Hilltopping
This morning I was driving to my favorite rock store, KRC, to pick up some bags of stabilized decomposed granite (DG) and I started noticing that every hilltop I could see, and there are plenty of hills around here to offer hilltops, is fully built out with one or two homes. Finding your own hilltop to command a view of the surrounding environs is obviously very popular. When we were in Italy recently on the Amalfi Coast, we learned that the adjacent town of Scala was the first built in the area several millennia ago and that it had 5,000 steps up to reach its lofty heights. This was a defensive maneuver and not especially oriented towards maximizing dominion or views. The way people used to locate their homes was a lot more practical than it is today. No one wanted to be too close to the ocean for fear that its power would eventually destroy their home. Being in the low-lying coastal zone also wasn’t really desirable since mosquitos and heat could be punishing in the summer. So people likes to live in the hills, but it was to cool off in summer and generally protect themselves the rest of the year from everything from pirates to marauders. Nowadays, pirates are doing infomercials and marauders simply drive up the hill in jacked-up pick-up trucks. As for mosquitos and heat, they still exist, but unless you live in the God-awful state of Florida, where one has to surround one’s pool with a bug screen, they are easily managed with whisper-quiet air conditioning run mostly off solar energy.
So, people build on hilltops and do it, as best I can determine, for some combination of views, cooling breezes and some degree of dominion over all the little Whos down in Whoville. I can tell you that hilltop views were not on my must-have list when I bought this place, but the views were still a big selling point. Now that I’ve lived here I don’t know what I was thinking. The views and the cooling breezes are essential to my daily life enjoyment and I could not imagine living without them. Unlike the residents of Scala, I do not need to walk up 5,000 steps to get to my home, but the driveway slope is certainly felt during the weekly garbage and trash placement at the curb. And, of course, the back hillside is my predominant source of daily exercise. Yesterday I did 8,000 steps up and down that hillside dragging 17 bags of fresh cedar mulch and slinging an electric string trimmer around to knock down some aggressive weeds where mulch and plantings have yet to arrive. It is all a small price to pay for the pleasure of sitting in my living room, as I am right now, and being able to glance either East or West for grand panoramic views of the mountains and ocean respectively.
As for the sense of dominion, I don’t really look down on too many little people from up here. There is a small slice of the #15 that keeps me aware of the commutation cycle and also keeps me connected to life in the real world as it scurries here and there in presumably productive pursuit. The rest of my view is of alternately green and beige hills of the high desert chaparral that dominates this landscape, those distant mountains that remind me that some places on Earth still get snowed-in and the distant ocean in all its Pacific grandeur. I am aware that I have what I think is the best home placement in the enclave or hilltop we live in and while I do not know if that was mere good fortune 25 years ago when these properties were carved out of the hilltop, I suspect someone had good three-dimensional perspective and could sense the wonder of the location.
Other homes up here have nice ocean views. Some have great mountain or inland ravine views. Few have both like we do even though there are enough hills around here so that there are no shortage of kingdoms that can probably compete. I have never been a particularly covetous person. I find I am happy with what I have more often than not and can feel joy for others that might have something better. I like my life and I like our hilltop. I do not desire to go through the process of moving to improve on our lot since I don’t feel there is much on which we could improve, at least not to our taste. I believe we have found the right balance of contemporary and homey, of remoteness without isolation, of scale without being overwhelmed by unused property. I have not come close to using almost all of my property with the exception of the very low part of the hillside below the Bison Boulder and some of the upper northern shoulder beyond the cactus knoll and patio. Neither spot is particularly special and for now I prefer to leave them wild. They are not overgrown, but rather natural and unimproved, sporting the random Steen boulders and the wild grasses that we keep cut down during the summer through the use of that string trimmer.
When we had our Garden Club visit last Friday, I became aware that while I have put in a number of paths to the various new areas of the back hillside and steps on the steepest slopes, I had not really thought much about traffic patterns. Specifically, I seem to have wound up with three specific dead end paths that leave the garden visitor in a place where they must turn around and retrace their steps back uphill. That seems fine on the northern ridge line path, which seems to end at a logical promontory near the Joshua Tree statue. But the other two only end at benches and feel as though they ought to connect. That is my reason for having a Tesla load of 600 pounds of DG that I have placed in my power wheelbarrow. My plan is to forge a connecting pathway down in front of the Bison Boulder that will allow visitors to walk from there up to towards the Hobbit House. This hardly requires a degree in civil engineering to accomplish, so I will try to do it on my own and before the grandgerms arrive this Friday. I am confident in my plan of attack, but I must admit to being less proficient at estimating pathway DG requirements. I bought a dozen fifty pound bags and I will simply see how far it gets me. KRC is close enough and they appear to have sufficient inventory in stabilized Desert Gold DG on site, so I think I am safe in my potential for easy and quick resupply if needed.
Yesterday I moved the 17 bags of mulch downhill one slope at a time, hefting and throwing the bags tits over teakettle until they were down in place where I wanted them by the Celtic Altar installation. This is what I mean when I mention that I get more upper body excise these days than I ever have before. I felt like Gerard Butler preparing for his role in The 300, when he flipped around giant truck tires for exercise. Those 17 bags of bark mulch only weigh about 40 pounds each, but what starts as a relatively easy toss turns into a soreness-inducing chore by the time I got them to the bottom of the hill. I was so weary that I only opened and spread half of them, preferring to leave some for the next few days while I am spreading DG on the nearby pathway I have envision. Those DG bags weigh 50 pounds and are more brick-like than not, so I won’t be tossing them downhill. I will take the power cart down all the way and simply deal with the gouging of the uphill path it will create on its way back up to the garage. These are the things that us Hilltoppers learn to deal with in our choice to be kings of our little hills.