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 he canyon in the late afternoon is half shaded, a
wide expanse of chaparral-scented wildness that looks puny on
Paul's map, a photograph of a North Park neighborhood with lines
drawn through the open space to show the proposed road. We are
walking with purpose today; at least they are: Paul, the Sierra
Club Coordinator and Terry, the amateur botanist, are on a mission
to save this little piece of coastal sage scrub from the ravages
of the Department of Sewer and Water.
 I have
decided to be the native guide for this pair of do-gooders from
back East. This attitude permits me to do nothing but wander,
and wonder over my homeland. This canyon, part of my homeland,
is beautiful today.
It is the
walk, the sun, the clouds and rain, the time-of-day. The walking
is muddy, wet-shoe-sticking walking, with the official purpose
lost while being in this small, wild place in the middle of the
vast real estate development of San Diego. The "looking
at the place-to-save" is the beauty of the walking and the
scent of the fresh rain on the baccharis that sage smell
of wet chaparral. We have just left our trucks, descended the
hill along the golf course, and I am in the beauty and the memory.
We walk together in the late afternoon in the chest-high brush
and talk of the mist and the plants and the sky, and I tell Paul
the story of Jerry and Phil making the evening news back in 1971,
smoking dope in this very canyon, and I just didn't walk home
from school with them that day. It was a big deal back then,
I remember.
We stroll
down the hill into the canyon proper, in the cloudy clean shiny
light of this January day, and the ground is dampened a deep
tan with the first good rain, and the plants and rocks are dusted
off and the air is fresh. Paul is looking for the spoor of sewer
surveyors and Ter is writing in her notebook. As she glances
at me, she points to the low shrubs to our right to begin our
native plant tour.
"There's
the prickly pear, see? Opuntia littoralis." It is
a small plant, two or so feet high, with a small number of pads
that it is possible to count, unlike the huge barriers of its
cousin the tuna, with its thousands of leaves and edible red
fruits, that we see lining the edges of the cultivated canyon-tops
that we call our neighborhoods. This little cactus likes to hide
among the chaparral, low-to-the-ground and humble in its spread,
protecting itself with long spines and a low profile. I look
at the pads and try to walk around them, momentarily fooled into
thinking they are backlit by the near sunset. But it is the rain
and the jade green leaves set against the olive color of the
buckwheat and black sage that make the plant look translucent,
like green window glass, and the brown spines are in sharp contrast
to the pads. Ter rattles off the list of plants we see as we
parade down the slope; "lemon-adeberry, agave shawii,
black sage, toyon, laurel sumac. That yucca is the schidigera,
the Mojave yucca," she says, pointing. "Native."
We go on and she goes on describing her botanical ambit, her
way to feel at home here in the brush. To acclimate herself she
Latinizes the world. We walk alongside a small, brown field of
buckwheat, dried flowers stiffly shaking in the cool pre-shower
wind and she announces, "Eriogonum fas-ciculatum.
We're in Coastal Sage Scrub for sure now." I can see the
description next to the little colored box on the Key to Vegetation
Types on her map at home, and I know she has oriented herself
botanically.
Paul has found
the first green paint of the sewer guys, and it matches the lines
on his map. He looks around, up the dirt track we have descended,
and to the left, up-canyon, where we will continue, and he looks
relieved, oriented; he knows where to put his next step.
I stopped
going into the canyons in 1971, the year we all got busted. Jerry
got caught twice: that time on the news after school, and the
time with me and O.B. and my brother, in the East County mountains,
on the way to a wilder, bigger canyon. The refuge of the small
wild places was gone to us, for now we were not just playing
anymore, experimenting with boyhood and adolescence, but were
experimenting with adulthood and more serious vices. The stakes
were higher, and the rewards of being among the secret quiet
and hidden serenity of the canyon as we walked home from school
were lost to us; there were too many cops, and we were "too
big to be in there -- what were you guys doing down there, anyway?"
And we didn't have a good answer for that.
There were
other reasons. I had to keep my clothes looking clean, without
boyish burrs or dust or stains, on the off chance that a girl
we knew would see us, and I would be written off as "immature,"
which is one of the worst things an adolescent boy can be. And
it wasn't just the girls or the pigs or the neighbors or our
parents, who knew what was up. Danny, who gave us our daily ride
to St. Augustine in the mornings, knew just what to say to keep
him older and superior. "You boys been beating off in the
bushes again?" and we knew he knew, and we were busted.
We reach
the canyon bottom, and start walking upstream, following the
green paint trail of the City of San Diego, and the stream is
running today, wonder of wonders. I pick up a stray golf ball
and look west to the sunset and the golf course and chuck it
(one stroke). The ball doesn't make it back to the course; it
is useless anyway, as Paul points to the others, hiding in the
brush like the ancient remains of an unsuccessful egg hunt, and
now I see all the trash. The beer cans, old socks, plastic flotsam
of lighters, bottle caps, grocery bags all are standing out now.
I put the next one in my pocket, and I realize that it is only
litter, and can be picked up; our hike today is to save the canyon
itself from much worse. I am participating in the conservation
of a land that I have lived on for all of my 44 years, and my
record of care for this land is spotty at best and downright
rude at worst.
I remember
some of the beer cans I have thrown down here, and the cigarette
butts and paint cans and the shopping carts which were so much
fun, and I cringe a little, and now I know where I am, which
way to go. I run my eyes along the edges of the neighborhoods
above, and I remember the other neighborhoods and the other canyons
in which I have grown as a citizen and a man, places only a few
miles from here where I have worked, lived, flowered, withered,
and bloomed anew.
Wendell Berry
writes that we need a wilderness as human beings, that we need
a place that is not of our creation, to see ourselves correctly.
"And so, coming here, what I have done is strip away the
human facade that usually stands between me and the universe,"
he says as he enters the woods.
These canyons,
pieces of natural San Diego now scattered throughout our County,
are far from a wilderness like the huge forest he describes.
And mine is a different universe; a scrub-covered habitat that
invites the eye to see in the distance, to look to the infinite
ocean from the hilltops. For me, however, these scented islands
of native flora have been my wilderness, that thing which has
exposed my humanness to myself, and the view hasn't been all
that pretty.
While I was
away in my 20's and 30's, the canyons -- these small wild places
where I learned to smoke, drink, swear, be a friend and get lost,
where I experimented with building construction, learned first
aid first hand, where I practiced my imagination -- have suffered
a bit and have survived a bit less, and I have learned that I
am not my own best world.
I am learning,
too, that for myself and these beautiful islands it could be
too late; the damage may be too great to be mitigated, the guilt
too deep to be forgiven.
I am walking
now with Ter and Paul. As we walk, we discuss the politics of
the upcoming meetings and Paul has some good ideas about getting
the homeowners and canyon neighbors educated and active. I am
describing the pink sidewalks of Burlin-game, the set of houses
to the south of the those eucalyptus trees, how the sidewalks
got to be pink, and we turn around and see the sun set, right
down the middle of our canyon -- the rain clouds have parted
and the sun is diving yellowly to the sea. The light in the hills
and the sky to the east is darkening, and the ground around us
is now as bright as the sky.
Ter shows
us the ceanothus, a mid-sized shrub with delicate white
flowers that is California's wild lilac. "Verrucosus,"
she intones, "It's always the first to bloom. Spring is
coming!" We stroll and pick our way along the temporary
stream, and around a big eucalyptus that permits no wildflowers
to grow under its toxic bed of leaves. We pass a small stand
of scrub oak, and come upon a wonderful old native coast live
oak, the lone survivor of centuries of depredation for firewood
and proper landscaping. This tree reminds me that this hillside
once was part of a garden, the immense landscape of the Kumeyaay,
who tended these trees for shade and sustenance.
Paul spots
the gem of the walk along the trail a little further on, on the
south face of the hillside. This is the first time he has taken
his eyes off the map and looked around him to see the place as
a being and not a habitat conservation planning exercise. And
he is excited. "Look!" He points down to the deep brown
soil, at the startling green at his feet. The golf-ball-sized
little rosette of succulent leaves is lime-green and bright against
the ground and looks as if it just landed from the golf course
on a long drive; I almost wait for it to bounce, stop moving,
before I try to look at it closely.
It is a live-forever,
a plant with several species that are native to California and
South Africa. Some that are endemic and endangered are known
to be in this area of San Diego. As we stop and look around,
we see more of them on the hillside near us, in between and among
the holly-leaf cherry, the ceanothus, the laurel sumac
that are the big shade brush of this little forest. They form
a small bright constellation of dudleya, the only one
we will see on this walk, for it is getting dark and the clouds
have returned threateningly, and the wind has gusted a few times;
it is going to rain soon. Ter is not sure of the species, and
it is too early for any of the spikes of the flowers to appear,
so we do not know if this is one of the endangered species, or
a landscaped South African escapee, or a hybrid; therefore we
cannot stop the tractors of the Department of Water and Sewers
with this little plant alone.
Paul doesn't
seem to think that one sighting of a rare succulent will keep
the City Fathers from their important sewerage work, Ter is only
mildly baffled by her inability to nail down the exact taxonomy,
and I have not been caught at anything. We are all, however,
gazing with delight at the little green wonder at our feet, and
the rain is starting to spatter our faces, the wind is chilling
our cheeks. We are together in this, the world, with no other
reason for being here than the succulent leaves turning towards
the dying sun, with no purpose but growth and death, with no
beauty other than the wonder of our being here, now. And I am
happy to be here looking at a little rosette of jade with my
friends, with muddy boots and stained pants, and I don't know
what I'm really doing down here. I'm busted. 
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