Out at the river this morning, I found a purple flowering plant I’d not seen before. I took out the phone, clicked Google Lens, placed it near the blooms and tapped. A mosaic of pictorial links popped up identifying it as dog’s tongue.

During her Friday Nature Journaling, Ann Marie demonstrated Merlin, the Cornell Ornithology Lab app I’ve had on my phone for over a year but never used.  Identifying real time bird calls with the tap of a finger, it confers powers of an experienced birder upon a complete neophyte.  Hear a bird call, even if faint or mixed with other ambient sounds, touch the button, the source with a name and a picture and a link to Wikipedia appears on the screen.

Yesterday morning, walking back from the river, my attention was arrested by a loud cheep originating in a blue spruce tree in the neighbor’s yard. I took the phone from my right pocket, opened Merlin, and tapped. When the next cheep came, there was American Robin. I showed it to the woman there watering her new sod, who’d never heard of the app. Out from the branches scampered the real robin, and cheeped again, both seen and heard. Next day the woman told me she’d downloaded Merlin and already shared it with several friends.

AI has been a topic of conversation among three generations during our visit. An essay in today’s NY Times by one of AI’s creators, acknowledging the ignorance about how it actually works and where it’s going, claims that AI will soon absorb most jobs in computer science. The author says that instead of learning coding and programming as has been recommended to young people for a generation, all students should return to an emphasis on liberal arts and math, since those fields develop capabilities that still are not available to this exploding new technology.

Counter to that, and also to my imagined literary conversations with Robert MacFarlane celebrating “The Old Ways,” I realized that the extension of senses created by Lens and Merlin heightening my physical and mental experience of nature demonstrates how far Artificial Intelligence has fused with its predecessor and taken up residence in my fingers and brain.

My lead guide in this difficult transition has been Ann Marie. We met as fellow members of the White Heron Sangha, a meditation group I’d belonged to for ten years where I’d regularly given “dharma talks” requiring reading and writing preparation that provided some continuity with my previous professional activity.  A fellow Cal Poly faculty retiree and environmental educator, she’d served as Secretary for the Board at City Farm SLO and then stepped down to free time for her growing responsibilities in a national organization devoted to Nature Journaling around the time I shifted involvement with the Farm to the Creek Project.

One day she came as a guest presenter to the twice-weekly Pacific Beach Continuation High School Ecology class I was co-teaching at the Creek with Deannie, the official science instructor.  Anne-Marie brought along little pen, paper and water color kits for each student:

and within the 40 minutes available, got most of them to produce a creditable page recording their observations at the site–to their own and their teachers’ amazement.

Greater amazement was elicited by examples from her journals she laid out on the picnic table.

I was entranced with the lushly colored sketches, the calligraphy, the varying page layouts, the scientific precision of their visual and verbal descriptions, and even more by the immediacy of the moment captured in their quick strokes, complementing their recording of location, time, date, season and weather.  Hesitantly I asked if I could photograph some of those pages for more time to absorb their rich feast of information. When the class ended I invited her to walk the trails I’d constructed over the last year with the help of College Corps student volunteers.

A few weeks later she returned for another workshop with students. She was carrying binoculars and said she’d like to do some of her own journaling along the creek. I was thrilled to find another person intrigued enough by my pet spot hidden in a canyon just below the shopping center and car dealerships on the opposite bank to want to linger there.  An hour later she emerged from the bush and said she was thinking of returning periodically on Friday mornings for more.

On one of those Fridays she showed me the pages she’d created so far. They included new names for familiar places, drawings of birds and plants I’d seen and not seen, stories of fleeting animal dramas and slow vegetational changes revealed through fresh eyes.

These were signs I’d been waiting for.  The original grant proposal for the Creek Project included installation of informational guideposts to engage visitors with natural and historical features of the site. But the institutional formality of earlier samples to me had the opposite effect. These journal pages’ combination of artistry, information and immediacy could open hidden treasures of the place to newcomers.

Once again, I hesitantly asked if she would consent to such a use and received a wary affirmative response.  The originals would have to be scanned professionally, reproduced on weather-resistant boards, and mounted on t-posts. With the help of our supportive printer at UPS, the hardware expert at Miner’s and my grandson apprentice, they took their place.

song

This is the initial entry here about the Prefumo Creek Restoration and Enhancement Project, my main activity for the past three years.

As the second and largely solitary portion of the project nears completion, my attention is turning from weed-whacking, chainsawing and mulch-moving to making it accessible to more people, rebuilding lapsed institutional support for its further expansion, telling its story and studying its lessons.

That study led me yesterday to a Google search about the bizarre growth habits of its dominant occupant, the Arroyo Willow. Buried deep in the list of uninformative links, I discovered a marvellous scientific paper published in September 2024: THE ROLE OF PARTIAL LIMB BREAKS IN THE GROWTH AND PERSISTENCE OF ARROYO WILLOW (SALIX LASIOLEPIS),

Its subject has intrigued me ever since I started cutting a pathway through the thicket of willows along the creek bank to open views of the incised channel 15 feet below.  The heavy trunks of the oldest trees crawl up from the stream bed and grow horizontally along the ground conveniently providing trail borders and benches before pivoting upward into leafy crowns.

The paper author’s onomatopoeic term for such trees seemed perfect: “decumbent sprawlers.” It captured the combination of weighted immobility and reptilian motion that I sensed passing them on my daily walks.  He provided an ecological explanation for their animated shape as the final stage of the tree’s growth. Young willows spring up single and erect to compete for light as do other pioneer species. Those which are shaded die out, while the survivors sprout multiple trunks from their bases, turning from trees into shrubs. Their rapid accumulation of biomass leads to breakage of limbs and trunks that cant be supported under the stress of weight and wind.  Such breaks would leave other species liable to infection, weakening and mortality. But willows can tolerate open wounds indefinitely, and their broken limbs continue to grow and heal even if thinly attached. They re-root when touching the ground, where they continue growing horizontally and mature as sprawlers that sprout decumbent vertical shoots which thrive in the light opened by the breaks.

Upon returning to the creek the next morning, I came upon a large branch that must have broken the night before, while I was reading the article.  Instead of an ugly marker of weakness and injury that needed to be cleared, I saw it now as the tree’s extension of territory and length of life.

I’d been led to the paper listening to the first chapter of Landmarks, a 2017 book written and narrated by Robert MacFarlane, mountaineer, naturalist, Cambridge English professor, and splendid stylist, while while walking with the dog at Pismo Beach. His thesis about the interrelation of language, literature and appreciation of nature is a variant of the one guiding the Cal Poly class I taught from 1998 until retirement in 2014, “Ecolit, Reading and Writing the Landscape,” its syllabus headed by a quote from Thoreau

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.

Grieving for the new Oxford Junior Dictionary’s culling of words like acorn, fern, otter and pasture, which named particulars of the natural world, and their replacement with terms like attachment, chatroom, and voicemail– supposedly of more relevance to modern children–MacFarlane includes glossaries of traditional local words for landscape features, plants, and animals whose loss accompanies the loss of the features they name under the pressure of industrial/commercial development. Naming, he observes, is the prerequisite for knowing, a point confirmed by my subsequent discovery of “sprawler.”

In addition to preserving dying vocabulary, MacFarlane practices literary criticism in appreciation of obscure books of nature writing, like The Living Mountain, a volume of essays by Nan Shepherd produced in the course of her wanderings through the Cangorns, a range on the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, which he has explored since early childhood visiting his grandfather there.

Facing an abyss of unstructured time at this interval of the Prefumo project, MacFarlane encourages me to relate to the Creek in a different way, to make the difficult transition from physical activity back to my earlier academic engagement with reading and writing the landscape.

Went this morning to water the seeds on the steep bank above the riffle secured by jute netting and covered with a light layer of compost.  After that took out the paddle board, as I’d been resolving to do for some time, carried it and a paddle and a pole saw down to the beach, along with my phone sealed up in the cookie container.  Water and air were calm. Paddled slowly to the top of the long pool below the log seating area, where, as before there was a minor blockage of twigs, a log, and some caught up trash.  Tried to clear them, but didnt feel the stamina to portage over the bank to the next pool upstream, which I saw was full of small patches of algae. Worked vigorously to cut and move the brush (without power tools, yuck) and to free the flow, quicken the current above and below and hopefully flush the algae out.

Back home I lunched and napped and did a little housework while Jan prepared for the dinner gathering tonight.  After researching cannabis in copenhagen and discovering the difficulty of finding it since the demolition of “pusher’s alley,” I took up another long delayed obligation: to try out the tablet form cannabis edibles I’d bought for our trip in 2023 to determine if they were still good.

I lay down again and put in earbuds and started the Beethoven Adagios collection, which sounded as if I was stoned.  After an hour I walked the dog to the creek, experiencing heightened colors and sensations.  There I tried out a number of sit spots, though the wind was blowing wildly.

I saw two things at the edge of perception I’d not encountered before: beside the rifflepool, sheltered from the turmoil above, I saw tiny points of light floating downstream at a steady pace. As soon as I took notice of an individual, it would blink out.  I concluded that these were little sun magnifiers produced by reflective cups of the water’s surface tension formed around miniscule floating particles–bugs, blossoms, flotsam.

Afterwards, sitting on the eucalyptus log near the Water Shed out in the wind , I watched two red tailed hawks flying high. Then coming from the housing development I saw a flock of tiny purple birds, or maybe large insects, wavily making their way in my direction. As I stared, the body of the flock sent out elongated arms in which I could still see tiny purple creatures.  And then suddenly they disappeared, but not before I could tell that they were actually shreds of cloud–separate drops or droplets blown by the wind from the west and dissipating on their way over the creek and approaching the farmland.

Last week we received a meticulously packed parcel from Hanna and Karl Britz containing a new book published by the Community Foundation of Kehl titled On the Trail of the Stumbling Stones in Kehl: Memories of Jewish Kehl, to which they  made major contributions.  Their enclosed card recalls the intense experience of our visit with them in 2023 and alerts us to the inclusion of  material we provided for an entry about my great grandfather, Josef Wertheimer. As noted in the introduction, the recent trend toward extreme right-wing politics in Germany  as well as in many other countries make this project all the more relevant today. [English translation provided by Mac Photos app]

(more…)

April 3

The P.A. at Medstop on day 7 of my illness confirmed bronchitis with an x-ray, and prescribed cough suppressant but not antibiotics.

Home alone on bed with computer deepens separation from people and the world around.  For two days I immersed myself in the web fighting boredom, surfing among youtubes, movies, news broadcasts– legitimate and bogus.  World events—wars, political mayhem, elections—all brief thrills and chills—and then movies.  Looking for quality on Britbox, started watching Brideshead Revisited, 1980’s version of 1940’s novel about disenchanted aristocrats, every minute dripping with homosexual romanticism that left me cold. Switched to Downton Abbey-like feature about Oscar Wilde whose lingering shots of pederastic tongue kissing and cornholing soon became unbearable, finally reverting to a James Bond action epic which required closing eyes for several torture scenes but was otherwise diverting. The only escape from this decadent escapism came from working on two writing projects dedicated to Jan in recognition of our anniversary and regret for spoiling it with illness

April 4

The anniversary has come and gone. I gave Jan the card I made and the apology poem, she made us a special halibut dinner and continues to urge me to rest and stay away from cooking and cleanup.

Restarting work at the creek, interrupted by two weeks of Spring Break was scheduled for yesterday afternoon.  Five people came, Viri, Katy, Taylor, Juan and Adriana.  My long planned intention to fell the ugly willow near the bench and turn it into a bridge worked smoothly with their enthusiastic teamwork.

Anne Marie messaged me that she would be out journaling in the morning and I managed to intercept.  She called the curve of the creek where we’ve been working “a riffle.” I came back at 4:00 and slept.  Jan made another great dinner and sent me back to bed, but I could only sleep sitting in the chair with feet up.  I plugged in airpods and put on the Apple Classical Beethoven Adagios collection, which suspended me between dream and waking all night.

April 5

I’d been planning to attend the “Hands Off” anti-Trump demonstration today, but acquiesced to Jan’s urging not to go in my condition.  Upon returning from it, she conveyed the seriousness of the situation that’s still sinking in. We are in the midst of a fascist coup that may be impossible to reverse or resist, and counters to it will be unprecedentedly painful. Everyone will face terrifying moral choices to fight or capitulate.

This political crisis overtops concern even for health.  Salud Carbahal, our heroic Congressional representative, spoke at the rally suffering from the worst cold he’s ever had.  What must it mean, flying in from Washington where the battle is hottest and shuttling among his activated constituents in need of his presence.

April 10

Fewer coughing fits last night, after struggling to teach two PBHS classes at the creek. A fit of afternoon energy drove ambitious meal preparation of eggplant parmesan.  Woke feeling fresh in the morning and went to beach with dog, wondering whether my illness has finally reached a turning point, the antibodies triumphing over the aliens. But there I felt waves of fatigue along with phlegmy cough, suddenly shifting to feeling really old. The same young woman in a swimsuit I’ve seen there several mornings alone sitting on a towel, writing in a journal and reading the bible, had her head bowed on two fists supported by her knees, I assumed in intense prayer.

April 15

Made appointment for this afternoon at Medstop for renewal of cough medicine and follow-up.  Bronchitis symptoms seemed to be subsiding enough for me to return to the bedroom three nights ago, but flared again, so I’m back in exile.  Able to function pretty well during the day and feel driven to exert and accomplish, but then I pay price.  So yesterday I spent the whole day in this chair reading Stalking Shakespeare, a book George lent me at the dinner he and Marta invited us to on Sunday.  It features Stanley Wells prominently along with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in a strange but  engaging memoir about the author’s quest for the true Shakespeare portrait, a goal pursued for centuries by scholars and sleuths.   Also prominent is author’s process through various stages of mental and physical illness and recovery. It made me wistful for the “Shakespearean Encryptions” project I’d abandoned, since I’ve heard nothing more about it since January from Shormi, the editor who invited me to contribute a book chapter.  The abstract I submitted began with discussions of two Shakespeare portraits, Droeshut and Chandos, in order to fit the projected collection’s rubric of “Shakespeare Image.”

Writing this entry was just interrupted by an email from Shormi asking if I was going to treat the stage version of Upstart Crow as well as the TV series, implying that the project was still alive.

At dinner George said he’s not depressed any more since he’s deep into writing a novel: a story about encounters between Melville and Whitman that never happened but could have. The mention of Whitman made both Jan and me pop up with reference to Gary Schmidgall, a friend  and Whitman scholar who also writes on Shakespeare.  George knew and admired a couple of his books.

Two thirds of the way through the book, I wrote to George to express my enthusiasm for the book, and, after determining I’d never sent him the abstract, forwarded that.  He got right back with a message including this:

It really does jibe with your new project. Write that article!

Those sentences agitated me with regret for abandoning the project and not submitting it elsewhere, followed by reflection on my reluctance to offer anything for publication that’s not requested—was it pride or the opposite?

April 26, 2025

At my second return, the P.A. at Medstop prescribed Prednisone to treat the bronchitis, and within two days it was gone. Since then the Creek project has fully taken over, leading up to hosting a lively Mark’s 75^th Birthday party there, which included recruiting relatives to do some some heavy construction.

Next day, the City Biologist and the Creeklands ED asked for photographs of it for an upcoming presentation. It took awhile to come up with the requested “before, during and after” pictures accumulated over ten years.   I was glad to include pictures of Anne Marie’s nature journal entries I had just turned into signage.

Thanks Vivian and Judy for forwarding this information.  The fact that it happens to any of us at this age is to be expected, but that it took place two months ago shocked me into recognition of how close what seems far away can actually be.

Friday January 17 was the day appointed for the harvest, that is, the slaughter, of my favorite sheep of the flock.  Savannah, our wheelchair-bound student in Therapeutic Horticulture, gave her this name and I always preferred it, but she was officially known as Maple. I made no objection to the choice of sacrificial lamb, affirming the need to regard our animals as livestock rather than pets in order to maintain the semblance of an agricultural enterprise and to recoup a portion of the expense of breeding and feeding them. There was also the value of their hides for wool rugs and for me, otherwise a confirmed vegetarian, the opportunity to eat the most delicious meat I’d ever come across and share it with others on festive occasions.

Unlike the farm’s true pet sheep, Tucker, who was bottle fed from birth and raised as a 4H project by a young girl in Paso intending to sell her at the 2020 County Fair  but adopted out to us after the Fair was cancelled by COVID, Capri was never halter broken and like the others, only controllable when following Tucker, who would go wherever his shepherd or shepherdess led.

Whenever I approached Capri’s corral or pasture with a friendly greeting, she’d join the others in turning and walking away.  But if I came in, sat down on an upturned bucket and played my recorder for a few minutes, she’d shyly approach and then nose up to me for some closed-eye skritchy-scratchy followed by stroking on her cheeks and chin.

After a long morning chain-sawing for the trail at Prefumo Creek helped by four students at Pacific Beach High School getting Community Service Credit, I attended a workshop at the farm this afternoon.

https://www.universe.com/events/winter-crafting-skills-series-poetry-workshop-tickets-XZ0FNH

Caroline has been a part-time staff member for a couple of years—a reserved sylphlike presence who’s shown interest in dried flowers, sheep, tanning hides, and making teas.  I learned recently she was a birth doula, nanny for Shane’s baby, extensive traveller.

She wouldn’t take the offered payment from me.

The event resonated with my recent activity to prepare a script for a ten-minute performance of the start of Shakespeare’s Sheep Shearing Shindig in Act4 Scene 4 of The Winter’s Tale  that I’ll propose as part of the program for City Farm’s Sheep Shearing Shindig coming up in May.

Six others attended the two hour session, 5 women and a man, ages mid-twenties to mid-thirties. All gave evidence of commitment to introspection, journaling, reading and writing poetry, probably greater than mine.

Caroline let us know that she’d been to college and graduate school and wrote and published.

At the start, as we sat at tables under the Pergola, she served tea and fresh bread she’d baked and described the workshop’s format: she’d provide prompts, and time for us to write in response at different sites on the farm along with invitations to read poems we’d brought.

I’d printed out Wendell Berry’s, “The Man Born to Farming,” from his  Farming A Handbook  a collection which influenced our decision to move from New York City to an old homestead we bought at the end of the road in British Columbia in 1970, where Jan and I stayed for nine years.

The Man Born to Farming

The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout
to him the soil is a divine drug.  He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing.  He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
That the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
Like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
Descending in the dark?

I was eager to read it to the group and to affirm the continuing truth of his prophetic  pastoral vision, manifested here at City Farm.

When Caroline asked each of us our connection to this place and what motivated our attendance at the workshop, I tried to keep it short, but my veteran involvement with the Farm and its link to my lifelong personal and professional literary engagements wouldn’t let me.

Caroline’s first prompt was to write without lifting your pen about last night’s sleep or a dream. It struck a note:

Sinking into the topper on my hard mattress, grateful for the fatigue and its support that floats me away, and when thoughts about the past day and the morrow crop up demanding attention, counting breaths passing in and out across the anapana spot—what’s left of my abandoned meditation practice—and knowing that by number eight I’ll be gone, and again after the midnight pee, greeting that trusty ritual, this time only up to four, grateful that this is all that’s left, no forcing or aspiration, but only an embrace of what’s not here and what is.

Next prompt involved walking to The Lookout—a location I’d selected and built up years ago, now rarely used except by shitting blackbirds– and to write inspired by its open view of land and sky.

Two mountain ranges surround us,
two watersheds converge in the creek
that fills and drains our life-rich home,
the brooks and springs marked indelible
by green explosions interlacing out and up.

The next prompt was to look at the sheep in the pen nearby and write of your connection.  I used up most of the brief time to get a sweatshirt from my car.  I observed only

Two flocks exchange stares.

Then we went to Plot 1, the immaculate regenerative vegetable garden, to look at a single plant  or creature

January peach blossom two months too early
to meet its welcoming Spring,
petals as pink, pistils and stamens
as swollen as if it had a fruitful life ahead
despite the canker that leaves last season’s
dessicated twigs and flowers on the branch.

Back at the Pergola, Caroline read a poem by her professor and mentor who died young. It started with “Write a question: Yes.”  Write a question was the prompt.

How Long Still?

Richard Stiehl in France I learned last night, died at 97.
Marilyn across the street last week at 93.
Rick in Lund at 75.
Beethoven 57, Shakespeare and Napoleon 52, Mozart 34.
Wendell Berry alive today at 90. I at 82.

Jan studied German in High School and college. A few months before we first met at a poetry seminar at the Free University of Palo Alto in 1966, she returned from a year-long residence at the Stanford-in-Germany campus near Stuttgart which entailed several months of work as a nurse’s aide at Krankenhaus Bethanien, a nursing home founded by Martin Luther’s wife and located directly on the Berlin Wall. She told me later that when she first saw me, dressed in a white shirt, wine colored v-neck sweater and beret, she thought she was back in Swabia.  My being a first generation child of German refugees was one of the factors that drew us together more than those that separated us–a New York Jew and a Presbyterian Mayflower descendant from L.A.

She’d been a leader of the Stanford-in-Germany alumni group that met regularly ever since and had organized their three-day gathering a few years ago in San Luis Obispo.  She’d also been active in the  organization managing yearlong home exchanges since the fifties between San Luis students and those attending a high school also in Stuttgart, the city where both my parents grew up.

Driven by her general interest in genealogy as well as the post World War 2 effort to understand the horrors of the Holocaust, Jan continually collected stories and documents about my family which I generally preferred to ignore or turn away from.  Learning of the German government’s policy to offer reinstatement of German citizenship to those from whom the Nazis had revoked it, as well as to their children and grandchildren, she took on the challenge of assembling the formidable archive of proof required to qualify for this benefit.

After two years of persistent research and correspondance with the German Consulate in L.A. she secured an appointment on October 16 2024 for the four of us to be sworn in and receive our papers.  By then, given the travel and work opportunities throughout Europe they provided along with a possible escape from the shadow of fascism deepening in this country,  we all were excited to meet for the event and celebrate at a nearby German restaurant afterward.

mm