The Return of the Natives in Los Angeles

Seven years ago the island in Alondra Park near Lawndale and Torrance, two Los Angeles’s southern suburbs, was used as a junkyard. Residents would abandon rabbits, roosters, and hamsters they didn’t want on the barren, muddy clay. There were few native plants, a little grass, and a couple of palm and pine trees. In a time of budget cutbacks, LA County had accepted this island as an ugly wasteland.

Once the whole Los Angeles plain was a garden teeming with native plants and animals. Father Juan Crespi, diarist for the first Spanish Sacred Expedition, described in 1769 camping along the Santa Ana River lined with “sycamores, alders, willows, and other trees.” Crespi reported that the land was full of wild antelope. Beside the antelope there were hares, coyotes, deer, and wild goats.

As Crespi moved over the Los Angeles plains, he noted that the plains were covered with grasses; the Indians gave the Spaniard baskets of seeds of sage and other grasses. By the Los Angeles River, the Spaniards walked through thickets of wild grapes and rosebushes in full bloom. Crespi said the “soil is black and loamy, and is capable of producing every kind of grain and fruit which may be planted.” As the Spanish party headed west to the sea, Crespi described a stream lined with herbs and watercress next to a grove of alder trees.

By the early 1990s many native plants have been wiped out or replaced with exotics in Los Angeles; large parts of the city were an ecological wasteland like the island in Alondra Park. The LA Times Times’ article “From Wasteland to Showplace for Native Plants” by Nikki Usher tells how Jeanne Bellemin, a zoology instructor from El Camino College in Torrance, got permission from Los Angeles County officials to replant 1/3 of the island at Alondra Park and encouraged volunteers from her environmental biology and field entomology classes to garden with her. For decades Southern Californian gardeners avoid planting native plants so there have been few urban native gardens, but Bellemin decided to use natives because they are tough, need little water, defend themselves well from attacks by bugs and squirrel. I wonder why this preference for exotic plants. Is it because gardeners compete with each for the showiest gardens? But Bellemin decided for the natives.

In the beginning, Bellemin had problems gets a hose to work properly on the island. During Crespi's time the Santa Ana and Los Angeles Rivers would regulary flood the plains, but now the rivers have been channelized to avoid such floods. A few times Bellamin found that the the poorly working hose flooded out sections of Bellemin’s garden. Another problem is that L.A. County gave her no money, so she spent her own money for seven years, haunting sales for native plants. El Camino College once gave her $5,000 grant while Dow Chemical gave her $700 but mostly she used her own money to buy plants.

For the garden she and her students planted the natives she bought: she chose “white, purple, and black sage, yellow native poppies and flannel bush, with soft fuzzy leaves and 2-inch yellow flowers. There are a wooly blue curl, a plant with purple flowers; California fuchsia; and island snapdragons, native to Catalina island.” The Times reported that the snapdragons have attracted “unusual varieties of hummingbirds and a rare orange-crowned warbler.” The garden has 85 different kinds of plants, 20 species of butterflies and 155 bird species have been seen there. Bellemin has even gotten a crown-beard sunflower, an endangered species, to grow in the garden.

She credits most of the work in creating and maintaining her garden to her El Camino College students, ten of whom work at the garden on Fridays and Saturdays 8-10 hours. Former students return to help out in the garden. For seven years she and her students have been gardening for free for L.A. County. The students do get credit or extra-credit for their work. “I’m trying to teach them that with a little hope and love you can turn something really ugly into something beautiful,” she said. “They’re seeing that what they can do can really make the community more beautiful.”

The Western Society of Naturalists gave her their Naturalist of the Year award while The LA County Department of Parks and Recreation said she was one of their top volunteers in 2004. But the recognition Bellemin gets she gives to her students and the park. Robert van de Hoek, Alondra Park supervisor, has recognized the wonderful work she’s done on the park: “There are so few real urban native gardens in Southern California, and Jeanne has created one worth driving to from far away to visit.

The county is thinking differently now about Alondra Park. In a time of budge cutbacks, they are talking about nature centers. “Who knows if the next nature center will be here,” Van doe Hoek said. There should, of course, be many more parks with gardens of native plants in the Los Angeles plains. Amidst the endless miles of concrete streets, freeways, factories and malls, the native gardens would be the true nature centers, helping bring at least islands of land back to the beauty it once had in 1769 at the time Father Crespi walked through the thickets of wild grapes and rosebushes in bloom, walked on plains well-covered with grasses, and and walked by rivers lined with herbs, watercress and alders.

Is There a Distinctive California Poetry?

It’s amazing that California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, edited by Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost and Jack Hicks, is the first such historical anthology. The anthology shows how English-language poets struggled from 1850 to today to apply the latest European poetics to talk about a natural landscape and social world in California quite different from Europe’s. California Poetry provides a good history of the state’s English-language poetry and illustrates California’s tradition of well-crafted verse. The book, which ably captures the diversity of California’s English language-poetry of the last 50 years, makes a huge contribution but also leaves out a lot.

What has been left out? In Dana Gioia’s introduction he admits “the editors lacked both the expertise and the space to examine, evaluate, and present the best work from the state’s rich American Indian literatures or the substantial Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and other traditions.” He further argues that only a monolingual volume could accomplish the book’s two purposes: “to establish California’s rightful place in the history of American poetry and to insist on the state’s position as a significant and distinct region in English-language literature.”

Gioia also mentioned California’s historical and geographical uniqueness: the state faces Asia; was formerly owned by Spain and then Mexico; has always been being dominated by huge farms, not small family farms. Yet the anthology neglects to show important poetries--Native American, Asian, Latino/a, working class/political poetry— reflect the state’s geography and history. These marginalized poetries also had histories that were crucial to creating California poetry.

In Section 1 on 19th century poetry, California Poetry rightly includes the significant Anglo poetry: Ina Coolbrith and George Sterling mainly wrote a derivative romantic poetry praising the California landscape while Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller combined frontier populist voices, English poetry forms, and Anglo nationalism. The anthology’s excellent introductions shows how poets in the late 19th century collaborated and helped guide the next generation, but there is a problem with this 19th century poetry. Gioia in an essay in My California astutely comments that British nature poetry “careful developed over centuries from close observation of nature” but English-language poets such as Coolbrith and Sterling didn’t find in California British nightingales, roses, and foxes but meadowlarks, poppies, and coyotes. Gioia feels that these Anglo poets and their descendants have been struggling for 150 years to find the “right images, myths, and characters” for this state’s literature.

After 10,000 years of living in California, the Indians have had thousands of years of closely observing nature, which permeates their literatures. In fact, the ubiquitous coyote is a comic star in Native myths while the meadowlark as well as Coyote sings the world into existence into the Maidu creation epic. Besides writing poetry saturated in the natural world, Native singers created love lyrics, dramatic narratives, mourning songs and vision chants. This poetry emerged out of spiritual visions and is alive with mythic characters. Including this astonishingly brilliant Native traditional poetry would help show how truly distinctive California’s poetry is. Since Malcolm Margolin published The Way We Lived: California Indian Reminiscences, Stories and Songs, his book began to make this wonderful literature available to an English-language audience.

Despite the abscence of Native traditional poetry, the anthology does include poems by two famous turn-of-the century prose writers, Ambrose Bierce and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Their two poems are Section I’s most delightful surprises. Bierce’s “A Rational Anthem” smartly satirizes turn-of-the century political corruption while Gilman’s “Matriatism” contrasts the violence of men fighting for the “fatherland” with the peacefulness of women struggling to create the “motherland.” Happily, the anthology includes Edwin Markham, the most successful poet from this era, as he decries the exploitation of farmer laborers in his “Man with the Hoe,” a poem published in newspapers worldwide. Markham’s poem as well as Frank Norris’s novel The Octopus began California’s literature of protest against the Octopus—the railroad and large landowners—which dominated the state.

Bierce, Gilman and Markham—all riding the wave of late 19thand early 20th century protest—wrote a new, original California poetry. Yet a few good poems don’t make an original literature in California. There’s really little distinctive about this 19th century California poetry until you add in poems from the California Indian languages and translations from poems written by Californios in Spanish. Then, California becomes a its own poetic region from 1850-1900 with three distinctive poetries: English; Native American languages; and Spanish.

In Section II on the California modernist the editors have happily included equal numbers of men as well as the lesser-know women poets—Hildegarde Flanner, Janet Lewis, Rosalie Moore, and Josephine Miles--and rightly evaluate two of most original voices as Robinson Jeffers and Kenneth Rexroth. Again the anthology’s excellent introductions to poets in Section II, III, and IV show how modernists in Section II taught, inspired, and encouraged the rebels and traditionalist poets of Section III and IV. This anthology’s introduction to Rexroth states that this poet, the father of the beats and California alternative lifestyles, was a radical and pacifist; loved the natural world of Northern California; and translated poems from the Chinese and Japanese; Gioia calls these translations “relevant sources for a California literary identity.”

Alongside Rexroth’s poetry, this book could have included selections from the Chinese poems of those immigrants who were imprisoned at Angel Island. The poems were published in Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigration on Angel Island, 1910-1940, edited by Mark Lai Him, Genny Lim and Judy Yung. Angel Island poems are the beginning of Chinese-American poetry. During this period Rexroth as well as Pound translated from the Chinese, praising the condensed powerful imagery of Chinese poetry. The Angel Island poems have the condensed powerful imagery as well as emotional power that the early modernists so admired in the Chinese poems they translated.

Also including Japanese-American haiku poets from the concentration camps would have contributed to a developing California poetic identity. In the 1920s and 1930s immigrant Japanese joined haiku-clubs, published in Japanese-language newspapers, and competed for literary prizes. These haiku poets, who continued writing during the war, had their haiku collected and translated in Violet Kazue de Cristoforos’s May Sky—There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku. Cary Nelson has said that among the writers were members of California’s haiku-writing clubs who were writing a free-verse modernist haiku popular in the 1930s. Indeed, the haiku Nelson includes in his Modern American Poetry are stunning in their imagery, restraint, and immense sadness—they are brilliant poems. If the book had included the translations of the Japanese haiku poems from the concentration camps, it could have begun documenting the history of California’s Japanese-American poetry.

In section II and III the anthology has Japanese-American poets after World War II writing fine English-language work: Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, Lawson Inada, and Amy Uyematsu. In the post-war period two other Japanese-American poets who could also have been included are Southern California’s Mitsuye Yamada, who writes a powerful poetry about her own experiences in the camps, and San Franciscan Janice Mirikitani, who writes wonderfully about her many subjects including mother’s camp experience. These two women have been mainstays of their poetry communities for decades.

Part III should be praised for its diverse coverage of the 1940s through 1960s. The book shows the many inter-connections of poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, both beats and their allies. These poets used free verse, were political dissidents, and often went on religious quests exploring Buddhism and Hinduism. These Bay Area rebels included gay voices of Robert Duncan, Thom Gunn, and Jack Spicer as well as Gary Snyder’s imagistic environmental poetry. The anthology has a good selection of the well-crafted poems of the traditionalists, many of who were students of Yvor Winters at Stanford. It also happily includes two working class poets, Charles Bukowski and Okie poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel.

Here California Poetry’s falters, showing Bukowski and McDaniel isolated working class poets which they weren’t. That early 20th century protest culture of Bierce, Markham, Gilman also included Wobblies including Gary Snyder’s father; Kenneth Rexroth’s Christian socialist parents; Ferlinghetti’s Italian anarchist parents; and Upton Sinclair, who settled in Los Angeles where he lived the last thirty years of his life. Sinclair inspired a new generation of 1930s radicals and proletarian writers with his novels and his running for governor of California. By the mid-1930s H.L. Mencken was printing the first stories of young proletarian writers from Los Angeles such as Italian-American John Fante who inspired Bukowski more than any other writer on earth.

Tillie Olsen was another one of the young 1930s proletarian writers in San Francisco. I’d also add to any anthology on California poetry Tillie Olsen’s “I Want You Women Up North to Know,” a powerful political poem about exploitation of Southwest seamstresses. In contrast to Olsen, John Beecher was a descendant of the illustrious Beecher family and Harvard-educated, but he dropped out in the 1930s to work for years in factories and with sharecroppers. Both Beecher and Olsen were blacklisted in the 1950s and only emerged later in the 1960s after the blacklist receded—a tragedy that any anthology of California poetry needs to include. In Los Angeles, the poetic circle around Thomas McGrath was particularly hurt when many of the poets were blacklisted, an act which stunted Los Angeles’ poetry for a decade. One 1950s Los Angeles poet in California Poetry, Bert Myers, learned his craft not from “poets at coffeehouses” as the anthology says but from the McGrath circle of poets. The fine anthology Poets from the Non-Existent City edited by Estelle Gersgoren Novak has at long last featured these writers: Tom McGrath, Don Gordon, Naomi Replansky, Edwin Rolfe, Alvaro Cardona-Hines et al.

California’s dissident tradition was huge by the late 1960s and 1970s, producing young poets who began to publish and appreciate Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. Also two poets from the working class who really need to be in section four on contemporary poetry are Judy Grahn and Ron Silliman. Grahn was far and away the most important woman poet in California in the 1970s as well as the first important lesbian poet. Her Common Woman series of poems had an electrifying effect across the state. Grahn’s work inspired a whole generation of working class women poets, began a new lesbian poetry, and influenced black poets like Ntozake Shange. The anthology excludes Silliman for leaving California but Silliman is as Californian as any poet in this book. Growing up in Berkeley, his life as well as his poetry is rooted in Bay Area dissident culture and his poetry with its deep social conscience is nourished from these roots.

Though section IV on contemporary poetry includes diverse poetry, the diversity should be broadened further to include important contemporary working class/political poets: San Franciscans Carol Tarlen, Nelly Wong, and Jack Hirschman as well as Southern Californians Fred Voss and Joan Jobe Smith. These poets write an oppositional poetry against the new Octopus of the New Gilded age of the late 20th century. All five poets, totally rooted in a hundred-year old California dissident poetry, have created distinctive voices: Tarlen’s avant-garde visionary take on the working class; Wong’s evocations of the lives of immigrant Chinese; Hirschman’s many translations from European languages and his internationalist poetics; Smith’s brilliant poetry on the sexual politics of work in the sex trade; and Voss, whom British critics have called the best Anglo-American poet of factory work.

Smith and Voss, a married couple from Long Beach, are poetic descendents of Bukowski whom Smith knew. So far, Voss and Smith have been more recognized in Britain than in California while Hirschman has greater recognition in France and Italy than just as Bukowski was first recognized in Germany before any academics in California took him seriously. Further, California working class/political poetry lacks the nostalgia for closed up factories dominating the Midwestern/Eastern poetry of such anthologies as Working Classics.

Starting in the 1970s Hirschman as well as other internationalists did important translations from Latin American poetry, often in collaboration with Latino poets: Alvaro Cardona Hines and Clayton Eschelman each translated Valejo; West End Press while in L.A. put out A Nation of Poets: Writings from the Poetry Workshops of Nicaragua (1988); Alejandro Murguia and Barbara Pashke edited Volcan: Poems from Central America (City Lights). Volcan had twelve translators, both Latino and Anglo. I translated El Salvadoran refugee poets. Just as Rexroth and Gary Snyder’s translations from Asian literature redefined Californian poetry, these translators of Latin American poetry are helping redefine this state’s poetry whose sources are now Neruda as well as Whitman.

In section IV though there are important Latino/a poets included—Gina Valdes, Gary Soto, Francisco X. Alarcon, Juan Felipe Herrera and Aleida Rodriguez—the anthology lacks any sense of the long historical dialogue among Hispanic poets in the state that Juan Felipe Herrera has called “The Califas Movimiento: 1964-1984.” Herrera distinguishes six parts of this movimiento: San Diego’s indigenous consciousness illustrated by Alurista’s 1971 Floricanto; the tough gritty urban avant garde of Los Angeles Chicano/as such as Marisela Norte, poetry’s ambassador from East L.A.; the Fresno school poets Jose Montoya and Louis Omar Salinas often writing about farm workers; and the San Franciscan internationalism of Juan Felipe Herrera himself, a fine poet and one of the translators in Volcan.

Herrera then mentions the strong Chicana voices such as Lorna de Cervantes and Bernice Zamora as well as the impact of some Chicano poets moving from the barrios into the university. Poets like Gary Soto began teaching in universities alongside the large generation of Chicano/a literary critics and scholars. One of these scholars, Reynaldo Ruiz, recently published Hispanic Poetry in Los Angeles 1850-1900 La Poesía Angelina, so questions can now be asked what continuities exist between 19th century, 20th and 21st/ century Latino/a poets.

Having more of a historical sense of the growth of Latino/a poetry as well as having more contemporary Native poets would both show more of the distinctiveness of Californian literature. Traditional Native American poetries are continued in the work of three wonderful contemporary Native poets: William Oandasan, Yuki; Georgiana Sanchez, Chumash; and Janice Gould, Maidu. All three write brilliantly about being Native Californians. Also the African-American poet Kamau d’Aaood, a major voice from SouthCentral Los Angeles, could be included. In the late 1960s he was a member of the Watts Writer Workshop; he has had for thirty year collaborated with L.A.’s world-class jazz musicians; is a superb poet; and founded the World Stage performance space giving 1990s black poets their stage.

Anyone interested in California literature should read this book. In his last paragraph’s Gioia says that his volume as “an historical anthology, it is only in an incomplete and retrospective sense.” Although the honesty and humility is refreshing, this book is only the first step in a journey. Now the state’s other poetries need to have their histories interwoven into the story. Gioia, Yost and Hicks have made the necessary step of creating the first historical anthology of California poets. They should be applauded for their efforts.






















It’s amazing that California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, edited by Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost and Jack Hicks, is the first such historical anthology. The anthology shows how English-language poets struggled from 1850 to today to apply latest European poetics to talk about a natural landscape and social world in California quite different from Europe’s. California Poetry has tremendously contributed to helping a reader understand the history of English-language California poetry and shows California’s tradition of well-crafted verse. The book, ably capturing the diversity of California’s English language-poetry of the last 50 years, makes a huge contribution but also leaves out a lot.

What has been left out? In Dana Gioia’s introduction he admits “the editors lacked both the expertise and the space to examine, evaluate, and present the best work from the state’s rich American Indian literatures or the substantial Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and other traditions.” He further argues that only a monolingual volume could accomplish the book’s two purposes: “to establish California’s rightful place in the history of American poetry and to insist on the state’s position as a significant and distinct region in English-language literature.”

Gioia also mentioned California’s historical and geographical uniqueness: the state faces Asia; was formerly owned by Spain and then Mexico; has always been being dominated by huge farms, not small family farms. Yet the anthology neglects to show important poetries reflecting these geographical and historical conditions--Native American, Asian, Latino/a, working class/political poetry—also had histories that shaped this state’s poetry. These other poetries were crucial in creating the distinctive California poetry.

In Section 1 of the 19th century poetry, California Poetry rightly includes the significant Anglo poetry: Ina Coolbrith and George Sterling mainly wrote a derivative romantic poetry praising the California landscape while Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller combined frontier populist voices, English poetry forms, and Anglo nationalism. Gioia in an essay in My California astutely comments that British nature poetry “careful developed over centuries from close observation of nature” but English-language poets in California such as Coolbrith and Sterling don’t find British nightingales, roses, and foxes but California’s meadowlarks, poppies, and coyotes. Gioia feels that these Anglo poets and their descendants have been struggling for 150 years to find the “right images, myths, and characters” for this state’s literature.

The anthology’s excellent introductions show the continuities in this poetry from 1860 through 1910 and how poets collaborated, helping guide and inspire the next generation. Two famous prose writers, Ambrose Bierce and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, have poems that are Section I’s most delightful surprises. Bierce’s “A Rational Anthem” smartly satirizes turn-of-the century political corruption while Gilman’s “Matriatism” contrasts the violence of men fighting for the “fatherland” with the peacefulness of women struggling to create the “motherland.” Happily, the anthology includes Edwin Markham, the most successful poet from this era, as he decries the exploitation of farmer laborers in his “Man with the Hoe,” a poem published in newspapers worldwide. Markham’s poem as well as Frank Norris’s novel The Octopus began California’s literature of protest against the Octopus—the railroad and large landowners—which dominated the state.

Bierce, Gilman and Markham—all riding the wave of late 19thand early 20th century protest—wrote a new, original California poetry. Yet a few good poems don’t make an original literature in California. There’s really little distinctive about this 19th century California poetry until you add in poems from the California Indian languages and translations from poems written by Californios in Spanish. Then, California becomes a its own historical poetic region from 1850-1900 with three distinctive poetries: English; Native American languages; and Spanish.

After 10,000 years of living in California, the Indians have thousands of years of closely observing nature, which permeates their literatures. In fact, the ubiquitous coyote is a comic star in Native myths while the meadowlark as well as Coyote sings the world into existence into the Maidu creation epic. Besides writing poetry saturated in the natural world, Native singers created love lyrics, dramatic narratives, mourning songs and vision chants. This poetry emerged out of spiritual visions and is alive with mythic characters. Including this astonishingly brilliant Native traditional poetry would help show how truly distinctive California’s poetry is. Since Malcolm Margolin published The Way We Lived: California Indian Reminiscences, Stories and Songs, his book began to make this wonderful literature available to an English-language audience.

In Section II on the California modernist the editors have happily included equal numbers of men as well as the lesser-know women poets—Hildegarde Flanner, Janet Lewis, Rosalie Moore, and Josephine Miles and rightly evaluate two of most original voices as Robinson Jeffers and Kenneth Rexroth. Again the anthology’s excellent introductions poets in Section II, III, and IV show how modernists in Section II taught, inspired, and encouraged the rebels and traditionalist poets of Section III and IV. This anthology’s introduction to Rexroth states that this poet, the father of the beats and California alternative lifestyles, combined his populist politics as a radical and pacifist; his love for natural world of Northern California; and his translations from the Chinese and Japanese, which Gioia calls “relevant sources for a California literary identity.”

Alongside Rexroth’s poetry, this book could have included selections from the Chinese poems of those immigrants who were imprisoned at Angel Island. The poems were published in Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigration on Angel Island, 1910-1940, edited by Mark Lai Him, Genny Lim and Judy Yung. Angel Island poems are the beginning of Chinese-American poetry. During this period Rexroth as well as Pound translated from the Chinese, praising the condensed powerful imagery of its poetry. The Angel Island poems have the condensed powerful imagery as well as emotional power that the early modernists so admired in the Chinese poems they translated.

Also including Japanese-American haiku poets from the relocation camps would have contributed to a developing California poetic identity. In the 1920s and 1930s immigrant Japanese joined haiku-clubs, published in Japanese-language newspapers, and competed for literary prizes. These haiku poets, who continued writing during the war, had their haiku collected and translated in Violet Kazue de Cristoforos’s May Sky—There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku. Cary Nelson has said that among the writers were members of California’s haiku-writing clubs who were writing a free-verse modernist haiku popular in the 1930s. Indeed, the haiku Nelson includes in his Modern American Poetry are stunning in their imagery, restraint, and immense sadness—they are brilliant poems. If the book had included the translations of the Japanese haiku poems from the concentration camps, it could have begun documenting the history of California’s Japanese-American poetry.

In section II and III the anthology has Japanese-American poets after World War II writing fine English-language work: Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, Lawson Inada, and Amy Uyematsu. In the post-war period two other Japanese-American poets who could also have been included are Southern California’s Mitsuye Yamada, who writes a powerful poetry about her own experiences in the camps, and San Franciscan Janice Mirikitani, who writes wonderfully about her many subjects including mother’s camp experience. These two women have been mainstays of their poetry communities for decades.

Part III should be praised for its diverse coverage of the 1940s through 1960s. The book shows the many inter-connections of poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, both beats and their allies who as a group finally did create a distinctive California poetry that was in free verse, dissident, including religious quests in Buddhism and Hinduism. These Bay Area rebels included gay voices of Robert Duncan, Thom Gunn, and Jack Spicer as well as Gary Snyder’s imagistic environmental poetry. The anthology has a good selection of the well-crafted poems of the traditionalists, many of who were students of Yvor Winters at Stanford. It also happily includes two working class poets, Charles Bukowski and Okie poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel.

Here California Poetry falters, showing Bukowski and McDaniel as isolated working class poets which they weren’t. That early 20th century protest culture of Bierce, Markham, Gilman also included Upton Sinclair, who settled in Los Angeles where he lived the last thirty years of his life inspiring a new generation of 1930s radicals with his writings and running for governor of California; Wobblies who crisscrossed the West including Gary Snyder’s father; Kenneth Rexroth’s Christian socialist parents; and Ferlinghetti’s Italian anarchist parents. In the 1930s H.L. Mencken was printing the first stories of young proletarian writers from Los Angeles like Italian-American John Fante who inspired Bukowksi more than any other writer on earth.

Tillie Olsen was one of the young 1930s proletarian writers in San Francisco. I’d also add to any anthology on California poetry Tillie Olsen’s “I Want You Women Up North to Know,” a powerful political poem about exploitation of Southwest seamstresses. In contrast to Olsen, John Beecher, was a descendant of the illustrious Beecher family and Harvard-educated, but he dropped out in the 1930s to work for years in factories and with sharecroppers. Both Beecher and Olsen were blacklisted in the 1950s and only emerged later in the 1960s after the blacklist receded—a tragedy that any anthology of California poetry needs to include. In Los Angeles, the circle of radical poets around Thomas McGrath was particularly hurt when many of the poets were blacklisted, an act which stunted Los Angeles’ poetry for a decade. One 1950s Los Angeles poet in California Poetry, Bert Myers, learned his craft not from “poets at coffeehouses” as the anthology says but from the McGrath circle of poets. The fine anthology Poets from the Non-Existent City edited by Estelle Gersgoren Novak has at long last featured these writers: Tom McGrath, Don Gordon, Naomi Replansky, Edwin Rolfe, Alvaro Cardona-Hines et al.

California’s dissident tradition was huge by the late 1960s and 1970s, producing young poets who began to publish and appreciate Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. Also two poets from the working class who really need to be in section four on contemporary poetry are Judy Grahn and Ron Silliman. Grahn was far and away the most important women poet in California in the 1970s as well as the first important lesbian poet. Her Common Woman series of poems had an electrifying effect across the state. Grahn’s work inspired many: black poets like Ntozake Shange, a generation of working class women poets, and also a new lesbian poetry. The anthology excludes Silliman for leaving California but Silliman is as Californian as any poet in this book. Growing up in Berkeley, his life as well as his poetry is rooted in Bay Area dissident culture and his poetry with its deep social conscience is nourished from these roots.

Though section IV on contemporary poetry includes diverse poetry, the diversity should be broadened further to include important contemporary working class/political poets: San Franciscans Carol Tarlen, Nelly Wong, and Jack Hirschman as well as Southern Californians Fred Voss and Joan Jobe Smith. These poets write an oppositional poetry against the new Octopus of the New Gilded age of the late 20th century. All five poets, totally rooted in a hundred-year old California dissident poetry, have created distinctive voices: Tarlen’s avant garde visionary take on the working class; Wong’s evocations of the lives of immigrant Chinese; Hirschman’s many translations from European languages and his internationalist poetics; Smith’s brilliant poetry on the sexual politics of work in the sex trade; and Voss, whom British critics have called the best Anglo-American poet of factory work.

Smith and Voss, a married couple from Long Beach, both are poetic descendents of Bukowski whom Smith knew. So far, Voss and Smith have been more recognized in Britain than in California while Hirschman has greater recognition in France and Italy than just as Bukowski was first recognized in Germany before any academics in California took him seriously. Further, California working class/political poetry lacks the nostalgia for closed up factories dominating the Midwestern/Eastern poetry of such anthologies as Working Classics.

Starting in the 1970s Hirschman as well as other internationalists did important translations from Latin American poetry, often in collaboration with Latino poets: Alvaro Cardona Hines and Clayton Eschelman each translated Valejo; West End Press while in L.A. put out A Nation of Poets: Writings from the Poetry Workshops of Nicaragua (1988); Alejandro Murguia and Barbara Pashke edited Volcan: Poems from Central America (City Lights). Volcan had twelve translators, both Latino and Anglo. I translated El Salvadoran refugee poets. Just as Rexroth and Gary Snyder’s translations from Asian literature redefined Californian poetry, these translators of Latin American poetry are helping redefine this state’s poetry whose sources are now Neruda as well as Whitman.

In section IV though there are important Latino/a poets included in section IV—Gina Valdes, Gary Soto, Francisco X. Alarcon, Juan Felipe Herrera and Aleida Rodriguez—the anthology lacks any sense of the long historical dialogue among Hispanic poets in the state that Juan Felipe Herrera has called “The Califas Movimiento: 1964-1984.” Herrera distinguishes six parts of this movimiento: San Diego’s indigena consciousness illustrated by Alurista’s 1971 Floricanto; the tough gritty urban avant garde of Los Angeles Chicano/as such as Marisela Norte, poetry’s ambassador from East L.A.; the Fresno school poets Jose Montoya and Louis Omar Salinas often writing about farm workers; and the San Franciscan internationalism of Juan Felipe Herrera himself, a fine poet and one of the translators in Volcan.

Herrera then mentions the strong Chicana voices such as Lorna de Cervantes and Bernice Zamora as well as the impact of some Chicano poets moving from the barrios into the university. Poets like Gary Soto began teaching in universities alongside the large generation of Chicano/a literary critics and scholars. One of these scholars, Reynaldo Ruiz, recently published Hispanic Poetry in Los Angeles 1850-1900 La Poesía Angelina (bilingual) so questions can now be asked what continuities exist between 19th century, 20th and 21st/ century Latino/a poets.

Having more of a historical sense of the growth of Latino/a poetry as well as having more contemporary Native poets would both show more of the distinctiveness of Californian literature. Traditional Native American poetries are continued in the work of three wonderful contemporary Native poets: William Oandasan, Yuki; Georgiana Sanchez, Chumash; and Janice Gould, Maidu. All three write brilliantly about being Native Californians. Also the African-American poet Kamau d’Aaood, a major voice from SouthCentral Los Angele, could be included. In the late 1960s he was a member of the Watts Writer Workshop; he has had for thirty year collaborated with L.A.’s world-class jazz musicians; is a superb poet; and founded the World Stage performance space giving 1990s black poets their stage.

Part IV does include a diverse group of contemporary poets, particularly the populist voice prevalent in California’s poetry today as well as given historicized the state’s Anglo mainstream poetry. Anyone interested in California literature should read this book. In his last paragraph’s Gioia says that his volume as “an historical anthology, it is only in an incomplete and retrospective sense.” Although the honesty and humility is refreshing, this book is only the first step in a journey. Now the state’s other poetries need to have their histories interwoven into the story. Gioia, Yost and Hicks have made the necessary step of creating the first historical anthology of California poets. They should be applauded for their efforts.

The Deer and Antelope Roam on the Carrizo Plain?

I’m a lover of the California deserts, treasure all my visits to the desert and count each animal I’ve seen there as a jewel. I saw the wild mustangs in Death Valley, and a wild burro mother and child in the Pannamint Valley, and the desert tortoise in Joshua Tree. Today I just received the Desert Report newsletter from the Sierra Club, full information about assaults on animals in the desert.

The latest edition of the Desert Report has a article on the Carrizo Plain in Central California between San Luis Obispo and Bakersfield and 100 miles north of Los Angeles. This area, refuge to more endangered animals and plants than any other place in California, is the last little remnant of 400 miles of grasslands that once covered the San Joaquin Valleys. The Spanish reported that on these grasslands in the San Joaquin Valley they saw endless miles of wildflowers and grasses reaching up to the horses’ bellies. They saw the grasslands teeming with animals and birds: tens of thousands of Tule elk, the only native California deer; thousands of pronghorn antelope, the only North American antelope and one of the earth's fastest runners; the magnificent California condor flew overhead; tens of thousands of other birds; and thousands of desert bighorn sheep.

After the Anglos came, the real killing of the animals began. By the 1880s in these great grasslands of California the pronghorn antelope were hunted to extinction and exactly 28 Tule elk remained alive in the world--all in a small herd in Buttonwillow in the San Joaquin Valley. At that point the deer and the antelope no longer roamed on the range. Then the farmers plowed under the grasslands and filled in the marshes of the San Joaquin Valley, leaving only this one little remaining little island of the grasslands ecosystem in the Carrizo Plain. By the 1980s only 27 California condors remained, living only in the Los Angeles and San Diego Zoos where a huge effort was made to keep the species alive. As for the desert bighorn sheep, they are another endangered species. There are no sheep in Central California but only 280 alive in the world, 200 of them in Anza Borega Desert State Park in San Diego County.

The Carrizo Plain, actually a desert with less than ten inches of water a year, has been called America’s Serengeti like the African Serengeti, a great plains teeming with wildlife, but it's not. The area has been called a wilderness but it's not. The Carrizo Plains is the last home for many endangered species: the San Joaquin kit fox, the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the San Joaquin antelope squirrel, and the giant kangaroo rat. Also, it provides home to almost extinct plant species such as the California jewel-flower, Hoover's wooly-star and San Joaquin woolythreads. It’s also an important habitat for the nearly extinct California condor. What seems to thrive here are the birds, with over 100 species of waterfowl and shorebirds visiting the many pools and the 3,000-acre Soda Lake. The San Andreas Fault cuts the Carrizo Plain in half while the area has Native American rock art, some thousands of years old, which are often defaced by recent visitors. Bill Clinton declared the 205,000 acres of the plains as the Carrizo Plain National Monument in January 2001 as one of his last actions before leaving office.

The problem is that this area is very disturbed grassland. Once Spanish ranchers grazed huge herds of horses, cattle and sheep on the grasses, but overgrazing destroyed a lot of the grassland; further, non-native plants have found the overgrazed land a wonderful place to propagate, so now over half the grasses and flowers are from Europe and Asia. Starting in 1885, farmers tried dry land grain farming; in1912, farmers used huge machinery to plow under huge acres of the grasslands, but drought often destroyed the crops. Small farms went broke trying to compete with the corporate agriculture of the San Joaquin Valley and the farmers quit, but still plow lines scar the foothills while old farmhouses with rusting machinery and barbed wire fences clutter the land.

But the Tule Elk was saved. In 1877 Henry Miller in Buttonwillow, Kern County, protected the one remaining small herd of 28 elk on his Miller-Laux ranch. Over time the federal government and private groups nurtured 20 Tule Elk herds in preserves from Redding to Santa Barbara and in Owens Valley. Since the Tule Elk have flourished, the government allows them to be hunted once again in a limited way. Then a small number of Tule Elk were reintroduced to the Carrizo Plain in this attempt to recreate the pre-Spanish grasslands. As for the pronghorn antelope, there were 35 million before Europeans arrived and hunters killed all but 20,000 by 1920. Conservationists have worked to increase the herds on the ranges successfully and introduce them into various areas where they once roamed such as the Carrizo Plain.

After Clinton made the Carrizo Plain into a national monument managed by the Bureau of Land Management, the government still allows cattle grazing and hunting. One website cheerfully announced that the Carrizo Plain offers many species to hunt: California quail, chukar, cottontail rabbit, deer, the recently reintroduced Tule elk; wild pigs, coyote, California ground squirrel and black-tailed jackrabbit. It’s bizarre to hear that in a place that just reintroduced Tule elk hunters are again allowed to kill them. I don’t think hunting should be allowed on such a damaged ecosystem. Yes, I know the endangered species aren’t being hunted, but when an ecosystem has been so hurt, banning of hunting could help the ecosystem heal.

The Bureau of Land Management has too little funds and staff to patrol remote sites or stop poachers illegally from taking artifacts and damaging ruins. Also hundreds of miles of barbed wire fencing cross the plain endangering the pronghorn antelope. The antelope don’t know how to jump, so when a coyote pursues them up to fence, they’re trapped. Antelopes are impaled in fences while hunters and poachers hang animals on the fences. Volunteers from the Sierra Club go to the Carrizo Plain to pull down some of the barbed wire. It’s absurd to call such an area overgrazed and pockmarked with barbed wire a “wilderness.”

Another threat to the Plains is that nearby Bakersfield has oil, so Bush’s energy plan periodically says it wants to open the Carrizo Plain up to exploration for oil and gas. Of course, this area should be permanently put off-limits from exploration for oil and grass. To protect the antelope and stop the thefts, the staff of the BLM could be increased to take down all the barbed wire and stop the poachers. If the Carrizo Plains are supposed to be protected, then they should really be protected, not halfway. No improvements such as “lodges” for humans should be built.

The federal government is trying to restore the area to what it was like before overgrazing and farming. Biologists are studying the endangering plants and animals to help create strategies to make them flourish. The problem of the non-native grasses forcing out many native grasses remains. Native plants are being seeded in areas that have been overgrazed. The cattle are only allowed to graze on the non-native grasses of early spring, but when the late blooming native perennials grow, the cattle are removed. Besides reintroducing the Tule elk and the antelope, conservationists are letting go of a few California condor in the wild, hoping the birds will be able to survive in the wild again. Robert "Roy" van de Hoek, a naturalist who used to work for the BLM, wants to reintroduce the desert bighorn sheep which once also lived here. Yes, conservationists should reintroduce the bighorn sheep.

What Carrizo Plain is, I think, an attempt to recreate the grasslands, which once existed for thousands of acress. The grasslands, a major California ecosystem, has almost been destroyed. We should all support these imporant efforts to recreate the grasslands, so once again the deer, the antelope, the sheep, and the condor can have a home on the range in Central California.

The Hat Creek Story

This is the first summer in four years I haven’t gone to visit my brother and niece in Hat Creek and Burney, two small towns in the northeast corner of California in a valley in the Cascade Mountains between Mt. Lassen and Mt. Shasta. In the fall of 1999 my brother had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. On my first visit to see him since the diagnosis, he picked me up at the small Redding airport. Redding, the last big town in the Central Valley on Interstate 5 before the Oregon border, was scalding hot as usual in the summer. We drove through the flat, sunbaked ranches and small farms on the eastside of Redding. Soon Highway 44 slowly started to wind its way up into the mountains, the trees getting taller, greener and bigger, the temperature a little cooler.

When my brother was first diagnosed with Parkinsons, he had been living with his wife and five-year old daughter Kat in Hat Creek near Burney and working as a paramedic in the hospital in Fall River, another nearby small town. Afer his diagnosis he went on state disability and applied for federal disability. He also started driving down to Shasta College in Redding to study computers and then got a job tutoring in the computer lab for disabled students. His marriage ended, so he had moved into Burney, taking care of his daughter over 50% of the time. On the second application he had gotten federal disability, which included money for his child, but he was supporting two households, so money was tight. He could work and make up a small amount, but if he made too much, his disability check would be cut.

At this point Highway 44 passed by the entrance to Lassen Volcanic National Park, an inviting road but for another day. He turned north on Highway 89 along which followed Hat Creek. A city girl, I always thought of creeks as tiny, but Hat Creek was at least twenty feet across flowing out of Mt. Lassen rushing mightily. Occasionaliy I would see trout fisherman in hip high boots casting in the stream which is famous for fly fishing wild trout.

We passed a few houses besides the road, pasture land with cattle of the remaning ranches, campgrounds, and picnic tables nestled under towering trees. Hat Creek had oncle been a valley of small cattle ranches, but a few of the cattle ranches had converted themselves into lodges for the fisherman while some retirees had bought houses there. The “town” of Hat Creek was a few buildings strung along the road: a post office, small general store, a Baptist church, a fire station. By now my brother had driven 70 miles. “You drove this three days a week down to Shasta College?” I asked. “Yes,” he answered. “Sometimes 4 days. I drove home three nights a week.”

He then turned off Highway 89, drove a short way, and then into a driveway to show me his old house where his wife, who was away, still lived. He parked, and we sat there looking at the lovely weathered wood house shaded by large towering trees next to a weathered wooden barn. The home on three acres of mostly woods with Hat Creek flowing through was gorgeous. The rustic house only had wood burning stove; since it was at 3,200’ where snow could fall from October through May, each fall my brother used to either chop wood in the forest or buy huge stacks of firewood.

Our family had originally heard about this area from Jim and Mary Lentz, old friends of my uncle. Jim Lentz, who worked with my uncle in the 1950s when they were both machinists at Lockheed in Burbank, used to hike with my uncle in the High Sierras. An avid fisherman, Jim always tried to catch trout on those trips; later with his wife he retired in Burney where they bought a house and he could go fishing. After my mother and uncle would make annual visits to the Lentzes for a couple years, my mother introduced the Lentzes to her son and then daughter-in-law who were living about 100 miles away in another small mountain community. When my brother got the job in the hospital, he and his family rented the house on three-acres with a horse, a donkey, and Hat Creek flowing through. My ex-sister-in-law loved to catch trout which she then smoked. Even my niece had her own fishing pole to catch trout! Across the road lived Atsugewi (Hat Creek Indians), the natives of this land.

After a few moments of looking at his old house, my brother started up the car. Back on 89, we quickly passed more ranches and campgrounds until we got to the intersection with Highway 299, turning left, passing motels on the outskirts of Burney, then past the two supermarkets, the bank, a coffee shop in this milltown of 3,000, turning left again until we reached the Lentze’s brown wooden two-story house shaped like a boat with pine trees and flower gardens in front and back. I was staying there as my brother’s one room apartment was too small.

I wasn’t the only visitor that June at the Lentzes: two teenager boys, former neighbors, were also visiting. Their mother, who had inherited a cattle ranch from her grandfather, had turned it into a fisherman’s lodge. Then she and her husband had sold the land, moving to Montana. The two teenagers, who had gone to Burney High, were returning to celebrate the graduation of the younger boy’s friends. Mary, a gracious hostess, served a wonderful roast beef-and-potatoes dinner around her large oval dining table where the teenagers described small town high school graduation.

After breakfast the next morning, Mary put out maps of Shasta County to help me decide where to go with my brother and niece. That first visit was a whirwind. My brother and I went to my then eight-year old niece’s 2nd grade class’s graduation party in a Fall River park with twenty-five kids playing on the elaborate swings and climbing structure; mothers and a few fathers bringing out food; screaming kids surrounding a child striking at a pinata hanging from a tree; kids playing water balloon games; and parents serving potluck lunch on the picnic tables. As we watched, my brother told me Fall River Elementary was a good school, so he wanted his daughter to stay there.

After the party brother and I took my niece to see Subway Cave in Hat Creek, the only lava tube open to the public. Because all of the Hat Creek floor was created when a chain a small volcanos on its south end exploded 20,000 years ago, the area has 50 lava tubes, huge caves where lava used to flow. When the lava flow drained out, the caves were left. The three of us followed the nature trail down to the cave, holding our flashlights. At the mouth of the cave there were five other people: a father with a three boys and a young couple. We all decided to walk through the cave together as if to take care of each other.

Subway Cave is huge: the ceiling ranges from 6 to 17 feet and the diameter is about 50 feet. Though we could still see fairly well, flashlights came on as we moved further into the cave. Since floor was full of shaky pieces of lava rock, we all had to be careful where we stepped as the light faded. Subway Cave is about 2,300 feet (750 m) long but the section opened to the public is about 1,300 feet (320 m) long. The three boys started making funny sounds in the darkness of as we walked further and further into this big cavern. We see a small light source ahead. That’s enough for the three boys and my niece to start running on the shaky lava rocky floor to the cave’s exit.

One the way back we stopped to look at the trout fisheries, where I saw long concrete thin rectangular boxes of water holding baby trout. With not enough trout in the streams for all the fisherpeople, the state restocks the streams and rivers as well as has a strict limit on the number of fish each person can catch. At nearby Lake Baum, an artificial lake created by the damming of Hat Creek, my niece played along the lakeshore while my brother and I chatted with a woman sitting alone whose husband and children were across the lake. She and her husband were both rangers at nearby Burney Falls State Park. Past Lake Baum Hat Creek flowed through the power station Hat Creek 2.Even this smallish flow was generating power. This was a California fished out and harnessed to generate electricity.

Mary one afternoon had to go to Hat Creek so she drove me up to the overlook at the Hat Creek Rim Overlook: the valley spread out below us, Mt. Lassen dominated the south, and Mt. Shasta emerged like a hulking giant to our north. The valley below us was formed when a huge hunk of earth dropped a thousand feet below the rim during the earthquake. Driving back from the overlook, Mary stopped by her friend Ellie’s house in Hat Creek which had its own private lake back of the house. Astrounded, I watched the pine strees and shrubs reflected in the waters of this pond.

The next day my brother, having promised my niece to go sledding in June on Mt. Lassen, borrowed a sled from the Lentzes; he, Kat and I drove off thirty miles to the mountain. Near to the entrance, we stopped by the lake to have lunch, watching the ducks and one huge goose come to our picnic table to beg for food. The goose was demanding and menacing as he crowded us. Escaping from the monster goose, we drove up the road to search for snow, driving higher and higher until near the mountains’ summit but only limited patches of snow, so my brother finally stopped by the largest snow patch. It was much too little for sledding, but Kat did make some ferocious snowballs she hurled at her father.

A little later down the road we started the hike up to Paradise Meadow. Hat Creek was on our right as we three started up the trail, hearing the creek rush and burble besides us as we climbed on the trail through canopies of trees until about 40 minutes later the trail went flat through a clump of trees. Finally, Paradise Meadow, a huge expanse of rich grass spread out before us surrounded by the mountain tops. On our right was snow patches given rise to puddles which slowly formed the beginnings of Hat Creek. “This is paradise all right,” my brother said. “The Indians must have come here.” My niece wandered by the snow patches and then the trickles of water which wound its way down the right side, slowly joining into one little stream at the end of the meadow. So here is where the Hat Creek begins. I had never seen the beginnings of any creek or river before. It was awesome!

A few days before I left, I hiked alone from Hat Creek Park to the confluence, the merging, of the Pit River and Hat Creek. The Pit started way up in Modoc County and then meandered through Shasta County until it eventually flowed into the Sacramento River. Now I walked through these shrubs on flat ground midday under a hot sun with Pit River, a huge expanse of water on my left, and Hat Creek, now not a small creek but a mightly river on my right. Now I saw a canoe on the Hat Creek and a few fisherman on the Pit River.

I kept walking while the sun kept beating down. Finally, I was at the huge melting of waters at the confluence of the Hat and the Pit. I had seen the beginnings of Hat Creek way up in Mt. Lassen, traced the creek down through the valley past cattle ranches, fisherman’s lodges, and retirees’ homes and by my brother’s former house, into and out of Baum Lake, through the power stations Hat Creek 1 and Hat Creek 2 to its ending here where it joined the Pit River. My brother, my niece, the Lentze all lived by this natural wonderland: Hat Creek!

Shasta County Days along the Burney Creek

Late summer of 2001 I returned to a second visit to my brother, my niece and our friends Jim and Mary Lentz in Burney, a small mill town of 3,000 in Shasta County. After my brother who had Parkinson’s picked me up at the Redding airport, which was broiling in late August, he drove State Highway 299, which winds its way forty miles past pine trees, a creek and a few houses to the top of Hatchet Mountain, and then down past the burned over slopes and the wood mill in Burney’s outskirts to Burney itself. Luckily, Burney was pleasantly warm at 3,000’, not scalding hot like the Central Valley.

That afternoon Mary Lentz, her three grandchildren who were also visiting, my brother, my eight-year old niece Kat, and I all walked a ½ mile down to Burney Creek. As we six ambled in the middle of the empty street I said, “I love the traffic in Burney.” I felt myself slowing down, melting into the leisurely pace of small town summer. One rarely sees a car walking Burney’s residential streets all summer. We left the road to walk down a dirt path, stepping on rocks down to the creek. Gary, a rambunctious ten-year-old boy, went charging down the rocky path beside the creek with my niece Kat on his heels and the rest of us in their wake. Then Gary starts skipping on rocks into the creek itself with Mary saying, “Be careful. Be careful.” Gary jumps on a rock on the middle of a fifteen-foot creek while Kat lands on a rock behind him. What could be better for summer than jumping on rocks in the creek? That entire visit I remember us constantly walking down to Burney Creek, which winds its way through town and then eventually becomes Burney Falls.

Burney Falls is really McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park. Quite a name. Quite a park. My brother and niece took me there to walk down the dirt path to where we see two mighty falls plunging down over basalt cliffs, both plummeting down a 129 feet. Then we turn around and walk on another dirt path above the falls so we can see them right in front of us. We could hear the roar and rushing water and even feel mist. Dynamite!

In his middle-twenties my brother had left Los Angeles to go live in small towns in Sonoma, Napa, and Shasta County for three decades. When he lived in Calistoga, another small town of 3,000 in Napa County, I remember a friend who lived in the nearby Russian River ask if Calistoga had a Safeway? “No, It has a supermarket but it’s not a Safeway,” I said, “but it has a movie house.” Her tiny town had a Safeway but not a movie house. Well, Burney had a movie house plus a Safeway plus another supermarket. Burney scored! Burney had a small department store, a Mexican restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, a coffee shop, motels for the trout fisherman, and churches. Burney was outside of the tourist trail, lacking any chi chi restaurants. Good for Burney! It just has a creek, magnificent waterfalls, nearby Lake Britton, the Pit River close at hand, and miles of hiking trails

Staying with Jim and Mary I didn’t feel deprived of city pleasures. Mary, a former English teacher from San Jose California, had a book-lined study with a computer with a DSL line where I could daily check my email. The Lentzes also had cable TV with god knows how many stations and NetFlicks, which delivers the latest movies on DVD. While Jim fished and worked in his shop, Mary worked as a volunteer with the Burney Library and had just had their garage sale in her front driveway, raising money for the library. Since no one had bought a tall bookcase, Mary decided to give it to my brother who was still settling into his new apartment, so we both loaded the bookcase in Mary’s SUV for the short drive over to my brother’s a few blocks away, pulled past the front house and parked. We both carried the bookcase into his one-room studio with kitchen.

My brother had moved from Hat Creek into his studio in Burney a few months earlier, leaving most of the furniture with his wife. Friends and neighbors generously gave him beds, a table, chairs, and armloads of woolen blankets which were stuffed into the one closet, but he needed a bookcase for the books he was acquiring as a student studying computers at Shasta junior college. After Mary left, he, my niece Kat and I decided to walk to Burney Creek so Kat could have go swimming. My brother lived in the Indian neighborhood part of Burney, blocks of wooden houses and cottages, but now we cut down a shortcut path emerging where Burney Creek is partially dammed by a head gate and broadens out into a shallow area. Here three teenage Indian girls were already swimming; Kat took off her shorts, leaving her bathingsuit and joining them in the water. Sam and I sat on the slightly uprise of the bank watching.

I told my brother I loved the feeling of being in 1940s California where you walked down the path in the middle of the creek so the child could go swimming; I almost felt like I was living in a Mark Twain story. My brother’s feelings were more practical. Sam said that Burney was fifty miles away to Shasta College, not seventy miles like his old home in Hat Creek. Also, a few blocks from his house he could catch a bus, which he could take to college to classes and a job. He had found a government program where if he worked a few hours a week, the state would pay for his medications, so he diligently drove or bused to Shasta College. Also, his neurological doctor for his Parkinson’s was in Red Bluff, south of Redding, so he was closer to his doctor. I could see he was establishing a new life for himself and his daughter in Burney.

Kat came out the water and we slowly ambled back to the house. I left and walked past the short bit of Indian territory where the Achumawi (Pit River) Indians had a casino, a medical center, and a child care center. The Achumawi were a river people, their diet heavily depending on fish and each man had a canoe; they did hunt, but always returned to the river. On the bridge over Burney Creek, the creek was dappled in the late afternoon light. Looking at the creek, I remembered the first fall when my brother had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s and was on disability, worrying he didn’t have the money to get loads of firewood he needed to get through the winter in the Hat Creek house. My mother and I were fearful about what would happen.

My brother was limping down the road when he ran into an Indian teenage boy who had a load of firewood. “Need wood?” the boy asked. “Yes,” my brother said. “Here some,” the boy said. “Thanks,” said my brother. “Need some more,” the Indian asked? “Yes,” my brother said. So the two of them went into the nearby wood where the Indian cut my brother more wood. That Indian was a guardian angel, appearing at a time when we were all afraid of the future, when we needed someone. Thank him thank him thank him. Thank the Lentzes. Thank the neighbors. Thanks everybody who helped my brother start a new life in Burney.

That fall after I left my brother was taking the bus to college. There were few jobs in Burney, so many people took that long bus ride into Redding to work. My brother became friendly with another bus rider, a man who had a job in Redding but who lived with his Indian wife and five kids on the top of Hatchet Mountain in a house with only a wood-burning stove. On a cold fall day, my brother told the man he had extra woolen blankets in his one closet. Actually, his apartment had one closet overflowing with those woolen blankets he and his daughter didn’t need. One day the man came by and picked up the stacks of wooden blankets. Besides the empty streets, the leisurely pace and the creek, I loved the country ethic that if a person needs help, you help them.

I returned twice more to Burney. Before my third trip my brother had hurt his back but was slowly getting better. He was also just moved into the Burney Villa Apartments, government-subsidized housing, where he could have a larger two-bedroom apartment--both he and his daughter could have separate rooms. Arriving in Burney, he drove us to see his new apartment, turning right off the road to the center of the complex, which was smack dab in the middle of a pine forest on both hillsides. Buildings with four apartments dotted the hillsides.

He led me up a small hillside to his apartment, part of a complex of four apartments, walked past his daughter’s bike, and then opened the door. The members of the Baptist Church to which he belonged had helped him move in a few weeks early, giving him a good large couch and chair which was in the living room as well as a fine-looking wooden table and four chairs in the kitchen. Then he showed how he actually had closets: a walk-in closet by the door, and each bedroom had a closet.

Kat, who was nine, had just made friends with an eight-year old named Brandy who lived in a neighboring apartment. Kat had given Brandy her white karate outfit which she wore proudly. Both girls had bikes, spending hours biking around the complex. With the bad back as well as his Parkinson’s my brother felt it was getting harder and harder to drive to work the 100-mile round trip or to take that long bus drive. At his new apartments he could work as an assistant handyman, so he gave up his Shasta College job.

The next day Mary, who was a member of the Association of American University Women in Burney, drove my brother and me to Lake Britton, to join the A.A.U.W’s canoe trip. Lake Britton is an artificial lake created by Lake Britton Dam, which was built in 1925 on the Pit River. The river was named after the pits dugs by the Achumawi Indians to trap deer.

I had fallen in love with an upriver wild stretch of mighty Pit River on my first trip but now I was seeing the tamed part of the river. Sixty ago the Lake Britton dam, built to provide rural electricity, stopped the river's flow into the seven miles of riverbed called the Three Reach and killed many trout. Fortunately, the springs in the riverbed provided enough flow for the native rainbow to survive in the Pit River; in 1985 a valve was opened in the Lake Britton dam to rewater the Three Reach, making the Pit River again an important wild-trout fishery.

My host Jim Lentz often has gone fishing on the Pit River below Lake Britton dam.
The 30 miles of the Pit below Lake Britton are divided by hydro projects into five individual reaches: a dam is at the upper end and a powerhouse and reservoir at the downstream end. Controlled releases from the three dams have allowed the area to again become one of the great trout fishing areas in America; Jim has returned from his fishing trips with plenty of trout but always keeping to the legal limit. The economy of this whole area now depends on the fisher people who come to catch trout just as the economy of the Achumawi also depended on the rivers.

But this morning Mary parked by the boat launch at Lake Britton, greeting the ranger from Burney Falls state park who was going to lead our canoe trip. Fifteen of us loaded into five canoes just like the Achumawi once had. My brother had a paddle in the rear of our canoe, I was in the middle, and Mary was in the front with the paddle. I was dubious because I knew both Mary and my brother had bad backs while I had never canoed before.

But all five canoes shoved off as we paddled after the ranger’s lead canoe, which skipped across the lake up to Burney Creek. Mary and my brother kept paddling as we entered Burney Creek. I forgot about being nervous when I focused on the view of the creek from its middle as we glided underneath a canopy of huge green interlacing trees in a wonderland. The ranger decided to turn around, so he paddled his canoe around, and we all followed his lead. Now we were returning up Burney Creek back into the lake, following the ranger to the sandstone cliffs where he came to a stop.

All our canoes came to huddle together next to the ranger’s who gave a talk about the making of sandstone cliffs long ago. At this time Mary decided it was my turn to paddle, so she suggested that she and I trade places. I looked at her and then said, ‘OK.” Others held our canoe to theirs while Mary scooted over me while I pushed under her. Aha! We did it. Now I was seated in the front with the paddle, paddling us again as we left to return to the boat launch. I paddled us all the way to the launch! What a trip.

After docking our group pulled out picnic baskets and picnicked at a nearby table underneath a tree. We talked about Daryl “Babe” Wilson, an Achumawi who had written a fine autobiography The Morning the Sun Had Went Down. Mary had loaned the book to my mother who then gave it to me to read. The ranger mentioned that later in the week at Burney Falls State Park he was going to lead a walk from the campground to the old Anglo settlers’ cemetery. We kept on eating. In some ways, in many ways my brother’s life was difficult with Parkinson’s, but he and my niece benefited from the country ethic of helping neighbors and could enjoy the summer idyll of Burney Creek, the waterfalls, and the wild/tamed Pit River. That was a lot.

At Lava Beds, the Site of the Modoc War

On my fourth trip to Burney in Shasta County in Northern California my friend Mary Lentz promised to take me to Lava Beds National Monument where the Modoc Indians had fought courageously against the U.S. Army in 1872-3. Because I had taught about the Modoc War to my English class the previous spring, I thought I should actually go see the battleground. It was June, 2003, during the Iraq War, after the U.S. had declared victory, but I wasn’t thinking about the war or my job but a vacation.

Mary and I started off early this June morning, loading up her SUV with sandwiches, water, and hard hats for the caves. She said she’d drive me not through the farm country on Highway 299 but the more picturesque route over the mountains, so she headed up Highway 89, past Burney Falls, drove on the bridge over the Pit River, then driving through miles of woods until she got to the cutoff road where she turned right. This very sunny June day the woods were thick on both sides of the two-lane road, and some logs had fallen down into the road, but Mary scooted around them as she drove. For miles our car was the only car on the car, and we hadn’t passed any cars at all.

We saw the first snow patches on the roadside, and then a snow patch in the middle of the road in front of us, but it had tire tracks where previous cars had driven through, so Mary just drove followed the tracks until we cleared the snow patch. Such a glorious day. Mary drove through tire tracks on another snow patch, a third snow patch, and a fourth snow patch. No problem. She had a SUV with high clearance. Ahead was a really big snow mound with the usual tire tracks through. Mary started driving her SUV on the tire tracks until she got stuck. The car wouldn’t move forward or back. Stuck we were. We both got out and stared at the car caught in the snow in June.

“Do you have a shovel?” I asked. “No,” she said. “I have a cell phone,” I said, taking it out of my purse and turning it on, but there was no signal. “No luck. Cingular Wireless doesn’t work.” We looked at each other, and then got to opposite sides of the car and started shoveling snow with our bare hands to free the car. After a couple of minutes my fingers started to feel numb. We alternated waiting and shoveling with our hands for half a hour when a car came down the opposite direction, stopping beside us. A man and two women got out, came over and looked at Mary’s SUV.

“I have AT&T cell phone,” the woman said, but her cell phone didn’t work either. The man tried hooking a rope between his car and Mary’s to pull her out, but the rope snapped. He had a small toy shovel, which he used to shovel snow out from underneath the car. Fifteen minutes later a motorcycle with an Australian couple stopped. More people took turns shoveling with the tiny shovel. Twenty minutes later a truck came from the opposite direction also stopped with two tall, husky young men hopping out. “We were stuck in the snow three days ago,” one man said. “It took two hours to shovel our truck out. We have shovels.” Hurrah, they got their full-size shovels.

Now we had both brawn and shovels. The men both shoveled, making mincemeat of the snow. Then all of us except Mary at the wheel pushed and pushed the car until finally Mary drove the SUV out of the snow patch. We thanked all our rescuers who drove on while Mary turned the car around, starting to drive back to Burney. Later we learned that the road we had gotten stuck on was closed during the winter, a season that could last through June.

“Let’s take the flat way,” she said. After the forty minutes drive back to Burney, she took Highway 299, entered the Fall River Valley, full of farms growing wild rice, and then we stopped for a short lunch in the small farm town of McArthur. Then at Bieber, she turned north at Hackamore/ Lookout Road driving through more small farm country to California Hwy 139, and then turned north on 139 until we saw the sign saying turnoff to Lava Beds National Park. Immediately we saw the acres and acres of lava fields, broken greybrown lava rocks which spread out across the horizon. I remember walking across Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii, carefull to stay on the trail because putting your foot on a short edged lava rock could be dangerous.

About twenty miles down the road we saw the turn off for the visitor’s center but we only stopped briefly for a map. Since we were so late getting there in the afternoon, we passed the turnoffs for all the various caves and other historical points, decided to go to Petroglyph Point on Tule Lake and then work our way back. Miles later we saw Tule Lake, home of wild rice growers, horseradish growers, and the town of Tulelake. Nearby was the site ofTulelake concentration camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II. I thought Tule Lake as immensely isolated here in northeast California, a place of exile if you were from the coast as most Japanese-Americans were. As we drove by the side of the lake, we could see houses from the town of Tulelake across the lake.

Finally, the huge greystone hulking hill of Petroglyph Point loomed in the distance past the flat green fields. We parked by Point, which was created when a cinder cone exploded from the bottom of ancient Tule Lake to form an island. We learned long ago natives paddled out in boats to the island to carve the glyphs in rocks. People have lived here for at least 10,000 years, yet the oldest petroglyphs here are only 4,000 years old—they’re still some of the oldest human traces in California. As the waters of the lake receded, the island became a butte, jutting out, pocked with holes in which owls, hawks, and prairie falcons nested. The glyphs were circles, triangles, groups of straight lines, and two diagonals with one on top of each other—a secret language I couldn’t read. What was so important that the ancient people would canoe all the way across the water to cut pictures into rock? What were their messages?

We turned to the car, stopping once to look out over the mudwet slick of Tule Lake, half swamp and half lake at this point, and then drove on to stop at General Canby’s white cross—at this site he was murdered at a peace parley. He was the only U.S. general ever murdered in a hundred years of U.S- Indian wars. Looking at the cross, I thought of American historian Limerick's idea that the Modoc War had started with a misunderstanding.

In 1864, the U.S. government negotiated two treaties with the Modocs: the Steele Treaty, which was never ratified by the U.S. Senate, said that perhaps the Modocs could remain in their home at the Lost River while the Huntington treaty told the Modocs to leave their homeland on Lost River and go live on the Klamath Reservation with the unfriendly Klamaths in Oregon. As the U.S. was split, so were the Modocs: one half accepted the Huntington treaty, settling on the Klamath Reservation, while a second group, led by Kientpoos or Captain Jack, held fast to the Steele Treaty. In 1870 Captain Jack led his group to leave the Klamath Reservation to return to their homeland on the Lost River, upsetting local white settlers.

The war still could have been avoided if the U.S. would have let the Modoc remain in their homeland, but instead the Oregon Indian superintendent Thomas B. Odeneal sent Major James Jackson with thirty-eight soldiers and some armed civilians to arrest Captain Jack and to force the Modocs back to the Klamath Reservation. After the soldiers and their armed civilians forcibly entered the two Modocs’ camps, the Modocs—men, women and children; old and young-- fled and crossed over Tule Lake in boats, taking refuge in the Lava Beds. A small band under Hooker Jim’s leadership broke off, stopping at the white settler’s ranches where they killed fourteen men and boys. Limerick says that at this point the whites, who had settled on lands lived for centuries by the Modocs, felt themselves to be the victims because of the killing of the fourteen white men and boys.

In Washington, General Sherman, the one who burned through Georgia during the Civil War, put General E.R.S. Canby in charge of subduing the Modocs; Canby replied, “I do not think the operations will be protracted.” In the second battle on January 1873, Colonel Wheaton led 300 men into the lava beds through a dense fog. The sixty Indians who knew the terrain fired and fired at the hapless soldiers who couldn’t tell where the bullets were coming from in the fog and amidst the huge rocks. The U.S. army retreated, leaving their thirty-five dead, their wounded, their firearms and their ammunition. The Modocs had no casualties.

At this point General Sherman in Washington ordered Canby to try to negotiate a peace. Captain Jack, who had never wanted the war, was pressured by Hooker Jim and the other Modoc militants into a plot. On April 11, 1873, at a peace parley with Captain Jack, the Modocs murdered two peace commissioners, General Canby and Reverend Eleazer, and wounded the third commissioner Albert Meachum. In 2003, looking at Canby’s white cross, I thought of how Canby had died in this whole senseless war and how Captain Jack had been forced into a war he didn’t want.

We got back into the car, driving past Gillems Camp where 600 U.S. soldiers camped from April 1-June 1, 1873, outnumbering the Modocs 10 to 1. The soldiers’ woolen uniforms and floorless tents didn’t protect them from the piercing winter winds; a little cemetery has the graves of soldiers who died here. At Captain Jack’s stronghold we parked, headed up the path through the huge boulders on our right as we entered the stronghold. Boulders upon boulders gave the Modocs good hiding places during the two battles. The path ascended through two rock walls on each side higher and higher. It’s strange walking through a battlefield where men died—almost as if ghosts of the dead haunt the land.

In the second battle of the lava beds on April 26, 1873, Captain Evan Thomas led soldiers on a reconnaissance and then sat down for lunch when the Modocs ambushed. Twenty-three soldiers died and nineteen were wounded. More would have died except Modoc Leader Scarefaced Charley yelled, “All you fellows that ain’t dead had better go home. We don’t want to kill you all in one day.” Again the Modocs had no casualties. The relief party to rescue the remaining soldiers got lost in the lava beds as did the doctor who came next. Finally, the relief party found the wounded but got lost trying to escape the lava beds. It was a debacle for the U.S. army who then proceeded to destroy most of the Modocs’ water sources within the lava beds.

We were now in the heart of the lava stronghold looking down at the caves where the Indians—men, women and children--lived. They had little food and water; the winter went on for months. One cave was Captain Jack’s. At another spot the Modocs held talks about what to do. These caves were the inner sanctum, the last refuge, the place of the Modocs’ last stand. Sacred space, haunted space. It was here they had decided, after the army cut off most of their water, to flee the lava beds in April.

After the Modoc men, women and children vanished into the night, the army marched into the inner sanctum of rock and caves, finding three old men and one old woman. Soldiers shot two of the old men and the woman dead while a Warm Springs Indian stoned the third Modoc man to death, but our guidebook didn’t tell us which spot.

Now Mary and I left the inner sanctum, following the path round and round through more rocks and then circling back to where we could see the highway. At the junction of two paths was a prayer tree hung with prayer ribbons and sage offerings. Canby had his white cross; the Modocs have the prayer tree. A prayer tree wasn’t enough for the destruction of a culture and a people. We headed out past the irregular boulders to the car.

As w e drove back through the miles and miles of jagged shards of lava beds, I thought of how Hooker Jim and his war party left Captain Jack’s group, surrendered to the Americans in May, and helped the army track Captain Jack down and captured him. We stopped briefly to look at one of the largest caves and then stopped again to eat snacks and drink water at the picnic tables by the visitor’s center, and I thought about this history of misunderstanding, betrayal and vengeance.

Yes, it ended in vengeance. The U.S. army didn’t try Hooker Jim and his men for the Lost River killings but let them go, wanting to encourage other Indians to change sides. Instead the U.S. tried Captain Jack and five other Modocs for the murder of the two peace commissioners. At his trial Captain Jack said none of his people “had killed any of the whites, and I had never told Hooker Jim and his party to murder any settlers; and I did not want them to stay with me. [Hooker Jim] was the one that always wanted to fight, and commenced killing and murdering.” Captain Jack and two other Modoc men were hanged October 3, 1873. The remaining Modocs—thirty-nine men, fifty-four women, and sixty children—were sent first to Fort McPherson, Nebraska; then to Baxter Springs, Kansas; and then to Seneca Springs, Oklahoma. Thirty-six years later in 1909 they were allowed to return, not to Lost River but to the Klamath Reservation, home of the Klamaths. The punishment of the Modocs seemed like a ruthless vengeance.

After I visited Captain Jack’s stronghold and the Lava Beds, I didn’t really think again about them until a year later. Now it’s June, 2004. For the last ten months the war in Iraq has raged hotter, a war I opposed from the beginning. The Mahdi army, led by mullah Sadar, is holed on in the holy city of Najaf in the shrine of Iman Ali, one of the holiest spots in Islam. The Channel 7 news today talked about how both the wounded and armed fighters of the Mahdi army have taken refuge in the sanctuary. I’m thinking of why people need to take refuge in a sanctuary. What does it mean to invade a holy place, a place of refuge, as some but not all generals in the U.S. army want to do? Some generals want to respect the sacred space.

We are now making new historical sites: a place in Iraq like Gillems Camp where our soldiers don’t suffer the terrible cold but the broiling heat; a new cemetery with white crosses like the one in Gillems camp and the white cross that decorates where General Canby died; new battlegrounds like Najaf this week where two armies fight for control. Last year’s vacation trip to the Lava Beds was no escape trip but a journey that carried me back into the reality of the bloody events of another war our country is in.

George T. Wrote a Violent Poem

October 5, 2003, I received an email from David Green, Executive Director of the First Amendment Project in Oakland, telling of the arrest of a teenager named George "Julius"T. I was a member of PEN Center USA West, a writers' group concerned with free speech issues for writers, so Green wrote me as a writer in PEN. When George T was a fifteen-year-old new sophomore at Saint Teresa High School in San Jose, California, he gave a poem he had just written to two girls he was acquainted with from his high school honors English class. He told them that it described his feelings. The timing was unfortunate. March, 2001, two weeks after the horrific Santee shootings at that San Diego high school, many students and most school officials throughout California were edgy and anxious.

George’s poem “Faces” upset the two girls so much one emailed the poem to her high school English teacher while the other broke into tears. That next Sunday the police arrested George T at his home. After he was convicted of making a criminal threat for giving the poem to the two girls, he spent 100 days in juvenile hall and was expelled from school. George T. now had a felony conviction. When he appealed the juvenile judge’s decision, the appeal court upheld the decision, and now the case was before the California Supreme Court. David Green asked me to join group of writers in a friends-of-the-court (amicus) brief on behalf of George T. The email contained a copy of George T’s poem:

Faces

Who are these faces around me?
Where did they come from?
They would probably become the
next doctors or loirs or something. All
really intelligent and ahead of their
game. I wish I had a choice on
what I want to be like they do.
All so happy and vagrant. Each
Original in their own way. They
Make me want to puke. For I am
Dark, Destructive & Dangerous. I
Slap on my face of happiness but
Inside I am evil!! For I can be
the next kid to bring guns to
kill students at school. So Parents
watch your children cuz I'm BACK!!
by: Julius AKA Angel.

The page on which the poem appeared was labeled "Dark Poetry." David Green said, “Julius testified [in juvenile court] that he used that label so that a reader would understand that his writings were fictional.”

“Faces” didn’t seem to be making any threats, so I immediately wrote David Green that I’d join the friend-of-the-court brief; a couple days later I sent him a short biographical sketch and described how violent themes are in my poetry including one poem I wrote about a woman who murdered the man who was stalking her. Yes, I wrote some poems with a character who didn’t just threaten violence but did murder. During the spring I taught Oedipus Rex to my literature students, exploring the psychology of the main character who killed his father. One of my favorite writers has always been Dostoyevsky who explored the psychology of murderers in his novels. Literature is full of violence. Doing some research I learned that George T. was only one of numerous students around the country who have been arrested for stories, poetry, or art with violent themes after the Columbine High School shooting in 1999.

A few weeks later the written amicus brief arrived. My fellow members of the brief who all said they used violence in their writings were J.M. Coetzee, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003; Michael Chabon, who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for literature; Peter Straub, an award-winning author of sixteen fantasy and horror novels; Harlan Ellison, one of the United States’ leading science fiction writers; George Garrett, 2002 Virginia Poet Laureate; Ayelet Waldman, a public defender and mystery writer; Neil Gaiman, an author of 40 adult, children’s and fantasy novels; Jayne Stahl, a widely published poet; Michael Rothenberg, a poet, editor and songwriter; Greg Rucka, a comic book writer and novelist; and Floyd Salas, an author of four novels. I felt proud to be part of the team going out in defense of George T.

The amicus brief was fascinating reading, starting with quotes from Hamlet and Eminem showing both fellows to have violent imaginations. Then it discussed confessional poetry of “Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, W.D. Snodgrass and others [which] are characteristically first person expressions of extraordinarily mean, ugly, violent or harrowing experiences.” After establishing the “dark poetry” ancestors of George T, the brief then said that with artistic works “a very strong presumption exists against the existence of a ‘true threat’” because art works are “designed not to inflict harm but rather to address it.” I liked that idea a lot: we explore violence in our writings not to do violence but to understand violence.

July 22, 2004, the California State Supreme Court overturned George T’s felony conviction, arguing that the poem wasn’t a clear threat under California’s criminal threat law. Justice Carlos R. Moreno who wrote the decision felt that “Faces” is a “discomforting and unsettling poem,” but not a threat because George wrote that he could bring guns to school but not that he would. Also, George didn’t have any conflict with the teenage girls. Further, the judge mentioned the amicus brief’s argument that dark poetry is “not unusual in literature” and has a long literary pedigree. Our writers’ arguments were heard by and had impact on the judge. I felt jubilation at hearing the verdict!

Happily, George's conviction will be erased from his record. As he’s now finishing high school and was afraid that the felony conviction would keep him from entering the military, he doesn’t have to fear any more from this incident. Also, University of Santa Clara Law professor said this decision means that prosecutors will hopefully be less likely to haul into court high school students who have written a poem or story. Further, the Court’s decision said that while school officials can use disciplinary measures like expulsion to ensure school safety, the courts must stringently review criminal convictions that involve creative work. Even the prosecutor Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey M. Laurence had to accept that artworks have some protection. The ACLU of Northern California, who argued on George T’s behalf, said the decision was “a resounding victory for students’ 1st Amendment rights.”

My Mother's Garden

Sunday I sit in my mother’s garden in the hammock underneath a fig tree watching a humming bird flirt around the tangerine tree and thinking about the history of this piece of land a mile north of the LaBrea tar pits. For two thousand years the Tongva Indians (Gabrielino) used this land for hunting, foraging and taking tar from the nearby tar pits. They frequently traveled from their village Yangna by the Los Angeles River downtown to Kuvununga village by the natural springs in West Los Angeles (now University High).

I imagine the first Spanish Sacred Expedition from Baja to Alta California camped by the Los Angeles River downtown on August 3, 1769. Father Juan Crespi, the diarist of the expedition, records that next day they broke camp, crossed the L.A. river, walked through a tangle of wild grapes and roses, and marveled at the black, loamy soil by the river. Marching west, they saw “large marches of a certain substance like pitch” (the LaBrea Tar Pits) boiling and bubbling. When the Spanish established the pueblo of Los Angeles in 1781, the Spanish king, who declared he owned all the land of Alta California, gave out rights to graze cattle and sheep on the lands around my mother’s house to people in the pueblo.

After Mexico got its independence, the Mexican government in 1828 Mexico granted Rancho LaBrea to Antonio Jose Rose Rocha: the land from between Robertson Boulevard on the west to Gower Street and the Cahuenga Pass on the east; and from Wilshire Boulevard on the south all the way to the Hollywood Hills on the north. Antonio Rocha ran cattle on his Rancho LaBrea, but the contract to his land said that inhabitants of Los Angeles pueblo could take out as much brea (tar) for their roofs as they needed from the tar pits. The Mexicans believed in the commons: all the people had rights to certain natural substances as water and tar.

After the Mexican-American war in 1848, Rancho LaBrea was sold several times until Major Henry Hancock got control of most of it, but Senora Perez still stubbornly claimed title in 1873 to 160 acres around Plummer Park until the U.S. government survey of the area when she lost title. In 1874 John Plummer got title to the 160 acres, building his home and farm in West Hollywood. With a couple streams coming down from the hills, acessible water underground, and no frost in these foothills, the area could eaily be farmed. In the next twenty years Major Hancock sold more land, so there were farms growing peas, beans, chiles, fruits and vegetables to be sold downtown in the growing town. Green beans grew particulary well on the farms in west Los Angeles. Lemon and orange orchards dominated in the orange belt of the Inland Empire south of the San Gabriel mountains and, of course, Orange County.

In the Fairfax area, where my mother has lived for the past 50 years, the farms were demolished and covered with houses in the 1920s when her house was built. Oftentimes developers left fruit-bearing trees in the backyards of the new homes in the Westside and the San Fernando Valley. Our neighbor had duplexes like ours and modest houses owned often by carpenters and plumbers, people with steady jobs at the nearby movie studios.

When my family moved into the duplex, I remember in the backyard a grape arbor, two avocado trees, and a tangerine tree. As a wee child I would sit under the grape arbor playing with my doll while my grandmother, who lived next door, had us all harvest grapes and then made grape jam and homemade bread but soon my parents tore down the grape arbor.

We loved the avocados, which dropped to the earth and used to exchange them for apricots from the neighbors across the street that had an apricot tree in their backyard. My parents put in a large swing where two adults could sit and smaller swings and a slide for my brother and me. My parents held birthday parties for me there, with a round of kids gathered around the wooden table. But first one avocado tree died and then the other, so my mother had them torn down, but a fig tree took root, grew ferociously, giving off delicious figs.

After my grandmother had died, my mother rented out the other half of the duplex. One of the tenants, Douglas, started buying flowers—white and yellow roses for the back of the house. My mother got bougainvillea, with bushes of red flowers spilling up the backside of her house and across one of her fences. Doug said it takes ten years to make a garden, and for ten years my mother cultivated hers, with rows of blooming desert succulents along both sides of the house. Doug added a lemon tree and an orange tree to the backyard and a small vegetable plot. The tangerine tree is still there, producing each December a mighty crop of tangerines we harvest, giving out to friends, neighbors and coworkers. I brought a bird feeder to hang in the tangerine tree.

Lawn furniture has come and gone over the years. The current tenants brought in a nicely weathered wooden table with four chairs and a huge hammock which is immensely relaxing to lie in. My mother got herself a new lounge to lie in and a blue fold-up chair is there. I sit here watching two hummingbirds dart around the tangerine tree. The new tenants had their first party in the garden two weeks ago, putting up lanterns, which still hang from the tangerine tree. I think of last January’s ritual of hauling in my friends with fruit pickers to pick the difficult-to-get tangerines high up in the tree and then we went to my mother’s best friend Molly’s house a mile away to pick oranges from her orange tree. For all my life I’ve been part of picking fruit from backyard trees and handing out bags of fruit.

Los Angeles’s urban foresters, Tree People, have been planting trees on streets for years all over Los Angeles, with neighbors getting together to hold a ceremony for their tree planting. But Tree People usually doesn’t plant fruit-bearing trees. Well, why doesn’t Tree People and Sierra Club encourage Angelinos to bring back the backyard orchards and plant sidewalk lines of fruit-bearing trees? Then whole blocks could organize the harvest and distribution from all the trees on their block. An old friend said in the 1930s orange trees lined Hollywood Boulevard so why not again have orange trees on the boulevards? Why can‘t we have a whole city full of avocado, lemon, apricot, orange, walnut and fig trees? Los Angeles already has community gardens so why not community orchards to make this a green, green city?

My brother has just started to grow tomatoes in the garden, and one almost ripe tomato was almost ready to pick. As I head into the house to cook dinner for the family, I think of picking that one red tomato. All the others are green. No, I’ll let it grow a little more. In another week we’ll pick it.