The morning is dark and overcast, the house cold. I get up three hours later than usual. The bad smell in the bathroom is back. This time I look high rather than low and see a swatch of fur protruding through the insulation panels in the ceiling. After coffee and a new fire in the stove I return with pliers, lift the panel, clasp the dead mouse by the tail and cremate it.

Since I’m offline, no new input here today. Writing about yesterday, when nothing really happened, has already taken up six hours. If I were online, I’d be interrupted every few minutes.

I eat soup and empanada at Nancy’s bakery and bike back up the hill to M’s place. Since returning here a year ago after 21 years away, he lives alone in his trailer, works on his subdivision plans and his art. He seems healthy and happy, but how does he handle the solitude and lack of stimulation? The TV is on, next to his internet computer. We talk about old times.

Peddling up the steep driveway in the dark I meet neighbor Dick in his diesel pickup on the way to dump his compost for the bears down below the rock bluff. He tells me that our tenant last year showed him a photograph of a cougar sunning himself on the moss near the deck.

I meditate from 7:30 to 8:00, the silence of this place amplifying the static in my head. Usually it “settles down” for the last few minutes, but not now that I’m doing it twice a day in this perfect spiritual retreat. Nevertheless afterwards, I feel clearer and more optimistic than before. I read till ten, finishing My Year of Meats, carrying on a conversation with the author, as if she were the protagonist, Jane Takagi–a Japanese-American documentarian filmmaker. Though a DES child, Jane wants a baby and gets pregnant. Then loses it with a “missed abortion,” a form of miscarriage involving carrying a dead fetus for several weeks. That rare term awakened long-dormant dark personal memories.

The truest material for me in the book’s somewhat contrived denouement is expression of grief for this loss. All the happy endings—Jane’s career success, the defeat of the feedlot hormone conspiracy, Akiko’s pregnancy, her escape and welcome in America, the rekindling of Jane’s romance with Sloan—don’t mitigate its pain.

Jan drops me off at the San Luis Obispo airport at 5:00 A.M. She says, “have a good time, that’s what you’re going for.” Nothing to see in the dark, I meditate. Waiting for connection to Vancouver in San Francisco airport I browse the bookstore. So many new titles. “Books have a short shelf life,” said rueful Ruth in her lecture a couple of weeks ago, consoling me, since it’s less true of true of hers than of mine. I’m immersed in her first novel, My Year of Meats, which is still selling all over the world, in many languages.

The cheapest low cholesterol breakfast I can find near the gate is vegetable sushi—freshly made behind the counter by a Japanese chef. On the two-hour Vancouver flight the buildup toward the novel’s ending alternates hilarity and horror.

Outside the Main Terminal in Vancouver Airport, I see Peter and Margaret back from a trip to New York, dashing toward the shuttle to the South Terminal I’m about to get on. We’ll fly up the coast together. No need to rent a car or take a cab or hitchhike the twenty miles from the Powell River airport to Lund.

As we ascend from grey rainy Vancouver above the middle of the Georgia Strait, the weather turns bright, the slant light of October golden even at midday. Looking out the window Peter and I identify archipelagos we’ve kayaked and mountains we’ve climbed. We eat lunch at Renee’s, the expatriate French chef who runs a little dive on Marine Ave. I have carrot ginger soup and fresh baguette, a lunch you’d love in Paris, and buy two more frozen soups and a chicken asparagus lasagna for provisions.

On the way north Peter stops at an organic farm in Wildwood, run by a sparkle-eyed grey haired woman in gum boots who grew up in Lund and says she took art lessons from one of the owners of the Marx farm before it got that name in the seventies. I buy goats milk in a square glass bottle—creamy but cholesterol-free—and little pear shaped tomatoes, still on the vine this late. We talk about the government crackdown on small farmers who no longer are allowed to slaughter meat without installing million dollar facilities. Pat, who’s supplied us with organic beef, pork, lamb and poultry from her farm across the road for decades, has been harassed by helicopters over her place counting the number of turkeys she raises and by men in suits presenting her with ever more onerous regulations. L. says she’d be better off growing pot or brewing up meth.

Slowing down to the posted fifteen miles per hour on the Reserve, Peter says you can hear the birds rioting over the salmon run. Despite jetlag from their trip, he turns off into the village, where he has taught Medical Terminology and now massages the elders. In thirty seven years I’d never gone down that road. He stops on a small bridge close to the mouth of the creek, shadowed by glowing golden leaved alders.

I see the large fish with ragged fins and peeling skins straining upstream to complete the final stage of their destined pilgrimage, finding the spawning grounds of their birth to lay and fertilize eggs and die.

Down at the mouth of the creek, ducks and gulls, three eagles and two dogs are feasting on white ones lying in eddies on their sides and backs, still gasping. The shore is littered with garbage and vomit.

At Peter and Margaret’s house, we unload their baggage and switch mine to Peter’s Tracker for the trip out to Lund. We take a mountain bike he lends me which should fulfill my transportation needs. He invites me to pick chard in his bluff top garden. I mention the irony of the government’s program to wipe out small meat producing farms while promoting the horrors of industrial feedlots and slaughterhouses I’m reading about in Ruth’s book. Peter says that his daughter, whom he just visited, works for one of those hog processing plants near Brandon Manitoba, where her husband is stationed in the Canadian Army. Her job is in the office importing and housing foreign laborers. She once took a partial tour of the facility, but said she didn’t like it.

Though carrying only a pack, I feel like a bridegroom crossing the threshold of Knoll House. Twelve years we’ve had this place and I’ve been here thirteen times, but each time the entry feels sacramental. The southern face is warm from the sun, which shines with a brilliance on the water only bearable to look at for seconds. The high peaked ceiling makes the upstairs like a mosque or a teepee.

I walk the bluff trail to visit the rocks I’ve thought about since summer. Mushrooms and moss are radiant.

Back in the house, I notice a bad smell in the bathroom—sweet and rotten. Sniffing around the toilet and sink yields no culprit. The baits that Jan placed in August are still around only lightly nibbled. No mouse or rat turds but dead carpenter ants strewn on the kitchen floor.

The house chills fast after sunset, temperature in the forties. I light the cast iron wood heater we bought from one of the renters years ago and try to learn its wishes. Open ash door and upper baffle to start up; once fully ignited close door, lower baffle and open lower draft; when the house warms up, shut lower draft and leave screw draft open. It needs only one log every few hours to keep going.

The ceiling fan upstairs on low reverse pushes down the heat. Thanks again, John, the uncommunicative philosopher-carpenter who built this house.

During evening meditation a vibration like someone walking up the stairs or tiny earthquakes.

The food I bought at Renee’s is forgotten in Margaret’s car. I feast on the gorp and fruitnut bread Jan packed for me, and feel her presence in the newly furnished interior. Margaret calls to say the lost groceries will be delivered by Peter U. on his way home from town where he’s at dog-training class. Here alone, I’m still provided for.

I unpack and download the day’s photos. Peter U. drives up with the food. He announces joyfully that S and W are pregnant with his first grandchild. Since September’s arrival of theirs, Peter and Margaret exude confidence in the value of their lives, the goodness of creation. It’s what I feel when Joe and Amy and Ethan and Abel are present, especially here, or when I’m with Claire and Ian and Luke. Passing through the First Nations display in the Vancouver airport I read a caption for the Thunderbird sculpture: “my grandmother, the creator of the universe.” This sentiment of the grandchild mirrors ours: my grandchildren, the creation. In both directions, we’re one generation away from eternity.

I make the bed downstairs and get under the covers to read. This late, I cant finish the description of the slaughterhouse in My Year of Meats.

Gently wafting Knoll House breeze
Stirs the firs and arbutus trees
That frame the watery passage I see
Between the mainland and Savary
From the deck six hundred feet up
Where a fritillary flits by my coffee cup.

Speedboats enter from each side
Gash parallel lines before they hide
Behind green curtains lost from view
Their white paths fading back to blue.
Horizon clouds disperse to show
The glacial glare off Forbidden Plateau.

A loud leaf scrapes the greying shakes
Above soft sounds that birdsong makes.
The sun radiates my soles with heat
And puffs of wind aircool my feet.
Whiffs of fragrance richly vary
Shalal, peat, and huckleberry.

Writing makes my observation
Slow motion, line’s permutation.
Dancing fingers lead the pen
Across the empty pages, then
Leave a snail-paced slimey trail
Wormy castings endless tale.

Broken off by–of all things–
Yellow belly-throat, black wings
Crimson crown–an Oriole
Visiting this blessed Knoll.

August 1998

(see Yom Kippur 2006, 2005, 2003)

My commitment to fasting and spiritual retreat shrank this year. I slept in my bed instead of camping out, drank coffee and practised connubial rites in the morning, and planned to go to Ian’s soccer game and then kayaking with a friend in the afternoon.

At 8:30 a.m. the delayed impulse struck and I decided not to eat or drink any more till dinner and to go on a hike by myself. There was also a pragmatic motive–to check out the route for the excursion I’d planned to take the Manzanita School kids up Poly Mountain to see the effects of last June’s wildfire.

The walk began with fanfare: a long predicted rainstorm arrived as a few morning sprinkles and grand skyscapes. There was enough moisture to make the rock hard clay soil congeal on my boots and to revive the strong smell of burnt vegetation.

When I reached the top of the mountain, the sky was full of variety and motion.

A subtle rainbow precipitated across the face of Bishop’s Peak below me, one end on the playing field where the marching band was striking up, the other on the bare soil exposed by the fire right beside me.

A few drops sparkled on the leaflets that sprouted from the base of a burnt manzanita stem hungry for moisture to maintain its precarious new growth.

The previous night, after the Coastal Cleanup party at Ecoslo organized by Jan, I watched Bill Moyers’ Journal. It was about Rachel Carson, devoted mostly to the performance of a play written and acted by Kaiulani Lee. She created the sense of glory and tragedy that Carson felt during her last years, when Silent Spring was published, villified by the chemical industry and generating the first environmental legislation in America. Carson hated to leave the peaceful Maine cottage where she spent the summers with her adopted son exploring forests and beaches. Now she had to return to the fray in Washington. And yet there she was drawn, by the excitement and by her sense of destiny. The moment of departure was framed by tragic knowledge: that even if her crusade against indiscriminate use of poisons succeeded, Earth’s natural systems remained imperiled. And she was dying of cancer.

The dramatization caught my mood. After four weeks in B.C., it was wrenching to leave Knoll House and the Zunoquad Kayak trip to the Broughton Archipelago and come back to the struggles here. All that time with no phone or email, a respite from continual reminders of global climate change and human persistence in suicidal folly. But return has drawn me into the heat of battle. I gave a talk on Thursday to the Student Services Conference urging them to demand that Cal Poly sign the Presidents’ Climate Agreement and get serious about its commitment to Sustainabiity. I picketed the Fall Conference of faculty and administrators with homemade signs:

Vice President, Provost and Dean
It’s time to make this campus Green

Students, staff and faculty
Want more Sustainability

Without more changes at the top
Sustainability will flop

President Baker,
Take the lead,
Green Cal Poly
With word and deed

President Baker
You’re the one
Green Cal Poly
Get it done

To be out front
The time has passed
We wont be first
Let’s not be last

Your Presidential legacy?
Green Poly University.

I distributed this leaflet:

From the funder of a major grant for a sustainability program at Cal Poly recently not renewed:

“However, the university’s decision to provide no university funding for the continued development of the program causes us to question the commitment of the university to sustainability … .

In considering requests for financial support, …. Foundation (as well as most of our foundation partners) requires evidence that the university is willing to re-program its financial resources and commit its intellectual resources to sustainability. Thus the foundation is most interested in, and responsive to, inspired leadership and expertise when it is combined with the political will to dedicate the university to the development of sustainable systems.

… We make this decision to decline the current application with great regret.”

Yom Kippur is for reflection and atonement. This year I didnt even perform my morning meditation. I’ve ceased saying “I’m sorry for not doing enough” since rejoining the good fight. I can feel some guilt for neglecting my deceased parents, an obligation revived by having to explain the cremation remains we found last week on the Felsman Loop trail to Ian, and by the sermon of the Chumash elder, Mr. Cantu, that preceded my talk to Student Services. He said care for the future must stem from reverence for the past.

The sky cleared and the sun warmed my back.

I felt gnawing in my stomach and fast-fatigue. I lay back on the bed of dirt, and chanted and dozed. An hour later, I descended the mountain in time for the soccer game: sharks vs. sharks.

Dusty cancelled on the kayaking but Jan decided to come. We watched the sky together.

At the Sierra Club ExCom meeting in March, Cal began with a reading, as is our custom. It was from a new book by and about Stanley Kunitz, The Wild Braid, A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden.

bay laurel

big leaf maple

black sage

blue oak

blue eyed grass

Buckeye aesculus californicum

buckwheat eriogonum grande rubescens

bush baccharis

bush lupine

bush poppy

California bay laurel Umbellularia californica

California buckwheat

California Fuschia.

california goldenrod

california grape–vitis californica

California Pitcher Plant

California Poppy

California Sagebrush

California sycamore

Carex praegraclis Clustered Field Sedge.

Catalinia Ironwood Lyonothamnus floribundus splenifolius

Clarkia elegans

Clematis ligusticifolia

coast live oak

Coast Redwood

coffeeberry

common rush

coyote mint

creeping black sage

creeping mahonia

creeping ceonothus

Currant, Golden Ribes aureum aureum

Currant, pink floweredRibes sanguineum glutinosum Pink-Flowered Currant.

Deer Grass.

deerweed

Dogwood.

Dogwood2

dwarf baccharis

elderberry (Blue) Sambucus mexicana

foothill penstemon

fremontia

fuschia-flowering gooseberry

golden currant

Holly Leaf Cherry

Howard McMinn Manzanita

Hummingbird Sage Salvia spathacea

idaho fescue

Indian Mallow, Abutilon palmeri

Iris longipetala Long Petaled Iris.

Island Buckwheat–Eriogonum arborescens

leather oak

Matilija Poppy Romneya coulteri .

narrow leaf milkweed

oregon grape

Pink-Flowered Currant Ribes sanguineum glutinosum

Purple Needlegrass

purple sage

Red Buckwheat Eriogonum grande rubescens

sierra columbine

sticky monkey flower

Sugarbush Rhus ovata

Toyon

valley oak

wax myrtle

Western columbine

Western Redbud.

Western Redbud (Cercis occidentalis)

western sword fern

white sage

wild strawberry

Woolly blue curls

yarrow

yucca whipplei

When I opened the curtain at 5:45 there was already a blue-gray glow in the western sky. We’re a third of the way to the solstice. I wont wake up in the dark anymore till August.

I sit in the green plastic Adirondack chair with the big camera beside me waiting for the sunrise over Cuesta Ridge. I’ve come back to it after noticing that the older plant photos on my screensaver have much more depth and brilliance than the ones I’ve taken recently with the point-and-shoot, even though it has higher resolution. It’s the lens stupid.

My perch is a new seat in the garden, three quarters of the way up the bank above the grape arbor at a switchback in the south trail. I decided to carve it out of the adobe clay on Saturday while sprucing up the yard to prepare for our big party this weekend.

Two rock doves clean up spilled seeds under the bird feeder, a hummingbird visits the hummingbird sage, a bee sips at the holly-leaf cherry flowers.

Week 4 of classes, Spring mind bursting with things to say and write and plan and execute.

I’ll be returning to this spot nestled between a Channel Island Ironwood and a Sugarbush.

A temperate dawn soothed by a wisp of breeze, disturbed by the barking dog next door and the hubbub of traffic.

Now the sun paints the east face of Caballo Peak, and now touches the grapevine and the belly of the goldfinch in the pine branch overhead. Now it casts shadows on the path. Now it’s 7:00 o’clock and time to get to work.

But first just a few more pictures.

Ian’s last day of Spring Break from Junior Kindergarten was the end of a taxing two weeks for me. April 1 was Flora!, the Sierra Club Fundraiser I’d been planning and worrying about since January. The day after, I returned to teaching after a nine-months’ recess. The day after that I launched a challenging new course on Argumentation about Sustainability focussing on Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth. Last weekend was the Focus the Nation organizing conference in Las Vegas and the day after a press to write up my report on it followed by nine more hours of lecturing on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The tough slog of grading the first set of English papers was on my schedule Friday. But the sky was bright blue and the hills were still green. Besides, I had required my Ecolit class to listen the poets’ invitation to “Rise Up and Come Away,” so I too was obliged to obey.

We drove along Foothill Blvd. through the threatened ranchland between Bishops Peak and San Luis Mountain thick with cows and calves trimming the pastures into glittering lawn. The open, black-soiled fields along Los Osos Valley Road seemed hungry for seed or ready to sprout. I asked Ian to repeat the name of the road. At first he struggled and then it rolled off his tongue. The mountains on both sides–Morros and Irish Hills–make this a Valley where the dirt rolls down and turns to soil that grows the crops, I explained. He recognized the rows of Snow Peas with their white polka dots that will turn into the sweet morsels we pick from the planter beside our deck. Los Osos means the bears in Spanish I told him, the name of the town at the end of the road. Watch for bears on either side. By the time we reached the turnoff to Montana De Oro, he’d counted 14–on signs, a mural, woodcarvings and the cast bronze sculpture by the bridge.

“Gwampa, wet’s wace to the mountain,” he called back to me from the beach. “I cant run with this backpack,” I answered. I boosted him on to the ledge sloping up the outcrop, where he passed the time making sand waterfalls, while I struggled to find handholds in the strata to pull myself over the first hump.

After several clumsy efforts I realized I wouldnt make it, and he’d have to come down. I wondered if the cause was the soft rock’s weathering since I’d been here last, or other sorts of weathering closer to home.

But there was no shortage of alternatives, and I remembered that last year several Cal Poly students had been swept into the water from this promontory by rogue waves, one to his death.

We noticed an alluring cave carved in the vegetation-covered cliff bordering the north side of the beach. Ian said, “that’s a dinosaur cave.” The creek that flowed to the sea at the foot of the cliff was low enough to hop with dry shoes. Ian led the way up another sloping ledge into what turned out to be a tunnel rather than a cave, with a perfectly formed arched opening to the sky. We passed through slowly and came around the back to perch on a ledge that looked straight down into the surf, which pounded with a force that carved these rocks like cheese. I kept a tight grip on the rolled-up waistband of his sweatshirt. In the wind-pruned scrub above the cove behind the tunnel, a flourescent red-throated finch burbled above the waters’ roar.

On the way back through the tunnel, we found another tunnel at the base of its lower, landward, wall, this one squat and deep. Through it one could see foamy water flowing in and out of the shadowed cove below the finch’s perch. One could easily slide down there, but with no way of return.

Back outside, we saw a possible route upward: vertical footholds in the rock leading to an oval opening in the brush that looked like the start of a trail into the dunes. This might be the dinosaur’s exit. Ian led the ascent and I followed him through the green tube.

It daylighted at a wooden railing marking a sand trail bordered by blooming bush poppies and silver lupine. A fork of the trail covered with delicate lizard tracks led toward the water and traversed the dune.

Up steep switchbacks and down muddy seeps, we made our way to tidepools and blowholes. Across the expanse of Spooner’s Cove, we saw groups of walkers on the popular cliff trail, but here there was no one.

I looked at my watch: 11:30. I had an appointment at the Social Security Office to apply for Medicare. Ian was getting hungry. Off the rocks and up the sand we rambled. On the warm trail that circled back to Reddy in the parking lot, over and over we sang “Dinah wontcha blow.”

Peterson Ranch, above the pole house, looking east. Breathing hard after a brisk walk. French horns and snare drum of the freight train laboring up the grade in the background, twittering of sparrows and finches in a dense grove of sycamore, bay and oak down below, the scream of a young redtail circling overhead, two rooks shouting and sparring in a tree top. Twenty five people spread out out on the hillside silently listening and recording.

A wisp of breeze stirs the stagnant air, cools the sweat on the back of my neck. Flat light, not the Vergillian golden radiance and lengthening shadows of former years. But the overcast makes the new growth flouresce with a dozen versions of green.

The usual April torrent of the creek is down to an October trickle. Not thirty but eight inches of rain this year. Yet around us on the serpentine bloom lupine and tidy tips, blue dicks and blue-eyed grass, monkey flower and johnny jump-ups.The dell explodes with a rude ecstatic trill. Wings wildly flapping, a small bird darts our way, then glides and swoops into the willows up the hill.

It’s a shame to disrupt this performance and its rapt audience, but I’ve assigned homework and prepared a discussion, and ink and paper has been consumed to print the readings. On the first day of class we read Ovid’s description of the Golden Age, when innocent humanity was sustained by honey and acorns, and also the biblical account of Nature’s creation as a harmonious artwork designed to provide for all the needs of his naked children by a generous parent-God. Today the ancient texts are Vergil’s Georgics—a praise of the farmer’s life acknowledging the immense difficulty of mere survival—and God’s speech from the whirlwind in the Book of Job, where He mocks the good man’s futile search for intelligibility and proclaims the cruel and awesome wildness of His universe.

Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars,
and spreads its wings toward the south?
Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up
and makes its nest on high?
It lives on the rock and makes its home
in the fastness of the rocky crag.
From there it spies the prey;
its eyes see it from far away.
Its young ones suck up blood;
and where the slain are, there it is.

I read the fierce verses and they echo the screams, the croaks and the trills we’ve just heard. They answer Thoreau’s question, the motto of this course:

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him …whose words were so true, and fresh, and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library… .

October 1 2006 7:30 p.m.

Inside tent after a clumsy pitch in the early dark, flashlight hanging from a loop in the roof. The first time in dozens of overnights on Cal Poly Land I’ve brought a tent. Only a light rain, but enough to warrant it.

Left home on my bike at 5:30 to get settled by the sunset start of the holiday. Headed for the high ground and a view. But the overcast created a sense of quiet that made me want to stop and listen rather than look.

I parked the bike at the trail leading to Sycamore Glen. Normally dry this time of year, the creekbed was full of watercress and yellow monkeyflower, so wet I couldnt cross without getting muddy boots. My usual trail was overgrown this time, but I found a new one made by horses higher on the bank. The sycamore leaves were black green, thick, a foot across.

I walked slow and wide-eyed, ready for surprises. At the end of the little canyon leading to the Glen, I heard the plash of flowing water. There was the source: a broken steel pipe. On another visit I’d found a slump in the hillside grown over with rushes, and above it a break in this pipe where a plastic coupling had come undone. I’d repaired that and wondered how the landscape might change as a result. In the waning light of this afternoon I sauntered up the Glen and saw that the former little wetland had turned to dry grass.

I decided to return to the broken pipe and camp near the old oak where I’d stayed during my Yom Kippur fast three years ago.

The temperature is dropping. My eyes are drooping. Its only 8:00.

(more…)

Low-grade illness and a heavy schedule has kept me from fulfilling my own assignment to students: get outdoors, pay attention, write. Yesterday morning’s cool weather and dramatic light got me going. The Sierra Club’s outings web page promised a kayak trip up the Morro Bay Estuary to spot birds, but when I phoned the leader he said it had been cancelled because of uncertainty about wind and rain. The Morro Bay Natural History Association offered a talk about “Living on tectonic plate borders” which sounded appealing since I’ll have to lecture on Cal Poly Land’s geology next quarter. I took my down vest, windbreaker and packsack loaded with camera, binoculars, bird book, a loaf of sunflower seed bread and an avocado, and told Jan I’d be back in the late afternoon.

I arrived at the Marina early and walked to the point to gaze at birds, clouds and the distant dunes.

Rounding the lion rock, I came across two white egrets. I was transfixed by their yellow eyes and graceful head plumes but they werent interested in my company. They slowly flapped their huge wings, lifted their legs and flew across the flat water.

(more…)

It gets light now soon after the alarm goes off and its not dark until suppertime, but the plants in the gardens have remained at the same stage of development where I left them two weeks ago, when I broke off writing the last entry and abandoned my postings. So I’m going back to where we were.

Here is the growing tip of Heuchera maxima

This plant is as hardy as a weed, tolerating deep shade in front of the house and direct sun in back, no water or plenty of water, as when it grows under redwoods. One of its common names is Alum root. And yet it’s delicate as these velvety hairs on its leaf tips and stems, and therefore it’s also called, Coral Bells, for the lily-0f-the-valley-like blossoms that will spring from these buds.

The flowering time of Umbellularia californica has passed since this picture was taken; some of the tiny blossoms in the inflorescence were already dry then. That lilting scientific appelation is almost as melodious as “Bay Laurel,” its vernacular name, linked with the myth of Apollo and Daphne, which recalls something I wrote twenty three years ago:

Three bay laurels have been growing in the front for four or five years. They prefer sun and water–you can see them as the lighter-colored foliage in riparian corridors on the hillsides–but here on the north slope they are dry and shaded. One grows under a large liquidambar tree. It’s intended to replace that beautiful non-native if ever it gets tall enough, but that wont happen in my lifetime.

The old Fremontodendron grows dense and low on the steep bank above the wall in front. It turns into a burning bush of gold flowers from April to July. The one I planted recently with the early orange bud needs continuous pruning to keep the path clear.

The one with the large heart shaped yellow bud grows at the top of the hill in back.

These Flannelbush are showy and indestructible, perfect California natives for the garden. I like looking across the valley to Poly Mountain and seeing the clumps of Flannelbush growing there wild. But Flannel is a misnomer. Rather than stroked, their leaves, flowers and stems should be handled with gloves to protect you from their tiny hairs which want to embed themselves in skin.

Creeping mountain lilac or Ceonothus Joyce Coulter is another prolific bloomer, here just about to burst into a rich purple quilt. After the blossoms drop, the leaves remain almost as deep green and shiny all year round as they do here at first emergence.

The same is true for the other five or six other Ceonothuses that thrive in the yard, each different in leaf and growth.

Only one Red twigged Dogwood, Cornus sericea, grows here, cramped between the path and the wall in front. It seems to be capable of putting out new leaves all year long, whenever it rains. When it’s dry, the leaves, which are neither waxy, leathery nor hairy, go papery and fall off, exposing deep wine-colored stems.

The flowers remain packed in tight white bud-buttons during December and January and then burst into bloom lasting only a week or two.

Just uphill from the Dogwood stands a Western Redbud, Cercis occidentalis. Unusual for California plants, this one is winter deciduous, losing its leaves in early fall, blooming and regaining them in Spring. The dying leaves, slightly rubbery in texture, take on a touch of
Autumn coloring that reveals a veined and capillaried web on their circular surfaces.

Two weeks ago, when this picture was taken, I hadnt seen traces of regeneration on this tree for months, but since then tiny leaf and bright pink flower buds have started to pop all over the gray bark.

More dramatic suspense was created by the grapevine in the backyard, now about 12 years old and the centerpiece of the arbor on the mid-hill terrace that creates an elegant shady bower in summer and a rich harvest of grapes and raisins. I cut the canes back to old wood to promote new growth and fruiting in November, hesitantly following some website instructions. But when no buds appeared, well after the native California grape along the eastern wall in front had started to leaf, I thought I’d have to pull out the whole venerable stock. I checked and poked everyday for a month, and then the day of the last entry, February 2, I found, two tiny sprouts.

Now two weeks later, I still wait for more.

There’s no new growth yet on the old oaks, the ones I planted seventeen years ago. But several recent volunteer Quercus agrifolia have come into leaf. I marvel at the fragility and tenderness of these infants, knowing that within the next four months they will expand and curl into thick, hard, thorny surfaces. These are the only volunteer natives that have cropped up since I started cultivating natives, testimony I think, to the fact that this north facing slope wants only to be an oak woodland.

Hummingbird sage, Salvia spathecea, has been blooming here since January, almost as early as the Red Currant. I love the delicious pink, magenta and purple colors of its flowers springing modestly, just a few at a time, from teardrop shaped sheaths of its bud clusters.

I love the sticky clear residue it leaves on the fingers when touched, smelling tart and sweet as grape soda. I love its velvety green foliage that returns every year and spreads by rhizomes, overwhelming the dark brittle remaining stalks of last year’s growth. And I love the way it draws the hummingbirds low to the ground under the oaks, where it hides in the shade.

It was supposed to rain today, but we got wind and clouds instead. While grading papers, I’ve been taking vitamin C and Echinicea pills every couple of hours, humbly hoping to hold at bay the headache, cough and scratching in my lungs. I visited my mother in law at Assisted Living for a break, and seeing her and her companions in the rec room 20 minutes early for Bingo reinforced the winter mood.

But the overcast skies provided some good light for pictures of developments in the garden last week. After Spring in December, not much changed during January. The longer days of February have brought the early bloom of the volunteer almond tree, remnant of what must have been a local orchard before the 1950’s subdivision of this neighborhood.

On Friday I got a copy of his brand new book, Plants of San Luis Obispo: Their Lives and Stories from Matt Ritter who teaches in the Biology Department and is curator of the Cal Poly Plant Conservatory. In addition to running the conservatory, teaching full time, and writing scholarly articles for tenure, he wrote the text, shot all the pictures, and did the layout for the book himself with Photoshop and Indesign.

His descriptions of the species in my garden help me see them up close: “Fuschia-flowered gooseberry is a bristly, evergren shrub with leathery, dark green, irrgularly toothed leaves. The beautiful, bright red, tubular flowers, which are pollinated by hummingbirds, hang from the stems. The stamens, which are twice as long as the rest of the flower, hang down with bright yellow tips. To ward off herbivores, there are three stout spines emanating from each node.” (p. 57)
This Ribes speciosum is another early bloomer. I’d describe the leaves as waxy rather than leathery, since they’re thin and they dry up in late spring, unlike the thick leaves of the holly-leafed cherry for example. Once flowers and leaves are gone the plants have a forbidding allure, like that of a cactus, but now they are all slender and delicate. At the Brizzolara Creek Committee we’ve talked about planting them as hedge to keep people out of the watercourse.

At the side of the house, by the compost and redwoods, the wild strawberries are back. Soft, matt, and pertly serrated, the leaves make a fresh bed for occasional yellow-centered white blossoms.

Today’s ecolit class was a hike to Rockslide Ridge.

We’ve been reading John Muir’s The Mountains of California. Its first paragraph contains a fine description of our home territory.

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.

I’d asked students to study the Geology chapter of Cal Poly Land: A Field Guide to connect the Muir text to our walk and to help them to decipher some of the language of the landscape.

The winter weather was clear and crisp. On my way up to our meeting place at the horse unit, I biked toward Drumm Reservoir and the site of “Poly Canyon Village,” a huge new student residential development I’d spent many hours haggling about in committee during the last five years. I’d just learned from reading Christy’s ecolit journal that groundbreaking started two days before with the destruction of ancient Eucalyptus trees:

Driving up to Peterson ranch this afternoon I was shocked to come across the mass arboreal murder taking place. The beautiful eucalyptus trees that have shaded the feed mill, the feedlot, and the bull test are being savagely mown down by hairy, overweight cretins in fluorescent vests. In the summer when it gets unbearably hot, there is some much needed comforting shade under these fragrant guardians. During wind-whipped storms, their branches sway and shed leaves in all directions. They hold the land stable; they act as nice bumpers for those whose breaking skills are not up to par. To me they stand watching over year after year of Cal Poly students. They have seen the succession of eager high school potential, to Poly student to teacher, teacher to department head, then to retirement. …Just five days ago, I walked to my car parked under those fated Eucalypts, listening to the eerie creaking and groaning of the trees, despite the dead stillness in the air. They knew, and they were broadcasting their goodbyes through the song of their branches.

I found only huge stumps, cut close to the ground. The rings werent visible enough to be counted.

While we waited for stragglers, I pointed out the borders of Cal Poly Land on the map. Our destination was just outside the property line. At exactly 10:15 by my watch, we started up the hill. Every minute counted if we were to be back in time for the next scheduled class at noon.

The horse corral above the stables provided a lesson in erosion and land misuse. As a flock of crows cawed in the twisted sycamore limbs, one student pointed out a foot-high gap between the ground and the concrete foundation of a watering trough, measuring the loss of topsoil.

At the top of the corral we came upon Indonesian reservoir, designed and built by a group of Indonesian students in the ’60’s to impound runoff from Horse canyon creek in front of us and water pumped uphill from the system of reservoirs, ditches, pipes and creeks that serve as plumbing to irrigate campus farm facilities. I pointed out Kestrel Crest, the serpentinite ridge above the reservoir. Kestrel was defined as a small raptor, a sparrow hawk. Kiell mentioned that it was also a verb that meant hovering in flight. As if on cue, two small birds with white spots on their wings–not kestrels–appeared below the crest and kestrelled for us. Another bird flashed grey-blue and light orange. I recognized it and three more that joined it, as female Western Bluebirds, Sialia mexicana. Not as impressive as the more brightly colored male I had photographed last year from my deck

they nevertheless gave me a thrill when their gray wings suddenly turned blue as they angled in the sun.

After a brief stop at bedrock mortars surrounding a grove of bay and hollyleaf cherries under the high voltage lines bringing power to the campus from the grid in Morro Bay, we huffed uphill on a deeply eroded dirt road past some recent slumpage in the Franciscan melange soils on the bank, passing through a shaded oak woodland along the creek. The woodland gave way to grassland and then to rock outcrop plant communities growing on the base of the steep upper slopes that constituted Rockslide Ridge. Despite an increase of wind, the temperature went up, and I had to remove my sweater and take a drink.

At the saddle dividing Horse Canyon from Poly Canyon, some people decided to ascend no further, while the rest of us left the road and found various paths through the unstable rock and gravel, avoiding the needle pointed tips of Spanish Dagger that thrived without much competition on the infertile serpentinite soil. Most of the group had never seen this backcountry before. Other people delighted in the escape during class hours. I watched the clock, knowing we had to reach the top by 11 in order to have fifteen minutes there before going back down.

I was one of the last near the summit to clamber over a barbed wire fence that ended in a vertical drop-off where half the mountain had shaken loose and slid down into the valley that was now the Architectural Area. Instructed by Professor Chipping’s explanations in the Field Guide, one could see where springs erupting from impermeable layers of rock covered by the slides secreted watercourses lined with green black clumps of trees–oaks, bays, sycamores and willows.

I collected papers due today and then people dispersed on the summit plateau, just outside the University property line to write in their journals.

(photo by Danielle O’Neill)

I found a natural rock bench, drank some water, munched on a chunk of olive bread and looked for a subject to describe. Just to my west, on a dried flower stalk of Yucca whipplei, perched another female bluebird. I approached her slowly to get a picture, and she let me come within 20 feet.

Then she disappeared and I went back to my seat. Looking to the south, over the campus toward the city in the distance, I saw her on another stalk, watching me.

I approached again. This time she flew directly toward me and fluttered in an arabesque a few feet from my eyes. At first I told myself she was rewarding my attentions. But then I realized this was threat behavior. I was doubly trespassing, my sit-spot in the middle of her territory, between her guard towers. I checked my watch. It was three minutes after the time to leave.

I’d been looking forward to today’s Sierra Club hike throughout a challenging week filled with classes, student conferences, 90 minutes of testimony at a deposition and lots of meetings. Big Falls is a famous local attraction and I’d never been there.

I carpooled with Chris on the way to Santa Margarita. Dense fog met us at Cuesta Pass, and at our meeting place, people shivered in the cold. There were 35 of us eager to tackle the nine miles and 1700 foot elevation gain announced on the Outings page of the monthly Chapter newsletter. I asked if anyone was interested in having a copy with articles about the many activities going on during the month and a membership application. Fifteen people asked for it.

Ruby RAV filled with two more passengers for the last ten miles of car travel to the trailhead through Santa Margarita Ranch and out toward Pozo. Huge valley oaks, bare of leaves during the winter, loomed in the fog, their limbs arching over the road and dividing into gnarled branches looking like arthritic witch fingers.

At the trailhead the fog broke up and we took off at a breathless pace up the first long ascent through blue oaks and coastal scrub. The small trees were still bare, but black sage, California sagebrush and chamise were in fresh new leaf. People spoke about how hot and dry this hike was during summer. At the top of the first ridge, we took a break and looked out over the Santa Lucia range to Cuesta Ridge on the horizon hiding Edna Valley on the other side.

Heading downhill toward Lopez Canyon, one could see a series of parallel valleys to the south filled with fog. Other than a couple of water tanks and fireroads, nowhere on the whole hike were there signs of human habitation, not even a fence.

Occasionally the scrub and serpentine outcrops alternated with meadows, mostly gray with last years dead grasses, but showing the green of new growth hesitantly emerging. I saw hardly any of the annual grasses that filled the hills in the lower elevations; instead these were native perennial bunch grasses. Clearly this area had not been cultivated by the early settlers. The remains of the highway 41 fire of twelve years ago were still in evidence, but I thought that this area would soon welcome more fire, since in some places the scrub was getting thick and clotted with dead growth.

The group was large enough to spread for half a mile along the trail, and it was fun to watch people far below on the steep slopes crisscrossed by switchbacks. They moved in shifting groups, pairs and singles and conversation flowed easily.

It was not too early in the season for dramatic displays of red current

and Chris noticed one large shooting star growing right alongside the trail.

Soon we descended into a shady oak woodland of non-deciduous California live oaks. Then I noticed a series of pools beside the path that gave way to a trickle. For the next mile it dropped away out of sight but within earshot of its increasing babble. Suddenly we came out of the woodland to a crossing where the water flowed over smooth rocks and formed lovely pools surrounded by wooded canyon walls.

This was the most pleasing part of the trail, and all too soon we we arrived at the top of the falls, where some folks decided to sit and rest while others explored the lip of the falls.

The trail spiralled through woods down the fifty foot drop and returned to the base of the falls where most folks chose to eat lunch. There was a festive sense of arrival at a worthwhile destination.

I really wanted to swim in the pool at the base of the fall–in my underpants. I took off my boots and crawled out on a log hanging over the clear inviting water. I knew it would be chilly, but I expected to be able to immerse my legs up to the knees until the pain went away and the rest of my body acclimated. This method had worked to allow me to swim for an indefinite time in the cold water of local beaches. But I couldnt leave my feet in for more than a minute or two at a time, and after a quarter of an hour I realized that my plan wouldnt work. So I stared at the tumbling spray and listened to its sounds and resigned myself to a chaste encounter.