Real Properties, part five.

A tale of two counties, and their river.

So, what does the dirt of Deep End tell me? Twenty years in and I am still working on it. A neighbor here hired a psychic after her new house burned down before she had even moved into it. The psychic was a bright muumuu clad middle European lady (to judge by her slightly unplaceable accent) wearing earrings of heavy crystals under her blonde chignon and false eyelashes. She was very difficult to talk to, as she was so often interrupted by people I could not see. “Hello Ellen. Nice to meet you, too. Excuse me a moment. ‘Yesssss, I do see your village there but, no, these good people did not live here then.’ Now, what did you ask, Ellen? Oh yes, plant corn at the four cardinal points of your properties. It will be much better for all of you out here.” And so we did.

But the real dirt, the physical dirt of this place is a soft, taupe-ish gray, a color the shelter magazines dubbed “griege” when that was a thing in paint colors and faux-wood flooring. The first thing I noticed was how silty it was, the kind of dirt that becomes an endless source of fine dust in an old house when the winds blow. It’s half the reason lemons and avocados grow so well here. The other half is the mild winters and the fact that ‘a river runs through it’ as someone once wrote. Those fossil beds in the mountain get released from their ancient seabed a little bit more with every rain fall and seismic shake. All that ancient muck slides down the mountain and into the riverbed and off to the ocean. Deep End was built right at the bottom of the mountain, at the edge of a river, on the muck that hasn’t quite finished its journey.

The Santa Clara River is not as the gods made it, but the part of the river that runs through Ventura County is remarkably intact compared to all the other rivers in Southern California. Any river big enough to be respectable got dammed or channelized or both. The LA river was big enough to start a town on sort of, but one year (1825 or 1835, accounts differ) it flooded so grandly that it chose an entirely new route to the ocean, from the west around Venice and the Ballona Wetlands, to the south, down where Long Beach and San Pedro are now. You can’t be living with that kind of unruly nature if you believe in property rights.

Like LA, the biggest settlement in Ventura County (in the European sense) was when the Franciscans built a Mission at what they called San Buenaventura to convert all the local pagans. There were a great many of them pre-contact, living lightly on the abundance of the land, the river, and the ocean comfortably, for at least twelve thousand years, and without screwing it up. But the Santa Clara River itself is not grand. My students who grew up in Santa Clarita—a planned community on the river upstream in LA County—did not even know it was a river although it ran right through their backyards. To them, it was always “the wash,” and they, their families and their neighbors had allowed it to wash away many inconveniences—old tires, used motor oil, dead animals, broken bicycles, stolen shopping carts and I imagine, lots of secrets.

The river emerges from a tectonic knuckle near Acton in LA county sixty miles to the east of the ranch. Most of the year, it is a thin skin of water moving slowly west over sand, mud, and cobble. When the central Pacific warms to what meteorologists call “El Niño” events, California gets monsoonal storms that bring lots of water into this watershed. It was that sort of rain year the winter before we moved. As the biggest of those storms moved through, David and I drove out from Los Angeles to park on the Twelfth Street Bridge in Santa Paula, a couple of miles upstream of the ranch just to watch the river rise.

Flood water is a strange substance. It looks very much like liquid concrete composed of an indigestible matrix: silt of course, but also boulders, lawn chairs, fleshy bits, trees, and entire cars. I remember I had to grab the handrail on the bridge at one point because the entire deck shook as huge chunks of debris pounded its pylons. It was, as these things go, a mild one, well within seasonal norms, but I experienced my first fierce and feral flood roar that day; I bet no survivor of one ever forgets that sound.

I watched the river feeling both exhilaration and a bit of perverse joy. I could tell the river in a serious flood would be dangerous to everything in its path. After all, I too believed in property rights as I stood there on that bridge, in the first years of a new century. I could imagine the river killing me and all my beloveds at the whim of the jet stream, especially in the dawning age of volatile climate change. But, at age fifty, I had survived enough of my own metaphorical floods, like my dad’s death, and my own long slow fight with breast cancer—to want to be up close and personal to at least one obliterating threshold that might possibly be coming my way. Somehow, that felt grounding, a tiny bit of control.

The Santa Clara percolates through a silty bottom. Along Deep End’s bank, the silt is about twenty-five feet deep. We know because that’s where we get the water to irrigate our orchards. It is fun to wade around out there until you hit a patch of usually shallow quicksand. One early morning, I lost a tall rubber boot and came home with mud above my knee. I have watched horses with their big barrel bodies and skinny legs sink so deep, they looked legless. Luckily, their big bellies float, and some thrashing about is usually enough to get them out.

I had found horses during the endless months of my father’s passing. Dear benign equines, they are exquisitely tuned to the emotional weather of whoever is in their vicinity. If I brought my fear, sadness or anger about my dad’s passage to the scruffy LA livery stable where the horses lived, the horse I was assigned to groom and saddle for my lesson would mirror and amplify my inner noise immediately—and dangerously. 1200 pounds of anger is intimidating. In order to stay safe around them, I had to summon my deepest calm and full presence. (These were my first lessons in the benefits of meditation.) When any being in a group of horses tunes into a threat, they all run away. Horses don’t stop to investigate, regret, or cast blame. Survival is their one success; flight, fight (if they’re cornered), and acceptance are their only methods. I am still trying to absorb the lesson.

And the Santa Clara River survived too, at least in Ventura County, which hosts roughly fifty miles out of its total eighty three. The city of Santa Clarita was built about twenty miles downstream of the headwaters in the 1970s. I worked at one of the sexier anchor tenants there, the largely Walt Disney-endowed art college, California Institute for the Arts. Over my thirty-year tenure, the letterhead was redesigned many times to show off the latest and greatest talents of the Institute’s impressive Graphic Design Program. Sometimes the letterhead stated the Institute’s address as “Santa Clarita,” but just as often, the address was listed as “Valencia.” At no time did the campus move, but fashionable self-reinvention and convenient historical obliviousness are all hallmarks of LA adjacent glamour.

In fact, The Chumash were living where Santa Clarita was built when the Egyptians began the pyramids. The Tatavium people moved in about the time Attila the Hun threatened Rome. The Santa Clara was first mapped into the European imagination by Spanish explorers in the 16th century. Several hundred years later, the Spanish claimed Alta California for crown and deity, but it wasn’t too long before they lost it and a lot of gold with it. One Henry Mayo Newhall arrived in California from Massachusetts a bit too late for the gold rush but, undaunted, made his first fortune by auctioning all his belongings, including his return ticket, on the San Francisco docks. Not long after, he bought 50,000-acres of the former Mexican land grant known as Rancho San Francisco. “Newhall Land and Farming” went public in 1969, hired urban planners, and bulldozed a large chunk of their century-old Valencia orange orchards to develop Santa Clarita, or Valencia as it was styled when I first saw it. Model home tours had just begun when David and I first moved to California in 1981.

From Santa Clarita, the river heads west, emptying into the Pacific where Ventura County’s beaches slide under the sea. Pro-growth Los Angeles County and slow-growth Ventura County split the river between them. In 1995, no doubt observing the rapid mushrooming of nearly identical beige houses in booming Santa Clarita, Ventura County decided to protect its historically robust farming community by voting in protective zoning ordinances. About that time, the local Ventura County tourism board began to market their part of the Santa Clara and its valley as the “Heritage Valley.”

LA casts a wide spell over Southern California. It is home to just under ten million people, and all of its adjacent counties are ballooning with its overflow, except for Ventura County, home to less than a million. How has this lovely, rural, coastal county ninety minutes from everything LA and its river escaped?