San Diego Trip II

Now that was just one story in a hike that yielded the possibility of many stories. Let me only give one more--in reference to the Tahquitz waterfall, a 40' (online accounts say it is 60' tall, but my estimate is that it is closer to 40') fall over a sheer rock face on the extreme Eastern end of the canyon. The rock face of the waterfall is slate-colored, except for the streak of water-doused rock about 4'-6' wide where the wall assumes a deep black marble hue. I thought for a split-second that it reminded me of countless marble counter tops in office buildings. Thus, the marble color next to the slate gray struck my mind as the contrast between city and country, between an "office" and a "removed" environment.

On the Waterfall

The more I looked at the waterfall, the more I could understand how it played a role in capturing Shangri-la, that mythical kingdom supposedly to the East of the Himalayas, described (invented) by James Hilton in his 1933 book Lost Horizon. Frank Capra, one partner in Columbia pictures, put out the film version of the book in March 1937 (in the height, or the depth, of the Great Depression), filming this precise waterfall as the location of his idyllic and remote kingdom of Shangri-la. The film was a depression-era hit, even though it put Columbia pictures in the hole about $.75 millon (big money at the time) and led to a fallout between Capra and his partner.

It was an irony to be sure. When the rest of America was dreaming of this utopian and idyllic place, where people don't grow old, where all the women are beautiful and where there is peace, abundance and relaxation, and by so dreaming were released from some of the grinding thoughts and realities of the Depression, the creator of this idyllic scene was going through a private Hell precisely because of the scope of the film's imagination.

So, I mused on the utopias and escapes that we all would like to create in our minds; I researched the places in real life that have claimed to be the Shangri-la of Hilton's book (and there have been about a dozen which claim this honor; it reminds me of my life in Kansas, where at least two KS towns, at opposite ends of the state, have tried to cash in on Wizard of Oz things...), though he may purposefully have melded different images in his literary portrait so that no one place could claim the identification.

More Ways Lead to Ways

Well, while in Palm Springs I visited the Moorten Botanical Gardens. This "garden" is really nothing more than a typical suburban-sized lot (perhaps 1/2 to 3/4 acre) which is covered on three sides with cacti and a few other desert plants. The Moortens have done a great job in introducing many rare and interesting cacti to us, even though you can tell that there is little effort these days to make new or even fairly complete identifying signs for the hundreds of species that are growing. But for $3 who can complain? Especially because one of the plants, a rare one in their "cactarium," led me on a "way leads to way journey" that quite easily took me out of San Diego for a few hours a few nights ago.

In the greenhouse was a plant that looked like the face and hair or mane of an extraterrestrial creature. The identification was not spelled correctly, but that isn't any obstacle: the official name of the plant was Welwitschia mirabilis. There aren't many pictures online, but you can easily find them. One description got me excited. It said: "unlike any known plant on earth." It is the single plant of the Welwitschia genus, which is the only genus in the Welwitschiaceae family, which itself is the only family in the Welwitschiales order. If you look at the Wikipedia picture, the plant just looks collapsed and disordered, as if it has been run over by a huge vehicle. It is one of the longest-living plants in the world.

Its natural habitat is in the Kuiseb River Valley in Namibia. This then took me on a journey into that interesting and oft-neglected land, and I spent the evening learning about the river, which flows from the neighborhood of Windhoek to Walvis Bay, and runs along the highest sand dunes in the world. These dunes often dump some of their silt in the river, thus clogging it and preventing it from flowing. Well, more and more information began to pile up as I began to study the history, culture, geography and vegetation of Namibia. Before long I was engrossed in the work of Kuiseb Delta Adventures, which for a fee will take you along that river, to the African beetle known as tok tokkies, the sound made by the male of the species scratching or tapping his belly on the ground to attract females--you wonder if human males have similar rituals?-- to the Khoi-Khoi (traditionally known as the Hottentots) people who are indigenous to the area. I could have spend many hours familiarizing myself with Namibian trivia--things that aren't at all trivial, I am sure, to people from that land.

What Can One Do?

Following the lead of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, I have to say that time would fail me to tell of all the stories of all the plants I discovered in the past few days. I have listed about 75 of them in my black Moleskine notebook; some plants have such grace and attractiveness that I just wanted to look at pictures of them all evening and go back and visit them the earliest opportunity I have. For example, the strikingly rare Hawaiian plant Brighamia insignis (the Alula) in the San Diego (formerly the Quail) Botanic Garden, pictured here, would certainly merit lots of study. But then there are so many other species, each of which would take us on a journey of its own, that I might have to write 50 essays just to summarize my thoughts and learnings from the past three days.

How about the Candelabra tree or the Candelabra aloe, or the Umbrella thorn, the Zulu fig, the Monstrose totem pole, the creeping Elephant tree, the Beaked yucca, the colorful Mexican coral tree or the Euphorbia tirucalli--the "Sticks on fire"? You just don't want to let any of these plants go until they "bless me" or, more prosaically, until they remain fixed in my mind. But these are only the more "sexy" bushes, shrubs, plants or trees. There are loads of commonplace desert and other plants which are far more prevalent than the more colorful/exotic ones I mentioned. Why not talk about the Common flannel bush, or the Lemonade berry or the various varieties of California buckwheat? There were several examples of the Toyon tree/bush at the SD Botanic Garden. The world is alive with all kinds of beautiful things, many of which are rather small and unassuming. We learn best to appreciate this world, and those who live in it, by patiently accumulating knowledge of its various parts.

Concluding Thoughts

But, in closing, I found myself musing: why did God, with some human help at times, create not just a dozen or so species of palms, but more than 2,500? What is the need for so much variety, so much diversity, so much overkill in the creativity department? Perhaps it shows us that whatever we long to do in life or however much we want to learn from the world, we will only be just "getting a glimpse" of the hugely diverse world before us. How then shall we live? Humbly. Pure and simple. Not only do people have so much to teach us from the variety of their experiences, but nature and history are our best teachers--taking us out of ourselves to understand worlds that are unlike ours, but which we are privileged to inhabit. One may never truly find a home on this earth, a place where one is convinced that one "belongs." But if you take your time learning the world around you and the stories which are encased in almost every living thing, you become a true citizen of the world. The Greeks under Alexander the Great thought they introduced the concept of the "cosmopolites," the "world citizen." But we truly are world citizens if we study plants, languages, cultures, histories, food and people wherever we go--and humbly learn from them. The most learned are the most indebted. I want not only the learning but the desire that fuels the quest to put everything in its place and to grant every living thing its due.

May that be the spirit of 2010...

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