Lunch under the Redwoods in the Arboretum, the tiny creek flowing in a shady wetland created and maintained artificially. Birdsong and sprinkler sounds.  I hope for another glimpse of the two western tanagers that darted by as I was thinking about the paragraph describing them by Johanna after three prompts and her claim that she’d never seen any on Cal Poly land.

I spend today and tomorrow with a printout of the second proof of the book, making corrections, writing notes and photo credits and the acknowledgements and table of contents.  Today Anna assembles the colored printout into a new comp and then Brian and Mary move forward with the page by page image processing and detailed layout. My meditations are consumed with the details and fears of more unforeseen pitfalls. I take little joy in the baby steps of progress, now that the thrill of scanning has worn off. I had no idea how many of them still lay ahead to realize Mary’s uncompromising plan.  All the organization and talent she’s devoted to this I regard with impatience.

I’m also coming down from the 60th birthday festivities that Jan orchestrated on the weekend. Friday night was the dinner party with Vicky T., Melody, Paula, Mike, Lindsey H.  The fresh baked Ahi and salade Nicoise were delicious.  Jan announced the occasion at 10:00 p.m.  After private festivities in the morning, we went to see Oma, who perked up after I found her hearing aid and a missing lens of her glasses. Back home I loaded mulch from the pile in front by bucket to the back yard.  At noon I heard a noise on the patio and spun around to find the silver-haired figures of Caesar and Penny. I hadn’t seen them in over a year”since Claire’s wedding. A fine surprise. Later came Ruth, then Claire, Dennis and the baby and a trip to Pete’s café for dinner.

Santa Barbara two days scanning slides into digital files for the book

Scanning my own photos taken with a professional camera in a professional lab with professional equipment.  All slides and negatives in a binder in perfect order with the complete comp version of the book to check against.  After many false starts and rescans, the procedure is now smooth.  Sky has been a wonderful guide and hostess, stopping in four times yesterday to give Mary and me moral support, taking us to lunch in her new Audi at Tutti’s in Montecito, where Mary wanted to go to see movie stars, then to dinner after a 13 hour day at another Italian restaurant in Montecito where we met Richard his his daughter and son.

The feeling now a little like at the end of writing a chapter or the introduction of a book¦things cruising, falling into place, producing better than expected yield.  Just the opposite of slogging through and getting delayed and needing to redo.

Richard insists on paying and then we drive to his and Sky’s new house”a palace, which reminds me of J’s house on Edna Ranch where Jan’s bookgroup Christmas party took place last year. Two-story roof and beams, stonework, light arch windows, stained redwood siding, three car garage.

Being in this place and having the help of these folks feels right at this stage of the project¦after years of begging and scraping and doing things alone and wrong, and redoing, and going backwards rather than forwards and not knowing what’s next and being humiliated by errors and delays.  How much unhappiness and discouragement and anxiety went into this project.  Not, as they say, a job for the faint hearted.

How will the book turn out? How will it be received?  Shakespeare and the Bible was best I could do, got some fine reviews, also panned.

Taking my own pictures for the book, as commanded by Sky and Mary, has gone from an ordeal to a challenge that I now hate to relinquish.

On the train back to SLO

Sun golden on the ridge of Point Sal.  We creep by the haunted junkyards of Casmalia on  a siding as the dominant freight passes on the right.  The seat is comfortable, the train almost empty.  The cost of taking me home with my CDS and Giggy, my portable hard drive filled with digital images is ten or a hundred times the twenty two dollar fare. I’m in no hurry for this trip to end, though I relish the thought of seeing Jan tonight. Reading “Headlong” by Michael Frayn, the novel she recommended, is a rich indulgence, the narrator like me an academic in constant dialogue with himself.  The gentle rocking movement and the insulated quiet unlike any other form of travel I know.

One slight breach in this contentment: when I met Sky at Armstrong she was pissed that I left scans for her to finish tomorrow morning, since she had so much else to get done and was jetlagged after her return from Thailand.  I had an excuse–I thought she and Mary had agreed to finish them together–but I could hardly bear the shame.

The pink sun was just grabbed by the gray fog.  The sound of the horn as we cross the Santa Maria Valley: muted, melodious, melancholy. Pink-orange glow behind the chocolate brown of fields of blue-green broccoli.  Diner, Eucalyptus, Forests, the Dune Lakes, the crop fields of Arroyo Grande at the base of Nipomo Mesa.

Shot the second roll of film today.  I’m curious to see how they turn out.  While out on errands I stopped at the RR station to ask when the Coast Starlight would be on the grade.  Southbound now said the stationman, Northbound will leave here around 4:00, it’s just arriving.  It was 3:45.  I dashed home, changed into my boots and drove up Stenner road.  As I neared the trestle, I saw the back end of a passenger train round the curve in front of me and thought I’d missed my chance.  But how could the northbound be here at 4:05? No it was probably the Southbound heading west before the hairpin curve by CMC.  I drove to Serrano Ranch and ran up the trail and heard a train whistle behind Kestrel Crest, and I knew it must be the Northbound exiting town and leaving me just enough time to get above the tracks, load the camera and set up the shot.  Breathless, I climbed the embankment by the cut near the hanging telephone pole and waited, rehearsing the shots.  The locomotive came round the corner faster than I expected and then round the Stenner canyon hairpin curve. I got three or four shots, but don’t know if the camera had time to focus.

Then in the afternoon light, took a number of vegetation shots, and headed back to campus for field 25 and to try to replicate Dale’s schematic landscape shots in higher resolution.

I try to learn again to sit and read and write, to slow down”not to be lazy but thoughtful, observant, awake to the shadows of leaves on the leaves of this page.  Yesterday I got up at 6:00 and took the new camera to photograph the fog bank and Poly Canyon, but none as dramatic as I’d hoped for, the camera either under or overexposing, losing the contrast between cloud and sky.  Regardless of the outcome, the looking and composing was thrilling.  Afterwards I came home and went to Avila for a picnic with baby Ian.

Things turning brown with no watering.  Not the holly-leaf cherry and the bamboo, which remains after the removal of the hot tub.  Too much noise, maintenance, energy.  But we’ll miss it too. The side yard with redwoods remains damp, the front yard still showy with native blooms.  Next door gardeners have been digging and planting for the last two days, talking cheerfully, playing the radio.  The grounds are being transformed from a wasteland of ivy to varied panoply of large shrubs and trees. Brian arranged for all of this before last Tuesday.  They become his memorial.  His widow doesn’t come out but her light is on at night.  They came here from San Jose, after he sold his lucrative business and she retired as police officer.  Planned to have children.  Another young widow joins Amena and Barbara B.

Kenton’s camera back arrived yesterday, the lens I ordered today.  Together they weigh five pounds.  The shutter action, the zoom lens, the image stabilizer.  I’ve been told by Mary I must shoot slides.

Summer quiet back here.  Wind in the pines on top of the hill sound like ocean, finches like canaries.  There’s time to work on Polyland book

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.

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.

Overnighting under the Valley Oak above the tracks after a class hike. This vast tree, so old with such new and vigorous sprouts.  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