Changes on A Fossil Dune

Posted on July 17, 2002 in Neighborhood

The dirt that we have here in Portola Hills is nearly white. Back in the Eocene, I’m told, the area was sand dunes. When you sit in the garden of the Tuscany Grill and look at the hills, you can make out the wind shaped contours of the old dunes, now hardened and covered with soft chaparral. The City of Lake Forest is engaged in breaking loose some of the fossilized grains and rolling them out into a noveau landscape they call “Concourse Park”. They’ve got concrete blocks, small steel superstructures, and a few stray pallettes laying around near the fence.The ground’s scarred with the tracks of heavy machinery. The site looks like a beach today — as it once was — but without the waves or the steady wind from Catalina you get twenty miles from here. If enough ice melts from global warming and the continental shelf falls a few hundred feet, this could become sea side property.

I’m happy for the park and look forward to spending some of my time there. I have no idea what stage of development it is in except I know that they haven’t started the conversion from Southern Californian vacant lot to New England pasture yet. They seem to be just repetitiously running the tractors and the trucks over the plain, packing it down and shoring up the sagging bluffs.

My neighbor Tim is not happy about the change. Tim is a thirty year old snow board representative who lives across the street. He claims to have broken a dozen or so bones. I’ve seen him in casts and braces three or four times since we moved here in 1999. Tim’s unhappy because when the site was a vacant lot he and his dirt biking friends took shovels and built bumps and troughs to pedal over. There used to be a big crack leading towards the center of the lot from one of the corners that had a challenging groove built into it. You jumped a bump, made a hairpin turn, and then rumbled down the narrow gully. Now the city plows and scrapes the irregularities out. They round the edges, raise a few faux knolls and hills, and fill the chasm that Tim and his friends used to enter Whiting Canyon like a gate to hell.

Tim and his pals loved the lot. Now he’s looking at a site farther down the hill. He’s going to have to break the crust of a shallow asphalt percolation or build his course around it. I suppose he’s looking at it like I saw the filling in of my favorite vacant lot back in San Bernardino with a convalescent hospital and apartments. Australian aborigines soak the features of the earth they walk upon in their mythology. Even rough badlands — dried splashes of mud — receive histories from the old men who remember the wisdom of the tribe. I knew the histories for the cracks in the earth, the trenches boys dug, and for the single mulberry tree that I pillaged for leaves that my pet silkworms devoured. I suspect the temporary boys and the eternal boys like Tim knew the little ruts and rolls of the lot like I did, in a way without names, a familiarity of pure form.

One of the next phases in the breaking of the wild character of Tim’s motorless speedway is the laying out of the lawns, a few weeks when the cream turns to cappuchino and the whole neighborhood smells like a feedlot. Gardeners shall replace the construction workers. When the project ends in the fall, there will be alien grass to mow, slim saplings to prune when they become unruly, and picnic tables to wash clean after summer time bacchanals. I hope they have shaded benches overlooking the adjacent wildrness when it is done. I shall bring sandwiches, then, and let my eyes dip and rise over the sharp sandstone divides and deep crevices that you can see from the rim.