I found the listing on the ECOSLO bulletin: Irish Hills Docent-Led Hike. A good location to see early flowers, and Jody a congenial leader. As directed, Jan and I drove to the end of Madonna Road and parked in the new subdivision bordering Costco and the Open Space. The houses are large and densely situated on the flat valley floor, stark, typical sprawl bedroom neighborhood, but promising a different atmosphere once the trees have grown enough to provide something of an urban forest. Jan noted that the park with basketball courts and baseball field that can be used by the residents of the  projects across the street were required of the developer, Marshall, while she sat on the City Council. So was the preservation of the old farmhouse at the trailhead, which was sold to a private party who could only renovate and expand it in such a way as to preserve the look of the original building.

It was one of those mild spring mornings with a touch of cool brought on by the slight sea mist especially welcome as the group of about ten people mounted the winding trail. The perennial bunch grass was bright green, and several lilies were coming into leaf. The first bloom a white flower I cant identify.

Ascending the serpentine ridge, we gained larger views of the Los Osos Valley, shopping centers and new subdivisions creeping over the fields and hills in every direction.

But a large green patch in the middle of the sprawl remained where the decades-long struggle over the Dalidio property has left the land fertile and fallow. Adjoining it, is the “Gap” property situated along Prefumo Creek between automobile dealerships and the South Laguna residential neighborhood. This was the parcel before the planning commission last Thursday night that Citizens for Planning Responsibly urged be developed in accordance with the General Plan. Jan wrote a long and expert treatise that formed the basis of all the testimony and for which the Commissioners expressed gratitude, since the City Staff had not done the job.

Jody stopped on the way up at several places to fill us in on some of the details of procurement of the 700 acre patch of open space that serves as one part of the city’s future greenbelt. The Madonna family, which owned vast acreage both of the hill property and the fertile alluvial plain down below were required to deed some of it to Open Space in return for permission to develop their huge shopping center. The same was true of the developer who built the neighborhood we passed through, as well as of the owners of the adjoining Foster property, who ended up developing only two lots on their more than 200 acre parcel.

At the shoulder of the ridge, the trail levelled and headed west parallel to Froom creek below. As civilization disappeared behind us, its sounds were replaced by the rush of water. Ahead and up the creek the only sign of human impact was the gash of the road gouged in the canyon by the property owner, the late Alex Madonna, master of the D9 Caterpillar bulldozer, whose ostentatious signature is inscribed on mountainsides in every direction. Above the opposite bank rose a high wall of impenetrable looking scrub oak woodland. The trail was bordered by the first bloom of Ceanothus cuneatus, light purple, odiferous, exuberant.

We continued down into the canyon along a branch of Madonna’s road that the city along with conservation organizations has tried unsuccessfully to restore. The disfigured walls were neverthess beautiful in baring the browns, greens and whites of weathering serpentine. The surface of the road was carpeted by a strange red plant, apparantely chlorophil free, which I havent yet identified.

Walking upstream along the creek, we found the first California poppies of the season, dazzling two-toned goblets of orange and white with red tipped leaves and buds.

Further along we came upon a tributary creek surrounded by the leaves of rare and endemic local native, the San Luis Obispo bog thistle.

Following the tributary to some its sources, I discovered water seeping straight out of the porous serpentine rock.

After a snack break in the shade of oaks and bay laurels along the rushing creek, we headed back up to the ridge, passing banks of bush poppies whose leaves were dried but whose blooms shared in the festivity of an early California Spring.

Great God, I ask for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.

And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe’er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou’st distinguished me.

That my weak hand may equal my firm faith
And my life practice what my tongue saith
That my low conduct may not show
Nor my relenting lines
That I thy purpose did not know
Or overrated thy designs.

(1841)

Universal spirit, O hear my urgent plea
For nothing less or more than plain integrity
That I may carry out in deed what in my mind I know
Is true but never comfortable, and find new ways to grow.

And if it is required to abandon obligation
And spend more solitary time in quiet contemplation
Then give me strength and confidence to follow my own light
And cut loose from the need to be approved in others’ sight.

Please let me saunter off with you, really walk the walk
Instead of giving yet another classroom Thoreau talk.
Let it not be that making do will win out finally,
That I cant find a way to write and testify,
That what was learned so long ago stays merely memory
Some idealist delusion better left to die.

Woke up this morning feeling rested, relaxed and healthy”first time since the new year. Went for a swim, after which I felt exuberant. At 1 p.m. I took a break from grading papers to fill the bird feeder and discovered it was clear, breezy and warm outside. After I added a scoop of sunflower seeds, the red-headed finches twittered their gratitude from the surrounding cover. I walked up the steps to the blooming volunteer almond tree, the first sign of spring. Coming close, I was enfolded by its shimmer and fragrance. Honey not tasted but inhaled, its sweetness pouring through nasal passages up into sinuses behind my eyes.

What a day for bees, I thought, and immediately was surrounded by dozens of them flitting and hovering, trembling in the wind along with the blossoms and new leaves, apparently oblivious of my presence. The breeze died down and the fragrance ramped up. Up close I watched the bees nuzzle and grope and hump the tiny golden stamens at the center of each blossom. Vibrating with excitement, released from the pull of gravity, they rode a wave of pleasure in taste and smell.

I was transported with them for a moment. Then I tried to observe. A single blossom held an inexhaustible supply of delight. One after another bee entered its bower of warmth and brightness, took its harvest, and was replaced and sometimes bumped out of the way by a new visitor.

I tried to track an individual bee, noticing how it used two or three or four hands to grasp whatever it gathered on the top of those stamens and shove it greedily into its mouth. It moved to another blossom, dove in, turned on its back, curled its abdomen around the group of stamens and rubbed furiously against them with its belly.

At most ten seconds on any one flower. But, why move on when there’s plenty left? Why approach another flower and then back off, or touch down on a third and depart without entering? What determined its preference? I couldn’t track a single bee for more than a minute before it sped out of my narrow focus.

more bee pics

I sit twenty five feet up in the branches of the great live oak, on the deck of the tree house. Inside is drenched by rain that’s fallen through a gash in the roof. I’m enjoying a break in the weather that probably wont last long enough to finish writing this entry. The hike up was easier than expected, aided by two new gaps in the fence and enough fresh grass to allow evasion of the worst mud.

I’ve moved indoors. The intact half of the roof keeps the drops that penetrate the canopy from blotting my words. What do we need for shelter? This makes the cabin at Walden a McMansion by comparison. No lake, but the occasional stream flows within view, down the middle of a gully covering the underground watercourse that allows this tree to grow so large. The lichen coating its elephantine limbs now is bright green. The slope that tilts almost to vertical just above the uphill edge of the canopy bursts with new vegetation, hastening to stabilize and clothe itself before it’s undermined from below by slumpage or eroded from above by runoff.

On the way here I noticed water sheeting off driveways and pouring out of drainage pipes embedded in the sidewalk, gathering in the gutters and racing down the gentle slope of the street. All that water from these tiny municipal lots, looking for a place to go because it cant soak into the ground or find its natural channels. Further along the flow increases and suddenly disappears with a roar. Tucked under the lip of the sidewalk a grated storm sewer opening three concrete squares wide. This is where the stream draining the whole valley between Poly Mountain and our Alta Vista hill must once have run, starting at the top near the Admin building, going by the site of the PAC, under the track and practise field, down to Palm Street, then California, then Monterey then Santa Rosa, before emptying into San Luis Creek.

Beyond the sewer opening, the water flowed toward me, a thick foam-edged meander crossing Grand Ave. next to the parking kiosk.

Its been raining for weeks. The one sunny day I remember since the funeral in Paso Robles was Thursday the 31st: Focus the Nation Day. May it be remembered as a historic one.

Focus the Nation Cal Poly slideshow

Eban

Here’s a sample of the kind of responses we’ve received
____

To the organizers of Focus the Nation:

I just wanted to congratulate all of you who worked so long and hard to put together the Focus the Nation event. I must say that in the 25 years I have been at Cal Poly, this was the most impressive, relevant, important, professional, and well coordinated student run event I have ever seen on our campus. You are all to be congratulated for an amazing job – the energy and passion you brought to the event was truly inspiring. Thank you for advancing the message of sustainability to our faculty, staff, students, community, and political leaders. And thank you for the opportunity to participate and share some of the things going on within Facility Services. Kudos!

Thanks,
Dennis
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I want, personally, to pass on some of this gratitude to you.

The first time I encountered you was in the elevator in the motel across the street from ASU November 2006. It was late at night and you were pulling your suitcase. No words were exchanged but I got a sense of being in presence of a furious intensity that made me both curious and uncomfortable. When I heard you introduce Focus the Nation at the AASHE conference the next day, I got it. That suitcase was carrying a time bomb of an idea. Of all the enlightening and inspiring material shared at the conference and the energy it stirred up, yours was the only outlet, the only immediate action item. At the organizing meeting you called afterwards, I had mixed feelings. I wished that you had offered more to rely on: financial backing, a staff, a sense of irresistible power like David Orr or Ray Anderson’s, but instead it was only a perfect name, a practical idea, and an agonized personal urgency that said you were going to give all you had to make it happen. The rest was up to us. From the small-scale experiences I’ve had of starting things up and getting people going, I recognized that this was what it takes.

Over the intervening months, my confidence in the progress of the project lagged, but my sense that it was the right thing to do didnt falter. After returning from Las Vegas with our Cal Poly delegation, the sense that it was up to us was even stronger. Regardless of what happened nationally, we were going to make it happen at Cal Poly. We presented the idea first to a group of faculty who said yes, came to a few meetings and drifted off. At the same time Chad and Matt, the two students who were in Las Vegas, decided to take more initiative. They invited their friends and took over calling and planning meetings. They got it: this is about action, not deliberation. The claim that to me seemed a bit overblown–“the largest teach-in in American history”–became their warcry. They were going to add a job fair, poetry slam, rockband, carshow, art exhibit, expensive dinner for decision makers, zero waste organic lunch, landscape installation. I offered some practical suggestions of who, how, and where, got early necessary arrangements out of the way, and urged the necessity for organizing strategy and program design. As a last resort we opted for sticking as close as possible to the exact models that you had devised. As we followed them in succeeding months, my appreciation steadily grew. At a certain point, I realized that you had this figured out to a T from day one.

In late Fall 2007, the national organization started looking more substantial, despite the absence of any serious media presence. But the idea that we could get a significant number of political figures involved seemed a pipe dream, let alone have any influence over the presidential primaries. Though our congresswoman Lois Capps was amenable, and so were local officials, where were the big endorsements? By the time they started flooding in, after the New Year, we neither expected nor needed them. But the unexpected flurry of national support toward the end must have been incubating for a long time, and I suspected that behind the scenes you’d been making it happen all along. That surge elevated the last stages of organizing to a level of joyful confidence that I never dreamed of when we first started.

Where this will go next remains to be seen. But I now have an easy confidence that you will lead it there.

The second day of rain. The gift from heaven prayed for in need. Wet. Cold. Dark.

My aunt Hannelore died Monday in Sao Paulo. She was 86, my mother’s half sister. We met in person only during the visit Jan and I made to Brazil ten years ago. But we talked regularly on the phone, and corresponded at length by letter and email. She was a born writer with a great mind. They wouldn’t let her become a doctor in the 1930’s. She married an older man who took a mistress and left her nothing in his will. She always loved him. “In her home when she was going to upstairs, her hart stooped and she died quietly,” wrote my cousin Marcelo.

On Friday we attended Maggie’s funeral. Saturday was Don’s memorial celebration in Lund. Sunday a fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration outside Solvang, where I sat next to a woman I went to elementary school with. We didn’t say it, but looked at each other marveling at the ravages of time.

I’m feeling overwhelmed by the demands of teaching, the impending climax of Focus the Nation next week, the huge expansion of the Sierra Club’s chapter’s commitments to lawsuits and fundraisers. I cant do justice to any of the specific obligations they incur, let alone to the doom-laden mission to do something about the threat of Global Warming which lurks behind all of them.

I wake up with grim determination to get through the day and I plow through the piled on tasks longing simply for the moment to sink into the pillow at night. Maggie, Don, Hannelore, enjoy your rest.

I regret binding myself with duties that generate unrelenting anxiety, that pull me away from the innocent vitality and the fresh bodies of my four grandchildren, and of the other kids at Ian’s school I was able to play with in the autumn. I long for more of the retreat at Knoll House and regret leasing it out to Tristen and his family for another year or two.

I read Thoreau to prepare for today’s class.

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Æolian music(1) to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too.

I want to take this therapy with a walk outside or with reading my own ecologs, but instead I have to scurry to get on with the jobs at hand. I know that the movement through isolation and sadness leads to connectedness and joy, and that the more room given to grief, the grander the reward:

I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.

Another mixture of Henry’s truth and lies. One hour only he says he felt lonesome. But I sense that he grappled with that “insanity” every day, rain or shine. And that he knew the struggle was what produced the exaltation that made the common companionships of life pale to inadequacy. Every gorgeous item in the catalogue of solitary joys that follows is drawn with ink of ashes and tears.

Today is the memorial gathering in the Gazebo for Don Worthen.

Yesterday we attended the funeral of Maggie Ballesteros, Teresa Fisher’s sister in Paso Robles. She helped take care of Ian between one and three years old while Teresa worked. We saw her frequently during that period and got quite close.

She died of colon cancer, the same disease afflicting Teresa and her brother Art. Teresa urged us to come to the ceremony and sit in the front rows with the family.

It took place in the St. Rose Catholic Church, a large building with a huge crucifix and a realistic statue of crucified Jesus above the altar. First came a viewing of the body–bewigged and coated with a rainbow of different colored makeup. Then a two hour rosary and mass in both Spanish and English. Ian stayed with us for the first hour, drawing a picture of Maggie with wings, and saying he missed her. The sallow priest officiated in a low drone.
We got lost on the way to the cemetery and stopped at Starbucks for directions and espressos.

Back on track, we drove through a beautiful wrought iron gate marked 1892 down into a little hollow where a crowd stood by the open grave surrounded by the flat monuments of the family plot and half a dozen ancient Valley Oaks, leafless and silver trunked, casting dramatic shadows in the low January light. Art, who was put under hospice care the day after Maggie died, was brought to the graveside in a wheelchair. An eight-man mariachi band played mournful elegies while the children ran up and down the grassy hillside above the hollow or sat in groups on the flat gravestones. After one long Spanish song by an elder of the family, the huge casket was lowered into the ground, and adults and children lined up to drop handfuls of dirt brought from the old family ranch on top of it.

As the air got chillier, people got back into their cars, returned to the St. Rose Church, and met in the bright gymnasium for what turned into an amazing party. Here are few pictures.

It took more time than conceiving a baby, but planting a new crop of snow peas was finished in the half hour between our Sunday morning walk with the dog and taking great grandma out to lunch at the Sushi bar. Now there’s less than a half hour to write about it, between completing Monday morning’s preparation and leaving for class.

I yanked the decrepit old cherry tomato plants out of the raised bed and salvaged the remaining fruits to explode in my mouth while spading the damp compressed soil. I’d planned simply to insert the peas in the ground without disturbing the soil structure but it was too hard for my forefinger to penetrate. Digging revealed that roots, probably from the adjoining Toyon or Hollyleaf Cherry, had invaded the bed from below and were converting it into a dense fibrous tissue. With the shovel I was able to turn the soil and pull out most of them. I used a hand cultivator to smooth the surface and picked out several dozen stones that somehow had floated to the surface. Then in a corner of the bed, I poked a circle of ten holes and dropped one hard quarter inch sphere into each. I made six more such circles to fill the space of the bed. At the center of each I stuck one of the ten foot bamboo stalks I’d been reusing for years to grow peas and beans and tomatos. I pulled the tops of the bamboo stalks together like tipi poles and tied them up with a short length of soft cotton string that I’d cut off one of them with kitchen scissors. I patted the soil smooth over the seeds with the flat of my hands. Seventy seeds, sixty climbing vines, twenty sweet and crunchy pea pods each, by the end of March, when it will be time to replant tomatoes.

4:45 p.m. close to sunset, sound of hoofs galloping behind the dome where thirty people sit quiet, the light and warmth of a day between storms waning.

A single birdcall highlighted against the silence protected in this hollow between Caballo peak and Cuesta ridge. Poly Mountain rises to the south, Rockslide Ridge to the north. A wispy cloud above the summit of the peak begins to luminsce below higher dark gray clouds, then drops below the ridge line. A small stream meanders through the middle of the structure, separating the rickety stage from the new concrete amphitheatre seats. Poly Mountain’s north flank now burnished with dark gold light from the invisible sunset. Muscles tensed from a day of preparation, teaching and hiking up the slippery canyon trail slowly relax as the weight of the body settles on the cool cushion of stone.

Jan, Steven,

About 8 trees blew down near your house in the last storm. The good news is that none of them damaged anything, & that they don’t need immediate attention. They don’t need Zenia or an expensive faller to clear them out. And the final good news is that there are now more poles for Joe.

We went up today and cleared the tree tops from the driveway. And I took the limbs off the downed tree near the shed but did not buck it up cause I don’t know the lengths Joe wants.

The house looks fine. Towagh, Kemi, & Aya plan to come up on Dec 20th.
In other news there was a great potluck at the Lund School yesterday.

Peter

blowdown pictures