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Tuesday June 16

Grades in. Half a dozen or more thank-you emails from students. Calculating the profit on the Sierra Club benefit: $10K. The agonizing move of Claire from 24A to 16B complete.  Hidden Hills Mobile Home on the market.

I complete the touch-up painting, mulch tomatoes and cukes, break down the bikes and pack for the trip. After spending the day together, Claire and Ian and Dennis and Lucas come for pizza to Albert Drive.  Jan to City Council at 6:30.  Ian and I watch Aristocats. I wake up at 3:00 A.M. and complete the article on Green Building and Joe’s spec house that he asked me to write for the Sun Valley promotional magazine. [click images to enlarge]

The holy crusade for sustainability converted into marketing strategy and composition class writing prompts.

Wednesday June 17

7:30 A.M. departure.  Ian in his sleeping bag, watching Spider Man in the back seat.  We listen to Garrison Keillor reading his new novel Liberty borrowed from the SLO Library.  Buy cherries, peaches and apricots from a farmgirl at a fruitstand on Hiway 5. This is our fourth June trip with Ian to Ketchum.  He is carsick twice, but avoids messing the car. This time, no dallying at Donner Lake or Yosemite.  Sleep at the Elko motel after a late Chinese dinner.

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By the Eucalyptus Grove above the hairpin rail turn in Stenner Canyon.

Yet another pipeline coming through, this time the Nacimiento project.  A great berm topped by the two excavators that piled it over the place where wildflowers and snakes flourished in years gone by.  Behind me the rush of skidding mountain bikes coming down from Shooters on this temperate May afternoon.  Aaron L., the new Cal Poly ranch manager we met at the trailhead says forty or fifty a day pass his house at Serrano.  Rockslide Ridge lit from behind and to the left, Poly Mountain.  The oat grass swaying, creeks on either side tumbling lightly, peaceable murmur of student conversation, while some write and others gaze.

The new trail up here from the tracks on land just acquired by the city switchbacks through oak groves crossing and recrossing Stenner’s central fork on artfully curved, banked wooden bridges.

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The students leave at 5:20, after I read a parting prose-poem by Mary Oliver

Look, it’s spring.  And last year’s loose dust has turned into this soft willingness.  The wind-flowers have come up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their curvaceous and pale bodies.  The thrushes have come home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow, happiness, music, ambition.

And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.

Chad back from Japan and Nancy back from Germany have joined the hike and have brought food to share  somewhere down the trail.  He called at 3:15 to ask if the class would go today and if they could join it. The fellowship of Focus the Nation revived. Alex comes along to explore the section between here and the great oak, where I plan to stop for dinner. As we traverse the three-dimensional curves of the path through grassland and oak canyon, they relate the night before’s adventure of staging a Renewable Energy Education Program for the Sierra Club in Atascadero.  The POPRs (Protect Our Property Rights) turned out en masse, some to harrass, others to learn.  I try to turn their attention to the long prospects down the canyons to the sea, to the the colorful Jasper boulders, the little wetlands, and then the tree.

They discover a dramatically lit canopy under the kneeling limbs and unpack a wine bottle, fresh produce from the organic farm where I went this morning to pick up veggies with Lucas, a little baggie of bulgar wheat and a campstove.  While they prepare the feast,

I climb to the top of the tree, salivating now at the thought of eating something more than the trail mix in my pack.

I’m invaded by memories: the Durand Oak, and the meals of vegetables and rice with students and ex-students at Columbia in the Sixties.

As the sun goes down, I direct them to the path looping back to Serrano, happy to find the solitude I was anticipating yet grieving for their departure.  Nancy is leaving San Luis for good within weeks.  Chad has graduated. They are trying to maintain the bonds of Empower Poly and Focus the Nation against the entropy of dispersal with plans for a California Energy Tour and  other world-changing enterprises. I look for them on the trail below, but it is too dark and too late.

I hoist my pack and walk through tall grass over a rise into an encounter with a black-tailed doe.

She poses for me then prances off, then poses again.

The full moon rises fat over East Cuesta Ridge.

As the dusk deepens and the wind picks up, I pass from the Stenner watershed to Poly Canyon’s and find a relatively flat spot beside one of the springs that source Brizzolara Creek. I’m too tired to read or write or even look at the stars.  The northwest wind has picked up, harrying the trees and grasses, recalling Muir’s description of “A Windstorm in the Forest,” which we read last week:

when the grand anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees,…and even the infinitely gentle rustle of the withered grasses at my feet. Each was expressing itself in its own way,–singing its own song, and making its own peculiar gestures…The profound bass of the naked branches and boles booming like waterfalls; the quick, tense vibrations of the pine-needles, now rising to a shrill, whistling hiss, now falling to a silky murmur; the rustling of laurel groves in the dells, and the keen metallic click of leaf on leaf.

The wind is warm, but not as dry as the hot sundowners that make you feel like wildfire is just a spark away.

Next day I find out that while I thought that the hills above Santa Barbara were burning and much of the city was evacuated.  I burrow into my bag and the unrlenting wind tugs at it all night, shaking me awake every hour or so to see the moon progressing across the sky.

Friday morning I drop down cross country into Poly Canyon, knees and ankles grateful for the bracing of my heavy boots. An interesting bird in a dessicated Sycamore lets me take its picture

At 6:30 am the rising sun spotlights the top of Poly Mountain, just where I slept two weeks before.  It’s greeted by a group of students!

This one-hour movie is about, among other things, the life and work of Ernst Haeckel and his mission to integrate science, art and spirituality.   It’s subtitled “A Nineteenth Century Vision,” and it weaves threads of cultural and intellectual history with mythography, art history, and literary criticism into a pattern of emergent form based on the growth of radiolaria.  The film chronicles an alchemical quest that incorporates quotes from Goethe’s poems, letters, and Faust, with a provocative reading of Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner,” and an account of the vessel, Challenger’s voyage of scientific research.  This is accompanied by music, sound design and animation graphics of extraordinary precision and quality.

There’s little discussion of the film on the web.  The New York Times review is dismissive and wierdly tendentious.  I’ve ordered my own copy of the DVD to keep exploring.

In the equine unit where we assemble, a filly born at 12:15 a.m. that morning.

The arboretum in full flower.  This morning I biked up here with Lucas in the backpack and we ate wild strawberries under the redwoods.

Out through the back gate, up the little creek still flowing from a single spring at the junction of the serpentine and the lodo soil.

Through the gate at Indonesian Reservoir, where ducks take off and thoroughbreds run over hoping for a treat.

Dylan shows me a picture on his phone of the fat bass he caught here.  I asked if it tasted good.  He threw it back, he says.

Bedrock mortars under the hollyleaf cherries. Volunteer artichokes spreading in the meadow.  At the divide between Horse Canyon and Brizzolara watersheds,  half the group remains and the rest head upward.

We have 40 minutes to get to the top and back.

Dylan finds his own stopping place and calls out that he’s spotted a bald eagle.

At the summit, we take in the big view.

I read out the first paragraph of John Muir’s The Mountains of California:

The Coast Range, rising as a grand green barrier against the ocean, from 2000 to 8000 feet high, is composed of innumerable forest-crowned spurs, ridges, and rolling hill-waves which inclose a multitude of smaller valleys; some looking out through long, forest-lined vistas to the sea; others, with but few trees, to the Central Valley; while a thousand others yet smaller are embosomed and concealed in mild, round-browed hills, each with its own climate, soil, and productions.

Five minutes to write in  journals.

Edge of escarpment–feels like looking into a volcano, but it’s just rotten serpentine slumped down into the melange through which it floated to the surface 100 million years ago.  The blinding green of the grasses three weeks ago has paled, fitfully retaining some chloroplasts, the drier areas now tan yellow after releasing seeds to the wind.  Soon all the grassland will be white against the black of riparian corridors.

The call of a meadowlark fills the big valley:  key-ho-trillabittle.

Endorphins released by the scramble up the mountain tingle through veins in my chest and flow toward my heart.  Sweat drying in the warm breeze cools my brow.

Photo by Ben Taylor (click for large size)

On the way to class on a gray chill Thursday afternoon overloaded with the lesson plan in my head and the computer:

• to complete discussion of last paragraphs of Thoreau’s “Sounds”– the negative formula divesting the saunterer of worldly encumbrances: “No yard but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills, A young forest growing up under your meadows.”  The irony of 600,000 people a year visiting Walden today, the edge of the  pond “restored” with rebar grid and imported rocks, sand and tree plantings. My afternoon there in the rain, in 2003, swimming in my underpants.
• moving on to “Solitude”—its insistence on the refusal to grieve—for the lost younger brother and the lost beloved, the only two people Thoreau was really close to—and the insistence on the cockerel’s joyful exuberance felt even by the “misanthrope and most melancholy man,” except for the one hour of “a slight insanity in my mood,”  after which “every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me.”  The desire to dwell not in a neighborhood but rather “most near to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction.”  The conclusion of that most transcendent chapter, the cry for a drug to repair the rent that tears us from our essence: “What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented?” And the answer—“a draught of undiluted morning air.”

As I approached the English building I was distracted by a gaggle of bird calls overhead. In the flat backlight I couldn’t make out their shape—were they starlings or grackles?  One bunch was rustling in the top leaves of the holly trees alongside the door, while another was spinning cartwheels just above it, and several individuals dashed toward Eucalyptus trees back by the Plant Conservatory.  Then the group overhead descended to the hollies, the group in the trees blasted together to the Eucs and different individuals shot up and down over the building.  I noticed the birds in the tree were gobbling the red holly berries. Now it registered: a migrating flock of Cedar Waxwings  drunk on fermented fruit.  I had seen such a flock seven or eight years ago on the sycamores where Via Carta crosses Brizzolara Creek, but they were sitting at rest, illuminated by the morning sun, their chamois-smooth bodies glowing, their graceful crests  and eye masks on stately display.

I begged them to stay  for another ten minutes.  As the students assembled in the classroom, I googled “Cedar Waxwing Drunk” and put up this webpage on the screen.

After the’d all arrived, I led them through the long corridor of building 10 and out the door on a sixty second hike. The party was still in full swing.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance, as it has never set before…where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have his wings gilded by it

… and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst … We walked in so pure and bright a light,

gilding the … grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright–

I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of elysium,

and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman, driving us home at evening.

April 16 7:15 pm

Sun dropping toward mist on the horizon.  Temperature dropping as the sleeping bag warms. Bits of remaining light in the needlegrass awns. An hour and a half since I departed from the class down in the oak grove and its words still echo—the words of Thoreau’s essay  “Walking” and his chapter, “Sounds,” along with our improvisations upon them.

The longing for the wild and the new, the demand for fresh and expansive experience, the unfamiliar, the virgin. The westward march and its ultimate demise with humanity’s dark dominion—the “End of Nature” in anthropogenic climate disruption. The sound of silence in the snap of sumac twigs too heavy to support their own growth.

Sounds now of the invisible traffic on Cuesta Pass and my stomach growling. A meadow lark.  A cow’s moo. A haunting ullulation across the valley. What is that familiar call—like a loon’s, but no loons here. Perhaps not a bird?  I struggle to find the memory, fail,  surrender to another diminution of capacity.  Shifting my gear to support my shoulder recalls previous sleepouts and the line “My pillow is my boot,” which I put on Tuesday’s reading quiz.  And the preceding stanza:

The silence of the valley
Breaks with a coyote’s sound
That’s followed by responses
From all the hills around.

Hello! it’s coyotes.

The sun dips under the cloud bank behind Hollister Peak.

I told students I hadnt planned on camping tonight, but rereading “Walking” seduced me again with its invitation to saunter, to wander a creek or scramble up a mountain with no plan or destination, to sleep where I felt tired. The sensation of freedom at 6:00 p.m. Thursday, the end of my week’s classes compounded with such a walk enabled “a fair return to my senses.”

Ironically, so does the camera and computer. The viewfinder provides concentration, the monitor focus, the harddrive memory. The pictures of sunset I just took recall those I took six years ago from a spot close by after another April class on Thoreau and just last week placed in a slideshow to accompany the first movement of Beethoven’s pastoral symphony.

Would William or Henry David or Ralph Waldo allow for technology to be the agent of this return to the senses? Not if Nature is the Wild or the “not-human.”  But also, yes,

the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and … all that we behold
From this green earth;… all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,–both what they half create,
And what perceive

Thoreau exults, “Man and his affairs…I am pleased to see how little  space they occupy in the landscape.”  But as Dylan observed as we sat in the deep  grass above campus, yes if you look north, but not if you look south, at the city and the freeway extending to L.A.

Now against the background of  darkened peaks and glowing sky emerges a panoply of orange lights: the state prison.

It started with the financial meltdown last September. I hired Chris to help me take down the ziggurat I’d constructed 7 years ago at the top of the hill and use the railroad ties to enlarge the vegetable beds. They were soon filled with spinach, chard, kale and lettuce and I began hankering  for more territory to plant.

In early November I went up Stenner Creek Road with Lucas and loaded our Subaru, Jade, with serpentinite boulders I found abandoned at a turnout.  I dug up a dozen heavy carex clumps in front of the house and transplanted them to make a little retaining wall, spaded and levelled the adobe clay in an irregular eight by five foot patch that might catch a little winter sun, laid out a new path around part of it connecting the brick walk to the top trail, surrounded it with the boulders, and worked in leftover compost.

I decided to plant sugar snap peas since, like the leaf crops, peas would grow in winter on our north-facing, shaded slope.  Peas also enrich the soil  and grow large plants in small patches of ground.  Like tomatos, their expansive vines provide something to watch and fiddle with, and they yield an ongoing harvest of food that’s good raw or cooked, both the pods and the little treasures inside.

I couldn’t find organic sugar snap pea seeds anywhere in town in November, but New Frontiers put in a special order.  The packet was embellished with an an enticing illustration and invitation:

Once torn open it also offered information about the history and culture of the fruit.

I’ve always been a little intimidated by gardening, partly because I could never compete with my neighbors, Stan and Peter, back in the seventies, but also because of the patience required by its slow rhythm and its uncertainty of outcome.  With both anticipation and fear, I patted the little off-white marbles into the holes I’d punched with my fingers every two inches into the dampened soil.  After just a week of watering  the seedlings came up juicy and vigorous and curled their tendrils around the fence marking the row.  I’d gotten the thumbs up from the Great Outdoors, confirmed every morning as I watched their progress in the golden light of sunrise.

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My assigned twenty minutes of Ecolog is overdue.  I sit behind the pea patch in front of the house, the breeze riffling newly transplanted tomatos and cooling the back of my neck damp with sweat from digging and mixing soil.  Lots of that’s been going on this weekend, starting with buying three-foot seedlings at Cal Poly’s “Tomato Mania” Friday morning and putting them into the ground while Chris restored one section of the drip irrigation system I ripped out when the native shrubs no longer needed water five years ago. Now its required for the vegetables.

Saturday I bought three varieties of basil seedlings at the farmer’s market and sweet pepper, cucumber and summer squash seedlings at Home Depot. Jan transplanted flowers at Claire’s mobile home this morning during the Easter Egg Hunt,

and for the last two hours I dug in yesterday’s purchases.

Then there were the hikes: Tuesday with the Ecolit class into Poly Canyon, Wednesday with the Cal Poly Land class, guided by geologist Scott Johnson

the light and the green overwhelming after Tuesday’s rain.  Up to Felsman Loop on Bishops Peak with Lucas before his nap on Thursday, and up on the ridge between Los Osos Valley and Clark valley on Good Friday afternoon, botanizing with Matt, Hunter, Jen and Bridey,

And yesterday into Froom Canyon with Jan.

The force of April, that pierces “the draught of March… to the roote”and “through the green fuse drives the flower”  drives me like lust to dig in the dirt and wander the earth.  Writing down this  desire is as old as poetry, which I rediscover like Spring with students as we read Solomon and Vergil and Marlow and Shakespeare, and as we listen to the raunchy flute and entwining voices of sixteenth century airs.