The swell measured 26.9 feet at 17 seconds on January 5, the largest in the 18 year history of Harvest Buoy.
“The swell on Jan. 5 and 6, by far, could be considered historic,” Waterfront Director Mike Wiltshire said, as quoted by Noozhawk.
The rain fell continuously for hours, for days, like we hadn’t seen in years, in decades. The creeks turned to torrents of chocolate.
The Pacific Ocean swallowed it all. It churned and heaved dark and dirty, thick and sloppy with sediment and driftwood.
Visibility out there in the water appeared to be absolutely nonexistent, at best.
And yet, there soaring over the seashore ahead of me was this raptor with a fish in its talons. The fish looked rather large.
A second later I realized the bird had a white tail or did it? I hardly believed my eyes.
I have a photo from 1985 showing me standing right below where the fish eagle was circling on this afternoon. I’m looking toward to the top of the point, the old long-removed beachside cabin shack visible on the lee of the point.
I ran down the beach, a mad fanatic high-stepping across the tops of cobblestones as the bird flew away from me. I had to confirm what I thought I had just seen.
The bird was all wrapped up in this place and my history there and I had to see if it was a bald eagle, but the chance was slipping away.
The bird tried to alight in a tree growing atop the coastal bluff deep inside the cove, but with the fish in its talons it could not manage it and came soaring back toward me.
I fumbled around in my pocket and had just enough time to snatch a few poor quality snapshots. A fleeting glimpse on the afternoon of January 7, 2023. This is the first bald eagle I have ever seen along Gaviota in all the time I have spent there.
Santa Barbara Women’s March Expands Beyond Abortion
Hundreds join 7th annual rally marking what would have been 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade ruling, but speakers emphasize issues are ‘bigger than Roe’
They gathered and marched in Santa Barbara in support of the freedom of choice and personal sovereignty in matters of health and well-being.
One leading lady who spoke cited numerous specific examples to illuminate a larger general point about “an attempt to control us collectively.”
Set aside the specific details of the march here in town and consider the general underlying principle as it may relate to the current 60-day closure of the people’s forest.
Who owns your person?
Days earlier the ruling class had closed Condor National Forest, formerly known on this blog as Los Padres.
For no good reason Forest Service administrators stripped us of our right to walk in our public lands, as if it were merely a privilege all along permitted only at the landlord’s whim.
A special closure, they said. To your health, they alleged.
Christopher J. Stubbs, Forest Supervisor, threatened the common walker with obscene fines and jail time equivalent to that meted out to violent sexual predators.
That’s nothing to smile about, sir.
Proclaimed Mr. Stubbs to 330 million Americans:
A violation of this prohibition is punishable by a fine of not more than $5,000 for an individual or $10,000 for an organization, or imprisonment for not more than six months, or both. 16 U.S.C. § 551 and 18 U.S.C. §§ 3559, 3571, and 3581.
It is to the ignominious shame of Christopher J. Stubbs that his name is so prominently and forever attached to this repugnant historical document.
Six months imprisonment is what they give rapists in Santa Barbara County.
Former UCSB Student Receives 6-Month Sentence for Rape
Lord Stubbs, brilliant and benevolent ruler of Los Padres shire, always concerned about the health of his lowly subjects, declared all 2700 square miles of the forest much too dangerous a place for the peasants to venture.
Otherwise, without the Lord’s prescient warning, the dumbasses wouldn’t know. The clueless fools can’t be trusted. Trust?
To further guarantee peasant health and safety, Lord Stubbs, ever gracious, promised to confine them in one of his many jail cells if they are found by the Lord’s men “going into” the dangerous untrammeled forest.
Nonsense!
We know that what our leaders are telling us is ludicrous.
If we were sitting around a campfire in the woods like ordinary folks what would we say?
Well, we would call it bullshit. Because we are honest, reasonable and plain spoken people. And we know it’s not true.
We believe, for it is plain to see, that our leaders are not acting truthfully. We’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt regarding smarts.
However, we must also mention along with the possibility of intentional deceit, there is the chance that instead they are just woefully ignorant, actually believe the nonsense they are telling us, and so are haplessly incompetent.
We know the forest is not a threat to our health and safety.
On the contrary, the forest is to the benefit of our well-being, as the science continues to show, one study after another, year after year, country after country.
The forest administrators have an arbitrary, bogus edict. It’s based on whim and word. That is all. There is nothing reasonable about it. Nothing.
We have the science. We have the data. We have the facts. We own the truth on this issue.
But so too, and perhaps most importantly, can we see this simple truth with our own eyes outside, out there, as conscious, sentient, intelligent human beings. And we know it intuitively, viscerally.
The forest is not a threat to our health. The forest is a tremendously healthful place to spend time.
Reasonable men and women cannot in good conscience pretend otherwise and we will not pretend otherwise.
We will not go along to get along.
They cannot tell us that what we see and what we experience does not exist without losing credibility and undermining trust. Trust.
We are not fools.
All that any government ever has is the people’s trust in institutions and leaders and so their allegiance, and coercive force backed by violence. That is it.
When trust is lost so too is legitimacy and people stop listening.
Yet, never mind the rank dishonesty of our leaders and the draconian punishments they threaten us with should we not abide. Set that aside for just a moment and consider the larger principle at issue.
What we know most of all, most assuredly, most emphatically, is that it’s our body and it’s our choice.
This is how it happens. I wrote of how things turn up in the forest like a stray coin on a city street. (Potsherd Ponder) And this is how it happens. A casual discovery.
We make our rounds checking seasonal change. I take the kids and we look for turtles and newts and we stop to notice creek flows, clarity and water levels and the blowout of creek mouths into ocean.
Rocky Nook Park features prominently on the itinerary. The other day we stopped to check the creek after recent rains, as we’ve done there for years, in the same spot, and by way of the same short scamper down the rocky bank into the creek bottom.
But this time, lo and behold, a boulder turned up I’ve never seen before in all those years, which appears to be an artifact of some sort.
The stone seems to have been prepared to some degree, as a flat surface, upon which the darker oval was then ground out forming a shallow dish. The bottom of the dish is remarkably smooth and not rumpled in the slightest.
The dark stained surface is similar to the surface of the bowl I found on the beach: Chumash Stone Bowl. The stain of the bowl was much more prominent when wet.
At the same place on the beach as the bowl, in the wash of high tide surf, another boulder has a shallow, round grinding slick that is also colored by dark staining. It looks remarkably similar to this one here in Mission Creek.
These things turn up. Along my thin and crooked way afoot in the wild places of Santa Barbara County, for some odd reason or maybe for no reason at all.
And then the question becomes, what does a person do?
On this, the last day of Native American Heritage Month.
I don’t understand why people do what they do. Why they hunt things like this to peddle for so little money. So little money. Surely driven by avarice and in no way needful.
Several years ago I stood on the mountain locked in a thousand yard stare gazing intently at a particular geological feature.
I returned another day and by another route, hiking and scrambling over steep and loose, rugged and rocky terrain, a strenuous walk without a trail. There were no tracks but that of a bear.
I saw no recent sign of people at this place, although in years past marijuana growers had put the remote and hard to access south facing site to their advantage. I found three different old grow sites.
A wildfire had swept the mountain not long before I hiked and so the earth was stripped naked of its many forms of cover.
I walked over to the boulder that had captured my attention from far.
I stepped slowly around the monolith looking at the ground and the sides of the giant stone. I did not see anything remarkable.
Using the blackened skeleton of a scorched bay tree I hoisted myself atop the boulder. I took several steps and there they were, well-weathered and faint, but unmistakable in their form and placement: cupules. Sacred markings bored into the stone by human hands.
I spent hours sitting about and wandering around this place. It is perhaps the most extraordinary place I have seen in the Santa Ynez Mountains for its natural character and long views alone, never mind the landed artifact of the cupule boulder. The geography of the site alone is mesmerizing.
Then of a sudden other small stones of importance I had walked past began showing themselves.
This place was speckled in lithic scatter and other small artifacts. Projectile points of various designs and drills and beads and blades and a pestle. All of it laying bare to sun for perhaps the first time in hundreds of years.
A nest found in a bush but right smack on the ground, along a steep ridgeline, while walking to the place.
I returned to this place another day.
I loved to spend time there for its prehistoric presence and the natural ambiance and phenomenal view.
I’d walk there in different weather and different seasons to see what life was like in the forest there throughout the year.
I walked on warm, still summer days under spotless blue skies and on chilly, wet winter days of cold gloom and low ceilings within heavy cloud cover.
The fire had cleared the way for a steep route, which was a pleasure to hike. And so I did, repeatedly, because I knew the chaparral was growing back and it would not be long before the site vanished under the bush and trees.
I marveled how I was the only human around in this densely populated region that apparently had any interest in explorations of the freshly revealed forest. And to just walk, walk the rounded hills.
The Grouch of the Woods was astonished at this lack of interest on the part of his fellow humans, yet also very much pleased by their absence, obviously.
The mountains were steep and irregular and boney and jagged in places with exposed bedrock.
Yet, by and large, these slopes were mounds of bare soil, well-weathered and shaped into smooth, organic and curvilinear forms from the wind and the rain working with gravity to bring it all down, like groomed hills at a ski resort and heaving ocean swells.
Hillwalking here was steep work, but easy in the fire-scorched terrain and the smooth lines of the curvaceous mountains very much reminded me of the grass hills of Scotland.
Then one day on my return I found tracks to this sacred place. Some other humans had finally shown interest. Good for them.
Then, on yet another day, I noticed the soil in places had been disturbed and it was plainly evident that a body had been digging.
Artifacts that I had left at this place were suddenly gone on my next visit, obviously lifted.
An arrowhead I had picked up and set in a small pock mark concavity on the side of one of the boulders disappeared. The traps laid had been tripped.
While I cannot fault a person for taking an arrowhead laying on the surface in plain site, digging is another matter. Not just a difference between physical acts of removal, but in the letter of the law and intent.
I became agitated and defensive. I had come to feel a particular personal attachment to this place. To have found it myself, without being told by somebody else and let in on the secret. That meant something to me.
I made the snap decision to collect every flake of stone I could find. I did not know then and nor do I know now if that was the proper decision.
I left a single pile of those chippings in plain view for anybody to find.
But only I know the layout of the site as first found, and where exactly lie the specific areas that the people whom left these traces of their presence worked so diligently.
I have it all recorded in words and drawings and I will not share this information.
I collected those things and set them aside so that a plunderer might not have it so easy. I did not want to return again to find it all dug out.
Sure, the pirates may be able to surmise where best to dig, but, I reasoned, at least they don’t really know where. It is not as obvious as one might think.
Several days ago I experienced an odd chain of events.
I never use eBay. I don’t even look at eBay.
I do not buy Native American artifacts. The purchase of something like that does nothing for me.
I enjoy finding artifacts, indeed, I must confess. But it’s a casual pursuit, when I’m out there, but not always. I don’t make special trips. I have a long-standing and profound interest and I’m just observant by nature, and lucky. And I always walk with chin to chest.
I sure as hell am not going to patronize the business of plunder by buying items.
I struggle to make sense of our shared history and my place in it going forward. A part of this blog is about that, my open journal of sorts.
For some unknown reason in the cosmos I was on eBay and stumbled across this auction for what was listed as a rare Chumash artifact.
Oddly enough the item apparently had just been listed. What brought me to eBay that day I do not know. It’s remarkably odd.
I read the description and cursed out loud in astonishment.
This person had listed for sale an artifact they said had been found “ensconced” in the Santa Ynez Mountains above Santa Barbara after a recent wildfire.
I could not help but believe that they had dug it up at the cupule boulder site. Of course, it is well within the realm of possibility it came from elsewhere on the mountain, but the description matches as well as it possibly could without being any more explicit in detail.
The listing was originally posted as a six day auction, but lasted only about one day or so before it was mysteriously terminated, without a bid or final sale price listed.
“People like to pick them up and take them home. Some are small as buttons, some a quarter of a broken bowl with insides painted in spirals and interlocked teeth. I’ve seen places lousy with potsherds turned bare in a decade or two. It’s like sweeping ancestry off the land. It seems innocent enough. Just one piece, maybe two. The stark black lines on white-slipped clay are like a prize. You feel like you really discovered something. You want it as a reminder. Don’t do it.”
I find things out there in the open spaces. You don’t have to look. People have lived around these parts of California for over 10,000 years. Like a coin on a sidewalk in the city artifacts turn up when afoot in the forest or seashore. I wonder what to do with them.
To do nothing is to do something and that’s maybe the sort of something I should do, nothing.
Turn today’s mantra of preservation on its head, and leave a trace. Leave it there.
I found this sherd recently when walking back along the beach from halibut fishing.
The place I fish I have been fishing for decades, since I was a small boy. From boats and beach and mostly in the water myself with snorkel and spear.
That’s why my ears are closing shut, not so much surfing as my doctor first said. Long hours with my head in the cold Pacific Ocean.
I’ve seen the halibut gather in this place so numerous I found it hard to decide which biggest fish to shoot first, because after the first shot they all might bolt. I remember as a small boy peering over the gunwale of a boat and seeing halibut dotting the seafloor in the shallow crystal waters of a calm day.
Through the years I have stumbled across a number of artifacts during my many hours spent at this place. I have learned from my own solitary experience that this place I fish is adjacent an old Native American habitation site.
“You’ll find them in trash middens piled in front of ancient villages and households. The people had a different relationship with their refuse. Bodies and offerings were lovingly buried in middens.”
There it was, this time, the sherd, before my toes as I stepped along. Other times arrowheads, bone pendants, stone bowls, shell beads. Pieces of peoples lives.
A friend found an arrowhead here once. A tiny black one. He threw it into the sea. To return it.
I had not been searching for anything, but, as usual, walking with my eyes on the earth, lost in thought.
And there it rested in the darkened soil and dried grasses.
“He may be just a tramp, a guy that likes to roam about this great country without any special aim, just to thank the Lord for these beautiful mountains.”
-B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
“. . .here, where there are still the silences and the loneliness of the earth before man, . . .”
That’s nothing to smile about, sir.
December 20, 2022
Jack Elliott's Santa Barbara Adventure 