horrific rapidity. Many of the men meekly followed their families into captivity and premature death. While we can debate the extent to which its impacts were understood as they unfolded, missionization of native populations effectively resulted in their systematic extermination.
By the time the Spanish arrived in Southern California they had had over two and a half centuries of colonial experience in the Americas and were successful in extracting huge amounts of wealth from the New World. Their goals for California were comparatively modest - to establish a presence in the region as a discouragement to the other lurking European colonial powers, England and Russia, from further encroachments - and to do so at a cost that was not burdensome to the Spanish treasury (Blowback).
They had every reason to feel confident: as Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo point out in their Indians, Franciscans and Spanish colonization: the impact of the mission system on California Indians, University of New Mexico Press, 1995, "The fundamental success of the Spanish colonial system was the ability to exploit sedentary Indian populations.... the mission, a center of religious indoctrination and acculturation, was the instrument used to forge the new colonial society". The California mission system was not an experiment, it was an extension of a hitherto successful program of wealth extraction. In the event, the Chumash had the misfortune to be at the epicenter when this modest colonial expansion all went horribly wrong.
The Chumash were the most heavily colonized Californian indigenous people. Between 1772 and 1804 a fort (The Santa Barbara Presidio), five missions (San Luis Obispo, San Buenaventura, Santa Barbara, La Purisima, Santa Ynez) and finally, in 1831, the Asistencia de Santa Margarita were built in their territories. As an almost direct corollary, this loose confederation of tribes, known since their naming in 1891 by John Wesley Powell, as Chumash (after the name used by coastal people for their relatives on Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz Islands), had the highest death rate amongst Alta California's native peoples.
The causes of missionized Chumash death were varied, but foremost was a range of European diseases against which they had no immunity. Additionally, a force-fed diet of high carbohydrate grains with few vegetables or animal fat proved ruinously unhealthy to people used to a lean but highly nutritious diet. Sanitation was atrocious and conditions were compounded by the number of the dead and dying. An eye-witness, Thomas Jefferson Farnham, writing in his, Life, Adventures and Travels in California, 1849, was repelled by the charnal house he found at Santa Barbara Mission, where the graveyard was regularly exhumed to make way for newly dead Indians. In the mission courtyard he saw,
"....three or four cart-loads of skulls, ribs, spines, leg-bones, arm-bones, etc., laying in one corner. Beside them stood two hand-hearses with a small cross attached to each. About the walls hung the mould of death!"
The high mortality rates in these communities resulted in the almost continuous recruitment of unacculturated Indians into the mission houses where, on the one hand they strengthened the survival of a relict Indian culture thus fatally impacting the Franciscan goal of indoctrination and on the other they provided highly vulnerable recruits to a system heavy with the stench of death. The Indian populations in the missions were never viable, they did not grow through natural reproduction. Children born in missions rarely survived beyond their second birthday dying, most often, of syphylis, consumption (TB) and dysentary. Survivors were lucky to make it to twenty five years of age.
The Chumash culture, the pinnacle achievement, in terms of complexity and sophistication, of California's indigenous, stone-age peoples proved enormously fragile in the face of this European invasion of new technology, domestic animals, disease and spiritual blandishments. It quickly withered in the missions where its people were serfs in the fields, slaves in the workshops and captives in their fetid quarters. In a little over half a century Chumash culture was effectively destroyed leaving a small, dispossessed Indian population thrown first into the Rancho system of large land holdings where they fared ill as impoverished agricultural workers then worse, into the maw of the aggressive capitalism as practiced in the new American State.
Junipero Serra, the Franciscan priest who was the driving force in the Spanish conquest and colonization of this culture (and many others), is remembered and revered; his figure is replicated in statues throughout the state (locally, in front of Ventura City hall). For the Chumash, its people gone, the remnants finally lost to the great American melting pot, their name lives on, now appended, in mis-remembrance, to Casino, Highway and some pan-Indian syncretic bastardization that is the public perception of the local native American heritage (Shadowland).
This Spanish project, which, as elsewhere in the Americas combined the ambitions of church and state, begun in earnest in 1769, aimed to create in Alta California a Christian, feudal dependency. For this to be achieved, however, not only the human capital of the Franciscan Friars and the soldiers who were to protect them would be required. It was also necessary to create a population of peasants who would till the land, tend the animals and provide other manual labor necessary to support the entire enterprise. Unfortunately, the indigenous populations of Southern California, although largely sedentary, had absolutely no agrarian background and proved entirely ill-suited to the Iberian agenda.
It is only with heavy irony that I note that these populations were never consulted as to their willingness to participate in this susbstantially medieval society of which the Spanish dreamt. In California, it remained a dream unrealized. Peonage, serfdom, or to put it plainly, slavery, ill-suits humans in general and particularly those well-fed and at ease with their way of life, as were the native populations before the Mission era.
While the Spanish initially presumed that bowls of steaming boiled barley would provide a sufficient lure to entrap these sitting ducks - their proto-peasantry - they quickly learned that the native peoples had little trouble feeding themselves and preferred the bounty of ocean and chaparral to the weevilly, over-cooked European mash. Thus it was that the Colonial oppressors turned to the lash to encourage the locals to sign up, by way of a perfunctory baptism, as neophytes in the mission system; but once enrolled they proved, from the Spanish perspective, more trouble than they were worth.
As the missions, built of an adobe composed of mud, straw and oxblood, fell about them - shaken to the ground, time and again, by seismic irruptions - the Franciscans also saw their socio-religious-economic agenda quickly fall apart, victim of that old problem of too many Friars and not enough Indians. For while the Spanish ultimately had some success in corralling women and children into the mission pens (for the arrival of new technologies, gods and voracious herbivores, such as cattle, sheep and horses, soon weakened the social, economic and spiritual foundations of native cultures), once there they died with a truly horrific rapidity. Many of the men meekly followed their families into captivity and premature death. While we can debate the extent to which its impacts were understood as they unfolded, missionization of native populations effectively resulted in their systematic extermination.
By the time the Spanish arrived in Southern California they had had over two and a half centuries of colonial experience in the Americas and were successful in extracting huge amounts of wealth from the New World. Their goals for California were comparatively modest - to establish a presence in the region as a discouragement to the other lurking European colonial powers, England and Russia, from further encroachments - and to do so at a cost that was not burdensome to the Spanish treasury (Blowback).
They had every reason to feel confident: as Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo point out in their Indians, Franciscans and Spanish colonization: the impact of the mission system on California Indians, University of New Mexico Press, 1995, "The fundamental success of the Spanish colonial system was the ability to exploit sedentary Indian populations.... the mission, a center of religious indoctrination and acculturation, was the instrument used to forge the new colonial society". The California mission system was not an experiment, it was an extension of a hitherto successful program of wealth extraction. In the event, the Chumash had the misfortune to be at the epicenter when this modest colonial expansion all went horribly wrong.
The Chumash were the most heavily colonized Californian indigenous people. Between 1772 and 1804 a fort (The Santa Barbara Presidio), five missions (San Luis Obispo, San Buenaventura, Santa Barbara, La Purisima, Santa Ynez) and finally, in 1831, the Asistencia de Santa Margarita were built in their territories. As an almost direct corollary, this loose confederation of tribes, known since their naming in 1891 by John Wesley Powell, as Chumash (after the name used by coastal people for their relatives on Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz Islands), had the highest death rate amongst Alta California's native peoples.
The causes of missionized Chumash death were varied, but foremost was a range of European diseases against which they had no immunity. Additionally, a force-fed diet of high carbohydrate grains with few vegetables or animal fat proved ruinously unhealthy to people used to a lean but highly nutritious diet. Sanitation was atrocious and conditions were compounded by the number of the dead and dying. An eye-witness, Thomas Jefferson Farnham, writing in his, Life, Adventures and Travels in California, 1849, was repelled by the charnal house he found at Santa Barbara Mission, where the graveyard was regularly exhumed to make way for newly dead Indians. In the mission courtyard he saw,
"....three or four cart-loads of skulls, ribs, spines, leg-bones, arm-bones, etc., laying in one corner. Beside them stood two hand-hearses with a small cross attached to each. About the walls hung the mould of death!"
The high mortality rates in these communities resulted in the almost continuous recruitment of unacculturated Indians into the mission houses where, on the one hand they strengthened the survival of a relict Indian culture thus fatally impacting the Franciscan goal of indoctrination and on the other they provided highly vulnerable recruits to a system heavy with the stench of death. The Indian populations in the missions were never viable, they did not grow through natural reproduction. Children born in missions rarely survived beyond their second birthday dying, most often, of syphylis, consumption (TB) and dysentary. Survivors were lucky to make it to twenty five years of age.
The Chumash culture, the pinnacle achievement, in terms of complexity and sophistication, of California's indigenous, stone-age peoples proved enormously fragile in the face of this European invasion of new technology, domestic animals, disease and spiritual blandishments. It quickly withered in the missions where its people were serfs in the fields, slaves in the workshops and captives in their fetid quarters. In a little over half a century Chumash culture was effectively destroyed leaving a small, dispossessed Indian population thrown first into the Rancho system of large land holdings where they fared ill as impoverished agricultural workers then worse, into the maw of the aggressive capitalism as practiced in the new American State.
Junipero Serra, the Franciscan priest who was the driving force in the Spanish conquest and colonization of this culture (and many others), is remembered and revered; his figure is replicated in statues throughout the state (locally, in front of Ventura City hall). For the Chumash, its people gone, the remnants finally lost to the great American melting pot, their name lives on, now appended, in mis-remembrance, to Casino, Highway and some pan-Indian syncretic bastardization that is the public perception of the local native American heritage (Shadowland).
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