Upland 1. The higher portions of a region, district, farm, etc. 2. The country in the interior.
It took a long time to get here. In October of 1994 I bought a big map, spread it on the floor, laid a yardstick across it, and drew a straight line from Vancouver, where I lived then, to southern California. I packed my car and followed that line as close as I could. On the sixth morning, October 12, I woke in a tent near San Jacinto and was on the road early. By late morning, driving south on highway 79, I came into country that opened wide and deep in golden curves. I was on my way somewhere else but I made a note. Sixteen years later, I was camping one weekend in September and looked in at a realty office across from the breakfast café. The realtor pulled up a Craigslist posting for this house. It turned out that I signed the lease on October 12.
Now I’m here and I’m not the young woman I was. I’m at the edge of an open space. It’s a perch, a shelf, a chance. It’s quite bare and lone. It’s not mine and I can’t stay long.
There is the land and there’s the house. There’s here and there’s then, there, other places with a similar meaning. There are my years. There’s what I know about the double of anything, darkly translucent to my right, the unsolid mythic double view.
a type of lightly forested grassland … maintained historically through wildfires set by lightning or humans, grazing, low precipitation, and/or poor soil
Among hardwood trees, oaks are uniquely resistant to fire. … The two principal fuels of an oak savanna fire are grasses and oak leaves. Oak leaves contain flammable chemicals; in addition, oak leaves remain in curled positions on the forest floor, so that fire moves readily from one leaf to another.
Intact oak savannas are now one of the rarest plant communities on earth.
Most oaks of full tree size are more than one hundred years old. Few saplings survive because grazing cattle decimate them.
In San Diego County many coast live oak occur along small arroyos in the coastal region. In the portion of the county inland from the coast, coast live oaks occur on the margins of large valleys, on north-facing slopes and filling smaller alluvial valleys. In some of the foothill areas, Engelmann oak occurs on rolling hilltops as well as mixing in with coast live oak. Farther inland, above 3,500 to 4,000 feet, the California black oak becomes a common species. In the higher mountains, the canyon live oak also grows. At the time of pre-settlement of San Diego by Europeans, it is estimated that there were roughly 80,500 acres of open oak stands on rolling hills and interior mesas.
Coast live oaks can be identified by their dark green, curled-under leaves and long, pointed acorns.
Black oak is deciduous, has golden leaves in fall. Local Natives found them to be the best-tasting of acorns.
Engelmann oaks are easily identified by large, flat, oval leaves that are bluish-green.
Acorns are food for woodpeckers, jays, squirrels and deer. The trees also provide shelter and nesting areas for nuthatches, owls, swallows, and small animals.
Also common in open oak woodlands in the interior foothills are scrub oak, toyon, white sage, buckwheat, and fast-growing annuals, many of them, like wild oats, non-native.
March 17
… hears the first music of England in the fine patter of rain on the oak leaves
oak, Oake, Oke, OE ac, OE aecern, of the beech family
The Oaks of Albion is Blake.
We may identify here a sense of belonging which has more to do with location and with territory.
tree … measure of continuity and ownership … beyond the memory of anyone now living … that sense of place, of literal rootedness, which is one of the great themes of the English imagination
The great oak itself descended into the other world.
In an old English carol Jesus talks to a tree while still in his mother’s womb.
I was cut down, roots on end …
I was raised up, as a road …
I was all wet with blood
Peter Ackroyd 2002 Albion: the origins of the English imagination Chatto and Windham
family of blue-leafed oaks … usually narrow, blunt, untoothed dull blue-green leaves
found only in Southern California
Mesa Grande and the Santa Ysabel Valley support the largest remaining expanse of Engelmann oak woodland habitat
October 17
Last night a bit before sunset we walked a ways past the cattleguard and sat on an edge of the asphalt to look down a shallow crease toward more slopes, more oaks, more rocks. The sun went down orange behind us.
Under its high canopy, from its carpet of broad, lacy shadow, the blond slopes falling away in curves and creases. On the opposite slope, far away tiny cattle. On the nearer slope cattle too, and the smooth looping asphalt of new road laid grey through yellow. Behind us where we had come before dawn to see the eastern sky color was the house in its grove and beyond it, uphill, thick dark oak forest.
There’s a thick-trunked grandmother oak up against the treehouse windows of the west bedroom, another over the driveway at the front door.
October 30
A lot of crows making a racket down on one of the yellow humps, now flying west with an occasional bark. Oak shadows six or seven times their height. I think those two peaks northeast of Volcan – if that is Volcan – are burnt, they have a look of grey whiskers.
Whole lot more crows. Some little thing downhill chipping steadily in a tiny high voice. Quiet tapping I think in one of the pines. The hawk is cruising. Another little thing in the canopy above me saying chut-t-t. Something with a tuft and a long beak on the snag at the top of the pine. Something bigger saying braa-aa and answered from across the way. Raucous, must be jays.
Now the crickets have begun. Now dogs or coyotes to the southeast. Powdery mauve over the distance. This ridge is the north edge of a vast shallow bowl. It isn’t dark enough for rabbits yet.
The branches that curve down, that I see in front of me in small-leafed black cut-out, give so pleasing a sense of layered depth.
Now the last pink light is gone even from Volcan. The bird on the pine snag is smaller and silent. Orange and pink clotted behind the three lowest Coulters, their Japanese profiles. More barking higher up.
March 4
While I was away for two weeks it snowed heavily twice. When I got back there were large branches down all over the yard and even on the roof, especially under the oaks. The iron chair’s oak is fine but the tree next to my bed has lost a quarter of its canopy and even at night looks rumpled and distressed, with branch-stumps here and there and a broken limb hanging loose.
It was here, under an oak. Rocks gently. The high back supports perfectly.
29 October
Twilight watch. I’m out on the iron chair and have just seen the new moon between fine branches.
A yellow streak between flamingo smears. Mountain cut-outs different distances of milky grey-blue. One bird saying rrrk quietly. Yellow hills lightly furred. Oaks’ shadows six or seven times their height.
Whole lot more crows. Some little thing downhill chipping steadily in a tiny high voice. Quiet tapping I think in one of the pines. The hawk is cruising. Little thing in the canopy above me saying chut-t-t. Something with a tuft and a long beak on the snag at the top of the pine. Something bigger saying braa-aa and answered from across the way. Jays.
Now the crickets have begun behind me in the draw. It’s dark enough so rabbits have come out to graze, two toward the stump and one over by the other draw.
One farmhouse light to the south. Is that a coyote yipping and howling.
Another light in the west toward Black Mountain.
The branches that curve down, that I see in front of me in small-leafed black cut-out, give so pleasing a sense of layered depth.
Now the last pink light is gone even from Volcan. The bird on the pine snag is smaller and silent. Orange and pink clotted behind the three lowest Coulters, their Japanese profiles.
Morning came up intense apricot-gold all along the ridge. I woke at the right time to see it and didn’t turn on the light until an hour later. Two rabbits were standing below the window, both facing northeast. The larger crouched on four legs, the younger, closer to me, on hind legs with forepaws dangling. They stayed that way, little rabbit statues, for twenty minutes? while I made tea and set the fire.
24 November
Woke at the moment when light was just starting to show above the mountains, the long rim lit orange. Six small rabbits near the window, nibbling, very lightly hopping, with ears translucent showing red.
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Brown back of a hawk on the pine snag, where he’s like the finial on a post. He’s warming after the night.
It’s a perfect morning, still, still.
Emerald green islands under the oaks, wherever they are.
26 November
Cottontails are considered crepuscular, most active around dawn or dusk.
Rabbits have a remarkably wide field of vision and much of it is devoted to overhead scanning.
Only about fifteen percent of the young survive their first year.
Forage mostly at night, conceal themselves during the day. Have trails, travel lanes. I think they’re living under the house.
4 January
Their touching innocence of movement.
At sunset yesterday two of them by the manzanita. One would rush the other, jump straight up the way springbok babies do when it rains.
A blue mushroom at the back door. Lactarius indigo. Also Boletus bicolor, quite a few.
I’m under the oak. Breeze from the southeast. Branches in front of me are wriggling some. A crow was quarking. Helicopter drone, I think a medevac route east of here. Deep blue sky across the north. Touches of yellow down there along the road, willows.
The nearest fold of hillslope is showing a pink underlayer. It’s that little weedy plant, I’ll look it up. Further down in the crease that goes past the west side of the house a line of sycamores has gone a dry rusty orange.
Woodpecker knocking briefly. Mountain bluebird dropping from a branch. I can see cars in the bit of road before Norm Feigel’s, bright glints.
Long cirrus feathers brilliant as angels coming on slowly from the south and dissolving above me. Threads of warmed pine in the air. A hawk at eye level down by the curve in the lane.
- Look, a yard-long line of spider thread flowing straight out from the little scrub oak. A squirrel standing up on the log.
Latitude 33.18 N, longitude 116.769 W, elevation 3,238’.
This here hasn’t always been here. I want someone to sit with me and tell me how these landforms were made: those peaks, this humpy upland, the pile of rocks below the house.
deep time
orogeny, mountain building
plate-margin encounters, slidepast plate contact
basement or country rock, native to an area
Coming ignorant into geology there are so many foreign words, many of them charming, some of them numbingly technical,
What little do I know so far.
Peninsular Ranges 80 miles east of the coast
Broad upland plateaus.
The topography is varied in the Santa Ysabel-Julian area, ranging from less than 1000 feet to 6,533 feet above sea level. The rock unit on which the Santa Ysabel-Julian area is situated is part of the Southern California Batholith, a mountain belt extending from Los Angeles County to the tip of Baja California. About 10% to 15% of the landscape in the Santa Ysabel-Volcan Mountain Preserve features exposed rocks. Most of the rocks that one sees when driving through the Santa Ysabel-Julian area have one of two origins: rocks that have risen from several miles beneath the surface of the earth where they were formed over one hundred million years ago; or rocks that were created over two hundred million years ago when ancient sea floor sediment was metamorphosed through heat and pressure.
molten emplacement of peninsular batholith from beneath … limestones were metamorphosed into marble, sandstones into quartzite, and sandy shales into schist and gneiss
Eastern half of the Range “ancient sedimentary country rock folded, metamorphosed and intruded by granitic/plutonic magmas” – the Peninsular Ranges batholith. Western half “an island arc formed 1000 miles to the south,” creeping north 50 millimeters a year. Faults where they meet, San Andreas and others, valleys running approximately along the faults.
Along the eastern edge of the Peninsular Range, intermittent appearances of much older rock, a “thin spine of primeval metasedimentary strata dating to about five hundred million years ago.”
On roadside cutbanks I’ll sometimes see the sort of white vein that is a “late intrusion” and may bear tourmaline or gold.
The nearest fault, slow-creeping Elsinore at .15” a year, lies maybe 6 miles away, almost under Highway 79 where I turn off Mesa Grande Rd on the way to Santa Ysabel. When I learned that I started parking farther from large trees.
