Hybridity

After San Francisco, I went over the Marin Headlands, across Tamalpais, and down to Bolinas and Point Reyes before turning inland again. There is no nicer flower pasture than the headlands when in bloom. The setting sun makes the grass look all of strands of gold and mallow and mariposa lilies stick their heads up like buttons thru the thread. Swallows flew and turned in the air. I've recently learned that these birds get most of their water requirements from condensation on the grass. I can well understand why they might seem to fly for nothing but joy. Had I the swallow's wings these are fields over which I would gladly fly to drink the dew in flight.

So much of this is lately come here. Before the Spanish, the golden hills kept their green all the summer through. The perennial native grasses could not hold up against the annuals brought by the Europeans. When the land was overgrazed, the annuals came back the faster. Then the oaks were cut, and new trees brought in from Australia to fuel the need for railroad ties in the growing state. Foreign succulents from South Africa were imported for their use in stabilizing sand dunes. Exotics from the world over became the flowers of Victorian gardens of the bay, soon to rediscover the wilds themselves. And then there were any number of seeds that just happened to come, stuck to a boot, or burred to the hair of a cow, or dropped from a crate.

So it is that there forests of Australian blue gum eucalyptus growing across the hills. They rattle their sickle shaped leaves in the wind and give off a clean scent, but cover the soil with a thick layer of leaves that nothing but poison oak will grow through. The wood itself does not catch fire easily, but the bark and leaves do, meaning the forests burn with a fury that sterilizes hillsides, leaving behind a black that the eucalyptus is first to come back to.

At their fringe, pampas grass from Argentina grows in tangles too thick for the native rodents to hide in. Himalayan Blackberry, larger and more ferocious than its native cousin, wraps the eastern sides of the hills. At the ocean, south african ice plant smothers the dunes, choking native plants, a precaution thought necessary by the highway department to keep sand off the roads. While higher up, an ivy of the same country competes with ones from England and Japan to climb the ladders of the Douglass Firs till even those mighty trees have the light blocked, or break under the weight of the vines, or rot beneath the tangle. Then there are the usual European weeds, - cleavers, oatstraw, timothy, milk thistle - and that newcomer lately of the Black Sea, giant hogweed. To survive here, in this roiling jungle of weedy exotics, one must be savage oneself, as the poison oak, stinging nettle, and poison hemlock, or else innocuous enough to escape notice, as a woodland orchis. Only rarely will one be able to stop at an unexpected clump of kniphofia - red hot poker plant - a lily relative from South Africa, and appreciate how it has settled here, in one tidy clump amidst the native brush, and unlike so many other newcomers, behaved itself.

The people, the land. Everything seems to be from someplace else in this strange state. We are players to a land in flux. This is a world that is moving towards hybridity. The pot is being stirred, whether it desires or not, the dregs mix with the broth. I will not say it is a bad thing, but it is certainly not an easy thing, either to do or accept. And whatever the outcome, the emerging world is one to which the inhabitants of these hills will have to learn again to be native to.

Like ourselves, the plants clamor for the sunshine and sea air of California. Unlike ourselves, they present no lawsuit to stake their claim - or refute another's - and so might be more easily restrained. A shovel would do nice work. But since they are so abundant, and persistent, and so obvious as to be overlooked - so weedy - they are likely to remain quiet conquerors of a once perfect paradise. Which is something like ourselves after all.