Back on the Hilltop
We flew in from Florida yesterday and I cannot express how good it felt to get back home. I know that especially as we age, we become more inclined to being homebodies, but in addition to that and being around all my “stuff” (as the great George Carlin would say), I have also genuinely come to love the climate and environs of our San Diego hilltop. I have spent my life in a combination of places including the tropics, the Midwest, the Northeast (including Upstate New York) and the plains of Rome. Urban is urban to me (though Rome and Europe are certainly different from U.S. urban), but the countryside is what goes to my heart for one reason or another. I thought Utah, where I had a home for fifteen years, was my place on earth with the alpine canyons of the north and the red rock canyons of the south. I still love Utah and do, indeed, consider the red rock canyon a sort of church or temple for my soul, but the high chaparral of this area of northern San Diego county has wedged its way into my consciousness in a meaningful way and this hilltop in particular is a place of great peace for me.
I was tired after a relatively long travel day (nothing as severe as an international travel day) and the three time zone transcontinental rally is more tiring to me than it used to be. We drove home from the airport in the late afternoon on a Friday with Betty and Natasha in the the car to recount our travels and impressions. Florida was the main topic as were the array of friends we saw and enjoyed being with. I told of my change of heart for Disney and why I believe that a true liberal like me has to constantly put himself in the shoes of the working man and the workaday life that he leads as well as the places where he derives pleasure (like Disneyworld). I explained the differing homes of friends that I visited up and down the East Coast of the Swamp State and my impressions of how everyone finds a place that resonates with their interests and their needs and that those are all very different for each and every couple that I saw. Some want horses, some want watercraft, some want social clubs and some want nature in some degree of proximity.
Relating all of that back to my hillside is a thought-provoking process. We purposefully do not live in a gated community. To me that is an important symbol of my immersion into the liberal and real life that I espouse. Security is key, but segregation is a slippery slope that I try hard to avoid. I like to think I have a gate (which I do at the bottom of my driveway, one that remains open 99% of the time) but that I maintain an open-door policy to the world. It is important to me that others know I could try to lock the world out, but choose not to do so. That is a matter of trust in mankind. I know others will say that I might be sorry some day when there’s an issue, but then I remind them that you can’t build your walls high enough to keep out the bad things of the world and that it is far better to work to make the world a more inclusive and embracing place than it is to try to bar it from entering without an invitation. Consider it my liberal silliness and indulge me that fantasy.
As for the environs of this high chaparral, maybe it is the cowboy movies of my youth that make it resonate for me. I think of Frank Lloyd Wright for some reason. When I was growing up in Wisconsin, my mother indoctrinated me to his design ways since his main home, Taliesin, near Spring Green, Wisconsin is located near where we lived and she went to graduate school in Madison. Taliesin was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019 for emblemizing the concepts of the Prairie School of architecture and combining the humanity of the plains life with the split rock formations of Wright’s native Wisconsin “Driftless Area” that is one of the few that avoided the last Ice Age for some reason. FLW went on to locate himself during the harsh Wisconsin winters (something I experienced in 1962 directly following my stint in the tropics) in the high desert of Arizona at what he called Taliesin West. The name Taliesin comes from the Welsh and it means “shining brow” and refers to a wizard that has connections to King Arthur and the Arthurian legends of Camelot. That is all a convoluted way of my explaining that I think the high chaparral is a magical and artistic place where my mind can roam free and feel welcomed.
My week ahead is going to be about further enhancing my magical and artistic hillside and its off to a great start. Natasha is leaving tomorrow, heading back to New York, but today she, Kim and I walked down onto the back hillside to look at some of the plants. Natasha has walked every inch of the hilltop while we were away, even into areas that I have yet to attack because they are over on the working northern side of the property that separates us from our new Nepalese neighbors. On one such walk she noticed what she thought was a “weird alien plant” that was bursting forth from a pair of different colored Aeonium (a green Arboreum and a red Zwartkop). I’ve been around succulents a lot and have learned that the less you worry about them, the better they do, so I was not concerned. I agreed to take a look. I used my plant identification app (called Picture This) and it told me that these Aeoniums were being invaded by a Madagascar Felt Plant. Since I don’t think a Felt Plant can physically grow out of an Aeonium, I investigated further and found that the Felt Plant just appeared to be growing out of the Aeoniums but was actually growing on a stand-alone basis. Mystery solved and alien invasion averted, so back to the hillside planning.
After the required Saturday visit to the cardboard recycling depot, I went to Home Depot to stock up on the various tools and fasteners I needed to round out my building equipment for the Hobbit House project which is awaiting commencement. With the day’s precipitation, today was a day for preparing to build rather than actually building. I did manage to build the Hobbit House furniture (a live-edge bench and a live-edge table top that fits over a large ceramic pot), but the rest of the time was spent measuring and hefting the wood I will need to work on shortly. The biggest challenge is figuring out how to create a template for the jig cutting of the beams. But then it struck me, its all geometry. I have a twelve foot long beam that’s twelve inches high and the first beam has to be a few inches higher than the fifth beam to create a natural water drainage. Making the precise curve simply requires the calculation of the circle radius, which I have done and then using a string cut to the proper radius length to draw the required curve. The next four beams just get gradually smaller until the curve of the last beam reaches the bottom height of the twelve foot beam. I plan to use the first beam (drawn with the huge string compass) as a template for the other four beams. Easy, right? We’ll see. That sounds like enough to keep me busy tomorrow. It’s good to be back on the hilltop.