If the morning is cool enough, and it usually is, I can walk from my house straight up the hill and onto the service road. The service road is cut into the side of the mountain and looks out over the whole valley. It’s wide and mostly dirt and pretty flat. It’s hot and dusty in the summer but not in the winter. I can walk from one end to the other in a little over an hour and then I can turn around and go back the way I came or do a loop, which takes me down a paved road past some citrus orchards and a corral with two donkeys and a horse. The horse is old and white with gray spots and the donkeys are friendly, they always come over to talk to me, even when I have my dog. I don’t really know what to say to them but am thrilled that they want to chat, so I just say “Hi, Donkey,” over and over until it’s time to go. Walking home the rest of the way takes another hour or so and eventually brings me closer to town where I start to encounter other people. It’s the expensive, east end of town—still close to the orchards, and a lot of the people I see are either farm workers, loading or unloading their trucks, or old hippies who were lucky enough to buy a house out there before the prices got too crazy, or young models, out for a run, or actors—who have moved here, like so many others, like me, to get away from it all, but still be within driving distance of it. There are musicians and writers too, walking around the orchards, taking breaks from—or maybe getting inspiration for—their work. I see them and also sometimes I see “regular folks,” who have large American flags on their houses or Trump signs on their lawns. This makes me mad until I talk to them and then they’re usually very nice and that makes me even madder. To me, it’s a good mixture—the orchards and the donkeys (and the horse) and the farm workers and the models and the actors and the regular folk. I’ll take it.
The green of the irrigated orchards is kind of an illusion though—it’s a harsh, dry kind of climate here really, and worse than it used to be—the mountains used to at least look lush, or green at least, even though they were mostly covered in chaparral, but then the big fire came and wiped everything out and the vegetation is only just starting to come back. It will come back fully someday but right now the mountains look almost frighteningly stark from a distance. If you go up in them it’s more reassuring, because there’s just so much going on, so much new life, so many hardy plants throwing their weight around—in the way that even in a desert there’s a ton going on, plant-wise, whether you can see it or not.
The climate is great in some ways—it’s never humid and the light is good and there are golden oats and sandstone and sage and nopales. But everything dries up superfast when the hot weather comes and then it’s dusty and kind of barren feeling and it’s bad and you can’t imagine it ever not being bad but in the winter it’s cool again—still mostly dry but there’s enough rain to bring out the scent of the eucalyptus leaves and the olives have turned purple and started to drop and there is just an absolute bounty of acorns and seeing them you know the birds and squirrels will never go hungry and everything feels healthy and rich again.
The dryness bothers me most in the summer because it’s “not how I was raised,” (fifteen miles north, in a temperate coastal paradise where everything is green all year round) but in the spring, after the rains, it’s just unbelievable here. There are always cacti and agave and yucca and bougainvillea and sage and stuff like that. But after it rains there are poppies and iris and periwinkle and clover and nasturtiums, and the cacti bloom, and the Hollyhocks, and the Pride of Madeira. I walk around the tiny, winding streets of the Arbolada, which is a beautiful, kind of rural-feeling neighborhood in the foothills, where there are little, tree-lined paths that lead between the streets, with clear rocky streams tumbling alongside, and wooden footbridges and old sandstone retaining walls, and everything is sparkling, and dewy in the morning, and the mix of wildflowers and cacti with their huge architectural prickly shapes is weird and loopy and to me it’s like nothing so much as being in a Dr Seuss book if Dr. Seuss landscapes were lovely and smelled good as well as being fantastical.
At the top of the Arbolada there’s a big grassy meadow with one sheep in it, who I think of as “Molly,” though she is probably named something else, and a small pond and some chickens and a family of ducks, and a couple of egrets and a heron who visits regularly. I see the heron at other points along the way—wherever there’s shade or water I look for it. I love how under the spreading oaks there might be a stream, and then there will sometimes be so much softness, so much dark green grass and clover and moss, and the air is cooler there, and that’s where I’ll look for the heron, and often find him too, unmoving, grey and blue but somehow still blending in, until I startle him and he lifts off, straight up like a helicopter.
“She had only three large sows, three cows, and also a sheep called Molly.”
-From Chanticleer and the Fox
My soundtrack for a walk. (Also good when cooking, drawing, or writing.)
❤️
I enjoy your writing because it hits me like love letters to California. I'm in Texas and I wish to be back in California.