the parsley.blog.landscape.life

from “Song of the Open Road,” by who else but Walt Whitman

for the fourth of july and all that

Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

The earth — that is sufficient;

I do not want the constellations any nearer;

I know they are very well where they are;

I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

You flagg’d walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges!

You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you timber-lined sides! you distant ships!

You rows of houses! you window-pierc’d facades! you roofs!

You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards!

You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much!

From all that has been near you, I believe you have imparted to yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to me;

You gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings!

From the living and the dead I think you have peopled your impassive surfaces, and the spirits thereof would be evident and amicable with me.

You doors and ascending steps! you arches!

O highway I travel! O public road! do you say to me, Do not leave me?

Do you say, Venture not? If you leave me, you are lost?

Do you say, I am already prepared — I am well-beaten and undenied — adhere to me?

O public road!  I say back, I am not afraid to leave you — yet I love you;

You express me better than I can express myself;

You shall be more to me than my poem.

I think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open air, and all great poems also;

I think I could stop here myself, and do miracles;

(My judgements, thoughts, I henceforth try by the open air, the road;)

I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever beholds me shall like me;

I think whoever I see must be happy.

I learned a new word from my sister’s (long anticipated, UTTERLY BRILLIANT) art history PhD dissertation – ‘staffage.’  I am sure it’s a completely routine piece of jargon for art historians, but somehow I, in my only dilettante-ish exposure to the field, had missed it up until now.

classmates at the Santa Barbara courthouse, 2006

“staffage” is the word used to refer to those little people or animals stuck somewhere at the bottom of a landscape painting,  to give the thing scale and convince you that it is the habitation of living creatures.   sometimes they will be helpfully pointing toward the thing you’re supposed to look at.  sometimes they are deer or cattle and will not be helpfully pointing at anything.  in a Bierstadt it pretty much always seems to be a couple of deer, not very convincing ones either.

in my own ill-educated way I find this word somewhat hilarious.  its etymology must have some kind of common root with “staff” as in hired help, which irresistibly leads to mental pictures of paid hollywood extras in the corner of a painting, calculating their timesheets and hoping for their union cards.

nevertheless, it’s a concept we in the world of architecture certainly understand – the need for figures to give scale and life to the image of a place.

my teacher, watercoloring, at the Santa Barbara Courthouse, 2006

what a pleasure to look down from on high and see miniature people, living what suddenly seem to be miniature lives.  when my graphics class went to the Santa Barbara courthouse a couple years ago, I was up in the tower almost the whole time, watching the little figures of my classmates move around and do their site analysis, and my teacher calmly watercoloring on the sidewalk while the class blundered around.  a nice lofty feeling, which of course belies the fact that I was in no way on a higher plane than my classmates.  metaphorically I was down at the same ground level as the rest of them, if not somewhat lower than most.

Will Rogers State Historic Park, polo field, 5/10/09

today I arrived at the Will Rogers park too late to see the polo – they play most weekends in the summer, and it’s a dreamlike experience to watch the ponies fly up and down the polo field, not seeming to touch the ground despite the thundering noise they make – and instead plunged into the morass of a million Mother’s Day picnics.

tons of family groups, a few soccer games, some unsuccessful kite-flying, and really a bit more cacophony than I had been bargaining for today.  so, I fled up the trail.

Backbone Trail, Topanga State Park, 5/10/09

you don’t have to climb very far to get to a state more nearly approaching isolation, but there were still plenty of people going back and forth on the trail, on foot and mountain bikes.  I overheard many snatches of avid discussion.

what to do if you meet a mountain lion.  what was it like the first time someone fell in love, I mean really adult love, in college.  what the problem was with someone’s knee.

Backbone Trail, Topanga State Park, 5/10/09

what someone was going to do to fix up their place and get a renter.  four little curly-haired girls and their – father? – getting them all lined up to march and sing a song.

lots of moms.  one elderly woman wearing a corsage, right there on the trail.  lots of panting dogs, working really hard to be obliging and get up that trail with their people, if it killed them.

Backbone Trail, Topanga State Park, 5/10/09

polite mountain bikers saying “excuse me” as I stood aside on the trail for them.  plenty of figures in this landscape; no splendid isolation to be found.

I got up as far as the bridge:

Backbone Trail, Topanga State Park, 5/10/09

and had it to myself a good long while; but then along came two teenagers.  she had dark hair and he had flaming red hair and a yarmulke.  they took up a position at the other end of the bridge.

I could tell you what I think they were really talking about, but the conversation was all about food.  there was some mention of pie, and of bottled water, and which brands are better.  is there really a difference? they agreed there probably wasn’t.  and then they talked about yogurt.  he said he had no problems eating yogurt.  she allowed as how yogurt is really good for you.  they both agreed that some kinds of yogurt are really too sour.  I had to leave; they were breaking my heart.

I went back down into the crowds of moms and babies and extended families and their long discussions about where everyone was going for dinner,  and lay on the polo field berm like a corpse, watching the soccer game with one half-open eye.  seemed that everyone was working hard at populating the landscape, except me.

Aloes at the literal zoo - San Diego Zoo

when I took Plant Systematics in college, purely for unscientific fun (I was an American studies major, and didn’t have any requirements to fulfil) I did OK, but I was a killer at the quizzes.  we were given plants to identify, but only had to get the family right, not genus or species.  nothing to it, once I had learned all the family names (and Zingiberaceae is still fun to say), because I was a plant geek from a young age, and knew a lot of plants already, enough to kind of recognize a lot of their characteristic forms.

the proper, scientific way to go about plant identification is to count the sepals and so forth, and there would be a ‘plant key’ that would give you the procedure for doing the steps in the proper order, but usually I’d just look at the plant and say “Looks like the fig family,” and move on.   my professor called it ‘identification by gestalt,’ and while she didn’t exactly approve, she couldn’t mark me down for it either.

I still I.D. plants that way – the overall quick impression, the form, the broad strokes, the personality.  the only drawing class I truly enjoyed in design school was a tree-drawing elective.  we drew leaves and twigs, extreme closeups of flowers, extremely fast gesture drawings, extremely slow contour drawings.  I spent hours sitting under a leafless weeping willow at Descanso Gardens – it’s not so easy to find weeping willows in Southern California, but I got a bug in my ear about wanting to draw this specific tree, so I did – tracing the long dangling branches up, and down, and up, and down…and finally coming to understand how a weeping tree is structured. it’s actually a vase shape underneath, like an American elm, and then the branches dangle down from there.  I was quite pleased with myself for this discovery; anatomizing trees made me feel like a renaissance art student, without having to engage in all that grave-robbing.

plant geekery comes from somewhere deep in the bones. I can’t explain it; there were some garden aficionados in my family but my parents weren’t among them.

of course landscape architecture is only partly about plant geekery, and some people skip the plant geekery altogether and just focus on urban design, but most of the people in my field have some degree of the geekery, like the friend I went to the Huntington Gardens with, and who was only too happy to make a detour through the succulent show.  you know, like a dog show or cat show, only with succulents.  with succulents, a lot of the time, you just have to know what family they are from: the first one here, the ever fabulous Euphorbia obesa, most people would never guess is in the same genus as a poinsettia, but it is.  you can see why the obsessive collecting urge is particularly strong in people who are into succulents.  could there possibly be a purpose for all these forms, besides pure weirdness? some alien visitation?

I heard recently about an online project called the Galaxy Zoo.  apparently, astronomers who need to classify large numbers of galaxies by shape decided to put up the pictures on a web site and let volunteers comb through them and classify them, looking for the patterns.  the scientist who gave the interview that I heard said that people are much, much better than computers at pattern recognition, and could do this work much faster and more accurately than computers could; the volunteer laypeople who are classifying the galaxies have even made some new discoveries, noticing certain strange patterns that repeated but had as yet  no explanation.

the innate ability to recognize patterns, I think, must be part and parcel of the evolutionary heritage I alluded to in an earlier post, called rogation – the fact that we evolved as hunter-gatherers with an exquisitely tuned ability to read our surroundings, landscapes, living things, and find the details and the patterns we needed to know about in order to survive.

long ago I read a theory about why people slow down to stare at auto accidents – I’m sure most people assume this is some ghoulish quirk of human nature, some evidence that we are morally faulty.  but this author said, We look at auto accidents because we want to know what happened.  we want to analyze the causes, look for the chain of events.  because on some level we know, there safely in our own cars, that we are vulnerable to the same fate at every moment, and we need to gather information about how it happens.

this doesn’t mean, of course, that everyone is truly attentive to the information they subconsciously feel they need, or that we make the best use of this information, or that we have learned that we really ought to take seriously the fact that we are steering thousands of pounds of metal and glass, and get those phones off our ears; just that the urge to gather the information is there within us.  sometimes I think we feel ourselves disconnected from the reasons why we look for patterns, and lose that exquisitely tuned attentiveness that we were meant to have.

of course I spend much of my time looking for patterns, both cultural and natural.  cities carry their own set of traces, patterns, scars, and evidence; the term they teach us in landscape architecture school is “palimpsest,” the term for a parchment or other writing surface that gets erased and then used over and over again.  of course, nobody actually knows this word except medieval monks, word geeks, and landscape architecture students; I wish I knew a better one to explain what I’m getting at, what I’m looking for in the patterns underneath the patterns.

this year, I very much regret that I will not be getting out to the Antelope Valley to see my special obsession, the poppies and all their friends.  the poppies have had a good spring, apparently, but have peaked early; and I’ve been working too many hours to find the time to drive out to the desert before my imminent trip to North Carolina.  fear not, though, I have enough pictures from my last few visits to keep recycling them for a long, long, time.

last year I went to see the poppies with a very scientifically minded friend; she is a much more knowledgeable photographer than I am (which, trust me, is faint praise for her very considerable abilities) and also much more interested in taking extreme close-ups than I am; I’m usually taking longer views of the landscape.   the scale of the macro photograph is not as useful to me, as beautiful and interesting as it is.

nevertheless, my friend was very happy to join with me in a deeply geeky exercise of looking at the poppies and the other flowers and trying to see the patterns in where they chose to grow;  some on north slopes, some seemingly needing to be more protected by the wind, some perhaps in drier areas or areas where the soil composition changed, and the elusive owl clover, that we couldn’t find anywhere until I remembered where they were before, in a soggier part of the reserve.

every year the mix is a little different, depending on exactly how much rain fell, and when, and the temperature, and a bunch of other factors that we probably couldn’t realize right away.  some years there’s more variety, some years there are huge stands of almost nothing but poppies.  sometimes there’s a yellow poppy in among the orange ones.

chasing these details and trends up and down the hillsides is endless fun; but then you have to step back and take in the overwhelming impact of the whole, which could easily break your camera, or let your mind abruptly veer off its scientific course.

science is long, hard, slow work.  so is art, for that matter. but some things are just a whack upside the head, an instant moment of recognition. an identification by gestalt.

you may later spend a lifetime figuring out what use to make of that moment; but it takes less time than we can measure to recognize when we have found something we really, really need to see.  I believe we’re built for that.

I felt lower than low this morning.  I mean lower than the sea level I usually wake up at.  coffee didn’t help. my computer didn’t help, stubbornly refusing to deliver good news or anything else that would break up the black clouds.

so I headed north, and followed the scent of orange blossoms to the Santa Clara River Valley, and found myself in Fillmore, where the oranges and orange blossoms are going at it full speed, very determined to make their point about the golden promise of California, as if that idea weren’t already a little shopworn in the century before last.

but when I pulled off the road to get my orange blossom pictures at the height of noon, completely unexpectedly (I swear there wasn’t a sign)  I found myself pulling into a little parking lot that looked like something was open to the public.  I wandered into what turned out to be a state fish hatchery.

with concrete pens completely stuffed with rainbow trout, in various stages of fishy adolescence.

I didn’t know quite how to take this unexpected discovery -should I be cheered up by the total unexpected serendipity of getting to visit the fish?  or depressed by their imprisonment?  or, perhaps, hungry for a nice trout dinner?  (what a SHOCKING idea.  I would never poach an Official State Trout.  The state has enough troubles without me boosting its fish.)

but after I got done visiting the trout, I remembered that there were orange groves to look at, and maybe, I thought, I could hunt up a few wildflowers too.

first, though, it turned out that downtown Fillmore was hosting a festival of train enthusiasts, with full-size real trains on the tracks, and various scales of little trains as well.

in the shed where the model trains were racing around the track, well they were racing at whatever weird scale they were at (model train scales make no sense to those of us who are used to architectural scales…)

there were cheerful old citrus crate labels on the walls, with their visions of yellow and orange PROGRESS, and apparently lemons are speedier, wiser things than you and I ever suspected they were.

and of course there had to be tiny orange groves too, a model train Utopia would be sadly lacking without them.

but after visiting the little trains, I suddenly took a notion to head north again, up into the very inviting-looking mountains that loomed overhead.  there was a sign, just one sign, pointing north to the Los Padres National Forest; I followed it, and found myself climbing above the orange and avocado trees, on a road called Goodenough Road.

good enough to get me started into the mountains, I guess, but shortly after that there stopped being any signs, and soon after that, there practically stopped being a road.  but being the foolish and stubborn itchyfoot that I am, I kept on going, although my tiny green car has done nothing to deserve being beat up by a road that really called for four wheel drive and white knuckles.

It turns out that for getting you to slow down and pay attention, sheer terror works about as well as any other mindfulness technique.

it turned out I was in the Sespe Wilderness, near the condor refuge (and I think I did see some condors.) not very well marked or well paved.  I kept going till I hit a trailhead and a dead end, and turned around there, for once in my life obeying the directive not to hike alone.  it was seriously deserted up there.

the national forests are not very well-funded and certainly not well-patrolled; you just never know when you’re going to run across a drug operation or perhaps a satanic ritual or two.  no such shenanigans going on up in the Sespe today; I did see shotgun shells where such things oughtn’t have been, but otherwise it was pretty much just me, a few guys in trucks now and again, and the condors.  totally quiet except for the wind.  that’s southern California for you: from the traffic jams to the cozy orange groves to the windy wilderness in just half a day.

so finally, back down the canyon, back through the orange groves and the tree farms, back south through the santa susanas, then eventually back down through the santa monicas and into the malibu end-of-the-surfing-day traffic jam.

back home with a bag of oranges and a very dusty little car.  back to the gym to make up for the hiking I didn’t do.  pulled a few muscles.  good enough.