the parsley.blog.landscape.life

Learning to live off hundreds of species of plants and animals required an attention to color, light, shape, and motion that must have bordered on obsession.  No wonder we began painting in such fine detail so early in the course of human events.  It is as if we were brimming with observation and had to let it all out.  The way we preserved our species during our formative years not only made us hunters and gatherers, but painters, singers, and poets…

- Richard Manning, Against the Grain

at one time, the Los Angeles basin was home to hunter-gatherers.   this seemingly barren ‘semi-desert’ produced such an abundance of food that agriculture wasn’t necessary, at least not to support the levels of population that existed then.

almost all physical traces of these people have been removed from the landscape, and the culture of the Tongva (known as Gabrielinos) suffered a very early and very thorough obliteration.  the Tongva don’t seem to be quite as well-documented as some other Southern California native groups (there is a lot more literature to be found about the Chumash, for instance) but there are still survivors, and a fair amount is known about how they lived.

a little while ago, I went on a quest to find out more about the native plants that people ate and used here, and the way they lived in relationship to the plants.  at the San Gabriel Mission one day in October, there was a native plant expert with a display of plants and native foods, and I went to see her.  the display was quite beautiful:

I asked her right away:  Have you eaten acorns?  because I’ve never eaten acorns!  there are no acorns at the health food stores!  it was the most important food for native people almost everywhere in coastal california, and yet we have completely forgotten how to eat them.

she said:  yes, I have.  frankly, they are pretty bland!  but then she went on to describe all the different plants and seeds that might be used as seasonings; and how some plants might even be burned, and the ashes used as seasonings.  about this she knows probably more than anybody; but I imagine the total body of knowledge is lost.

one thing we know about hunter-gatherers is that they typically eat hundreds of species of plants, whereas most agriculturalists live off about a half-dozen at most.  even our modern, affluent “varied diet,” in which we foodies might congratulate ourselves on picking up kumquats and cherimoyas at the farmer’s market and actually knowing what to do with them, consists of such an impoverished few kinds of plants compared to what hunter-gatherers know of their landscape and what it can provide for them.

I read in the LA Times that today is the blessing of the animals down on Olvera Street.  this must be when the Catholics do it; I recall from my Episcopal upbringing an observance called Rogation Sunday, when we brought our pets in to church for a blessing; it’s held on a different date, later in the spring.  of course, as you can imagine, hijinks ensued.   I remember trying to bring gerbils, and cats on leashes, and lizards and various things;  did we ever bring fish in a jar?  we probably wanted to, but the parents may have vetoed the effort.

of course, originally the observation of a rogation day was a blessing of the crops, of our agricultural efforts – plants and animals.  “rogation” is one of those oddball words you’d only know if you have a churchy background;  it was a humble supplication to God not to come down and destroy everything, which so frequently tended to happen.  the observation of rogation days was accompanied by a solemn procession around the boundaries of the parish.    rather than a cute Keystone Kops scene with kids and their pets, it must have been an occasion of the greatest solemnity and anxiety.  the whole agricultural enterprise has always been so fragile and vulnerable; it is as if we balanced a rock precariously on top of another rock and then prayed that strong winds would not blow it down.

consider how we live in los angeles: at the base of steep granite mountains, prone to violent flooding, like looking up the barrel of  a cannon; in the midst of extremes of dry and wet, drought alternating with torrential rain alternating with harsh desert wind, and prone to wildfires, made much worse by the changes in vegetation we have wrought on the hillsides and our habit of building up into the canyons. we’ve channelized our rivers to preserve all our investments on their banks, magnifying the effects of the floods when they come.  we’ve paved, and we suffer the consequences every time it rains.

surely a little rogation is in order. we have put ourselves in a highly vulnerable position.

the tongva, somehow, survived all the violence of this environment, and by all accounts were fairly peaceful and content.  they must have had rough years, but they knew how to work around them in ways that are no longer available to us.  they did not depend on the massed monocultures of industrial agriculture; they had options, not just plan A and plan B, but hundreds of plans, different paths through the rough times.

it’s not my intention to be sentimental about the native americans’ mystical balance with nature; there is a lot there that I don’t have access to, and I wouldn’t claim to have the right to go on and on about it.

but I recognize, in myself, the hunger for knowledge, images, sensory experiences, as being tied to those primal evolutionary urges; when we evolved as hunter-gatherers, as Manning describes, we evolved the ability to collect, store, catalogue, cross-reference, and synthesize information gathered through all of our senses.  and we are, perhaps, happiest when we are exercising those abilities to their fullest.

the Rogation Sunday prayers ask for mercy, but also for justice; it seems to me there is no justice without understanding.  we lost a lot of living things when we paved; but we also lost a lot of knowledge, perhaps never to be regained.

originally posted December 31, 2008

I’ve just returned from Denver again, this time not just for Christmas but for a family reunion on the occasion of my mom’s 70th birthday, just two weeks after my 40th. a wonderful time was had by all; and I am now happy to be home.

the connections with Colorado go way back on my mom’s side of the family, many of them involving a certain summer camp in the Rockies where my grandparents first met; several generations of the family later went to the same camp and some in the family have settled in Denver over the years.  my mom moved to Colorado the year I graduated college and has been there ever since.  the love of this wild mountain landscape is in my bones too.

but…the suburban sprawl is not my favorite thing about Denver.   you can look up and see the sky and the mountains doing all kinds of dramatic things, especially in the winter when it’s always storming in the high country:

but at the ground level…chain stores and cul-de-sacs for miles and miles.

the first night that the whole family rolled in from their various home bases – New Mexico, Utah, Texas; nobody’s left in the old hometown in Iowa any more – we all went to a nice chain restaurant that serves, among other things, bisonburgers.  some of my young cousins were not at all sure how they felt about eating something so exotic, and opted for chicken instead.

speaking for myself, I love bison. my fascination with bison goes way back, but probably mostly dates to a time I read a book by Dan O’Brien called “Buffalo for the Broken Heart,” in which the author describes how after years of frustration trying to raise cattle in the harsh climate of a South Dakota ranch, he came to be a bison rancher instead. he had just gone through a painful divorce, and called his ranch the “Broken Heart Ranch”; he found that the animals native to that landscape were better adapted to it, and the landscape to the animals, leading to the ultimate healing of a damaged piece of land.

without going into a long screed about bioregionally appropriate agriculture (and believe me, I have one ready) it might suffice to say that although I have eaten bison many times (Lindner Bison, Santa Monica Farmer’s Market on Saturdays, Hollywood Farmer’s Market on Sundays)…I have rarely had the opportunity to see them, you know, roaming.

one day before the big party, in all our errand-running, we got lost and came across yet another neighborhood of hideous mcmansions:

adorned with a fine bronze sculpture at its entrance:

oh, says my mom, we must be near that park where they have the bison.

me:  WHERE?? CAN WE GO SEE THEM??

well, we might get back here later if we have time.

lots of errand running and family time.  not a lot of excursion time.  but we did sneak in one little excursion to the Colorado Historical Society Museum, which was very good and we ought to have taken more time to see it.  out front, glowering at us:

and my desire to see the buffalo roaming only intensified.

the party went off well, most of the extended family departed the next day, and my sister and brother-in-law had one day left in Denver.  everyone else had forgotten the intention to go see the bison, but I assure you I had not.

we found the place all right:

but the bison were not there.  we speculated with someone we met in the parking lot that they had been moved, since a new access road was being built in the park. there was nobody inside the fence but a lot of prairie dogs.

well, you might have to take my word for it, but there are prairie dogs in that shot.

nevertheless, Daniels Park turned out to be a nice spot to have discovered. if you looked to the other side, you could see a grand vista of the mountains, and a valley in front, which my mom said was the Plum Creek valley.

of course, it was better if you didn’t turn around to see what was right on the other side, creeping along every ridge top:

down there in the plum valley, said my mom, I know a really nice little church with a cemetery around it.  you might like to see it.

of course I would.  my family knows how I am about cemeteries.

so, we drove down into Sedalia, a real place with houses and ranches not yet stamped out by a developer’s cookie cutter, and a real church, St-Martin-In-The-Field:

and all around it, a little rural cemetery, with all the quirkiness that such places can acquire over the years of people being there and caring about it, and not buying every gravestone out of a catalog.  some of the markers were homemade, a few were very elaborate:

the little sign on the neck of the bass reads: “Most people go to their graves with their music still in them.”

realizing that we were losing the light, I ran around as quickly as I could to photograph everything; another cemetery for my collection, and one that I really liked. although we had the place to ourselves on this cold December afternoon, it felt like a place visited and loved by the community, a real place.

I headed home from Denver to Los Angeles the next day, getting stuck in the Denver airport for a while waiting for a delayed flight: I sat in a patch of sun I found at the end of the terminal, reading “A Sand County Almanac” and thinking about what makes a place a place.

every time I start to think I’m only loosely connected to Los Angeles, a place where I wound up for reasons that have now vanished from my life, I come home from a trip and realize how the light and the crappy streets and the smells of the ocean and the chaparral plants have rooted themselves in my heart.  somehow, if only for myself, I created Los Angeles as a real place.

I’m cooking bison for new year’s tomorrow.  I had to go to Whole Foods to get it and it’s not Lindner’s; but it will still make my tiny apartment smell amazing all day.  Ten hours in the slow cooker with red wine, garlic, onion, salt and pepper, rosemary, thyme, and a couple strips of bacon.  I recommend it as good for many ills, possibly even including broken hearts.

my thanksgiving dinner in absolutely-not-near-anything, colorado.

about an hour and a half out of Denver. a friend of my mom’s had us over for thanksgiving dinner.  she lives way out on the high plains, at about 7000 feet elevation, just where the ponderosa pines start to creep into the landscape.

this friend lives a semi-homesteader life, due to her health issues she has raised most of her own food for years now, and shares five acres with goats, sheep, guinea hens, rabbits, ducks, and lest one forget, turkeys.  these are the ones we didn’t eat:

the one we did eat was fantastic. plus, all kinds of other things, not 100% backyard produce, but close.  greens from a cold frame, even in this bleak-looking November landscape.  (I understand the high plains wildflowers are spectacular, but I’ve never been out that way at the right time to see them.)

the goats and sheep had no interest in us, but were VERY interested in the trough at feeding time.  some of the sheep had two goats at a time standing on their backs.

this was a quick visit to colorado.  there will be a longer one at christmas.  most of the visit I spent at my mom’s house in the massive blanditude of the Denver suburbs, trying to get her set up with her new HDTV and DVD player (the digital transition is coming!!) and help her figure her way around the brave new world of digital photography.  she’s been going through years and years of family photos and slides and sending slides off to be digitized, but learning to manage the digital files is a whole other thing.  (let those among us who are perfectly organized with our digital files cast the first stone.)  and…there are a LOT of family photos, it seems we are a family of shutterbugs, and my strange addiction to my camera no longer seems so strange when I contemplate this.

a few last minute instructions on how to use flickr.com, and I’m out the door again for my flight home. I had last-minute tickets, the only affordable ones I could find had weird connections, making what should be a short LAX-DIA hop into a slightly more elaborate connection through San Diego on the way out, and Santa Barbara on the way back.

I actually have no fear of the little puddle-jumper airplanes, I sort of love them.  less insulation from the actual experience of flying; the better view of the propeller I have, the happier I am. however, the LAX-SAN hop was rendered much less enjoyable by the fact that the guy sitting opposite me lost his breakfast halfway through the flight.  I think last night’s dinner and possibly yesterday’s lunch may have been included too. it is at moments like these that one becomes aware of the very limited supply of air circulation on a small plane.

but, last night’s return through Santa Barbara (had to look that one up – SBA) was much less eventful.  somehow my travels had never taken me through SBA before.  it is unbelievably miniature! it looks like an old-timey mission-style restaurant.  I half expected the TSA guys to be wearing peasant blouses and describing the enchilada special.  well, it turns out there is not quite that much of the romance of Alta California to be found here, but nevertheless it is pleasant to wait for your connecting flight outdoors.  my very bad pic:

use your imagination; there is a propeller in this shot.

then, across the blade runner vision of the san fernando valley, and home.