Preparing for my next quarter’s class, Ecolit: Reading and Writing the Landscape, I modified the Journal writing requirement to include a weblog option. At least twice a week students must write an entry. I must follow suit.

I’ve been going to Nature Explorers with my grandson Ian every Thursday morning. Its a program for kids up to age 8 and their parents and grandparents, part of the Coyote Road School in San Luis Obispo. The school focuses on outdoor education and nature study with an emphasis on tracking that derives from the educational philosophy of Tom Brown’s Tracker School.

We’ve been to Bishop’s Peak, Reservoir Canyon, Cuesta Park, Laguna Lake, the Sand Spit and Morro Bay Estuary, a few of the hundred wonderful natural preserves within 20 minutes of home. All the kids are enthralled with these sessions, especially Ian, and the adults seem to enjoy them with just as much enthusiasm. There’s alot of philosophy and expertise that goes into the program, but each excursion feels casual and slow paced and leaves plenty of time for adventure and pure fooling around.

Alot of what goes on is similar to what happens in my University classes, although less information is conveyed. As a student rather than a teacher, however, I find myself marvelling at the knowledge of wildlife, vegetation, and Indian lore drawn upon by Dave and Evan, the leaders, especially the kind of reading of the landscape they do with the kids by studying the inscriptions left by animals in tracks, scats, and bones.

Each session has ended with some unscripted but dramatic sighting–yesterday, the last of the quarter, it was a peregrine falcon mobbed by a merlin–the two raptors noisily squabbling overhead at the Morro Bay Marina in the estuary. The week before it was discovery of the skeletal remains of a seal or a sea lion on the Sandspit. The week before, a kestrel sitting in the sun for his portrait at Laguna Lake.

Most of the students and parents attending Coyote Road classes are being home-schooled. I remember that one of the most well informed and talented writers in my ecolit class two years ago was home-schooled in North County. A full generation below me, the Coyote Road parents and instructors seem to have resurrected or retained the spirit of the sixties and seventies whose demise I’ve mourned since returning from exile in Canada in 1979. But at Tuesday night’s general meeting of the Sierra Club, I saw more traces in the presentation about his Environmental Studies curriculum by a Paso Robles High School Teacher, Mark DeMaggio.

Atop the Citadel.  A perch on a flat piece of grassland 30 yards from the lone oak noticeable from all over poly canyon. Last time I was here a Yom Kippur years ago it was too windy to stay; now a gentle sea breeze in the oat grass, the last sun on my pants a weakening gold.  It will get chilly but I have a down vest, windbreaker and sleeping bag.  I’ve been snacking on cheese and gorp.

Fathers Day lunch was delicious barbeque.  I had to carry Oma up the stairs then her change her horrendously stinky diaper, but then she was fine and quietly watched the baby and ate with gusto.  Ian is the glowing center of joy for all the old and youngish folks, bringing us together in delight and concern.  Jan and I had a great Sunday morning and I phone Mary L. to discuss working on the book again.  Yesterday was graduation.  I felt (a little) honored rather than humiliated and invited to a party at the house of Bob and Sarah.  Afterwards Jan and I took a hike up a new trail in Reservoir Canyon where the flowers were splendid: yuccas, Obispo lilies, California fuschia, fairy bells, lizard tails, buckwheat and monkeyflower. Sun dropping to the horizon.

This morning I washed the windows.  I concluded that the poppy seeds are hurled as projectiles off those formerly pink launch pads.  I sat on the bench and planned to wait for the hurl.  I was thinking about sleeping out tonight when I heard a weird click, looked to my right and saw what I thought was a grasshopper leaping through the poppy patch. Click and leap.  Then I realized it was what I was waiting for: the poppy seed dispersal.  Sure enough, where the grasshopper landed, about five feet from the path, there was a split seed hull.  When Jan came home a few minutes later, I asked her to sit next to me and told her what happened.  She said, “that’s why they’re called poppies.”  Is all seed dispersal ejaculation?

9 PM  I’m awakened by the train whistle from a deep snooze.  Hollister’s top protrudes above the line of fog.

After I returned from taking Oma home from the party, a beautiful read haired woman came out on the neighbor’s new driveway and greeted me.  I said something about the weather.  She said Brian died a few days ago, under “special circumstances.” Turns out he drove up Cayucos dam road and shot himself because the rare form of liver cancer he was diagnosed with is incurable.

The train at Stenner is now very loud.  I look back at the spot by Rockslide Ridge where I watched and heard it a month ago.  The moon is a thick crescent and Venus is to the west.  I brought the star chart, but am sleepy.  No other stars.  My mission here is to get to Caballo and reshoot the central campus and Brizzolara drainage at dawn.

Waiting on the bench in front of Buona Tavola to meet colleagues at the English Department’s lunch honoring Kevin, the latest recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award—a celebration of triumph in the face of low regard by the professional schools.  Just before biking down here I gave Terry the check for $750 I received as recipient of this year’s Scholar of the Year Award—a contribution to the Cal Poly Land Project account.

A next book?  A sequel to Thoreau’s Dispersal of Seeds.  Poppies, Erodium, Sycamore.

Students are writing.

I’d get F on my ecolit journal this last part of the quarer.  No sleepouts and no entries other than notes since the last ones were collected.  Every day I feel more strung out, like one of the students who reported being hooked on hikes.  Tailspin yesterday about not finding the formula for averaging 330 grades and did so just before the nighttime exam, entering the room and finding the wonderful 380 ecolit anthology made by Andrew and Katharine.

I’m ambivalent about Nature Steve, my nickname at Camp Moonbeam in 1960 after Freshman year, where I was supposed to be Nature Counselor, my only qualification having gone to Camp Hackmatack at ages 7 and 8.  Since then I’ve tried with varying degrees of success and failure to live up to the role.  This class, the Cal Poly Land Project, the Earth Day Program with Amory Lovins I organized in June, Sierra Club, the whole Lund experience, treework and Arbor Day in Claremont.  If the Field Guide was done, I’d feel more hopeful.

Reading: I long for it—back to Benyus and Thoreau, Muir and Austin.  And the Polyland class stretching beyond my capacities.

A sixty year old man…are these students different from Ian?  Almost two generations away. I draw back from their world, longing for trees, sunsets, and stars. But they too long for that, as I did at their age.

Dick Simon asked if we would  retire to Lund.  I said, impossible, I’m too young.  But to read and write there…to retreat to the observer.   But why, when there’s Sycamore Glen? I’ve developed a real history with Cal Poly Land.  Every hike and campout and new species I learn and place I name on the map leaves me richer.  But still impoverished.

Student departures tonight are warm and appreciative.  Antidote to the despair I experience when criticizing their bad writing.

8 PM under the freshly sprouting branches of a truly ancient oak growing on a shelf  above the tracks in a bend of the south fork of Stenner Creek. Everything here is still green, horsetails and watercress and sedge and rust and yellow monkey flower in the flat marshy area.  This tree a grand surprise as I walked slowly, slowly in the late sun looking for a perfect place to lie after a relentless day of reading the second set of student journals and essays, many of them excellent, one that I spent two and a half hours with.

Followed by the class field trip to Cheda—easy now, with students having plenty to say and reading Troutman and talking Lovins, and finding the wriggling tail of an alligator lizard and picking it up to show.

This vast tree, so old with such new and vigorous sprouts. When Jan departed for Tassajara, I took leave of her as if it could be forever, seeing her this morning beautiful and clear.  A jet below the crescent moon makes a brilliant vapor trail in the colorless sky, a cloud of gnats dancing in front of me not interested in blood.  The afterglow from class, students ranged at many distances talking quietly, writing, staring.

Tomorrow I meet with someone from RMI to strategize about having her consult with Cal Poly to promote sustainability.  At night a party at my house for Writerspeak visiting novelist, before that an opening of Andy’s show at the gallery and on Saturday a reception for the student volunteer of the year and her mentor, me.

The darkening evening is damp and cool, the sound of the distant freeway drowned out by the train just below this hidden garden. Crickets join the meadowlarks.  The vapor trail pales and the crescent moon brightens.

My tired feet aching to get out of boots. Comfy in sleeping bag on Thermarest chair.  Dark grey fog, like smoke coalescing in the west.

Where is the wildlife? I haven’t moved in an hour. Two planets flank the moon.  The stars are pleasure points.  The fog gone and so are the gnats.  Pink and blue on the horizon.

I take pictures almost daily. How will I manage them? Does preserving the past make it stale? I prefer that to losing it.

Good night Jan.

Stenner

Seabreeze in the blond oats, curves of the railway as graceful as the swoops of a swallow.  Wind and water and birdsong.  A west-facing hillside.  Thick green light and dark set off by straw-colored grass.

Andrew asks, “Are there peacocks up here? I just saw one.” I remember encountering a peacock by the old homestead behind the eucalyptus grove.

Crossing the creek by the big cypresses I found a newt.

Two grand circling red tails as came above the tracks.

That super deep green, as we passed through it on the trail winding the curves of the round hills in the lowering sun

turned out to be great patches of lupine–dark green of the leaves and purple of the flowers.

Sitting at the base of oak rock, a tree growing out of a crack in a sculpted outcrop of conglomerate waiting to see a quadruple conjunction of planets in the west.

But the fog comes in as the light recedes and just a few shreds of blue transparence remain behind the gathering grey curtain.  From one rock to another a straight arrow trail in the grass uniformly three inches wide as if made by a mechanical herbicide dispenser, connecting one underground city of gophers to another.

This shelf above Stenner canyon thick with springs and marshes releasing water from the chapparal steeps above. Huge sycamores and oaks directly below.

This morning making coffee in the dark without my glasses, a sharp prong of light appears above Cuesta Ridge.  Not the sun or the moon.  A new being in the heavens? I get the binoculars and look again, recognizing a curve on the dagger-like spike. The nail-pairing of a crescent moon almost vertical clawing the sky.

4:40 p.m. Edge of Grassland above Dorms

Thirty two people around me have scrambled up the hill through the grassland.  Smell of manure. A cooling breeze.  Sky a variegated canvas of whites, grays, windows of blue.  Damp air.  Some oat grass has spilled seed, some still green.  Nasella pulchra intermixed. The whole city of SLO and the red roofs of the campus directly below.

So much of the land covered with cars.   Clouds lowering gray, turning to black underneath. The progress of summer and the degreening of the hills again arrested.  Spots where soil is thin are browner.  A glaring sun in a hole in the clouds changing intensity of the shadow of oatgrass on the page.  Shadow and light on the ground as varied as in the sky. The world in motion. Windwaves combing uphill through grass below as individual fronds sway around me.

8:30 p.m. Outcrop on Miossi Ranch

Now it’s dark, the crickets and frogs and freeway closeby are audible.

The 32 students in the oak tree were shivering after ninety minutes exposed to wind and low temperature, not really wanting to talk about Thoreau, but still intrigued to be assembled in the same tree.

I have a good grasp on “Walking” and the five chapters I teach of Walden.  But I know too little about the rest of his work and his life and the body of criticism about it.

Four of us hiked down here from the top of Poly Mountain where we’d met Dusty through wild flowers and the fresh yucca whose flowers we ate, laughing at the meeting and sense of escape as we headed over the hill into the backcountry.  He was on the front page of the newspaper today for his brilliant installation in the library atrium.

How long will this remain back country?  When will it be moved to the front?

photoset