umbering, tillage of the soil, and ownership of the spacious harbor of San Francisco had been the main objects proposed by the annexation of California to the United States. But another advantage, which threw all these into the shade, was revealed at almost the moment of its formal transfer. It was a land of treasure-trove. Gold, mineral wealth of inestimable worth, lay ready to tempt cupidity, in rock, in crevices, in river beds, the moment these possessions became ours. A century earlier, so runs the story, Jesuits found gold in this region and were expelled in consequence. Minister Thompson’s book gave gold and silver a passing mention, while describing the resources of California. Mines nearer the heart of Mexico, which had been lately pledged for the security of British loans, once yielded a handsome return, but forty years of civil disorder left them unproductive. Indeed, since 1810, products of the precious ore in both hemispheres had fallen off greatly, though the yield in the New World far excelled that of the Old. Hitherto, however, bowels of gold and silver had belonged to the sicklier races; we, like our hardy English progenitors, had boasted rather of our coal and iron, products for common use. The gold region of the United States, as hitherto defined, lay along the mountains which bordered Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia; and science, capital, and skill, while slavery infected that region, had all been wanting to develop or so much as locate these resources. But now this republic was on the verge of a discovery which would impart a new influence in the civilized world, and give new values and a new impulse to finance and the industrial activities. Had not God guided us? Was not the Union working out some sublime mission of manifest destiny?

– James Schouler, from The World’s Great Events: A History of the World from Ancient to Modern Times, B.C. 4004 to A.D. 1903 (in five volumes) by Esther Singleton, published in 1903 by P.F. Collier & Son, New York

We’re having a spate of splendidly sunny weather here, and the dogs and I have spent much of the day reclaiming the garden as our own turf (they have different issues than I do, but it’s all of a piece). I’m working on tuning into the energy of the plants. There is much to explore, but I could spend hours on end, if not days, doing nothing more productive than sitting out there with a good book and a cold drink, soaking up some rays. I have the lovely combination of a sunny, south-facing hillside up above the valley floor with breezes that blow in fresh off the bay. There are days when just breathing the air is like sipping a fine wine.

Back when the landscape project began a couple of months ago, I had several bags of riches from the earth in the shed that were intended for the compost heap: dried oak leaves and composted horse manure mixed with straw, the latter courtesy of the Tilden Park Stables in Berkeley. I was disappointed to find that they have disappeared somewhere in the midst of all the construction chaos. The landscapers commandeered the shed for the duration of the project, and moved some of my stuff aside. I expect that the bags probably got wet, and they tossed them out. Who knew they wouldn’t recognize and appreciate the value of dried oak leaves and horse manure compost? This is the kind of stuff money can’t buy – I collected it via good, old-fashioned sweat equity. What IS the world coming to these days?

My oldest brother is an avid outdoorsman and hunter who has been into guns since he was a tiny tot being taught by our grandfather how to hold a rifle taller than he was. Several years ago, around the time the Internet was really taking off, he mentioned that his perfect fantasy of being out in the wild included hitting a key on a laptop to send instructions for a stock transaction and then turning around, picking up his gun, and Kapow!—taking out a deer. I have spectacularly different interests and aptitudes than him, but I can appreciate the sentiment.

That story came to mind today because I’m working both sides of the nature/culture divide in my own fashion. I’ve just upgraded my Mac to a fancy new state-of-the-art “Magic Trackpad,” replacing the old mouse that kept getting gummed up. I’m generally more interested in content than in technological bells and whistles (there’s an understatement!), but this gizmo is actually pretty cool. It will save wear and tear on my thumb joint, among other things.

AND, the landscaping work is wrapping up this afternoon. I can’t wait to get out there and get my hands dirty. The puppy was running around whimpering last night when the dogs went out after dinner, and I think it was because the spot where she’d buried a rawhide chew had gotten covered over with landscape cloth and bark chips and she couldn’t orient herself. I’m quite happy to have most of the exposed ground out there covered over so the dogs don’t track dirt in the house, but everything in moderation including moderation. It’s good to keep patches of bare earth around—you never know when they’ll come in handy.

The landscaping work is expected to finish up tomorrow, which means I’ll finally be able to settle in outdoors and begin working with the garden beds. At the moment, they stretch out like blank canvases waiting to be sprinkled with fairy dust and brought to life. Today I bought the first set of plants for the vegetable bed: Winterbor Kale, Red Express Cabbage, Collard Greens, All-Star Lettuce Mix, Green Arrow Peas, Mammoth Melting Snow Peas, Stockton Red Onions and Soy Beans. Tomatoes and Zucchini will need to wait for Spring, and then I’ll improvise from there if there’s still space available. There’s a whole host of herbs I intend to plant, but, as they’re mostly perennials, I’ll intersperse them in the flower beds.

The garden is the place where I find it easiest to let go of being constantly goal-oriented. I think it’s because it’s the domain of natural magic. The frequency is always around us, but it’s all too easily drowned out by the cacophony of modern culture. My aim is to get it all in better balance, and then find a way to maintain that.

With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.

My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mîr Camar Uddîn Mast, “Being seated, to run through the region of the spiritual world; I have had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines.” I kept Homer’s Iliad on my table through the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.

–Excerpt from Walden, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Winter rains have turned the rolling, golden hills a brilliant green, and some of the meadows and forests in the regional parks could pass as settings for one of those nineteenth century fantasy novels where the protagonist is drawn into a pastoral realm and sets out on a series of adventures.  I took the dogs on a new trail one enchanted afternoon last fall, and the sun filtering through a grove of oak trees created the effect of walking in a Maxfield Parrish painting.  There are worlds to explore, here.

My garden landscaping project has reached the finishing touches stage, and this weekend was the first time in several weeks that I’ve been able to truly relax and enjoy the space out there.  It helps that we’re in the midst of a stretch of sunny weather.  Yesterday evening I was looking at the view across the valley and I became intrigued with the idea of trying to find the precise location of a particularly pretty hillside.  It occurred to me that it must be close to an area where the dogs and I have recently begun taking hikes, and a look at Google Maps backed that up.  I went out there this afternoon, and, while my four-legged companions raced around in the meadows, I took out my binoculars and tried to see if I could pinpoint my neighborhood.  I’m definitely on the right track.  I don’t quite have it pinned down, and there’s a barbed wire fence separating the parkland from a cow pasture that I think may be the hill I can see from across the way (meaning I’m barred from getting the vantage point I’d like).   But it’s fun to try to match the shapes of hills and the texture and patterns of trees from perspectives near and far.  Kind of like searching for pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, only in real time and with real terrain.

I’m trying to match up this:

with this:

I know they’re close, but it’s a puzzle. I don’t have it figured out yet.

August 7, 2002, Santiago de Compostela, Spain—

Hello Sinners:

I finally arrived here in Santiago last night.

My last day of riding the Holy Skinkmobile didn’t go quite like I had planned. I had thought that, with the finish of my holy pilgrimage so close, I would have been blessed with a divine passion to do His will. With a second wind, I would have mounted a herculean effort and the ride would have gone something like that old Burt Reynolds movie “The Cannonball Run,” with La Guardia Civil chasing after me trying to give me numerous speeding tickets and arrest me for other outrageous traffic violations, but never being able to catch up with the lightening fast Holy Skinkmobile.

Instead, it took my entire second wind and then some just to get out of bed, which didn’t leave me much energy for excessive speed violations. In fact, it took six hours and five double shots of espresso just to get 40 km here.

Becoming a saint sounded so easy when I first heard about it in that cafe of the ultra left radical artistic crowd back in Paris. All I really had to do was get on the bicycle and ride over a couple of minor hills. But I looked at the odometer this morning, and found I have peddled 1,614.50 km. For you non-metric philistines, that is just over 1000 miles, and it is incredible: at least 99 % of that seemed to be uphill.

On my last bicycle ride over here I went over twice that distance, and I don’t recall being this tired. But then I wasn’t trying to get to any place in particular, I just wanted to get as far as Africa so I could say I had done it. I only rode on days that I felt like riding.

At least this trip I have something more than a few photos to show for my efforts. I now have in my possession an official document, written in Latin by the higher hierarchy of the Roman Clergy of Spain and recognized by both St. Peter and the Pope, attesting to my spiritual purity, piety and status that mere mortals don’t usually achieve.

Last night was the first time I have ever been able to sleep for 14 hours in a tent. I was really tired, and still am. I’m at a campground now at the edge of town with some of the other pilgrims that passed me along the way. I wasn’t the fastest pilgrim, just the holiest.

I think I will stay at the campground for awhile and devote my time to some more academic and less physical demanding interests, at least until I can walk over 100 meters without having to rest.

Talk to ya later,

St. William of the sore butt de Compostela

In developing a sense of rootedness in place, I’ve found that the logical place to start is with the natural, social and literary history of a geographical area. Merely scratching the surface yields up so much information that from there you can just follow trails of crumbs into the forest and see where they lead. I could get very far on just the fact that John Muir lived out his life in the neighboring city of Martinez when his friends finally succeeded in pressuring him to come down out of the mountains and settle into a civilized life. Some of the hills and forests where I wander with my dogs are on terrain that he roamed.

Stephen Vincent Benét, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929 for his magnificent epic poem on the Civil War, John Brown’s Body, also lived nearby during his early childhood years. His poem “American Names,” the source of the famous line “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee,” mentions the Carquinez Straits, just a hop, skip and a jump from here.

That snippet of history alone makes local lore come alive. I took the dogs out this afternoon to Wildcat Canyon, a magnificent name for a decent-sized park plunked down in the midst of an urban area. The trail we go on is not one of the more spectacular hikes in the regional park system, but it has a subtle beauty that grows on me each time I go there. The wildest thing we came across today was cows grazing up on a hillside, including a few nursing moms. The dogs behaved themselves, and didn’t pull any magical tricks such as crossing the barbed wire fence that separated the trail from the cow pasture.

Many moons ago, when I was homeschooling my son, I became enchanted with the manner in which the impressionist artist Claude Monet lived and worked in his magical garden in a small village outside Paris. In the early 1880s, Monet settled with his large family on a sprawling country estate and set to work transforming the grounds into a wonderland of color, mood, and culinary bounty. Adjacent to the house was a barn that became the studio where he painted his famous canvases. The Japanese Bridge and the lake filled with water lilies were only footsteps away. Fruits, vegetables and herbs from the garden went into the kitchen, where they were transformed into everything from ordinary mealtime fare to exotic wines and liqueurs.

I was swept away by the idea of a garden, kitchen and workspace forming an integrated cauldron for nurturing the creative pursuits of the occupants of a household. The possibilities for realizing such a space are infinite. In 2001 I had the good fortune to visit Monet’s home and garden at Giverny, and I found it every bit as magical as I had imagined. I instantly saw how one could never grow tired of studying the endless play of light, color and shadow in one beautiful patch of land and shaping its growth and produce. Given how busy modern, urban life is, I’ve found over the years that it’s easier said than done to create a lifestyle that pulls together all these elements. But I find the dream no less inspiring today than I did when it first came to me.

Then on a stately Oak I cast mine Eye,
Whose ruffling top the Clouds seem’d to aspire;
How long since thou wast in thine Infancy?
Thy strength, and stature, more thy years admire,
Hath hundred winters past since thou wast born?
Or thousand since thou brakest thy shell of horn,
If so, all these as nought, Eternity doth scorn.

From Contemplations, by Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

N.B. Anne Bradstreet was among the first, if not the first, of America’s published poets. Born in England, she married and came to the New World while still in her teens. Her brother-in-law had her first book of poems published in London in 1650, unbeknownst to her. It was entitled The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America.