Valyermo – God’s Country (3)

Posted on October 2, 2002 in Photos Travels - So Cal

The timid monk need not fear frequent intrusions by female visitors. The monastery stands on 1500 acres of land. More than 200 yards, a low barbed wire fence, and prickly scrub separate the cloister proper from the road.

Valyermo Canyon harbors solitude. Sharp bluffs overspread by a raw cover of sagebrush, cholla cactus, and joshua trees funnel the waters of a slender bottomland towards an absorbent alluvial fan. The monks have built a pond and planted a few cottonwoods and eucalypts to grab what they can of the runoff before it is lost to the desert.

The tract is the kind of place where a few buildings and a crowd of festival goers can be concentrated while surrounding it with a solitude that can only be had when the subdivisions are kept away. I noticed, on the road winding up, a grotesque, amorphous golf course that had smaragdine mottling and buff sand holes. The Benedictines, who had come from Belgium by way of China, chose to plant only a few trees for shade and allow the rest of the land to reinvent itself as a place untouched by plough or irritation or the teeth of cattle. Their lenten sacrifice gave it more beauty, I think, than the desparate attempt to turn a piece of the nearby chaparral into a clump of manufactured Scottish moraines and eskers.

Click here or on the picture.