No Planting Plan Required

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

In the early morning mists, a pale frieze of bunch grasses sweeps along the drive animated, in this still air, only by the swoop of the chip-seal roadway as it parallels the fall line of the seasonal stream at the foot of the east ridge. Beyond, in the weed patches left by a century of intermittent ranching and more recently by the land's development as a rural home site, the alien mustard, tocalote (Centaurae militensis), rye and the interloper broame grasses, together with native deerweed, not yet flowering tar weed and tangles of wild cucumber vines, convolvulus, occasionally a stand of toyon, coyote bush, currant, holly leaf cherry, mountain mahogany and laurel sumac form an arrangement (held together in the grey miasma) redolent of the work of the great Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf.

Amongst Oudolf's startling innovations are his practice of ecologically attuned planting schemes, his championing of perennials, his awareness of a plant's natural life-cycle (and his joy in every phase) such that he believes that "a plant is only worth growing if it also looks good when it's dead" and his celebration of mist as an active collaborator in his garden designs. This latter innovative trait extends to a delight in the frost riming of skeletal plants and their seed heads. These aesthetic predilections are amply demonstrated in his assiduous photographing of his work.

His notion of natural planting - the creation of an apparent structural chaos in his invertebrate planting schemes - is an example of high artifice (or even, perhaps, high art). But for those fortunate enough to live in the southern California biome his aesthetic goals can quite simply be subsumed within the real, existing, chaparral plant community. Early summer mists reliably arrive in May and June and soften the margins of and between the natives and create stunning, Oudolfesque early morning views of the chaparral and its sage-scrub margins. Along any given track there will be, just now, the perennials Lotus scoparius (Deeweed), buckwheat, any or all of the three sages (white, black and purple), ghostly gnaphalias – all in bloom –the shrubby artemesia, yerba santa and sometimes the red blooming heart leafed Penstemon together with annuals such as clarkia, yellow pincushion (Chaenactis glabriuscula), and phacelia. No planting plan required.

As I look into our back yard to the rise beyond the pool, there is a garden that puts the showy naturalism of Dutch New Wave planting to shame: it is composed mostly of drifts of deerweed and bunch grasses, dotted with sculptural chaparral shrubs and straggly clumps of coyote brush; all that is required is weeding – primarily the invasive tocolote and mustards. To the right, as I look towards the spalled face of the Topatopas, a native walnut that has succumbed to the drought provides a rich tangle of bird perches and stands in graphic silhouette against the sky as an explicit homage to Piet, the patron saint of dead biomass.

I first discovered Oudolf around the year 2000 when a panoramic video of his own garden at Hummelo was featured on his site (sadly, it is no longer available) and I was absolutely stunned by the randomly arranged clipped yews set amidst a meadow of perennials and grasses. I seem to remember that there was a swirling mist featured as well. By that time he was well established as a plantsman in northern Europe and enjoyed a growing reputation as a garden designer, but was almost completely unknown in this country. For a while I felt that this explosive, transformative talent was my secret. His commission to plant James Corner’s Highline in New York City changed all that.

The Dutch live in an entirely constructed, managed and un-natural landscape – and it has been that way for a very long time. The last stand of natural forest was felled in the 1860’s. The land has also long been riddled with dykes, drains and sluices in an ongoing attempt to hold back the rising waters of the North Sea. In this environment, the lure of un-reconstructed naturalism is intense and Oudolf’s horticultural stylings (he selectively breeds many of his perennials as well as designing their garden settings) are the outward manifestation of a longing for a reconnection with the natural world.

David Abram, in his The Spell of the Sensuous, 1996, notes that we are embedded in the matrix of earthly life: that is, we are embedded in the biosphere “experienced and lived from within by the intelligent body” and of which we are entirely a part. Our perceptions are transitive: we see objects in the natural world and they see us. What does it mean then, to exist in an entirely humanly constructed version of the natural world? It means, (it seems to me), that we become solipsistic, consumed with ourselves - the world not a rich stream of data constantly challenging our primacy, but a pale reflection of our own anthropocentrism. It means, ultimately, that we become incapable of caring for other beings -other life-forms - because we are surrounded not by self-willed nature but a domesticated landscape that speaks not of the cosmos, but of our own small, self-serving place in it. The pleasures of the garden are then muted by this echoic mechanism; us looking at a ‘natural’ world edited, composed, bred and finally neutered by us.

Many of Americans live in suburban homes surrounded by such botanical ghettos, where well trained plants are sequestered for their sensory delight. Oudolf has taken a step away from this tradition. He demands, in his planting schemes, that we accept the chaos of the natural world and that we take delight in a botanical life cycle where dead flower heads , stalks, and seed heads have intrinsic grace and beauty. He demands too, that we embrace weather as an aesthetic accomplice in our obtaining sensory pleasure from his plantings. Yet there remains an irony in the fact that his gardens remain no more than a simulacrum of wilderness, of wildness, of the chaotic profligacy of the natural world.

He has, in a life lived in the well-ordered, mostly agricultural landscapes of Holland, demanded that we look again at the richness and diversity of plant communities in Europe and in North America (he has a particular passion for the Prairie biome of Ohio) that have, for millennia, developed wayward complexities that are self-sustaining, site specific and possessed of a gravitas entirely lacking in even the finest gardens. Plants in the wild are playing for their very survival, their persistence forever contingent on the quality of soil, the weather and their interaction with the surrounding plant, insect and animal life. Oudolf has gone some way in replicating this intense game of life in his perennial gardens and has, by his acceptance of death and decay within his aesthetic realm, captured some of the spirit of the wild.

Those of us who live at the wildland urban interface can entirely forgo the elaborate conceit of the artificially constructed, sprinklered garden. Yet most choose not to. An Ojai friend explained recently that he had been busy planting a small garden of California natives, expecting, perhaps, to receive my approbation. I did not have the heart to tell him that growing natives is about not planting. It is an entirely extractive process. The soil is brimming with native seeds. Remove the invasives and the locals will inevitably show up.

Practiced assiduously, this will result in a patch of wilderness rich in complexity and capable of an expressive power that extends far beyond the human sphere. Living at the edge of the chaparral wildlands I can experience, as Abrams puts it,

“a vast interpenetrating webwork of perceptions and sensations borne by countless other bodies – supported, that is, not just by ourselves, but by icy streams tumbling down granitic slopes, by owl wings and lichens, and by the unseen, imperturbable wind.”

Chaparralville

Also at www.urbanwildland.org

There are a few sprigs of Eriodictylon in what I think is called a bud vase - narrow neck bulbous body, clear glass, about ten inches high, provenance unknown, sitting on the kitchen counter. Because of the narrow neck and the sprigs' short stalks they have required a little top up of water the last two mornings; because they are right by the sink where I fill the kettle for my tea, they are the first thing I focus on in the morning. I collected the pale blue blossoming Yerba Santa, Eriodictylon crassifoium, (sometimes called Indian chewing gum) on two successive runs this week: first one flower stuffed in the pocket of my running shorts snatched from a plant somewhere up in La Broche Canyon, where it grows alongside a track from which there are, on a clear day, sweeping views of the Oxnard Plain and beyond to Point Mugu and the ocean; then yesterday, a further two sprigs from a stand of the leathery leafed plant growing in the dry, braided creek beds that serve as overflows for Sisar creek (not required for the past four years and thus fully vegetated).

This little display of a chaparral wild flower gives me sufficient pleasure to fully recompense for any fleeting guilt I might have about snatching these blooms from their parent plants quietly minding their own business in the largely untracked hinterlands of the Topatopa foothills. So, it comes down to this: it's all about me; the chaparral a verdant tableaux from which I may pluck at my pleasure whatever floral bauble (so to speak) strikes my fancy, imprison it (them?) in the none too salubrious environs of my shorts' pocket and thereafter impale their heads on a spike (in a manner of speaking) for my morning's fleeting delectation, my conscience almost entirely untroubled by this flagrant act of anthropocentrism. Why then, dear reader, this barrage of rhetorical exposition?

It's Spring! I'm back blogging after the deaths of two close friends and I am, once again, reporting to you, my imagined audience, about entirely inconsequential minutiae set against sometimes portentous, sometimes mildly philosophical and sometimes, regrettably pompous considerations of our place in the cosmos (all in service, ultimately, to a consideration of my place in Upper Ojai or yours in Woop Woop). It's time to continue building the brand one twelve hundred and fifty word blog piece after another (this is number 230); building a state of mind as a prophylactic: a mildly dystopian antidote to my (our) unthinking acceptance of neo-liberal bondage. Call it urbanwildland, call it Chaparralville.

My not posting in the first three months of the year was also the result of my teaching an on-line seminar for the Viridis Graduate Institute on ecological ethics. The reading, lecture writing, subsequent recording of a forty minute talk and hosting the two hour seminar for ten successive weeks not only reduced the time I had available to devote to Urbanwildland but also, in many ways, supplanted the reason for this blog (see also above), which is to investigate the moral, spiritual, aesthetic, practical and ethical impacts of my relationship with the natural world - specifically as I experience them here, in a particular place. I return to this investigation within a slightly altered context: our house is now augmented by a newly constructed guest house - a small step towards more gracefully accommodating others in the attitude-altering environment of Chaparralville.

Much of whatever foreboding I feel (see 'portentous' above, listed as a brand ingredient), when confronted with evidence of the sixth extinction, weather disrupting climate change, rising sea levels, desertification around the globe and the agricultural, infrastructural and commercial development of the world's remaining wildernesses, is shared by the many. It functions as a leitmotif of our contemporary existence: it is woven into the low level angst that urban dwellers experience when considering the fate of the world. For me, these concerns are exacerbated by the intense pleasure I derive from a surrounding wilderness that I recognize to be representative of other wildernesses under far greater existential threat.

California chaparral has survived at least partly because it is so unassuming, the land so incapable of being harvested for commercial profit (except in the case of oil and real estate) and so indomitable in its resistance to flood, fire and drought. Nevertheless, there are many thousands of acres where it has been bent to the will of successive waves of colonial conquerors and now is under pressure from the expansionary forces of capitalism to which, as the developer of a wildland site for a residence (and now guesthouse) I am a small contributor.

And yet, as Joachim Radkau writes in his new book, The Age of Ecology, 2014, "the Eco-age may be conceived as the New Enlightenment" capable of elucidating the choices available to us and guiding us, against all odds, towards a safe haven where a reasonable and sustainable balance between humankind and the natural environment is achieved. This 'Age of Ecology' can be traced back to Alexander Von Humboldt early in the nineteenth century. Andrea Wulf's popular history, beguilingly titled The Invention of Nature, 2015, weaves the story of the great German polymath, (the Aristotle of his age), together with those of Jefferson, Darwin, and Ernst Haeckel (1834- 1919) who coined the neologism 'Ecology' in 1866.

As Wulf indicates, the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century was founded on the revival of classical thought, Natural Philosophy, and Rationalism, while 'Ecology', in the nineteenth, emerged out of a primordial soup of discoveries and speculations (often sourced from expeditionary travels) by Maupertuis, Lyell, Lamarck, Darwin, Haekell, Agassiz, and, most importantly, Von Humboldt. Meanwhile, in America, as Roderick Nash demonstrates in his Wilderness and the American Mind, 1967, the initial fear and revulsion experienced by the early European settlers towards this country’s wildlands were transformed by Thoreau and John Muir into an attitude that fostered the establishment of the National Parks and the Sierra Club early in the twentieth century. An American environmental movement was then forged from the ideas of Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, David Brower (Friends of the Earth) and Dave Foreman (Earth First!); the establishment of Earth Day in 1970, precipitated by a massive oil spill off of the Santa Barbara coast, marked the beginning of a more generalized ‘green’ or ecological awareness.

I am privileged to experience my ‘green’ awareness at ground zero, grubbing in the broken margins of the chaparral, pulling out Tocolote (Centaurea militensis) with my trusty Pulaski. Tocolote is a close relative to the notorious Russian Star Thistle (C. stolstitialis) and marginally less toxic. It has colonized swathes of grass (mostly non-natives) along our driveway that border the dark, green lines of chaparral beyond, where this stable, 30,000 year old plant community continues to resist invasive species – until you mess with it. Having built at the Wildland Urban Interface I am now engaged in trying to mend its native landscape.

In this Age of Ecology, the fragility of our diminishing wildlands demands that they experience a minimum of disturbance - that we establish a kind of cordon sanitaire around them. Or better yet, perhaps, as Roderick Frazier Nash suggests in an epilogue to the fifth edition of his seminal book, that we create human clustering on a global scale, where giant megalopoli, perhaps one hundred miles in diameter, contain (and entrap) all human activity. These points of light would then exist in the dark space of the wildlerness which would exist untrammeled, unexploited, untraveled and forever self-willed. He calls it Island Civilization.

My residential life is lived within the confines of our built structures, a gravel terrace and a pool. Beyond, slowly healing from the disturbance of their creation, and reverting, slowly, to a reasonably pristine state, are the surrounding wildlands. I call it Chaparralville.

Tree Fall

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

As Ojai slips gently into fall, I am filled with longing. A longing for the coming of winter: for the synchronization of my personality with the cold and gloom, the creeping damp of early mornings, rain-blackened tree trunks and lowering skies. Across three continents, I have experienced the same grim pleasure as the sun, in its elliptical orbit, swings closer to the polar hemispheres - its warmth thinned as its reach widens.

In Australia, living by Sydney's North Shore beaches, the beginning of autumn presaged good surf and empty sand. Come March, off-shore winds whipped across the inland sea of Pittwater and rustled the parched leaves of tall gums: a wooded spine separated my house from Whale Beach where these same cool, off-shore breezes smoothed the in-rushing waves and held up their exposed faces.

In the 1970's, with no thought of ozone holes, Australians remained great sun fetishists, their oiled bodies splayed across the summer beaches like colonies of anorexic, bipedal seals. In the water we wore zinc ointment on our noses but otherwise embraced our blackened skin as a sign of our dedication to the most sybaritic of sports. In fall and winter, we wore wet-suits that glistened black in the water. It was as though the summer seal colonies had taken to the waves; the depressions where they had formerly lain erased by the wind.

In England, in the village where I grew up, the oaks that remained after the paroxysm of road building between the wars (linking London with provincial market towns and the beaches of Sussex and Hampshire) were fleshy monsters, towering over road, houses and traffic: clouds of green on massive stalks like atomic explosions of foliage. Come fall they were transformed.

Drifts of pale brown leaves gathered at the bases of concrete tank traps that had been readied for deployment a few years previously to block the arteries that might permit invading Nazis a clear run to London. These squat columns, of about the same girth as the oaks, were manufactured replacements for the trees felled to make way for concrete and tar macadam: the great defensive forests of the realm decimated for the convenience of day-trippers, owners of country houses, provincial merchants and outlying commuters.

There was a row of four or five of these trees at the end of the road which linked the major routes to Sussex and Hampshire, growing in a nature strip placed between the main road and a service road onto which our house fronted, about halfway along its length. By chance, another ancient oak stood in our front yard, this one a survivor of the post-war boom in public housing which blighted requisitioned farms, estates and common land throughout the villages of the so-called home-counties that ringed the metropolis. In my young mind, these half dozen oaks were vastly old, sentinels of pre-history, and gravid with occult significance.

Their summer raiment was discarded in autumn to expose the wiry filigree of their armature: the stiffened arteries that had so recently fed and supported their mounding green canopies. Rooks nested in the twigs, their caws replacing the susurration of leaves. Off at a distance, lines of bare trees, oaks among them, scratched at the grey skies.

On both sides of the Pacific, the dominant trees are evergreen - they shed their dead leaves throughout the year. The gums maintain their emblematic grey-olive foliage and the live-oaks of California keep their dark, oak-shadow green. Signs of fall are carried in the chill of the wind, a shortening of the days and a quickening in the biotic life-force as the storms of winter loom.

Autumn in Europe, Asia and East of the Rockies is accompanied by flamboyant fall colors which quickly give way to displays of twiggy chiaroscuro - their deciduous forests presaging a waning energy, a time of hibernation in the natural world. Here, and in Australia, the mood darkens, but the landscape is vitalized: it stirs in fall after the oppressive heat and drying winds of summer. My spirits rise as I anticipate another winter in the chaparral. My heart beat quickens as I welcome the possibilities of trails being threaded with creeks, of seasonal streams roiling rocks and fallen tree limbs and scouring their weedy beds; as I welcomed the thinning of summer crowds on Sydney's beaches and the arrival of wind-whipped winter waves and celebrated the arrival of the massive edifices of trunk, branch and twig that centuries old English oaks manifest in winter.

The Gum, as Australians call Eucalypts, is mostly a tall, willowy thing with bursts of foliage pitched apparently randomly against the sky. Its peeling, or sometimes shredding, bark can be a milky white, pink or reddish brown. Its leaves hang mostly vertically, pointing at the tree's litter below (which they will join on entirely individual timetables) and often provide scant shade. In their native land they are trees of exquisite elegance. In the looming bush at the edges of Sydney, they tower over the chaotic underbrush. The punctuation of their trunks and sky-strewn foliage seem to echo the wheedling thrum of the didgeridoo as it might have emerged from some ancient corroboree while their etiolated, bone-like structures mirror some aboriginal dreamtime phantasm. The metallic rustling of leaves is their signal that fall approaches.

How different the mushroom cloud of the English Oak. The stout, phlegmatic long-lived foundational tree of the British Navy, of much of Britain's architecture and of its primeval wood henges - concentric rings of ritual (or as William Logan (Oak, The Frame of Civilization, 2006) calls them, "monuments about the mind") that were expressions of visionary or entoptic geometry designed to expand the consciousness of the celebrants. Sacred tree to the Druids, their conduit to the 'otherworld' of the pantheistic divinity, the English oak is literally rooted in Celtic pre-history, reaching far back to the swirling mists of the melting ice age when, at the margins, the oak forests were submerged in the rising waters that isolated Britain from Europe, creating an underworld of bog oak.

Here, in Upper Ojai, a lone scrub jay probes the rocky soil and disgorges an acorn into the hole it has made and then covers it with soil and leaf litter. Perhaps it will remember where this one is buried come winter. Perhaps not......and, if the rains come, the acorn will germinate and become a part of the profusion of plant life that emerges in the great lottery of fecundity which is the chaparral winter.

Last night we waited patiently for the advertised total eclipse perigee blood moon to appear over the eastern ridge. A little after 8:30 I looked up from my chair facing the ridge line and saw a sliver of a crescent subtended from the shadowed moon. I had allowed the moon to rise on my watch, so to speak, without my full attention because it was well-nigh as dark as the night sky behind it: only the dazzle of its tiny illuminated crescent alerted me to its presence. As the shadow of the earth passed over the moon, ‘the red of a thousand sunrises and sunsets’ failed to impact the coloration of our lunar satellite, although today I did see fairly compelling images showing an orange orb scaled beside the Washington monument, and hanging above picturesque skylines in Europe. A little late on the total eclipse, because of the looming ridge to the east, and denied the orange wash, we went inside feeling a little cheated.

This morning, the day dawned with a fiery orange-red sky to the east and as its color faded the western sky assumed a soft, rosy hue. Still fairly high in the sky, the super moon appeared to be wrapped in pink tissue – in drifting filaments of cirrus cloud reflecting a single, sanguinary sun rise.

The Harvest Moon, the first moon of fall, announced the season’s arrival with just the kind of subtlety we would expect in California, where the changes in weather and landscape reward close attention. I remain on high alert.

There Goes the Neighborhood

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

Ojai’s economy relies on tourism, agriculture, oil and the wealth of the retirement and second home communities all of which combine to drive its service and retail businesses. Here on Koenigstein, oil is the dominant economic product with a minor assist from avocado and cattle ranching. Its residential community is comprised of a mix of weekenders, retirees and those who commute to work beyond the Topatopa foothills. Nowhere, along this dead end street, with the possible exception of a single avocado farmer and a part-time cattle rancher are there examples of families living on the economic resources of their land. It is predominantly an urban wildland dormitory sustained by incomes generated beyond Upper Ojai while its indigenous oil wealth flows to widely dispersed workers, management and owners.

Of culture workers there are a couple, evidenced, at least, by the Ojai Artist’s Studio tour, which features two neighbors, the recently widowed fauvist painter Nancy Whitman (R.I.P., John, another Death Comes to Koenigstein) and Shahastra Levy who creates romantically lush landscapes entirely at odds with the harsh realities of our surrounding eco-system.

I have constructed a life and now, at Urbanwildland have worked hard at creating a persona at least partly based on an attachment to the chaparral, but that is a long way from living with the land as an economic resource. I have had the luxury of developing a primarily abstract, intellectual and at moments spiritual connection to the land without actually ever having the need to grub a living from it. I accept that that puts me in a privileged position and one from which it is hard to critique the ways and means of those who have a direct economic interest in this landscape.

Nevertheless, as someone who wishes to use the environment as a cultural artifact, I deplore its exploitation on a purely economic basis. The activities of the rancher, the avocado farmer and most of all of the oil companies that besmirch an erstwhile pristine landscape with their noxious mechanical, arboreal and bovine infrastructures are entirely antithetical to my concern to re-wild this land and make metaphoric hay of its adjacency to the urban technological, economic, legal and political conditions that characterizethe tentacular conurbations that sprawl across southern California and are themselves links in global communications and commodities chains. I accept the urban as urban but dearly wish for the wild to be truly wild (excepting my presence within it as your intrepid correspondent).

These musings are partly prompted by having read The Shepherd’s Life by James Redbanks, 2015, based on the author’s life tending his flock on the rugged uplands (or fells) of Northern England’s Lake District. Redbanks does not altogether ignore the irony that he farms in an area which was ground zero, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, for the cultural construction of its rugged landscapes, lakes and mountains as fodder for the feeding of the Romantic sensibility and that this construction, evidenced by continuing tourism (both by car and fell-walking) far outweighs the value of the rough grazing it affords his sheep. He argues that there is value in his continuance of a traditional way of life that reaches back at least five thousand years, provides his family with a living and some part of the general population with meat: it surely does this, but it is at the cost of continuing a centuries-old mono-culture that has contributed to the reduction of local floral, arboreal and faunal species and that now exacerbates the impacts of climate change.

George Monbiot sums up the impact of sheep on Britain’s marginal uplands as ‘sheepwrecking’ in Feral, Searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding, 2013. Despite the proclamation, as you enter National Forests, that you are broaching a Land of Many Uses, Monbiot makes the point that most human endeavors, driven by remorseless entropy, tend to devolve into monocultures. National Forests are mostly about protecting the nation’s timber supply; lacking oversight by C-Frog and engaged neighbors, Koenigstein would become an oil super-highway as Mirada opens more wells in the Topatopa foothills on its exploratory drive into the Sespe Wilderness; in Britain, the marginal uplands of Wales, England and Scotland, once mostly lightly grazed common land became, upon their privatization through the lamentable Enclosure movement, intensively farmed by landlord’s hoping to profit from the wool trade. Now, with wool a largely devalued commodity, it is the arcane traditions of sheep breeding, sheep-dog training and the insatiable appetite of up-scale restaurants for English spring lamb that drives the five thousand year tradition that, over the millennia has entirely transformed the uplands forest ecology into a grass monoculture incapable of absorbing winter rains and erased much of the complex web of life these primeval hills once supported.

Wordsworth and John Clare among others, bemoaned the enclosure (and thus taming) of the rough edges of England’s lowland arable land that traditionally remained marginal commons available for coppicing and mixed grazing of pigs, sheep and cattle to the landless local peasantry. The industrial revolution then, as in China now, depopulated the countryside leaving it to capital intensive crop mono-cultures necessary to the feeding of urban populations. Monbiot is careful to exclude these highly productive farm lands from his critique: it is the marginal grazing lands that he sees suffering unnecessarily from the ‘white plague’ and which could be most fruitfully re-wilded.

Now Koenigstein, and more generally Ojai, are on the margins of the Southland’s major oilfields (despite the area’s historical status as the location of California’s first oil well in 1867) and could usefully dedicate its wildlands to its prowling top predator, the mountain lion (reliably reported as currently resident in these parts by two neighbors and filmed on security camera by a third) rather than to the economic advantage, on Koenigstein, of the Price family (as owners of Mirada) and the continuing debasement of the climate through carbon mining and gas flaring.

Monbiot favors the reintroduction of the wolf into Britain’s uplands, a move predictably resisted by farmers but one that could quickly re-balance the wild and the tame and remove, once and for all the plague of sheep that infest the uplands and inhibits their higher value as carbon sinks, rain infiltrators and true wildlands. Similarly, greater State and Federal protection for the range of the Puma concolor, black bear and steelhead trout might reasonably re-establish these chaparral lands as untrammeled wilderness - surely now their highest and best use - unthreatened by oil interests, cattle and agriculture and safe even, for the reintroduction of the Grizzly, that great symbol of California (last sighted in Santa Barbara County in 1924) and of the vitiation of its wild lands.

In creating a redoubt and by re-dedicating the surrounding acreage to its highest purpose, of chaparral, there is an ecotone established at our house on Koenigstein balanced between the wild and the urban: it is here I can practice a dialectic of the tame and the untamed and at this interstice, to paraphrase Marx: live a life that determines my consciousness. It is where, in practical terms, a run in the pre-dawn or a walk in the gloaming requires that one carry an air-horn. It is where I can, in odd moments and in these postings, add value to the neighborhood by honing it as a cultural artifact.

Sci-Fi Metaphysics

Now also at www.Urbanwildland.org

We are children of the Big Bang. In a helplessly atavistic recapitulation of the Universe's creation story, Humankind has now developed an algorithm by which the little world that we know on Planet Earth, trapped within its fragile atmospheric skin, is exploding.

It began when woman first planted seed and our species began to farm. The human collective went on to establish local markets with its surpluses, then riverine and subsequently Mediterranean trade. These regional markets, transformed by the Industrial Revolution, metastasized into Atlantic mercantilism and eventually global capitalism. Now, in the twenty first century, this slow burn has resulted in the mineral, animal and biotic resources of the planet fueling the expansionary process by which we blight the land with kipple - Philip K. Dick's term for the material stuff that is exploding across the planet.

In other Philip K. Dick related news, we ask the question,

Does the Elfin Forest Dream of Crystal Rain Drops?

Although the author's prescience in his classic novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 1968, (on which was loosely based Ridley Scott's 1982 noir sci-fi movie, Bladerunner) can be seriously questioned, most obviously in the setting of his futuristic tale of hovercars and laser guns alongside of cigarettes, pay phones and carbon paper memos, he nevertheless broaches one of the central questions of our newish age: to what manifestations of Creation can we reasonably extend our empathy, our care and concern? Or, as Dick frames it, what is real?

In his tale, reality, as opposed to the ersatz or cyborgian, is equated with the ability to emote in ways exhibited by a normal, well-adjusted human, and our hero Rick Deckard, employed by San Francisco Police Department as a bounty hunter, is charged with 'retiring' the non-human, but entirely convincing replicants, or Androids, that have escaped from Mars where they are offered as personal slaves to induce emigration from Planet Earth - rendered almost uninhabitable following what Dick calls World War Terminus.

The Nexus-6 android is well nigh indistinguishable from a 'real' person, and in place of their Miranda rights, Rick administers an 'empathy test' which differentiates the human from non-human. Despite its highly sophisticated engineering, the Android does not emote in an entirely convincing manner when confronted with certain hypothetical scenarios concocted by a team of psychologists at the SFPD. Failure to shed a tear when confronted with the scripted suggestion that your dog has died may result in your immediate offing.

How we as a species react to mountain ranges, aquifers or zoophytes and zygotes - whether we can can successfully embrace the non-human with the levels of empathy we customarily extend to each other (and our pets) - clearly impacts our relationship with the biosphere. Can we shed a tear when confronted with the decimation of a plant community or the demise of an ecosystem and generate action out of empathy? Failure to do so may ultimately compromise our place within the biosphere, if not in our species-wide offing.

At Urbanwildland there is a concerted effort to extend the readers' range of empathy towards the natural world via the sharing of my reactions to the local plant community. As your hack chaparral reporter (embedded, with his series 6 i-phone, somewhere on the Wildland frontier) I make no excuses for posting this latest dispatch on my well worn trope of seasonal dissonance in the topsy-turvy world of the Elfin Forest.

'Tis the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness here in the Upper Ojai chaparral. Leaves are turning orange and brown, stalks to straw and seed heads have replaced flowers. Only the doughty, foundational, schlerophytic shrubs retain their full quotient of chlorophyll and amongst them, it is laurel sumac which is putting on the bravest show with a late burst of creamy pyramidal blossom and still, in places, the bright green leaves of new foliage. Chamise is more typical: seeming to hold its breath while the tips of its branches venture into the red-brown spectrum, yet drawing on its phlegmatic resilience to somehow remain in character as an evergreen shrub. Fruits of the holly leafed cherry are ripening and reddening amidst the plant's still shiny green leaves while rust is curdling the milky buckwheat flowers below.

A thin veil of mist this morning, but across the valley, the deep dark of the oaks can still be discerned dotting the meadows, amongst the barns, houses and refined, Italianate fingers of cypress point skyward in the languorous vapors. Beyond, the oak riven mass of Sulphur Mountain looms like a heavy cloud on the horizon. Calendrically, it is high summer, but the local ecosystem is hunkering down for the season most beloved by that most romantic of Romantic poets, Keats.

There are outliers to this general drying up of the sap: tar weed remains spritely with tiny yellow flowers on its antic armature, deer weed is sometimes still in bloom (whilst others of its kind have succumbed to the seasonal desiccation, their stalks turned an orangey, brick-red); Turkey mullein has erupted across over-grazed pastures in white, psoriatic patches and vinegar weed is newly sprouted, along a stoney track up the hill, with its cornflower blue flowers and strong turpentine smell.

Overall, the mood is somber. Sweet, maple-syrup perfumed California everlasting has decayed into a frouzy fuzz of seed heads on mahogany stalks and acourtia bristles with seed atop its kelp-like structure now turned a tobacco brown. Gauzy seed balls of the local clematis are draped forlornly across parched shrubs, while elsewhere in the Elfin Forest poison oak foliage is now carmine. The plant community may have mostly retired for the season, deep in summer sleep, but does it dream of its awakening, come October, with the first kiss of rain?

That question drives us to the heart of Philip K. Dick's sci-fi metaphysics. When we have empathy, we confer on its subject the presumption of sentience - we transmit our feelings to what we believe are potential receivers. To impute dreaming in other beings is to imply sentience. In Dick's world, almost all plants and animals have been destroyed in the nuclear carnage of WWT. The remaining humans crave the company of pets and those who cannot afford the high price of the rare living examples, choose replicant animals such as the eponymous Electric Sheep. Hence the titular conundrum.

Living in a deluge of hyper capitalism that threatens to flood the natural world (in metaphoric augury of impending ice-melt) we can expand the ambit of our inherent anthropocentrism by an imaginative embrace of the non-zoological, far beyond, to the global sum of all ecosystems, the biosphere.

James Lovelock has already pioneered the notion, in Gaia, 1979, that our home planet is a living, self-regulating, sentient entity of which we and our civilization are a tiny part (as ants and their anthills are of the human realm). It dreams, we can dream of it. We can empathize with it; it registers, in some infinitesimal way, our empathy.

Are mountain ranges tickled by the babbling streams that wriggle down their flanks and, do androids dream of electric sheep? Locally: Does the Elfin Forest Dream of Crystal Rain Drops?

Sex and the City

Now also at Urbanwildland.org

In the scrublands between Sisar Road and the braided, currently dry creek bottoms that cross the Ojai Oil Company leases that back up to Koenigstein, there's a spot where nothing grows. Until now.

Now, it is transformed by an efflorescence.

The flowers are a deep, reddish pink (a more venturesome writer might even suggest heliotrope but I think the tiny blossoms lack sufficient blue to make them a candidate for this description - and as a chaparral denizen such highfalutin, literary color names are inimical to the cultural setting in which this plant community finds itself (see below)). The stalks too, have a reddish cast. They grow low to the ground forming a loosely woven carpet with a pile that is about six inches deep. They are stunningly beautiful: their name is Turkish rugging (Chorizanthe staticoides).

This sandy patch, strewn with small rocks, pebbles, twigs and scat where previously nothing grew, is about twenty five feet in diameter and has revealed itself, for this moment in June, as a plush Fairy circle. Elsewhere along the trails I am revisiting, after almost a month in Europe, acourtia is in bloom. It's pink-purple flower heads are lifted high atop stalks wrapped in ragged, papery leaves. In places where there is an understory of popcorn flowers (now mostly dried and gone to seed) there is this floating field of purple with a low understory of grey fuzz. Between the floral plane and dwarfish thicket floor, the antic acourtia, its foliage susceptible to every passing breeze, undulates like a terrestrial kelp forest.

Higher up in the Topatopa foothills on a switchback canyon trail, passing through early morning sun and then deep shade (where the cliff side plants seem to welcome, as do I, their respite from solar irradiation) I notice the white flowers: white sage barely in bloom, convolvulus, sprinkles of remaining-in-bloom popcorn flower, and yucca. From elsewhere in Ojai, I think of the giant roadside flowers of datura, of the at-our-front door California everlasting and everywhere, the heavily planted Matilija poppy (although there is no sign of it in my chaparral neck of the woods).

Of them all, the yucca stands out: exhibiting its buxom blossoms in a wanton display to lure a pollinating embrace of its blooms from its dedicated moth-toys. In the demure surroundings of the self-effacing chaparral, such brazen floral displays seem oddly out of place. What we notice of flowering plants is most often their means of reproduction - their flowers, their sex organs. Unnervingly, the voluptuous Yucca whipplei stands, in spring, at the very edge of species transgression.

Back in the garden (those areas of the chaparral turned into weedscapes by the soil disturbance of the development process) I have been busy culling the aliens, primarily brassicas and tocolote. The grasses are terminally bleached, but the deer weed and tar weed are in bloom, giving a yellowy-green cast to the meadows; the hills, where the chaparral plant community has remained undisturbed, except by fire, for thirty thousand years, remain largely unchanged from a month ago, although the fruits of the holly leaf cherry are now fully engorged and ready for consumption by the family of foxes that has taken up residence just across the seasonal stream to the east of the house.

In short, I have resumed my Thoreauvian transcendental triathlon of trail-running, weeding and ruminating - an activity first mooted, in slightly different form, by Jay Atkinson of the New York Times. In the week that I have been back these ruminations have sometimes been clouded by the pall that descended over me in Paris, where I spent the last three days of the trip.

Paris began as an Iron-age fishing village founded on the banks of the Seine by Pictish bands of Celts. It was a significant outpost of the Roman Empire after Julius Caesar conquered Paris in 52 B.C. Under Charlemagne, it became a center of learning and by the end of the first millennium it was firmly established as the French capital.

As the power of its Kings increased it remained a seat of theological and secular learning. The Renaissance saw Louis XIII's chief minister Cardinal Richelieu, establish the French Academy and build the Palais Royale and the Luxembourg Palace. In the seventeenth century, the Monarchy supported men of science. The Enlightenment provided an illumination that revealed the threadbare nature of medieval mysticism and thus doomed the power of absolute monarchies (its early supporters had imagined an entirely different outcome: where kings and queens controlled the new sciences to further their hold over their kingdoms). After the Revolution, Napoleon enriched the Louvre (re-purposed in 1793, from Royal palace to museum) with artworks plundered from the countries he and his armies had conquered.

Haussmann's renovation of Paris was a vast nineteenth century public works program commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III which swept away the old medieval city and replaced it with axial avenues, parks and squares. While the plan provided needed light and air and vastly improved sanitation, it was visibly a scheme dedicated to the glorification of the Emperor rather than his people. Now, having uniquely survived the twentieth century's two world wars with nary a scratch, Paris remains a city historically redolent of a great deal of plunder and very little redistribution.

Despotism didn't entirely stop with the demise of aristocratic absolutism. A new kind of tyranny emerged from the Revolution and predictably the response was a military coup. Under the pretext of protecting the Homeland, Napoleon began a world wide campaign aimed at global hegemony. Sound familiar? In Paris, the architectural artifacts of the French saga of Ancien Regime, Directory, Consulate, Empire, Bourbon Restoration, Constitutional Monarchy, the Second Empire (Napoleon III), and the founding of the Third Republic retain their power to chill me to the marrow.

The latest iteration of societal control is now evidenced by a bloated bureaucracy that attempts to fully occupy the vast hulks that loom over the streets of central Paris. The Nazis too, took every advantage of the palatial digs available to them in their conquered city. Now, the Baroque gaucheries and Gothic pinnacles that rise up along the avenues, mansarded with green-grey zinc, or steeple-roofed in lead, still weave their architectonic spell of an authoritarian and spiritual disdain for the sans culotte who beetle along the pavements below.

My longest mile in Paris was the walk between the imposing flanks of first, the Louvre, formerly the palace of the young Louis XV, then the Palais Royale - after Richelieu, home to the Duke of Orleans, regent to the pre-pubescent Sun King and later the official residence of the Bourbons. In 1848, after the Bourbon Restoration, it was looted and trashed by the Parish mob. In 1870, it was fire-bombed by anarchists still acutely aware of the building's status as a symbol of aristocratic oppression. It survived: now, as one moves through central Paris under the dread architectural influence of the first and second estate (the aristocracy and the clergy) one can feel, not unreasonably, a momentary soupçon of regret that the Nazis were unable to follow through on their intention of razing the City before abandoning it to the triumphant American liberation of 1945.

No matter: as the lively bans lieu foment future insurrections (continuing the long tradition of resistance offered up by Parisians to the establishment) and the Financial, High-Tech and Entrepreneurial sectors establish camp in the La Defense district beyond the old city, where the triumph of Capital is announced by gleaming towers of commerce that cluster like giant crepuscular ice shards on the horizon, the irrelevance of Central Paris becomes increasingly apparent - except perhaps as a bizarre chamber of horrors that caters to the blissfully ignorant tribes of global tourists who still gather there.

The great Romantic philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who died on the eve of the Revolution) wrote in his Discourse on Inequality, 1754,

"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."

We can only hope that the French rule of aristocratic absolutism marked a high-point of such imposture.

It's good to be home where the democracy of the chaparral plant community remains unassailable.

Spring Romance

Now also at Urbanwildland.org

There's a place where bleached grasses form a ridge when viewed from Koenigstein Road looking south over the valley in which Highway 150 is enfolded. Nowhere, from this viewpoint, is the road visible but instead, the top third of the north face of Sulphur mountain rises up beyond the grass like a dark scenic flat so that the foreshortened view is of blonde on black.

In the foreground is an old oak, set amidst the grasses, and its shadowed leaves create a tenebrous void that somehow sinks into the mountain oaks beyond as though a ragged hole has been torn in the time/space continuum. The valley of Highway 150 is swallowed up in an existential warp - the third dimension, for the moment that this view exists, entirely absent.

The experience is one of a brief dissociative trance, a return to the primitive mind where the intellect is subsumed by the elemental and experiences a return to the animus mundi, the animating spirit of the universe (the light hidden in the darkness) and represents perhaps, a brief moment of clarity in our numbingly mediated lives. Or not. But I am a Romantic, and I cling to these moments of grace (as I choose to perceive them).

Perhaps I had been primed to experience this aperçu by my casual rumination on the meadow flowers of late spring. Along the track that leads off of the local metaled road, in the hard pan over-trodden by Lorrie and I on our evening walks, there are yellow pincushion (Chaenactis glabriuscula), wild Brodiaea (sp.jolonensis), purple Clarkia and Mariposa lilies. Bordering the track are wild oats, foxtail bromes, erodium, rye, native bunch grasses (stipa spp), occasionally the golden-star lily and often the pink flushed milky flowering buckwheat: sometimes, the warm honey yellow of Mimulus monkey flowers.

Across the way, the north facing slope harbors ferns, solanum, poison oak, toyon, walnut, coffee berry and bay beneath the predominant oaks but engulfed in oak shadows it registers as a dark, mounding mass lightly riddled with oak foliage that is scarcely less somber. My mind attuned to the pointillist blooms against the bold masses of color, tone and the blank canvas of the whitening evening sky, I am alert to the phenomenology of this place.

Recently, I have been in England and it is traipsing across the nation's beleaguered countryside long ago that I first developed a Romantic susceptibility of mind - the most fundamental trait of which is a nostalgia for a pre-capitalist past which now, in Ojai, manifests (for me) as a fascination with the tribal society of the Chumash and their predecessors, the Oak Grove People. Like figures such as William Morris, an avowed Marxist, Arts and Crafts designer, writer and architect, the great British Romantics fantasized about a return to the societal structure of the early medieval era, or perhaps to the even earlier times of the indigenous pre-Roman tribes.

To suggest that England is a palimpsest maybe a truism but the image of the much overwritten map reflecting a cultural and infrastructural layering is irresistible in Norfolk where Ickfield and Peddars Way mark the spirit path of the Iceni (and other more ancient British tribes) rising south from Avesbury; Roman roads and ruins lay across the land and the city of Venta Icenorum lies beneath modern-day Norwich; where the earliest Saxon village yet to be unearthed is just north of Bury St Edmunds and where medieval tracks have now been substantiated as B roads, Royal Highways as A roads and the wide, all-obliterating erasures of the twenty-first century Motorway have made inroads into the west of the County.

Wherever you drive, the route is measured in Ancient Market Towns, heralded in signage as though the development of a vicious system of proto-capitalism inherent in regional trading zones and with their rise the devolution of cooperative systems of patronage (of feudalism) is something to be celebrated - as glorious way stations in the history of western civilization that David Graeber condemns as 'the first 5,000 years of Debt'.

A return to reciprocity, to a world of exchange and gift giving is a profoundly romantic impulse. As. Karatani notes in The Structure of World History (2014) in primitive societies, "reciprocity was not limited to the living; it was assumed that reciprocal exchanges were also carried out with the dead (ancestors) and the not-yet born (descendants)." This profound sense of the cycle of life engendered a stewardship of the environment now entirely lacking in a global culture predicated on inexhaustible natural resources existing at the service of the system of industrial production. Thus in harkening back to pre-Raphaelite (and then some) societies, the Romantic outlook contains within it an implicit critique of capitalism. Karatani suggests that in adopting modes of exchange based on exploitation, humans have "disrupted the processes of exchange between humans and nature......The only hope for solving our environmental problems lies in our first superseding capital and state".

Having identified the three stages that characterize the economic history of mankind as Gift Exchange, Plunder and Redistribution and Money and Commodities (which more or less align with tribal society, feudalism and modernity) Karatani identifies a borromean knot of State, Capital and Nation that supports what he calls the 'the modern social formation'.

In the U.S., the State, comprising the military, the bureaucracies of taxation, intelligence, international relations, domestic law enforcement and justice, exists largely independent of the oversight of the people (manifested by electoral politics and its farcical representations in Washington) but is profoundly coupled with Capital. The mythologies of Nation are dutifully spun by the media in ways that reflect their fractal differences across the so-called political spectrum; manifested every two years in the horse-race ritual of voting; and carefully nurtured in K through 12. Capital, characterized by its relentless appetite for growth, is sustained within its own global bubble of structural imperatives.

In the twenty-first century, coalitions of State and Capital vie for the earth's remaining resources and this duopoly continues to act partially under the guise of fulfilling national mythologies. But as the world continues to globalize, national identities wither and personhood is increasingly characterized by life-style choices rather than geographic allegiance: beware the Hipster nation!

The collapse of the philosophical, mythological and psychological constructs that make up the abstract fabric of nations (which in turn provide the emotional and intellectual bulwark to Capital and State) may well unravel the borromean knot that still entwines all three and thus create opportunities for communities based on a variety of alternative ideologies. It is within the poetic imagination that such alternatives may develop. The mind of the Romantic, which attends to the wild Brodiaea (or the daffodil), is such that it embraces notions of an idealized relationship with the natural world - where we may return to the time of gifts and endeavor (like William Morris) to re-enchant the world.

On the Road

Now also at www.Urbanwildland.org

I woke to the white-noise of a City awakening. It is 4 a.m. in Venice and I feel a mild anxiety slowly filling my consciousness tracking parallel to an awareness that I am not in Ojai anymore…..

It’s salutary to spend time in Los Angeles. How else to confirm the joys of living elsewhere? Yet I carry the stamp of an urban-dweller wherever I rest my head: thus it is entirely apt that this blog is titled UrbanWildland.

I am an outlander, an outlier, an outsider. More urban than wild. But I am at home with myself and at home in the chaparral, that entirely useless, but infinitely valuable eco-system that has never nurtured people – where humankind is intrinsically alien. (The Chumash were careful to situate their villages in areas adjacent to a creek and riparian shade trees or in oak-meadowland). Grizzlies, mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes, grey foxes, and their animal prey were the mammalian inheritors of this Pleistocene eco-system and all but the grizzly still dominate its dense thickets. In its cleared patches people now farm, build country estates and horse ranches or, mostly hidden from sight, extract its oil. Some, like me, live in isolated houses in the scrub-land with cherished access to the City and relish the frisson of the urban wildland - where our expensively acquired liberal educations allow us to parse the relationship between town and country while avoiding commitment to either sensibility. Mostly, we look at the chaparral as an ancient scenic backdrop to our twenty-first century lives.

My parents were both Londoners evacuated from the city early in WWII and ended up spending the rest of their days in rural Surrey. I was born a few years after they made this move, living in the small villages of Eashing, Witley, Churt, Frensham, Lower Bourne, and then, at age six, moving to a new Council house on a small Estate (or Project, as such congeries of Public Housing are known in the U.S.) in Milford, a village that suffers the indignity of having a Victorian era Gothic revival church as its centerpiece - still considered, in the 1950's, an example of brash modernity compared to churches in surrounding villages that typically date back to Norman or Saxon times.

My parents were neither locals nor did they maintain cultural and economic roots in London, as did those families whose bread winner traveled daily on the British Rail Southern Region line to Waterloo Station. My father briefly commuted to his insurance job in the City from Churt, but quickly tired of this routine and resolved to work locally. By the time we had arrived in Milford, to live in public housing, we had forfeited any pretensions to belonging to the middle class and settled into our lives of alienation, physically within but socially firmly outside of the stock-broker belt and never likely to be considered country folk, certainly not a part of the local gentry nor, with my father employed as a small time insurance agent, ever likely to ascend to the professional classes.

Compounding my estrangement from any comfortable niche within the English class system was the fact that both my parents, but particularly my father, had upper- middle class accents of which my dad was very protective and concerned that his children inherit. After the age of nine I was banned from playing with the local kids for fear that I might pick up a Surrey accent.

A couple of years after leaving High School, in 1967, the inconsistencies in what might be called my class affect (I was the embodiment of false consciousness) were such that leaving England seemed the only reasonable course.

In the spring of 1933, a similarly tumultuous time, and perhaps for some of the same reasons, Patrick Leigh Fermor, at eighteen, left to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He was an assiduous diarist and eventually turned the material from this epic stroll through Europe between the wars into two books that made his reputation as a writer; a third volume was published posthumously. Although he went on to live an extraordinarily rich life, it was the memories of his walk across a continent that fuelled his literary production into his old age; they remained the well spring of his creative life.

Fermor, who was thrown out of every school he ever attended and never went to a university, acquired great learning at an early age from an adoring mother who was a fashionable haute bohème in London and a famous geologist father resident in India, who introduced young eight year old Paddy to mountain climbing in the Swiss Alps; together they provided enough contacts in Europe's fading aristocracy to assure comfortable lodgings when the boy was not sleeping rough in some remote field or abandoned shepherd’s hut. He also had a weekly stipend of one pound that kept him in food and drink while he was 'On the Road'.

My journey away from England began by hitch-hiking to Dover and boarding a cross channel ferry to Ostend in Belgium. It was the first time I had left Britain. My previous hitch-hiking experience was mostly limited to Gloucestershire where I had briefly attended the Art College in Cheltenham. It was April and I had a kapok filled sleeping bag. As I recall, I slept rough the first night and then hitched to Paris, then on down the N-9 to the French Riviera. My first night in a bed was somewhere in Provence - courtesy of a couple who were on their way to their country house. The next morning I was taken to the appropriate route by the husband in his gull-wing Mercedes. Fermor would have moved in for a week and made life-long friends – my almost complete lack of French, despite studying for five years, limited my entertainment value after the first flush of vagabondish appeal. I was, however, given the address of their son in Nice, who was about my age, and I looked him up upon arrival. A deeply entitled young man, he had little time to waste on a provincial lad from England intent on the romance of travel and totally incapable of sampling the wealthy youth culture of the Riviera. I hitched through the string of glamorous resort towns and headed for Venice, Italy.

Emblematic of a trip that wandered across Asia and then ran out of roads in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), I saw the sinking city only through the haze of Northern Italy’s industrial smog: an early success in avoiding the culturally sanctioned sights, lightly sacrificed for the greater thrill of journeying onward and Eastward.

Now, I find joy in looking north through the foothills to the Topatopas, knowing that onward is a wildland that stretches to Bakersfield and beyond. It is here that I imagine resides the primordial soul of California, nurtured long before people journeyed down the kelp road (in the familiar marine environment that holds constant all the way from the Aleutians), forged in the maelstrom of colliding tectonic plates, pullulating coast lines, disappearing inland seas and finally, grinding mountains of moving ice which, in a warming world, puddled into great rivers, aquifers and lakes.

In my rear view mirror I see the vast conurbation of the southland, from the teeming tenements of Tijuana to the broad coastal plain of Los Angeles, bounded by the Santa Monica Mountains and the San Gabriels, where lives a virulent urban culture that leaks through the canyons and passes, floods the San Fernando valley and is finally sated somewhere just north of Oxnard and the City of Ventura - all woven together with the sinews of a profoundly twentieth century transportation system that found its apotheosis in the freeway.

Somewhere between these hulking mythic realities lies the urban wildland. It is in this precarious interstice that I have found my place.

Triple Cream

(Now also at www.urbanwildland.org)

With a stiff neck from watching a one hundred and fifty minute film, I walked out of the Riviera Theater in Santa Barbara on the first day of daylight saving to see a viscous twilight settling over the bay. Lights had begun to appear across the darkling plain of downtown and at the shore's edge, a white twig-like line illuminated with strings of light was etched into the bay - Stearns Wharf: reduced by distance and the scattering of light through the dust and pollution of earth's atmosphere to a filament, a tiny scratch on my retinal canvas.

I had, indeed, just seen Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh's grand biopic of the early nineteenth century painter. I was primed - stretched and gessoed - ready to receive the faintest optical stimulations of atmosphere, earth and ocean. What I got, as I blinked into the early evening's light, was a cineramic shot of the edenic, sub-tropical, crepuscular, Southern Californian, Spanish provincial revival, stage-set fantasy that is Santa Barbara seen from the Elysian heights, above the Mission, on Alameda Padre Serra.

The Riviera Theatre is housed in the auditorium of the old Normal School of Manual Arts and Home Economics, built in 1909. The campus later morphed into the original setting for UCSB. Improbably, the Riviera is the one Santa Barbara screen showing independent and foreign movies. The theater still features a heavy beamed mission-style ceiling and amber wall sconces embellished with a gothic ‘R’. Across the street is the newly re-modeled luxury resort El Encanto which utilizes some of the old buildings from the original dormitories for the Normal school.

Turner painted atmospheres of sufficient viscosity to function as dream catchers - he created external matrices tuned to capture inner thoughts or visions that might otherwise never escape the unconscious. His subject matter - from the horror of a burning slave ship to the pathos of an old Napoleonic era ship of the line being towed up the Thames by steam tug or the technological marvels of the day, like steam trains - was enveloped in texture, color and impressionist mood sufficient to stir inchoate emotions from deep within the viewer. He elaborated the captured moment in ways that produce a gestalt of meaning that transcend the prosaic realities of the original scene.

Leigh shows us canvases (prepared by Turner's housekeeper with benefits) painted, smeared, scratched, and smudged so that they reflect those fleeting moments of visual revelation initially caught in the artist's sketch books. The filmmaker's graceful camera and economical script bring Turner, his domestic life and loves, his rancorous dealings with patrons and the stultifying Royal Academy, his professional jealousies and above all, his fascination with the world of the Thames estuary, so fully to life that our own relationship to place, light and our lived lives is ushered into that delirious zone where the prosaic is ennobled both by a soulful beauty and tenebrous meaning.

This morning, before dawn, a half moon hung overhead giving sufficient light for me to move confidently along the trail; wind buffeted the sage and stirred the scents of the chaparral; no birdsong yet, but the tympanic breath of the warm air filled the aural void. Random fronds of chamise whipped in the breeze and brushed against my body: my senses thus engaged, they resonated somewhere deep within me.

The painter’s contemporary, Wordsworth, practiced a similar recollection of fleeting events in tranquility and then a transposition into enduring verse. Both artists were assiduous in broaching the concerns of the day while expanding the consciousness of their audience with bravura renditions of purely visual, often natural, phenomena. It has not entirely escaped my notice that I practice a journeyman version of this device of sugar-coating the pill. The compulsion to concretize the evanescent too, is an enduring artistic compulsion - as is the use of beauty to cloak intellectual constructs and critiques: they are at the heart of the artistic endeavor. But the Romantics, and Turner is surely one such, were also engaged in the practice of drawing back the veil: of revealing the sublime beyond the quotidian surfaces of the world.

At first light, the sky is almost fully illuminated and the sun's impending appearance is heralded by a yellow wash leaking around the back lit silhouette of the Santa Paula ridge. An ocean of fog creeps slowly up the Santa Clara river delta bounded by the headlands of South Mountain and Point Mugu. Here was a Turneresque background in the chaparral: but the master was more than a painter of seascapes, landscapes and atmosphere: he imbued his scenes with social, historical and economic significance. Turner would require a foreground, at the edge of the waves of fog, and extending picture plane left. A native scene: a collection of thatched, beehive shaped huts clustered along the Santa Clara River valley, blue tendrils beginning to coil out of the hut's smoke holes and about them, the first flurry of the mornings activities animating the plain, would have served. His was an imagination, typical of the nineteenth century intellect, that slipped easily into past worlds.

Turner's, proto-impressionist paintings shot his viewers half a century or more into the future enabling them to see the world with something that approached a modern sensibility. He attached emotion to the everyday and wonder to the extraordinary. Karl Ove Knausgaard, that voice of the moment who has elevated the neuroses of the schlub to an art form, writes in My Saga (2015),

"The external has to awaken something within; nothing means anything in itself, it is the resonance it produces, in the soul and in the language, that gives meaning to the thing described."

In the chaparral this week, the externalities stirring my soul are the triple cream blossoms of the native clematis, holly leafed cherry, and elderberry. They have no need of artistic mediation - they speak directly to me. Here in the wildland, the veil may be drawn back, transcending the picture plane, abrogating the word and eschewing the moving image. The prickly, scented, untidy and random profligacy of the dull green fuzz that clings to the earth's crust in Southern California - still, in places, in its primal state - can fully reveal the soulful adumbrations so hard won by the Romantics and now, by the logorrheic Knausgaard. It offers transport to the Universe's infinitude where the romantic spirit may collapse into a vertiginous gyre of the sublime.

Owl's Head Clover

Also at www.urbanwildland.org

In Brooklyn last weekend, Prospect Park was limned in monochrome only occasionally leavened by a snow plow's colorful livery or a red, yellow, or blue jacket of a runner who had not gotten the memo: black cold weather running gear best complements the snowy wastes of the park. It was a few degrees above freezing and a plow's blade had cleared a dark band of wet asphalt between rippled piles of slush. Across the white meadows and steely grey lakes stood a black filigree of trees that plumed towards a leaden sky. The previous day, half a foot of snow had fallen transforming the park into this visual slurry of white ash and charcoal.

Returning to California, the Jet Blue Airbus 321 takes off and then traces a wide arc out into the Atlantic offering its passengers aerial visions of the snow fringed continent, black and white cornrows of Long Island's Levitt towns, and then the obsidian daggers of industrial jetties carrying oil pipe into the wintry ocean; then, as I watch (now on the seat-back screen's map channel) the blue silhouette that serves as the plane's pixeled icon turn, in the blink of an eye, towards a crude cartographic representation of the white heart of a mostly frozen land, I plunge again into the dense, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, deeply sectarian, tribally costumed and variously be-hatted world of Patrick Leigh Fermor's magisterial travelogue, The Broken Road, (2013).

As a youth, the author walked the length and breadth of pre-WWII Bulgaria, and remembered his journey, with startling clarity, in his old age. I was driven, from Park Slope (and around Grand Army Plaza) then along Eastern Parkway towards Jet Blue's revivification of Saarinen’s spread-winged terminal almost entirely oblivious of the social, ethnic, economic, religious, national, and political enclaves through which I was passing. I glimpsed (and conjectured) along the eight-lane, bifurcated street (and heaven knows, over the continental United States) that there is substantial evidence of our ethnic heterogeneity: yet Levi Strauss' pronouncement in Triste Tropiques (1956) that we are headed for a global mono-culture remains prescient.

On many of Brooklyn's streets, terra-cotta, common brick, yellow brick, brick clinkers, pale rough-cast stone, granite and brownstone alternatively wrap ossified cavities (their interiors often encased in dark woods) that once hosted lively communities of worshippers. This borough is famously replete with churches, most dating back to the former city's days as the most populous in the country. Now these varied ecclesiastical edifices remain as hulks, massively irrelevant carcasses in a world gone secular - where Mammon has established his patriarchal sway, attended by nymphs proffering votives of enabling technology.

Barclays Center - a rusting, Corten-clad Leviathan seemingly hauled up from the Hudson River on the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush is a twenty first century corporatized multi-use venue. Here the many arrive to worship their sports stars and, this spring, for instance, Barry Manilow, Neil Diamond, The Who, Stevie Wonder, and other aging acts still, apparently, of appeal to what, in another borough, is known as the bridge and tunnel crowd; here they are enraptured in a place which once was at the heart of multi-ethnic low and middle income neighborhood. Sometimes known locally as the 'Slug', this facility represents the creeping Manhattanization of Brooklyn, a dilution of ethnic, economic and. cultural diversity before the leveling impact of a global corporate mono-culture. On some nights, streets that once may have seen a multiplicity of headgear are swamped by a sea of black, Chinese made Brooklyn Nets snapback hats - a sign of the wearer's allegiance to a company of tall, ball-bouncing mercenaries: but I suppose that there is also, in that flotilla of brimmed cloche, some of the same exoticism of which Fermor takes note in a Turkish graveyard where stone pillars marked the graves. He writes,

“The lower and older ones, chipped, split, tilted askew and leaning at all angles, were crowned with extravagant carved headgear….They expanded like giant pumpkins and vegetable marrows, intricately pleated round a cone, and sometimes a helmet’s point pricked through the bulbous folds; others were coil upon stone coil of twisted linen; yet others, jutting fluted cylinders adorned with aigrettes. What pashas and agas and beys, what swaggering bimbashis, what miralais with mandarin whiskers, could have worn these portentious headpieces?”

The avowed modernist Ataturk abolished the fez and turban (of which the above lithic draperies are all examples) in 1920. The elaboration within, and multiplicity of, social worlds is a defense against cultural entropy – the process where taste devolves towards what used to be called mass culture.

Complexity empowers the human world. Monoculture destroys vitality and facilitates entropic decay. Mark Fisher points out that “Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics” Capitalist Realism (2008).

At the same time, the natural world is increasingly homogenized by the growth of monoculture agriculture, destruction of habitat, the spread of invasive species and by global warming. The bright green weeds of the world are by their very nature, dominator species – bent on global hegemony over the vast variety of the plant kingdom.

Once upon a time, there was a world of plenty and peace. Over this beneficent tranquility ruled the Great Goddess. But it was but a small step to move from Goddess culture to what Riane Eisler calls an 'androcratic' social organization under a patriarchal God where domination of the natural world, women and the physically weak is condoned: where might makes right and where rigid hierarchies of power prevail. We are the heirs to such a world.

Complex communities of varied ethnicity, taste and culture have long been under threat from the dominator ideology of neoliberal capitalism. A desacralized Nature is threatened externally by the plundering of its economic resources and within it, by opportunistic flora and fauna, abetted by deliberate and accidental, humanly engineered migrations that further degrade native ecosystems of their complexity and stability.

Long before the godhead was anthropomorphized, human societies lived in worlds of enchantment where there was a recognition that the infinite energy of the universe existed in all things. Then, the human task was to propitiate all that they touched in supporting their livelihoods and worship all that surrounded them. Then, men and women were equipped with egos that remained subservient to the world soul, and humankind's chthonic unconscious acted like a pervious membrane that allowed for the universe to flow in and human intention to flow out.

Drifts of owl’s head clover are set in a lush backdrop of weeds. The plant's slightly purpley red pin-cushion flower heads rise above a sea of alien grasses, clovers, and the irrepressible erodium. The trails through the chaparral that a couple of weeks ago were rock strewn dirt tracks are now grassy, virid veins that thread through the dull brown green and shadowed wild lands. It has rained again: New York's snow echoed in Ojai by half an inch of warm rain. Imported, European sourced chlorophyll is rampant: there are places that look like gimcrack evocations of the Emerald Isle.

This morning I awoke to the steady drum of rain on our metal roof. At first light I saw the Topatopa bluffs were rimed with snow that clung to ridges spread across the spalled sandstone - the dark rock banded in white. To the east, the Santa Paula ridge was lightly dusted while its conical peak was white with snow. Below, as light began to stream over the upper valley, the chaparral remained its dour, somber self; at its edges, meadows, the bright green of trails, and weedy roadside verges pulsated with a manic vigor.

For a moment, I am transfixed again by the clover, lost in its exuberance and its native beauty. I am enchanted - transported to a more complex time (paradoxically), long, long ago, when magic inhered in the world.

Candy, Candy

Now also at Urbanwildland.org

In the burgeoning bohemian capital of Ojai (as Architectural Digest gushes in a recent blog piece), we live at the vortex of a luxury market devoted to an ethos of the organic, natural, hand-crafted, and locavore.

There’s no denying the appeal of artisanal foods, small-batch beverages and locally-sourced goods made from natural materials. Yet the market for such products typically exists, in the Global North, in wealthy societies underpinned by an antithetical means of production – corporate capitalism.

How do we live with this paradox?

The prevailing goods and services and means of communication across the planet are the products of advanced technologies that have been created with the deliberate goal of reducing the amount of hands-on labor involved and concentrating the profits of such endeavors into the hands of the few.

This phenomenon was enabled in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the development of a highly focused and reductive way of looking at the world known as The Scientific Revolution, and its practical adjunct, The Industrial Revolution. Advances in weaponry, navigational technologies and transportation enabled peoples from countries who first adopted this new outlook to colonize great swathes of the planet and use foreign labor and raw materials to enrich their own societies. Thus we have the familiar tale of modern civilization: a world founded on the twin pillars of rational scientific analysis and greed. It replaced a pre-modern age of manual labor, hand crafts and food and drink that, even if often scarce, were always organic.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, increasing mechanization of large scale agriculture reduced the number of jobs available to rural populations and made available a vast labor pool for the new industries of mass production. A similar process continues to play out in the so-called developing world today. A universe of artisanal production and small, mixed farms of crops and livestock is being replaced by hugely productive, artificially fertilized mono-crop agri-businesses and meat factory farms tied into a global distribution system, enabled by the fossil-fueled internal combustion engine. Displaced rural workers, over the generations, have become fully enmeshed in the modern world, overwhelmingly as passive consumers rather than as active producers.

Yet we continue to crave the organic artisanal foods and hand-crafted goods that once were our birthright and in Ojai and select towns and suburbs throughout California, they are readily available, marketed by an array of local providers. We may even fantasize about a universal reversion to organic farming methods, localized production and hand-made goods: but we are dimly aware that such a transition might entail the destruction of corporate capitalism along with all the financial, health, food, communications, transport, scientific research, education and consumer goods that the system supports. For most people too, their livelihoods (and their ability to purchase artisanal luxuries) depend on the maintenance of that system.

Patti Smith, who played the Granada in Santa Barbara recently, has the answer.

She sang,

I had a dream, Mr. King, if you'll beg my pardon
I was trespassing a sacred garden
And the blossoms fell and they dropped like candy
And the nature cried, "Gandhi, Gandhi"
And the nature cried, "Gandhi, Gandhi"

And then,

Long live revolution and the spinning wheel
Awake, awake is the mighty appeal
Oh, people awake, awake from your slumber
And get 'em with the numbers
Get 'em with the numbers……

The numbers are indeed what it is about: the planet’s ability to support over seven billion people depends on the cruel system of production and reward the powerful have devised over the last half millennium and whose viability is profoundly dependent on the ravaging of the natural world – of trespassing a sacred garden.

This week, the chaparral has also spoken. Ceanothus blossom is dropping like candy. Nothing is as sweet in the local elfin forest as buckbrush (Ceanothus cuneatus) in bloom. The Santa Ana winds of late January have scattered the tiny white petals across the chaparral trails. On still days the sweet scent hangs in the air: anchored by a dark, honey fragrance freshened by herbaceous sage-like top notes it is redolent of the nose of a vintage Sauterne; of floral candy.

Gandhi used a spinning wheel as a symbol of self-sufficiency: it represented a way to replace industrially produced clothing with self-spun khadi cloth dhotis, lungis, kurtas and sarongs. His was a vision of self-employed small farmers and craftspeople who lived in small villages rather than cities and derived their livings entirely within the local community; governance, to the extent that it was required, would be organized through consensus driven village assemblies.

Gandhi was adamant in his opposition to the centralized, industrialized, and mechanized modes of production that the British had developed and he fully understood the impact of India’s economy becoming subservient to that system. He preached, “Not mass production, but production by the masses”. Transportation in traditional, rural India is by foot, bicycle and ox-cart and Gandhi saw no need for further elaboration. One of the great symbols of Britain’s command and control of the sub-continent was its vast network of railways: Gandhi understood its true significance as a conduit of imperial power.

We are now, ourselves, mostly colonial subjects of multi-national industrial capitalism: a system ultimately upheld by governments, legal frameworks and militarized police forces. Notions of the organic, natural, hand-crafted, and locavore are a subset of broader concepts of sustainability, localism and democracy. Gandhi’s idea of Swadeshi, or home economy, retains its relevance: there can be no genuine embrace of the local without breaking the bonds of a globalized economy.

Our fetishization of organic food, natural fabrics and homewares fits neatly into the prevailing economic model as a high-end, boutique market ultimately sustained by consumers fully embedded within neo-liberal economics and the industrial modes of production, transportation and communication it enables.

If we are to awake from our slumbers and get ‘em with our numbers, it will take a little more commitment than shopping at the farmer’s market, driving a Prius and enjoying device-free home-cooked meals with our families.

Clouds of ceanothus blossom have emerged from the chaparral. Surely, in Ojai, we can hear nature’s cries of “Gandhi, Gandhi”? The blossoms have dropped like candy: it’s time to get our dhoti on.

Sea Fever

Those of the bourgeoisie who are handicapped by their hyper-extended educations and tedious histories of talking therapies usually avoid words that have, linguistically speaking, a high degree of modality like ‘must’ and ‘should’. We don’t do emphatic injunctions (see what I did there?). We prefer shadowy multi-valence: we seek out grounds for misconstruction, shy away from certitude and are perpetually prepared to flee along carefully established verbal escape routes.

The poet John Masefield, however, was largely self-taught and, as far as I know, un-analyzed. Although thoroughly upper-middle class (within the taxonomy of the British class system) and thus, in the Edwardian era, expected to go to one of two Universities he was, instead, sent away to sea having been diagnosed by a maiden aunt as, heaven forbid, a bookworm. Ironically, (for said aunt) the merchant seaman has ample spare time and a distinct lack of amusements available to him on the high seas (in an age before digitized movies). The youth was therefore shipped into an ideal environment for literary annelids, far richer even, than the bookish humus available at Oxbridge and one already possessed of an old-boy of unimpeachable credentials, Joseph Conrad.

All of this, it seems to me, is essential background to an understanding of,

“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky…..”

This line is responsible (among so many others) for the ill-repute into which almost all rhyming poetry has fallen. The sing-song attack that generations of English and not a few American school children use in the annihilation of poetic reason likely smothers Masefield’s next line,

“And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by…..”

in a typical abnegation of meaning as rhythm and rhyme transcend all in a race to the bottom of the doggerel pond. The fallout settles like toxic grime on all poems that you-know-what. Pity: because Sea Fever is quite an effective piece of verse. Who cannot, if of a certain age, but empathize with the hopeless, impotent dreams of lost youth so affectingly sketched in the last stanza?

“I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.”

Ain’t going to happen, except for that last bit. So it was, ever the versifier, that Masefield left instructions to his "Heirs, Administrators, and Assigns":

“Let no religious rite be done or read
In any place for me when I am dead,
But burn my body into ash, and scatter
The ash in secret into running water,
Or on the windy down, and let none see;
And then thank God that there's an end of me.”

Scatter….Water….Ouch! Agreement in terminal sounds? Not so much. But with that written he felt ready to take his last breath: the ‘must’ in Masefield victim of mortality - the imperative applied to one too many items on an overly ambitious bucket list.

Speaking of which (lonely sea and the sky): at the further reaches of Koenigstein Road, where it becomes a track serving cattle pastures on a ravine-split mesa, then a winding mostly paved road headed for the Nesbitt’s avocado farm, a horse ranch and an off-the-grid shack currently on the County’s watch-list, then splits off to the left up a nameless canyon (by which time it has presumably shed its allegiance to the eponymous German hotelier) and then hairpins around several seasonal streams that cleave to deep fissures in the hillside, there is sometimes a view of the sea set beneath a wide-ranging sky. It is there, on clear days, in hazy sight of Ormond Beach, that I retain a connection to the Pacific Ocean.

Used to be that I needed to live close enough to check the surf, or at least be within a short walk of the beach and most certainly within ear-shot of a sizeable swell crashing on the shore. Remarkably, I achieved that for the most part of thirty years – ten in Sydney and twenty in Venice or Santa Monica Canyon. Now that need has fallen away. Running has replaced surfing and the chaparral the beach. Good trade.

At first light, after overnight rain, looking west between the Santa Ynez and the Santa Monica Mountains, the agricultural plain lays far below, unshrouded in its customary morning mists while plumes of steam arise from the Proctor and Gamble plant in Oxnard and the 1500 megawatt twin natural gas-fired steam turbine units of the Ormond Beach Generating Station. Beyond, a grey-white slab of ocean merges almost imperceptibly with the dawn sky - an ocean that serves as boundary to an earthen shore beholden to its top-predator: producing power, food and products on an epic scale.

Further still, unseen, are the modern-day equivalents of Masefield’s tall ships, container vessels and oil tankers that plow the sea lanes between beach and islands along the Santa Barbara channel. From the trail, they are but ghost-ships drawing the world together in a Gordian knot of trade routes delivering energy and box-store stuffing.

Masefield’s middle verse…

“I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.”

…is a beautiful evocation of the sights, sounds and atmospheric energy of ocean and sky – presumably as experienced on a ship under sail – but it elides the commercial circumstances that impel this merchant voyaging. Now, it seems we can no longer enjoy the likes of Thoreau’s train whistle (and it’s not clear that his was an unalloyed aural delight (Scream of a Hawk)) – or any of the sensory delights erstwhile afforded by vehicles, vessels and locomotives embedded in their infrastructures of travel and trade – burdened as we are by an awareness of their cumulative environmental costs. The romance of the road, iron or asphalt, or sea lanes has far outlived the earlier, Blakian awareness of the satanic impact of the architectural emblems of late capitalism; but now that romance is colored with the dark shades essayed, for instance, by Cormac McCarthy in The Road.

More often, as I reach the switchbacks that can afford the ocean view, there is a grey mist on the valleys below, and as Masefield might have it, “a grey dawn breaking”. Focused on the crumbling bank of sandstone, a steep chaparral slope below and the narrow path between, I register the oaks and sycamores that appear at each tumbling dry creek (now moistened by recent rain) and the wand buckwheat, deerweed, eriodyctylon and gnaphalium along the way, I am content to be cocooned in a landscape that has not changed significantly in 30,000 years.

I function as a free floating intelligence disengaged from the concerns of now: the scents, sights and sounds of the landscape pricking at my senses – the complex and destructive bargains we have made with our sheltering planet forgotten. Free (at last) from the imperative to be in other, alternate places, I determine once more that this primordial land is my home.

Place-World

“Attachments to places may be nothing less than profound”, Keith H. Basso writes in Wisdom Sits in Places, his short monograph on landscape and language among the Western Apache, University of New Mexico Press, 1996. But, as he also notes, our attachment to places remains enigmatic.

I arrived to live in Ojai with my family almost six years ago. We lived in town, on Blanche Street, while our house in Upper Ojai was being built. In May of 2009, we moved into our new residence which was quite deliberately set at the wildland urban interface – the place we were about to call home. A year later I began this blog at least partly because I wanted to both record and nurture my attachment to this particular ecotone: as I had hoped, it has become a way to construct my surroundings, to create bonds to a particular locality and to engage in the process of place-making.

But as followers of this blog will know, I have pursued a parallel bonding experience directly with the land itself – primarily in attempting the restoration of the disturbed areas of our site. My guide in this endeavor has been our neighbor Margot Griswold, a professional landscape restoration ecologist. Under her tutelage, I remain, in keeping with my English heritage, an enthusiastic amateur. We are both engaged in weeding out non-natives on our respective sites and share notes on our battles with mustard, tocalote (Centaurea melitensis) and the noxious star-thistle. I think we are both resigned to the continued existence of erodium (now, after a few warm weeks, fried to a crisp and crunchy underfoot!) and each give a pass to many of the introduced grasses.

At the same time I have tried to locate our property - within the axis that runs between Santa Paula and Ojai; within Ojai’s economic cultural and spiritual sphere of influence and both to the wilderness at its back (Los Padres National Forest) and the Pacific coast to the west. Temporally, I have set the moment of the area’s first human settlement as a baseline in which to situate the land, and have attempted, in these posts, to establish a resonance with its earlier, native inhabitants and a dissonance with their cruel European conquerors (but with whom I accept a modicum of complicity).

Occasionally, there have been notes from abroad, but always now with a firm sense of home, of an anchoring to our house, its site and surrounding landscapes. Edith Wharton, a writer of breathtaking psychological acuity, writes in her 1905 tear-jerker, the ironically titled House Of Mirth, of her heroine’s lack of this geographical grounding, feeling (at the moment of her final peril) “the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years”; and, “the feeling of being rootless and ephemeral, mere spindrift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor tentacles of self could cling….”; of having

“grown up without any one spot on earth being dearer to her than another: there was no center of early pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others…”.

Wharton piles on in this vein for another paragraph or two, eerily echoing a sense of the moral and spiritual sustenance that connects the Western Apache to their homelands, me to the Topatopa foothills, and all of those favored portions of humanity who have a notion of domestic locus (of home), but that is tragically absent from her heroine’s background.

Place-making is best practiced in one’s youth, but it is a skill, perhaps, that can also remain with us into our dotage. It is, after all, an activity that is embedded in time. Places do not represent unchanging realities. Indeed, the act of paying special attention to a “spot on earth” dearer than others reveals that said spot is in constant flux. To coin a cliché, we never step into the same place twice. As Basso writes, “we may perceive a place afresh, but it resonates with our past knowledge of it”. Place-making involves multiple acts of remembering and imagining that inform each other: it is thus both a discursive and a recursive activity that mostly occurs, in our culture, unconsciously.

By contrast, the Western Apache go to great pains to weave their storied places into a moral universe – to establish ‘grave endearing traditions’ to which they can look for support and guidance. The names they give to these special places, which are often topographically precise, such as Line of White Rocks Extends Up and Out; Whiteness Spreads Out Descending to Water or A Red Ridge with Alder Trees, have tales of human folly, wisdom, grief or happiness (for instance) associated with them and the names become a kind of short-hand for behavioral guidance, especially for the young.

The process of establishing ‘what happened here’, of recording the minutiae of human activity within a limited geographical area, of fabricating a local history has been one of my goals in producing the almost two hundred posts (198…and counting) that make up Urban Wildland. I make no claims, however, for their general usefulness in terms of moral guidance: but given that I privilege my own experiences in telling my tales, they are effective in elaborating a convincing place-world which I  use as a touchstone of my personal psycho-geographic space, or, more prosaically, of my neighborhood and home. Others, meanwhile, may find interest in the baroque tessellations of this fabrication.

Last evening, I continued weeding the north facing slope which acts as an abutment to the portion of Koenigstein Road which was re-routed, a dozen years ago, to short-cut the hairpin meander traveled by the old County road as it skirted one of the more lively seasonal tributaries to Bear Creek. The crimp in this hairpin (the old road still sits in the landscape and is now a part of our property) is marked by Peruvian peppers emerging from the gulch on each side of the road as the stream passes beneath it in a corrugated steel culvert. The two sides of the hairpin splay southward towards the base of this road-triangle formed by the new short-cut. Within it, is a wedge of land along which the stream winds before disappearing into another culvert that passes deep beneath the new road. Block this second culvert and a wet winter would produce a fine pond. The whole construct is warped and there is a twist in the planar surface of the abutment. I know, I get awfully close to its surface as I extract star thistle, tocalote and mustard.

I have just described a place. For five years now, I have weeded that slope and progress –measured by the reduction in non-natives - is slow. But where once was a solid tangle of star-thistle the herbage is now leavened with tarweed, an occasional clump of bunch-grass and a few bushes of Baccharis pilularis (Coyote brush).

By building data about particular local areas, by establishing an experience of them in some informal way, by writing or telling stories for instance, there is a slow accretion of particularity which is at the heart of place-making. I am privileged to be surrounded by chaparral hills, streams and oak meadowlands. I have created places in them, places where time and space have fused in an idiosyncratic personal history. I have worked in these places in ways that enliven my present through their evident reverberations of the past.

Basso writes,

"….for Indians, the past lies embedded in the features of the earth – in canyons and lakes, mountains and arroyos, rocks and vacant fields – which together endow their lives with multiple forms of significance that reach into their lives and shape the ways they think”.

I aspire to this condition.