If there is an underlying theme to this blog it is one of pleasure. For me, pleasure is almost entirely about paying attention.
Being in and looking at the landscape is a sensual experience. But senses can easily be abused when confronted with surroundings which have, themselves, been abused.
As American naturalist, John Burroughs wrote, "(A man's) own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part of himself;
he has sowed himself broadcast upon it, and it reflects his own moods and feelings; he is sensitive to the verge of the horizon: cut those trees, and he bleeds; mar those hills, and he suffers."
There is evidence on the land of ethical and unethical practices with regard to it. The unethical, exploitative attitude, which results in vast despoiling, numbs our senses as we try to flee our own pain in witnessing it. But when we are in an unspoiled landscape we are uplifted and opened up. Good feelings also come out of landscape which has been enhanced ethically by humans.
In my unending openness to pleasure, I sought out, last weekend, Middletown's Dry Creek Cutoff. Passing beneath the embowering colonnade of Valley Oaks, which lines this stretch of road is to experience a deep satisfaction. Here humans, for once, worked in tandem with nature to create a sublime work of art. These trees were planted here as saplings by people with the imagination to see beyond their own time. We have the foresighted early ranchers to thank for planting and encouraging this gift that keeps on giving.
Intentions may have been good when someone decided to plant redwoods along the the 101 freeway in Sonoma County, but something was left out of the thought process. The result of this incomplete thought is the ongoing unsatisfactory experience
while driving on 101 in the agricultural and suburban valley bottoms of Sonoma County. I ask myself why Caltrans landscape consultants planted redwoods in sunburnt ranks along the freeway. OK, the road is called the Redwood Highway, but it rarely, if ever, passes through natural redwood habitat until well north into Mendocino County. Valley oaks would have been infinitely more suitable, would have better thrived, and would, by now, a half century after the construction of the freeway, be providing the beginnings of a stately canopy. Most importantly, the oaks would have been habitat appropriate. We would "feel" the rightness of those oaks just as we are aware of the wrongness of the redwoods.
Another gift of pleasure to our local landscape and economy is the restoration of some of the county's most historic buildings on Main Street in Upper Lake. Bernie and Lynn Butcher, in undertaking the Tallman Hotel and the Blue Wing Cafe project have jump started the revival of the town. What they have done with old, abandoned and collapsing buildings is akin to efforts in the ecological arena, such as habitat, landscape and wildlife restoration. It does nothing less than restore a sense of place in a world in which "place" is increasingly difficult to decipher.
Other examples of architecture in the local vernacular include the modest barracks on a former migrant labor camp in Big Valley.
Ground squirrels practice an architecture of subtraction rather than that of accretion.
The season of first mowing.
Cabbage roses scented Hulka's and Bill's guest rooms at the ranch.
A cloud clung to Konocti at sunset.
A sign seen by many.
