Armen and Cindy were startled at the sight of the new canal—the California Aqueduct. Unlike the canals they had known, this canal was paved, and it was wide—and immaculate. It shone as a long, geometric strip of blue and white in the hot midsummer sun.

“Look around!” their father declared, gesturing out across the desert. “Soon there will be crops up and down this canal, for hundreds of miles. There! There! … Over there!”

It certainly seemed that there would be enough water. Garegin’s marvelous vision found its way into the eyes of his family. Armen and Cindy would both remember that day for years and years to come.

The Adroushans picnicked from their tailgate. Armen and Cindy listened to their father expound upon the historic significance of this great canal that carried life-giving water from far up north down into the Sink, over the Range, and into the desert beyond. They listened, trusting their father would not belabor the topic.

After the lesson, Cindy and Armen each stood looking down into the great concrete canal. They each kept their distance, each feeling the pull of the current through the dry air. The lines of the aqueduct were synthetic and swift; its colors more sky than earth.

A black shadow skated across the blue water, and Cindy looked up to find the shadow’s companion. At the jagged boundary between land and sky, she spotted it: a raven glided toward the highway and seemed to land just out of view.

Cindy turned her body in line with her eyes and began to walk to the place where the raven had vanished, and she soon found two ravens hopping around a corpse on the shoulder of the road. She approached slowly, and both ravens leapt and flew up into an oak tree nearby. Cindy squatted down upon what remained of a squirrel, and she heard one of the ravens croak. She stood up, and she sat down against the trunk of the tree.

One of the ravens dropped out of the tree and alighted upon the carrion. A minute later, its companion followed. Cindy watched the couple dine until she heard her mother call her.

As the family car accelerated down the highway, Cindy watched the ravens fade into the west and into the past.

She met them again that night, long after she had passed into the land of dreams. There was a heap of something on the shoulder of the road. She walked toward it, and she soon noticed that it was larger than a squirrel. It was much larger, and it was steaming, or rather, it was smoking. Its bones and skin were metal. She could see that it had been a car.

The two ravens descended upon the corpse and one pecked at a sinew. As the raven pulled the sinew out, Cindy noticed that it was rubber and metal; some kind of wire. She could smell it now; she recognized it. It was the smell of a dead machine. Then she saw another raven alight upon the corpse, and another, and another. Soon the corpse resembled a great raven pile.

One raven turned her way. It noticed her, and it cocked its heavy black head. Cindy awoke.

Continue …

Winter Wheat in Goshen - Phil Hawkins

As summer ages, the mood of the Sink relaxes into an easy, gradual decline. The sun’s reign lasts through October, but his manner grows less tyrannical with age. The autumn air is loaded with the exhaust of the year, like thousands of smoky autumns before—the smoke of Indian burns and lightning fires.

A warm, mild rain fell at the close of October and washed the smoke out of the air, if only for a moment. Sam looked out through the living room window that first morning, collected his lunch sack, bade Buck a good day, and walked through the front door, inhaling the alien mix of wet dust and hydrated airborne compounds. It was foreign, and it was invigorating to fully breathe again.

Broad and shallow puddles of water and oils appeared everywhere, scattered about on roadsides and wheel ruts, as Sam stepped off over the strangely dark, soft, and moist earth. As he passed a plowed field, he sensed something off to the east. He turned reflexively to see whether something was watching him, and caught sight of a distant, narrow, white banner that stretched across the East, above and beyond the canopy of an orchard beyond the field. It was as though he’d never seen that broad, white crown before. Perhaps he hadn’t. Like a great phantom of ice and stone, it had been all but nonexistent before, and suddenly it appeared, vivid, white, and silent, hovering over the heretofore limitless plain.

The Range was suddenly so massive and vivid to Sam that it seemed to him that he could walk there and get back in time for lunch.

Throughout much of California, that first autumn rain is the first sign of spring, and a little while later, the winter solstice is accompanied by a burst of new green growth. So it is that the old Pagan festivals of autumnal rebirth are nowhere more appropriate than in California. In the Sink, even as the world is reborn, the cool mountain air slides off the Range, and the people of the Sink watch their breath turn to fog, like the white steam of dragon breath that fills the valleys.

Tule fog is a true winter white-out that sometimes lasts weeks without admitting any view of the sky, but in the Sink winter is wrapped within spring, for spring progresses even under the bone-chilling fog. There is no dead season there. Rain and fog nurse the seedlings of early winter, and as the white breath of the dragon burns off in the month of Mihr, fields bloom with color. It is all consummated long before the equinox that elsewhere marks the break of spring.

Continue …

As Behrooz drove up the highway toward Tehachapi Summit, Zal looked up at the desert ridges that overshadowed the highway, wondering whether the distant figurines on the ridge-tops were all Joshua trees, or whether any of them were Indian braves in disguise, poised for an ambush. As the Kermani family rode through the gates of inner California, several black flecks—vultures?—wheeled high above a ridge. Zal remembered the open-air burials of the Indians he’d seen on TV, and the story he’d heard of how the birds had been fed by the dead of his Iranian ancestors.

Your beauty is beyond compare
With flaming locks of auburn hair

The lady in the radio sang along with the tires on the highway. To Zal, she seemed to be singing to the sun and the flying landscape. He glanced at his mother and knew that it seemed different to her.

Seemo wedged his snout into the window opening, surveying the panorama of scents, mapping their course as best he could.

It is true that the Range does not provide easy crossings. The Tehachapi route, though not easy, is an optimal crossing. The locomotives that labor along the same route are forced by the Range to burrow, boring eighteen tunnels in all, looping over and under themselves like so many king snakes as they strive against gravity over the tail of the Range.

Zal counted the tunnels as they passed. The highway descended into a stagnant, purple sea of trapped exhausts, herbicides, and pesticides. The air reeked of cattle and crude oil. Under that sea lay the Sink, a vast, subsiding basin at the southern end of California’s Great Valley that trapped the exhaust of the human economy and myriad millennia of wildfires. Pump jacks sucked the black blood from the dark, fertile soil everywhere, so numerous that a cloud of mechanical locusts seemed to have descended upon the earth.

Soon came Bakersfield, a city made of oil, citrus, grapes, nuts, and vegetables; a working town, and a dirty town; a city of many smokes. Looking at the size of it, Zal could hardly imagine that water and sediment carried through this city by the anemic Kern River had washed off the highest peak within thousands of miles. Hardly could he imagine the glacial bowls and canyons or the golden trout camouflaged against the amber sands of streams colored with sunlight. It was merely upstream, but not all streams are navigable.

Behrooz and Deena found a house near the Kern River Oil Field and the shores of what was once known as Kern Lake. This lake once spilled into Buena Vista Lake, which in turn spilled into Goose Lake, which spilled into Tulare Lake. You’d never guess that such a chain of lakes ever existed just looking at the land today, but those lakes did once live there, and their ghosts sometimes do haunt the house where they once lived.

Summer sat heavy on the polluted air with such a presence that it seemed to Zal to have been waiting for him there. It was a dry heat—as they say, but it was stale, sticky, and foul-smelling. What it lacked in humidity it made up for in toxicity.

Zal fell ill with the Valley fever—a notorious Bakersfield native—not long after his family moved into their new home. The boy sat coughing, looking out his bedroom window through the heat of the day into the suburb, with the orchards of refinery stacks beyond. He’d come from the desert where he was accustomed to wandering in every direction and following every mirage with boyish relish and canine curiosity. Now he looked out from his aching eyes to see a maze of warehouses that people called homes, each an impenetrable fortress. He labored to breathe. It seemed that one Valley fever had stricken his body, while another had seized his psyche. Seemo held to his side, waiting for direction.

Seemo had always been at the boy’s side. He’d been there since he was a puppy, and before that. He’d been there for ten thousand years, since the first dog, and before that. Long before that, Seemo watched the boy’s village, and studied the ways of men. Later, he entered the village and made the village his home. The men of the village were impressed by the dog’s ability to work with them. He knew them well, and he could see much of the world that they couldn’t see. He could see it all with his nose, his ears, and his night vision. He could even see death. Perhaps he could see it with his nose. However he did it, he could see when a man had crossed over into the world of the dead, so the village elders made him priest of the dead. Before the priest of the village prepared the dead for exposure, he would ask the priest dog if the man was truly dead.

That was how the partnership of man and dog developed in Iran, long before the armies of Allah drove the priest dogs and eternal fires off the land. Perhaps Iran has forgotten about its contract with the dog, but Zal had not. He knew of no creature closer to man than dog, but there were yet other creatures for Zal to meet, and one would prove to be very close indeed.

Continue …

In this island called California, because of the great ruggedness of the country and the innumerable wild beasts that lived in it, there were many griffins, such as were found in no other part of the world.

Because a country named “Califerne” is mentioned in the 11^th Century heroic poem the Song of Roland, there is some reason to believe the myth of California predated Montalvo by centuries.

Island of California, by Johannes Vingboons

Montalvo imagined his island called California to be on the right hand of the Indies, so it should come as no surprise that when a rugged, griffin-inhabited island was discovered west of America, it occurred to a Spaniard to name the island after the myth.

And make no mistake: there were indeed griffins in California.

L. T. White of UCLA reports that in 1647, Bisselius the Jesuit insisted that in California “griffins (gryphes) are found; and this is not a fable but the truth.”

It’s a fact. The world’s second largest raptor is a native Californian. Men have named it the California condor, but it once had the name California pseudo-griffin, that is, before less poetic minds thought better of it. Just as the griffin was named after California, so the griffin—guardian of that Persian realm of sacred fire—might have inspired the naming of California.

Like Montalvo’s California, the land that became known as California was first known as an island, Baja California being such a long, narrow peninsula that many guessed that California’s shores never met the mainland. California was still suspected to be an island as late as 1776, well after the Alta California mission system was established. Even today, Baja California remains a de facto island, her residents speaking of the land across the Golfo de California as “the mainland.” And though modern geographers insist that California is no island, yet this doctrine does not go uncontested. Ecologists and anthropologists, for instance, are in general agreement that California, speaking in their own terms, is indeed an island.

Continue …

wherein the whole world is not consumed in flame.

Pliny, Natural History

The dry breath of the Mojave blew tumbleweeds, ravens, voices, and parcels of waste across the plain. A yellow mongrel inspected scents from shrub to shrub, aimless as the dust devils that whirled and vanished around him, to a rusting electric stove that lay on its side, oven door ajar. Something had been there.

I’d be safe and warm if I was in LA.

Nearby, another creature stood under a black baseball cap, his green eyes squinting against the wind, dust, and ebbing sun. He was the dog’s master, a scent-blind primate who lived among the colors of the rainbow. An orange leash lay slung around his neck like a scarf.

I got down on my knees, and I pretend to pray.

A white wire wound out of his ear and through his sandy blonde hair, down into a black transistor radio in his right hand.

The boy’s thumb turned the tuning wheel as the sun was eclipsed by an unemployed utility pole—or was it the mast of some stray longship that sank into the desert sand at the ebb of a great flood, or the gallows for some forgotten messiah?

The dead do live long in the desert, in the sheltering shadow of the Range. The boy had not yet been trained to bury them.

The Mamas and the Papas dreamed California into his oblivious ear while he waited for the L.A. Dodgers broadcast to begin. The Dodgers were scheduled to play against the New York Mets and their centerfielder, Willie Mays. Number 24 was no longer wearing the black cap of the San Francisco Giants, but that made no difference to the boy.

The arid openness of Antelope Valley engulfed him. The face of the earth was a dehydrated, hexagonal mosaic of desert tile and isles of creosote and tumbleweed. He circled the ruin, holding it at a safe distance, stepping carefully from tile to tile.

He stopped. His eyes found his dog as it inspected a solitary brick chimney. There was no other trace of a house. Had the desert wind blown it away board by board or fed some fire that consumed it? Had anyone been there to watch it disappear? Did it happen a year ago or a century ago? Did anyone ever notice that it was gone? The questions circled around on the desert wind and the hours blew by. The sun dipped down toward the tail of the Range.

The Range. The Spaniards named it Sierra Nevada, literally “snowy saw blade.” It must have reminded them of that lesser sierra nevada down in Andalusia. But this blade of California is more than serration and snow: it is a granite dam that extends along much of the length of Alta California, squeezing the moisture out of the Pacific air. As the water cuts the gold out of the rapidly rising rock, the lands downwind are robbed of their share of life—without prompting any outcry for justice or compensation. The desert seems resigned enough to its fate.

The boy turned around, yelled “come on, Seemo,” and headed for home. The dog pricked up his ears, popped up his head amid the creosote, and followed his leader toward a distant patch of eucalyptus green.

Continue …

Big Meadow: the damage, November 2011.

I brought the kids along this time. They insisted, hoping to make snowballs, and besides, they do keep the angels at bay.

I wanted to see Foresta, to see how the neighborhood had recovered from the A-Rock firestorm. I expected to find the great scar concealed under two decades of brush and young pines, but I found an open wound instead. I inquired into it at the visitor center and was told that a year or so back a 90-acre controlled burn broke free and devoured over 7,400 acres at the heart of the scar. Now the A-Rock generation of growth around Foresta is mostly gone. A new generation is in its infancy before us, and I feel a pang of resentment. I expected to watch the children of A-Rock mature as I grew old, but—ah, well.

I’m taking in one more look across Big Meadow and Foresta before we drive back to the city. The kids are waiting in the car.

A fire that seemed like the very final word on creation is itself slipping into oblivion—like the dissipating heat of last summer’s love. Some few will remember it, but even they won’t remember it like we will, eh, Sam?

“Sam,” I hear myself say.

“Have you seen her lately?”

The kids are getting restless.

El Portal, California
Mehekan Aramazd, 4503
February 21, 2011

Continue …

Metamorphosis

About thirty million years ago, the trailing edge of the Farallon Plate began to disappear under North America in the shape of an inverted 90° wedge, beginning at the location of present-day Los Angeles, and proceeding northeast under the continent, leaving nothing but hot mantle where before was the cold, subducting oceanic plate.

Burial of the Farallon Plate

Over the past twenty million years, that trailing edge has been crossing the Sierra Nevada region, and it’s traveled nearly as far north as Mount Lassen thus far, creating a great triangle between the trailing wings of the subducted Farallon Plate and the Pacific Plate.

With no more subduction to trigger the kind of volcanic activity characteristic of Mount Lassen and the Cascade Range to the north, the Sierra Nevada has transitioned into a new phase of plutonic activity. The hot, underlying mantle has pressed up through the great triangle, causing uplift and, as the uplifted dome has increased the surface area above, spreading. The spreading, in turn, has created grabens such as Owens Valley.

Though the stone that makes the Sierra Nevada was formed long before this uplift and spreading, it was this event, beginning about thirty million years ago, that actually gave rise to the Sierra Nevada that we know today. Still, there have been much more recent events that have contributed greatly to the general, large-scale structure of the range.

A New Age of Volcanism

This new incarnation of California lacks the Cascadian volcanism of its past, yet the existence of the eruption of the Long Valley supervolcano 760,000 years ago attests to the volatility of the present-day Sierra Nevada. It was an eruption 500 times the size of the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption and 30 times the size of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption , surpassed by only four eruptions over the last million years:

1. Lake Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia
2. Whakamaru, North Island, New Zealand
3. Lake Taupo, North Island, New Zealand
4. Yellowstone Caldera, Wyoming, USA

There are no stratovolcanoes along the spine of the Sierra Nevada, but there is evidence of something more terrible.

Localized Foundering of the Farallon Plate

As the trailing edge of the cold, dense Farallon Plate was detached from the supporting mass of any trailing oceanic plate, that trailing edge must have begun to sink — not merely as a caboose follows a train downhill, but rather more directly down, as it was no longer supported on its western boundary.

Delamination and Mantle Drip

Such a sinking mass must have pulled on the lithosphere above it, and possibly pulled the dense root of the Sierra Nevada downward and away from the mountain range. Once the trailing edge of the subducted plate passed, the detached root of the Sierra — being relatively dense — may have begun to sink more directly into the depths of the mantle, causing local downwelling.

Sinking mountains east of Fresno

Asthenospheric mantle flowed in to fill the gap where the Sierra’s root had been — probably liquefying under reduced pressure, and the Sierra, without the ballast of its dense root, became more buoyant, and began to rise, pulling even more asthenospheric mantle up with it, some of which would have liquefied. As magma, it would have injected itself into cracks in and around the thin Sierra block, ushering in the current phase of Sierra volcanism.

As the delaminated Sierra root descends into Earth’s mantle, it has created a local convection cell. The sinking root is causing downwelling in its wake, and pushing mantle rock downward and outward ahead of it. This downdraft appears to be causing subsidence in the Tulare Basin and the western Sierra adjacent to the basin.

As the displaced mantle rock is pushed aside, it then begins to rise, creating upward pressure at its edges — probably more along one edge, due to asymmetry. The upward pressure creates a local updraft, which may be adding to the uplift of the Sierra.

Further Reading:

Active foundering of a continental arc root beneath the southern Sierra Nevada in California

Watching Whales in the Sink

The continents of Pangaea

Up to about 200 million years ago, at the dawn of the Jurassic Period, there was no California. It might be said that even North America didn’t exist. North America had then part of the supercontinent of Pangaea, which was about to break apart.

As ancient peoples once imagined their world an island in a great sea, so Pangaea was an island in a great sea. For eons, the rivers of Pangaea carried sediments to that sea, loading down the dense, cool crust beneath the waters. That crust, it turn, was floating upon an ocean of lithospheric mantle, but the crust was getting heavier and losing its buoyancy, until finally it gave way, and began to list like a ship giving in to the sea.

Around Pangaea, ocean floors began to dive beneath it for the same reason, leading to what we know today as the Pacific Ring of Fire, and the Triassic supercontinent began to fracture under the strain of the spreading triggered by the suction of ocean floor subducting into its perimeter.

Here on the eastern shore of the great ocean, the Farallon Plate was born out of the disintegration of Pangaea. As this young oceanic plate dove under Pangaea (and later Laurasia), the uppermost layer of the plate was scraped off and piled against the edge of the continent, and so Cascadia was born. Cascadia is that land commonly known today as the Pacific Northwest. When California was young, it was part of Cascadia.

The continent was pulled westward and stretched along its margin, giving rise to the forearc basins known today as the Puget Sound, the Willamette Valley of Oregon, and California’s Central Valley.

The water-loaded serpentine hydrated the rock beneath the continent, liquefying the rock and causing streams of melt to form. This led to the formation of a volcanic arc along the Pacific Coast, and deep below, the plutons that would eventually uplift to become the Sierra Nevada and Klamath Mountains of the present.

The hydrated magma streams that feed the volcanoes of Cascadia are not pacified by their water continent, but contrarily, rendered all the more volatile by the resulting steam, making for explosive releases of subterranean fire, not unlike the sudden expansion of a grease fire when fed with water.

Down in Cascadian California, there was no San Andreas Fault, nor any great granitic Sierra Nevada. These and other characteristic features of present-day California would arise as the trailing edge of the Farallon Plate began to disappear under North America.

To be continued …

When once I was a child in the west I was looking east,
and when a child in the east I looked west,
ever aiming through that Gateway;

and I again was on my road west
when Lady and I were again children,
basking in the wonders of commerce and truth and trivia
in fashion magazines and such vivid things,

in a moment without motion,

I looked up to feel a warm breeze from the eastern ocean,
but there was time passing in a vision

of a Gateway
rising on the horizon
over the River I could never cross completely

and in the Gateway beckoned a City
and Lady greeted the City—warmly
as though he were expected
as though they were old friends
and I followed her through the Gateway
and I cannot cross that River
and she sat in the lap of the City
she kissed the City
and before my eyes she became the City
and those eyes last saw her in the Gateway
and I continued my steps west
and I thought how strange that City had always been so friendly
how the City and I had always been such friends
but now she is the City and I cannot recognize him

And years from home I am touring Topeka
Columbia Lawrence Independence
pre dawn hours thinking on the shape of things
side walks car lots front yards thinking on the shape of things
not half sleeping in the park dodging cops and moon and
dreams that she is gazing at the sun
setting on the Pacific
that she is squinting for my silhouette on the horizon
and I am not in California
I need to see the sunrise

and her Gateway

and think upon the shape of things.

I remember, as a matter of fact, the rains returning last Halloween, while trick-or-treating with the kids. I remember how warm that first rain was. It even seemed refreshing.

The old Gaelic year ended on Halloween, so I hear. In California, the return of the rains is obviously a big deal, but I’m not sure it ought to mark our new year (as though it represented a rebirth).

I say I’m not sure, but it probably should. It’s ironic because the leaves haven’t even fallen from the trees yet by Halloween, but one can watch the world being slowly reborn through the mild winter months. February and March bring progressively more glory, but it all begins with the first rain in autumn.

My doubt has to do with the role of the sun in all this. To base the rebirth solely upon the return of the rains seems to disrespect the importance of sunlight in bringing about life, but I suppose it’s obvious enough that this is all made possible by the fact that the sun is somewhat ever-present around here.