Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
“Californ-i-ay, where the rain doesn’t rain, it just drizzles champagne.” — Yip Harburg
We finally had a real winter storm, two days of nice soft rain. Thank the Elye-wun, or whose-ever long white beards those are, flowing over the hills.
The hollyleaf cherries greeted me as if they were Irish Spring models, fresh and perky.
The deerweed has pinked up remarkably; the tired wilted look is gone everywhere. It’s a pioneer species in recovering disturbed areas: it cleverly fixes nitrogen in the soil, preparing for fertility.
The star of the show is an elegant hunting-pink buckwheat variety, Eriogonum fasciculatum, only this strain seems very gracile, and ripens to ruby red, not orange-brown.
The gracile buckwheat strain blooming white, and the deerweed in gold, in the June, 2020 Superbloom.Comparing the LOC buckwheat, left, with your common-or-garden variety, right.
Re-capping from Feb. 2019:
January, 2019. Hills bare, contrasts extreme, and the creek bed was streaked with oak-char, but…potential!
Here’s one year later, Spring 2020:
January, 2020
In August 2020 we had a single-day spike of 118 degrees, and everything then alive, sizzled, I thought to death. By Christmas Day of 2020, after months of no rain, the hills had roasted up brown and crispy.
Christmas, 2020. Looks pretty fried, doesn’t it? But one month, and a couple inches of rain later:January 29, 2021. The land is filling in with “Foothill Alluvial Fan Chaparral.” It’s far more diverse than ever.
Just last week I was fretting about the parched sands in the foothills; then yesterday our first big winter rain arrived. It whitened the peaks, cleared the air, and delighted the chaparrall. Beauty and good feeling result! View Little Tujunga Canyon:
The fresh air and the clouds were so sweet — one wrapped itself in a funnel, and puff! — blew me a smoke-ring kiss, like Santa. One momentary curl of condensation refracted an amazing spotlight, conveniently pointing exactly to Valley Village!
Early August brought foggy foggy gloom, so I hied me out to the West Valley, to Calabasas, to El Escorpion Park, which was known to the Chumash as Kas-ele-wu, Swordfish-God Peak.
It’s a tiny vest-pocket park in L.A., right on the Ventura County border, but it was once the center of an Indian-owned rancho called “El Escorpion,” on a site where the Chumash had long had a town and a holiday resort. The sacredness is palpable here.
The Ele-wu, the Swordfish
The Elye-wun were the ancient Swordfish-Men, a cantankerous, gut-stuffing brotherhood of fishermen who lived at the bottom of the sea just off the coast. If tricked or bargained with, or following their own gluttonous hunt, the greasy, bloody-mawed Elye-wun would drive pods of whales up onto shore at Malibu, where the Chumash gratefully kindled roasting fires on the beach. The Elye-wun would heave whales out of the waves on the points of their “gaffes” which were of course their headspikes, idealized as huge manual harpoons.
Almost as sharp, is the pungent fragrance of the vinegarweed. This is a handsome native plant, with beautiful green awl-shaped leaves and nice purple flowers. It is a starter in disturbed areas, such as the sides of cleared trail cuts. I’d never come across it before, but the not-unpleasant dill-vinegar-chip odor in the grass was a dead giveaway.
The harbinger of the Elye-wun’s hunt was the coastal fog, when their great long white beards hung over the mountains. For this reason, on a day like today, Kas-ele-wu was full of Big Medicine. Below: white sage, buckwheat; white sagebrush and chamise; oaks and a young sycamore. Biggest medicine of all, of course, is momoy, datura, moonflower, the central ritual hallucinogen of the local religion.
this fantastic sage
…prefers oak shade and shines there, a ghostly greenish-white.
Beautiful buckwheat
California Everlasting, drying apace
so pretty in the oak terrace!
white sage…
And “White Sagebrush,” Artemisia ludoviciana
Like the shade-loving sage, the white sagebrush here prefers the oak shade, and adopts the same spectral coloring strategy.
Mugwort, valued for its skin-tonic effects, was an important part of the pubertal scarification ceremonies.
Momoy, datura. This plant still thrives here in the bowl, especially outside the cave entrance. I wouldn’t be surprised if individual plants were still tended and pruned by the Chumash.
There were bush mallows everywhere along the creek, beautiful as flowers in a storybook. Their burst into lavender cups of glory, and their withering to a desiccated brown shrivel, is a potent Memento Mori. A whole bank of them got draped this year with a noisome net of chaparral dodder — yecch.
Even the wasted-looking grassy slopes can harbor life. Here, wild gourds — las calabasas — still sprawl across the chaparral.
There were powerful shamans here, including Munitz. Kas-ele-wu was a center of the ?antap cult of aristocratic ancestral dances, ceremonies and datura ingestion. The shamans from here nurtured the Chinigchinich religion down in the cosmopolitan Valley below, at Siutcanga and Achoicomenga. The bowl was a place of pilgrimage especially at the Winter Solstice. But I can’t imagine this place is more beguiling than it is now, in August. Look at the reds.
The coral red whips that puzzled me turn out to be the summer dress of dear deerweed. It lends a healthy pink to the chaparral’s cheeks.
The uplifted crags are full of clefts and caves. My guess is, the south-facing Munitz’s Cave is suffused with a very intense sunbeam, maybe around noon on the Solstice.
On the other hand, the Chumash were great star-watchers, and it is probable that there was some phenomenon of the constellations dramatically apparent there. I Meanwhile, the constellations in the tall grass were the finest stars one could wish.
…in the July heat of the San Fernando Valley. Recently I hiked up the Old Stagecoach Road to see what July was doing to the hills out there in the chaparral.
It was all intensely colorful in the Julian sun; I didn’t stray too far from the oak shade.
I’m always amazed how green the California natives are in the high summer. It’s the invasive pasture grasses that turn to brown, making hay to fatten the longhorns of Rancho El Escorpion. But they’ve long-since vanished. So instead, every year, the oats and bromes become fodder for our wildfires. Somehow, these artemisa hang on, mugwort and sagebrush huddled together.
It’s growing with the buckwheat, orange above. The flashy coral-red shoots are the fall colors of dear deerweed.
A fire seems to have started here recently; it sliced through the meadow, then mysteriously died back. Could it have been a controlled burn? If natural, it was a miracle — maybe a ground-fire at a a slow creep? Maybe it was a beneficial clearing out of a too-crowded chaparral. The burn gave the hills an eerie sepia color, with dramatic shadows, wistfully beautiful — like projections on the present, from a forgotten old Western.
There were several healthy stands of Giant wild rye, and abundant laurel sumac.
There were only two milkweed plants, but extremely vigorous. They’re in a brilliant spot for seeds to tumble down and take over an uncrowded slope.
Asclepias fascicularis
narrow-leaved milkweed
Here, right at the end, in a tricky run of the road between the creek and a cliff, aptly at the end of the Devil’s Slide, was the most splendid Poison Oak I’ve ever seen. It cascaded, neon red, into the very shoulder of the road. Imagine if Miss Kitty had removed her kid gauntlets for the warmth, and let her fair forearm dangle in the shady oak air, just outside the jouncing coach…it would be a case. But if you respect it — gorgeous.
Pacific Poison Oak, a great lord of the woodlands. His banner bore the strange device: Noli me impune lacessit
The Valley Village View 