“Fortunately, the task of preparing this volume has been carried on by those who have had the feeling that a piece of work must be done, but who also have had a purpose to make it reveal beauty and exude the historical atmosphere of the region with which it is concerned.”
—Santa Barbara: A Guide to the Channel City and Its Environs (1941)
A cellphone snapshot from shore.
I combed the beach for over an hour before sitting to rest in the hook of the arroyo mouth.
The narrow, deep drainage chute cuts the shalestone sheets underlying the grassy plain of the coastal terrace and emerges onto the beach in the lee of a big point. Here surfer’s sit.
Some thirty years ago I kindled a fire here at this spot from salted driftwood, always burning with an inordinate reek, and dried my girlfriend’s shoe. She had slipped a foot into the water on accident during our beach walk.
Decades later she mentioned it in conversation as an early measure of a person she was still at that time getting to know. We were teenagers.
At that time no otters could possibly have been seen at this beach; they weren’t legally allowed to exist here, in their historic native range.
On a recent afternoon I sat here on a sunbleached log for a rest. I looked up to the scene before me for the first time, having been consumed with beachcombing all moments prior, chin to chest, eyes hard on the positive rake.
And there floated the sea otter before me. To see an otter in Gaviota waters today is to witness positive change in one’s lifetime.
By the 1930s, it’s said that fewer than 50 otters remained in existence in California waters, only around Big Sur, a remnant population that had survived over 100 years of hard pursuit by fur trappers.
From this small band the otters rebounded to their present population of about 3,000, having been listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1977.
But then from 1987, until the moratorium on removal was granted in 1993, under the No Otter Zone law, otters found in south county waters in Santa Barbara were forcibly relocated north of Point Conception. The anti-otter policy was not officially terminated until 2013.
Return of the otters to the Gaviota Coast has been a long time coming.
I sat watching the otter dive and eat whatever it was collecting from the seafloor.
Sometimes the otter would remain underwater for longer than usual, as if troubled by something particularly hard to get a hold of.
Then finally it’d rocket through the surface of the water with buoyant force enough to lift half its body into the air.
I thought of one of those lobsters you get a hand on once in awhile when freediving coastal shallows, but the bug is wedged deep in a cavity in the reefstone. You hold out as long as possible, trying with gentle force to pull the lobster out of its hole, until, desperate for air, you plunge upward breaking through the surface water in a violent, gasping rush.
Whenever the otter surfaced with its quarry the seagull would swim in close hoping to score some of the pickings.
On and on the game went, the otter and the gull, at otter’s point, along the Gaviota Coast.
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The ephemeral pool forms on the bedrock
high on a sandstone ridge
hundreds of feet above the creek,
otherwise filling the canyon with the sound of its rushing water,
but for the displaced croak of frogs
hole up in a lone pond in the sky,
and the polliwogs waiting,
water skeeters skating,
encircled by lichened rocks and chaparral,
glare of sun,
scent of sea.
tadpoles
The hitchhiker.
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Lone Wandering
Detail of Nicholas de Fer’s map from 1705 showing Santa Barbara Channel.
An excerpt from The Forgotten Peninsula: A Naturalist in Baja California (1961) by Joseph Wood Krutch detailing the suspected origins of the name California:
Most of the place names in Baja or elsewhere in Mexico are self-explanatory. Either they are derived from native words like Oaxaca or Tehuacan; they testify to recent revolutionary enthusiasm like “Libertad”; or they honor the saints and mysteries of the Catholic religion.
In Baja itself some of the favorite saints were honored so often that there are, for example, at least three Santo Domingos and three San Antonios, besides two All Saints (Todos Santos) and such other evidences of overwhelming religiosity as Immaculate Conception (La Purisima Conception), Guardian Angel Island (Angel de la Guarda) and Holy Ghost Island (Espiritu Santo).
The only really shocking exception is “Aunt Jane” (Tijuana). But that border town was not founded until 1830 and it acquired during the reign of Prohibition in the United States a reputation for wickedness which would have made any less secular name highly inappropriate.
The name “California” is quite a different matter. It fits no pattern and offers no evident explanation.
When in 1535 Cortez took formal possession of what he thought was an island he displayed conspicuous lack of originality by calling it Santa Cruz — that being the name of the festival day on which the authority of the Spanish king was formally proclaimed.
Who, then, did literally “put California on the map” and where did he get the singularly euphonious name destined to become familiar to millions of an alien race?
Though its first-known use is in the journal of Juan Paez who wrote under the date July 2, 1542, “We came in sight of California” and though it appears again twelve years later in a published history of Mexico by one Gomara, its first known appearance “on the map” is a chart of 1562 where the name is applied to the tip of the peninsula.
Only by 1600 had it come to refer commonly to the whole of what we now call Baja California.
Three-quarters of a century later the two Jesuit missionaries, Father Juan Baegert and Father Francisco Clavijero, both of whom wrote accounts of Baja after they had been expelled with the other members of their Order from all of Spain, new or old, were speculating over the meaning of the universally accepted name.
Both were familiar with the guess, still current in our own time, that it was derived from “calida fornax” or “furnace,” but they were skeptical.
An even less probable origin suggested was the name of Ceasar’s wife, Calpurnia.
But the hot furnace theory was usually excepted, sometimes with the suggestion that it referred, not to the heat of deserts, but to the enclosed sweat baths which some of the aborigines were accustomed to build.
Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps — RareMaps.com
Nicholas De Fer’s “Cette Carte De Californie et Du Nouveau Mexique” (1705) showing California as an island.
Continuing without interruption, The Forgotten Peninsula: A Naturalist in Baja California (1961), by Joseph Wood Krutch:
There the matter rested until the American writer Edward Everett (“Man Without A County”) Hale chanced to read a chivalric romance “Amadis de Gaula” which Cervantes calls the “best of all the books of this kind that have ever been written” and which he spares from the flames to which all Don Quixote’s other books of chivalry are to be consigned.
The date, original authorship and ultimate source of this romance is one of the great problems of literary history, but in Cervante’s time it was enormously popular and the fourth book of the romance (apparently an addition) deals with the adventures of a son of Amadis who collects an army drawn from various Christian nations and goes to defend Constantinople against an attack by the king of Persia.
Among the allies of the pagans is a queen of the Amazons who rules an island “at the right hand of the Indies, very close to that part of the terrestrial paradise and inhabited by women without a single man among them.”
These warlike ladies are accompanied on their expedition by an air force composed of five hundred griffins (which are fortunately an important part of the avifauna of their island).
When first released near Jerusalem the griffins wreak havoc because they attack the Turks on the assumption that all men are enemies of the queen. But when this misconception is rectified they prove very effective.
In the end, however, the Christian forces are triumphant, the Amazon queen is converted to Christianity, and is given in marriage to a Christian hero.
What has all this got to due with our subject?
Just this: Edward Everett Hale was startled to notice (and to notice that no one seemed to have noticed before him) that name of the island ruled over by the Amazons was “California,” and the name of the queen herself, Califia.
According to the author of the tale the first of these names was derived from the Greek kalli “beautiful,” and ornis “bird” — because “in this island are many griffins.”
Hale did no more than call attention to his discovery and it probably seemed to him as, at first sight it must, somewhat farfetched.
The assiduous research of scholars (admirably summarized by Ruth Putnam in one of the University of California Publications in History) seems to confirm it so strongly that it is now generally accepted by historians, though my experience is that the man in the street will still say “hot furnace” if asked for an explanation.
The romance was so extremely well known at the time when Baja was discovered that any Spaniard even barely literate would have heard of it and very likely thought of Califia’s island in connection with any described as “near to the Indies.”
Moreover, Amazons had a special fascination for the early explorers (witness the name of the South American river) and now that these warlike ladies were known not to be found in Africa where they had formerly been supposed to live, the imagination eagerly relocated then in several other still sufficiently unknown lands.
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The organic curves of chaparral-cloaked Condor National Forest.
I’m growing like a seedRain’s been falling on me
— KT Tunstall, Feel It All
“I’m wondering if we won’t see August thunderstorms.”
I wrote that in June, a freak premonition.
The feeling came after two days of uncommon rain showers, which had followed the unrelenting foggy gloom and weep of a spring that never quite sprung and an exceptionally wet winter.
Though the calendar read summer, something seemed to suggest the showers were not yet over as we headed into what was typically the driest time of year.
I hadn’t thought of July. It was August for some peculiar reason. Not September.
And in August it rained.
The rain fell like we had not seen in many decades, like some people had never seen.
The summer rain was extraordinary!
Larry runs the green grass in Sespe Wilderness, an uncommon sight in summer. (September 2023)
In downtown Santa Barbara 0.59″ fell in August of 2023. That does not seem like much, but usually no rain at all comes in August or only a heavy misting from marine layer off the sea.
Not in forty years — not since the incredible 1.55″ unloaded during the El Nino year of 1982/3 — has more rain fallen downtown for the month.
In 1935 0.70″ was recorded downtown; the only other season on record dating back to 1899 to surpass 2023.
San Marcos Pass station recorded nearly a full inch of rain; an all-time record dating back to 1965, at least.
The historical record shows the following for August beginning in 1965, but with apparently no measurable rain coming until 1983:
1983/84 .48″
1990/91 .36
1996/97 .34
2005/06 .12
2006/07 .03
2008/09 .11
2020/21 .12
2022/23 .97
Spring greens oddly getting greener in fall. (October 2023)
Water still held openly in small tanks in October.
Tell-tale sign. A summer-grown cactus pad born of the August downpour, green and plump and smooth with the banked moisture. (October 2023)
Ventura County backcountry got soaked last August. Rainfall was heavy and widespread.
Lake Piru station measured in at 4.21″ and 3.16″ fell clear back in Lockwood Valley, deep in the mountains’ rain shadow.
In October, dispatches from other parts of the state told of an unseasonal desert bloom and an ephemeral lake filling Badwater Basin in Death Valley.
Los Angeles Times : Death Valley gleams with water, wildflowers and color
Following the rains of August came the flush of fall.
Summer turned slightly to spring again rather than drying further into fall. The burst of water remade Condor National Forest in seldom seen ways, the change subtle but significant.
The summer’s green grass and blooming flowers and especially the flow of water appeared all the more fantastical after many dry years of extreme and exceptional drought, among the most stricken in the state and for the longest time.
And yet I wonder if anybody noticed. So we tack a note to the board here now, that a moment be remembered.
Late-season blooms in December tell of the rains of August.
A howling coyote and one at the den barking. They didn’t seem to sense the presence of a human right off, but were suddenly startled to see or smell me and that’s when the one began barking.
The howler happened to be facing the full Cold Moon of December 26, 2023, which was rising over the silhouetted Santa Ynez Mountains just between Arlington Peak and White Mountain. This presented the common folk lore impression of a wild dog howling at the full moon.
It appears to be a pregnant female, yet also with a bad limp.
Last year I saw coyotes in a different den, but not too far away.
Looking right, a view of the moonrise at 5:28 pm from same place.
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Waterfalls
Caves and Rocks
Sunsets, Sunrise and Moons
Fishing
Surfing
History
Jack Elliott's Santa Barbara Adventure 