Portola Hills 2

Posted on August 7, 2003 in Ecotone Neighborhood Photos

I’ve been going out, in bare feet, to trot the searing sidewalks in search of documentary evidence for my contention that I live in a planned unreality. I broke my rule about not photographing at midday, I burnt my feet on the sidewalks because I wanted to offer an honest testimony of the land. I wanted you to see the shapes and the hues of our unnatural community.

Twenty steps was all that it took to find the first bizarre proofs: over a neighbor’s fence I observed the contrast between the landscape we purchase and reform for ourselves and the one that truly suits where we live. I turned my back to the chaparral and beheld weird geometries, slowly being defaced by the spread of molds in the low spots where the puddles form in winter. Finally, I found a most unnatural grassy spot shaded by liquid ambers and other deciduous trees:

I grant you that it is a pretty place, but we pay dearly for it. We who are stuck in all seasons in the lowlands, who cannot ascend to the hills for the cool we crave in the hot summers as the land demands — must pipe in water and plant forests that would not survive here without us.

We Americans are stuck in the imagery of Holstein cows munching away on verdant hills and trees that vainly change their dress for autumn, go nude in the winter, and then redrape themselves in green for the spring and the fall fashion seasons. I’ve watched the chaparral closely and I’ve noted that we have seasons, but our clock is not the clock of Minnesota. Just last night, I read about how insect collectors from the east arrive in California in June only to find nothing to collect except a few moths! They’ve missed our season when the beetles and the small moths breed. The naive region-foreign entomologists leave, believing that they’ve come to a dead land.

You have to live here a few years to know the seasons and to revel in them. I was born here, so I have never had to unlearn the natural calendar that is so firmly reinforced in the minds of most Americans by wall calendars and sales. I have learned to rejoice when I see the first green in January, beneath the snow of the San Gabriels and the San Bernardinos. Summer, as I wrote a year ago, is our season of death. We mourn for a long time — from July until December, but the resurrection of January is a great thing to behold and the flowers of February — particularly when the deserts have had a wet year — a miracle.

You who have never watched the changes and who have not studied the modestly variegated hues of our ridges do not know how marvelous a thing subtlety can be.

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