Ojai Quarterly - Winter 2024-25

WINTER 2024-25

The daring pilot who recreates aviation history

A life

aloft RACING THROUGH TIME:

An Ojai man’s vintage car collection and adventures

MIMI’S MODERN MUSE:

Singer-songwriter’s musical ‘Undrowning’ $6.95

SHIP OF FIRE & STEEL:

Ojai Writer’s Gripping True Story

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OQ / FALL 2023

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OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

I Can Show You How

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OJAI QUARTERLY p.19 Editor’s Note p.20 Contributors p.21 Ojai Podcasts & 2 Degrees p.35 Arts Section p.37 Artists & Galleries p.46

MIMI’S MUSE A Listening Tour of the Ojai Music Scene

Story by Brendan Willing James

p.56 Food & Drink Section p.65 Yesterday & Today Section p.103 Healers of Ojai p.109 Calendar of Events

p.56

p.26

CHILI SEASON

‘UNSINKABLE’

What Takes Off the Chill Like a

Ojai Writer Brings Heroic Tale to Voice

Good Bowl of Chili?

Story By Bret Bradigan

Story By Ilona Saari

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OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

FEATURES & departments

p.76

COVER STORY WINTER 2024-25

The daring pilot who recreates aviation history

A life

aloft RACING THROUGH TIME:

An Ojai man’s vintage car collection and adventures

p.92

A LIFE ALOFT

TINY TITANS OF THE CARRIZO

Pilot Recreates

The Giant Kangaroo Rat’s

Historical Flights

Big Role in a Fragile Ecosystem

Story by Robin Gerber

Story and Photos by Chuck Graham

MIMI’S MODERN MUSE:

Singer-songwriter’s musical ‘Undrowning’

SHIP OF FIRE & STEEL:

Ojai Writer’s Gripping True Story

p.110

TWO GREAT HOUSES

NOCTURNAL SUBMISSIONS

Telling the Story of LA

A One-Woman Play,

p.84

Through its Homes

With Tea & No Sympathy

Story by Jerry

Story by Sami Zahringer

Camarillo Dunn Jr.

OQ / WINTER 2024-25

15

WINTER 2024-25 Editor & Publisher

OJAI QUARTERLY Living the Ojai Life

Bret Bradigan Director of Publications Bret Bradigan Creative Director Uta Ritke Intern Kate Fernandez Ojai Vortex/Hub Administrator

Julia S. Weissman Contributing Editors Mark Lewis

Jerry Camarillo Dunn Jr.

Jesse Phelps Columnists Chuck Graham Ilona Saari Kit Stolz Sami Zahringer Circulation

John Nelson

CONTACT US: Editorial & Advertising, 805.798.0177 editor@ojaiquarterly.com The contents of the Ojai Quarterly may not be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: To subscribe to the OQ, visit ojaiquarterly.com or write to 1129 Maricopa Highway, B186 Ojai, CA 93023.

Subscriptions are $24.95 per year.

You can also e-mail us at editor@ojaiquarterly.com.

Please recycle this magazine when you are finished. © 2024 Bradigan Group LLC. All rights reserved.

IG: #OJAI Courtesy of Joe Sohm / Visions of America

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OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

O Q | E D ITO R’ S N OTE

CITY OF HUNGRY GHOSTS “If you read the news, you learn that things have never been worse. But from reading the olds, you learn that things have never been better. Read history.”

— Kevin Kelly In Buddhist tradition, there exists the concept of the “hungry ghost” — beings consumed by insatiable desire, forever searching for something just beyond their reach. Here in Ojai, we’ve long been a beacon for spiritual seekers, drawn by our valley’s mysterious vortices and promise of enlightenment. Yet perhaps what makes our community truly special isn’t the destination, but the journey itself — the perpetual quest that lures so many remarkable individuals to our doorstep — and the collective wisdom they bring with them.

This issue of Ojai Quarterly celebrates these seekers — not necessarily of spiritual enlightenment, but of something equally profound: the pursuit of passion in its purest form. Each story in these pages features individuals driven by an unquenchable thirst for discovery, adventure and meaning.

Take Tracey Curtis-Taylor, our cover story subject, whose spirit seems to soar straight out of the 1920s and ‘30s. Like the legendary aviatrixes whose paths she recreates, Curtis-Taylor embodies that timeless human yearning to push boundaries, to touch the sky, to follow in the contrails of those magnificent women in their flying machines. Her hunger for historical connection and adventure reminds us that some ghosts are worth chasing.

Speaking of historical echoes, John Mawson’s 11-episode audio drama about the San Demetrio brings to life another kind of hunger — the appetite for storytelling that preserves our most inspiring moments of human courage.

With voices like Brian Cox and John Malkovich breathing life into this tale of wartime heroism, Mawson’s project demonstrates how our hunger for meaningful narratives can transform historical footnotes into living, breathing art.

Our own Kit Stolz reflects on his decade of literary exploration in our pages, sharing conversations with luminaries like Jacqueline Winspear and T.C. Boyle. His journey through countless pages and interviews reveals another form of seeking — the endless quest to understand the human condition through the written word. Like our valley’s spiritual seekers, readers and writers are perpetual wanderers through landscapes of imagination and meaning.

Nature, too, has its own hungry ghosts. In Chuck Graham’s feature on the Giant Kangaroo Rats of the Carrizo Plain, we discover how these remarkable creatures’ endless burrowing, gathering and hoarding of seeds doesn’t just satisfy their own hunger — it creates life-sustaining conditions for countless other species. Their activity transforms an entire ecosystem, reminding us that sometimes our personal quests can nourish entire communities.

Bill Erickson’s passion for vintage racing cars and his adventures in the Mille Miglia speak to yet another kind of hunger — the desire to preserve and celebrate mechanical history while pushing these incredible machines to their limits. Vintage car enthusiasts are chasing something that exists between past and present, between material and ethereal.

Ilona Saari and Sami Zahringer with food and humor, respectively, also nourish this hunger. It’s my own joy to present to you their work.

I’m struck by how Ojai continues to attract and nurture these beautiful obsessions. Whether it’s pilots recreating historical flights, storytellers preserving maritime legends, literary explorers mining for golden conversations, naturalists documenting keystone species or mechanics breathing life into aging engines — we are all, in our way, hungry ghosts. But unlike the tortured spirits of Buddhist lore, our seekers find joy in the seeking itself. Each journey, each project, each passion adds another thread to the rich tapestry of our community. In the pages of the Ojai Quarterly, we don’t just tolerate these beautiful obsessions — we celebrate them.

OQ | C O N TRI BU TO R S

ROBIN GERBER

worked with the National Geographic Society for 35 years and has won three Lowell Thomas Awards, the “Oscars” of the field, from the Society of American Travel Writers.

is the author of four books and a playwright. Check her out at RobinGerber. com

BRENDAN WILLING JAMES

MARK LEWIS

RYAN SCHUDE

is a writer and editor based in Ojai. He can be contacted at mark lewis1898@gmail.com.

is a photographer & educator from Oak View.

You can find his most recent photos in the book “Also On View: Unique and Unexpected Museums of Greater Los Angeles” by Todd Lerew.

ILONA SAARI

KIT STOLZ

is a writer who’s worked in TV/film, rock’n’roll and political press, and as an op-ed columnist, mystery novelist and consultant for HGTV. She blogs for food: mydinnerswithrichard. blogspot.com.

is an award-winning journalist who has written for newspapers, magazines, literary journals, and online sites. He lives in Upper Ojai and blogs at achangeinthewind.com.

SAMI ZAHRINGER

is an aspiring playwright and would-be top chef, but sticks mostly to singing, writing and taking photographs.

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CHUCK GRAHAM

JERRY DUNN

His work has appeared in Outdoor Photographer, Canoe & Kayak, Trail Runner, Men’s Journal, The Surfer’s Journal and Backpacker.

is an Ojai writer and award-winning breeder of domestic American long-haired children.

She has more forcedmeat recipes than you.

OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

OQ | oja i p odca st SONGS FROM THE WILDERNESS, ALASKA TO OJAI Atz Kilcher, singer-songwriter, Vietnam vet and star of Discovery’s “Alaska: Last Frontier,” held a Nov. 2 benefit concert at Ojai’s Topa Institute for his Heroes Healing Homestead, an intensive outdoor program for veterans. Miriam Jones of the Open Circle Foundation joined him.

We shared stories of his many friends with Ojai ties, the value of wilderness for healing PTSD, playing music with his daughter Jewel, and much more. Learn more at Foundation.WeAreOpenCircle.org and @HeroesHealingHomestead on Instagram. (Ep. 207)

Ojai was first developed in the early 1870s by Royce Surdam, who purchased the land from railroad baron Tom Scott. Surdam relentlessly promoted the town site, naming it Nordhoff, after Charles Nordhoff, author of a popular book extolling California for its salubrious climate. In 1874 he advertised sites for $30 per acre, for which he had paid $6.

IN BRIEF: OJAI TALK OF THE TOWN PODCASTS HOW TO CHANGE YOUR CULTURE

‘WRONG STATION,’ RIGHT AUDIENCE FOR SAARI

Tom Krause, Ph.D. joins the podcast to talk about his fifth book, “If Your Culture Could Talk.” The premise is that a company CEO must deal with a catastrophe that puts the entire company at risk. Through dreamlike sequences with the “Culture Creature” he explores how this amorphous being is at the heart of most organizations, successful or otherwise. Krause is wellpositioned as he was hired by NASA in the wake of the Columbia disaster in 2003. (Ep. 205)

Ilona Saari, novelist, speechwriter, activist and food writer, has written “The Wrong Station,” a sequel to “Freeze Frame,” a thriller about the videographer Lorna Raven being in the wrong place at the wrong time, looking to track down the murderers before they find her. It also features lots of delicious food, fashion and romance as she seeks the perfect cheeseburger. Ilona talks about her experiences as a music journalist and crazy coincidences that have informed her life. (Ep. 204)

ARTHUR VANDER’S LIFE IN SCIENCE & ACADEMIA’S HIGHEST LEVELS professor and researcher at the University of Michigan.

Vander is known for taking complicated medical advances and explaining them in ways that give laypeople insight into the startling implications for our health care. He talked about

Arthur Vander, Ph.D planned to become a doctor, but a brief assignment to a medical research lab set him on his career path as a leading kidney expert and textbook author.

He and his wife retired to Ojai after his half-century career as a

ZOOT SUIT RIOTS & OJAI

EDUCATOR & INNOVATOR ONE: During World War II, fabric shortages for military uniforms clashed with the fashion of young Mexican-American men in Los Angeles, who wore flamboyant zoot suits characterized by pork pie hats, flowing fabrics, and dangling watch chains. Some viewed these suits as a “badge of delinquency.”

In June 1943, racial tensions erupted into the Zoot Suit Riots, a week-long conflict where servicemen attacked Black and Hispanic youths, particularly in the diverse neighborhood of Lincoln Heights.

Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus, a formidable six-foot-tall

2

recent studies that show bizarre activity in the brains of clinically dead people, the replication crisis in medical studies and how snake hearts and stomachs can expand enormously and what that means for cardiovascular health in humans. (Ep. 202)

TWO DEGREES

of SEPARATION BETWEEN

OJAI

ZOOT SUIT RIOTERS IN JUNE, 1943 OQ / WINTER 2024-25

redhead, served as principal of Lincoln High School from 1917, when she became California’s first female high school principal.

Many of her students were zoot suiters, and she played a crucial role in maintaining peace in her neighborhood during the riots. Former students praised her ability to provide leadership during tumultuous times.

TWO: In the 1950s, she moved to Ojai, where she founded Grey Gables, the birthplace of the American Association of Retired Persons.

21

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From the Ojai Podcast | EPISODE 208 In November 1940, as German U-boats and warships prowled the North Atlantic, attacking a convoy hauling desperately needed fuel, the crew of the British fuel tanker San Demetrio faced an impossible choice: freeze to death in the frigid waters or reboard their burning vessel. Their remarkable story of survival and salvage has now been transformed into an immersive audio drama featuring an all-star cast including Brian Cox, John Malkovich and Nathalie Emmanuel.

This harrowing tale was brought to life by Ojai writer and actor John Mawson and his co-director Misha Crosby.

Image: Recreation of the crew reboarding the San Demetrio on Nov. 7, 1940 by painter Norman Wilkinson

"Unsinkable," available on the Wondery network, recreates the true story of the merchant sailors who refused to let their ship — and its crucial cargo of aviation fuel — slip beneath the waves during Britain's darkest hour in the winter of 1940 during World War II. The 11-episode series was written by Mawson, whose 13 years as a merchant navy navigator lends the production exceptional authenticity.

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OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

UNSINKABLE Ojai Writer’s Tale of Heroism, Survival & Salvage in the North Atlantic STORY BY BRET BRADIGAN

The frigid waters of the North Atlantic in winter, where temperatures plummet below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, set the stage for this tale of survival against impossible odds. "That's about the last place you want to be," Mawson observes, having traversed this stretch of ocean many times.

"The Battle of the Atlantic is a story I wanted to tell," Mawson

explains. "The only reason Britain survived in both World Wars was because of the contribution of civilian sailors. They kept the fuel lines going, they kept the supply lines open." This crucial supply line came perilously close to being severed several times during the war, with Britain nearly forced to surrender due to the devastating toll of merchant ship losses.

OQ / WINTER 2024-25

27

ACTORS IN THE RECORDING STUDIO, FROM LEFT: NATHA-

AS WELL AS “QUEEN’S GAMBIT,” BRIAN COX OF “SUCCESSION”

LIE EMMANUEL, KNOWN FOR “GAME OF THRONES,” THOMAS

AND “DEADWOOD,” AND JOHN MALKOVICH OF “BEING JOHN

BRODIE-SANGSTER, ALSO KNOWN FOR “GAME OF THRONES,”

MALKOVICH.”

Against all odds, the crew managed to save not just themselves but 99 percent of their precious cargo. The technical challenges they faced were immense, as Mawson describes: "The challenge at that moment was, ‘How do we stop this ship from sinking? She's taken damage forward. She's got damage to her collision bulkhead. She's hard to steer.

She's taking heavy seas over the bow.’"

John Malkovich's character, as Chief Engineer Pollard, masterfully portrays the complex calculations needed to shift the vessel's weight distribution fore and aft, to keep it from capsizing, or worse, exploding. His improvised repairs allowed the damaged ship to limp to shore.

The production's attention to detail is evident in its sophisticated sound design.

Working with Jimmy Boyle, who crafted the iconic soundscape of "Band of Brothers," the team created a three-dimensional audio experience using Dolby Atmos technology. "We were able to input a lot of detail about what a ship sounds like,"

Cox and Malkovich, who had previously worked together on the film "Red," helped secure Malkovich's participation.

“HOW DO WE STOP THIS SHIP FROM SINKING? SHE’S TAKEN DAMAGE FORWARD ... SHE’S HARD TO STEER. SHE’S TAKING HEAVY SEAS OVER THE BOW.”

Mawson says, having served on tankers similar to the one in the story. The resulting soundscape immerses listeners in the claustrophobic confines of the ship's engine room and the terrifying expanse of the storm-tossed Atlantic.

The casting process began with what Mawson calls "dream casting"— creating a wish list of ideal actors for each role. "Once Brian Cox came on, then it got easier," Mawson reveals. "We were talking to the top agents at CAA. Everyone wants to be second, not first." The connection between

From the Ojai Podcast | EPISODE 208 28

Cox's involvement was particularly fitting, as he spent his first nine years of professional acting working in radio plays, bringing valuable experience to the audio drama format.

Thomas Brodie-Sangster, fresh from his success in "The Queen's Gambit," brings a compelling period authenticity to the role of Second Officer Hawkins.

"He just has an amazingly good period style," Mawson notes. "He really got the whole concept and his environment." The character arc Mawson created for Hawkins, a young officer thrust into extraordinary circumstances, showcases Brodie-Sangster's ability to portray both inexperience and growing determination. His performance in Episode Nine's storm sequence particularly impressed Mawson: "My God, he really went for it."

The project faced unique challenges during production, as recording took place during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We started casting and recording in the summer of 2020, and we finished in January OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

OJAI’S JOHN MAWSON, RIGHT, WROTE THE SCRIPT WHILE MISHA CROSBY, LEFT, CO-DIRECTED WITH MAWSON.

2021," Mawson recalls. With 37 actors playing over 100 roles, coordinating remote recordings was a massive undertaking.

"We spent over a year in post-production," Mawson says, noting the painstaking process of selecting the best takes from various recording locations.

Among the rare exceptions to the isolated recording protocol were Juliet Aubrey and Rupert Vansittart, who played a married couple in the story. They managed to record together in a studio large enough to maintain safe distances, separated by a glass screen.

"That helped because they're playing husband and wife, so most of the scenes were together," Mawson explains. Vansittart's performance particularly impressed the production team. "Everybody thinks of him as this sort of bluff, outgoing, superficial character. I tell you, he's so good, so good."

The production's musical score by Stephen Endelman (“The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain), was inspired by the epic sweep of Maurice Jarre’s compositions for David Lean films like "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Doctor Zhivago," adds another layer of sophistication. The composer created specific themes for each major character and environment, weaving them together to enhance the storytelling without relying on heavy narration. "I don't like exposition," Mawson explains. "I was able to use the court case as linkage if I needed some back explanation."

The court case dealt with the crew’s challenge to be awarded salvage rights for their heroic rescue of the San Demetrio. At stake was a not-inconsiderable amount for the much-needed fuel.

Some of the most challenging scenes to write were the intimate character moments that reveal the human cost of war. One such scene involves Hawkins and his mother in a hotel, which Mawson crafted with particular care. "It was very difficult to write that particular wording of that interchange. Took me a long time to get a feel of it," he recalls. "I didn't want to make her too monstrous, and I didn't want to make it too on the nose. I wanted it to be one of those moments when you just go, 'Oh, OK, right. We get him.'"

UTMOST WITH ATMOS In the gripping audio drama “Unsinkable,” listeners are transported onto the British tanker San Demetrio during its perilous World War II voyage through the North Atlantic. This immersive experience is powered by Dolby Atmos, the cutting-edge audio technology that envelops the audience in a soundscape of cinematic depth and realism. Unlike traditional stereo sound, Dolby Atmos allows audio to move in three-dimensional space, creating the sensation of sound coming from all directions, including overhead.

As the San Demetrio navigates through the deadly waters, under constant threat from German “wolf packs,” Dolby Atmos places listeners right at the heart of the action. The creak of the ship’s hull, the roar of the ocean, and the terrifying whistles of torpedoes are rendered with breathtaking clarity. This technology not only enhances the dramatic tension but deepens the listener’s emotional connection to the crew’s harrowing ordeal.

By using Dolby Atmos, “Unsinkable” not only tells a story but also pioneers a new form of storytelling where the audio environment plays as crucial a role as the narrative itself. The project was led

by Ben Wilkins of “Whiplash,” and Jimmy Boyle, who worked on “Quantum of Solace,” and “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.”

OQ / WINTER 2024-25

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From the Ojai Podcast | EPISODE 208 The story's historical accuracy is complemented by dramatic elements that bring the human cost of war into sharp focus. Harry Hamlin delivers a compelling performance as Mortimer, a character whose struggles with alcoholism were crafted to explain his historically documented smaller share of the salvage payment. "The only thing in the historical record that mentions him at all is the final share he got," Mawson notes. "Alcohol would be a major problem as it is today. I think it needed to be recognized."

For the sound design team, led by Oscar winner Ben Wilkins (known for his work on "Whiplash"), the challenge

Britain entered the war, in September 1939," according to Mawson. "The Germans were already waiting, laying mines, attacking by air, attacking by submarine, attacking by surface raiders, and it continued until the last day, until summer '45."

FROM THE VERY FIRST DAY THAT BRITAIN ENTERED THE WAR ... THE GERMANS WERE ALREADY WAITING, LAYING MINES, ATTACKING BY AIR ATTACKING BY SUBMARINE, ATTACKING BY SURFACE RAIDERS, AND IT CONTINUED UNTIL THE LAST DAY.

of creating consistency across different recording environments was immense. "You can do a lot with sound, but you do have to start with a clean, good sound," Mawson explains. "You have to have no background noise, no echo so that you can manipulate it."

In bringing this forgotten piece of World War II history to life, "Unsinkable" does more than entertain — it honors the memory of the merchant sailors who faced the constant threat of German attacks while maintaining the vital supply lines that ultimately helped secure victory.

Their story, as Mawson presents it, reminds us that heroism often lies not in grand gestures but in the quiet determination to survive against impossible odds.

Some potential cast members had to be turned down due to inadequate home recording setups, while others were reassigned to different roles that better suited their capabilities.

The production, which Mawson describes as an "audio movie," succeeds in creating vivid mental images through its masterful combination of performance, sound design, and music. It demonstrates the continuing power of audio drama to capture the imagination and bring historical events to life in ways that resonate with modern audiences. As Mawson and his team have proved, sometimes the most compelling visual effects are the ones we create in our own minds.

The series captures a pivotal moment in the Battle of the Atlantic, a conflict that began "from the very first day that

You can sign up for a free seven-day trial on Wondery to catch Mawson’s 11-episode production. He says the story is also in the works for an episodic television show.

JOHN MAWSON AS A YOUNG MERCHANT NAVY NAVIGATOR. IN 1987, A BLACK BOX CONTAINING AN EARLY GPS SYSTEM WAS BROUGHT ONBOARD, AND MAWSON DECIDED TO RETIRE HIS CHARTS AND SEXTANT TO GO INTO SHOW BUSINESS. 30

OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

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OJAI!

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an Ojai tradition since 1964

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OQ | a rts & l i teratu re

46 46

38

Gilbert’s ‘Undrowning’

A Decade ‘Off the Shelf’

Songwriter’s New Album Navigates Life, Guided by Personal Truths

Kit Stolz Reflects on his 10 Years of Writing About Ojai Writers

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37

ARtist Profile

artists & galleries

Christopher Noxon’s Personal, Artistic Journey

The People, Places That Make Ojai an Arts Destination OQ / WINTER 2024-25

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OQ | A RT i sts & GA L L ERIES Perhaps it was potter and “the Mama of Dada” Beatrice Wood’s influence, going back nearly 90 years. Maybe it even goes back further, to the Chumash people’s ingenious and astounding artistry with basketry.

It’s clear that Ojai has long been a haven for artists. The natural beauty

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framed so well by the long arc and lush light of an east-west valley lends itself to artistic pursuits, as does the leisurely pace of life, the sturdy social fabric of a vibrant community and the abundant affection and respect for artists and their acts of creation. Come check it out for yourselves.

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Visit SkyheartArt.com or OjaiStudioArtists.org for more information OQ / WINTER 2024-25

Original Landscape, Figure & Portrait Paintings in Oil. Ojai Design Center Gallery.

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OQ | OF F T HE S HEL F

LITERARY OJAI: A Decade of Stories STORY BY KIT STOLZ

T

en years ago, a poet and artist friend named Tree Bernstein, who lived for decades in Ojai, teaching and writing and making art in community by helping to launch the late great Ojai Poetry Festival, asked me if I would be interested in taking over her column on Ojai’s literary scene for this very magazine, the Ojai Quarterly.

Tree called her books column “Off the Shelf,” because … duh … and because she lived for a time right off Shelf Road. She moved away from Ojai in 2015, and later taught in Cambodia for the Peace Corps.

I said yes to Tree — thrilled — and was delighted when the publisher of the Ojai Quarterly, Bret Bradigan, agreed to allow me to carry on where Tree left off.

Unlike Tree, I’m not a poet, nor a master of metaphorical analysis, and my prose lacks balletic grace. But by way of compensation I’m a reporter, and an interviewer, and a devout believer in a literary concept from the too-often-forgotten American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“Talent alone cannot make a writer,” he wrote.* “There must be a 38

man behind the book, a personality.”

Emerson meant “man” in the sense of “a person,” not necessarily a male. Despite his early eminence and white-hair patrician looks, Emerson sympathized with marginalized outsiders. Famously he supported Henry David Thoreau, giving him use of the land on which Thoreau conducted the year-long “experiment in living” that became “Walden.”

But Thoreau — now suspected by some sympathetic writers to be neurodivergent — was just one of many out-of-the-box thinkers that Emerson backed, including the innovative editor and writer Margaret Fuller, and a proto-hippie movement in Concord attempting to live communally. Emerson also famously extolled a new book of poetry, “Leaves of Grass,” as a work of genius, giving his blessing to a radical poet named Walt Whitman.

Whitman in turn blew the doors off the plodding and formalized verse-making of the 19th century — including Emerson’s poetry.

“Leaves of Grass” was issued in a pocket-sized edition best read, Whitman said, in the open air, and perhaps on the road. His odes to the vast nation and to ordinary Americans — lumberjacks, soldiers, nurses, lovers of men — inspired the Beat Poets of a century later.

OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

“Talent alone cannot make a writer.

There must be a man behind the book, a personality.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

So what Emerson meant by “there must be a man behind the book,” I think, is that no matter how much we may admire a book — or even believe that reading it changed our lives — we cannot forget that the book represents a small fraction of the writer’s originality.

So when a new book arrives, it’s proper and right for a reviewer to give the context, to outline the book and quote it and discuss it, but it’s also right to talk to the author. To hear her think out loud about what brought her to the subject. Most writers seem to enjoy answering questions about their work (as long as the attention isn’t relentless, as it can be at times for Ojai’s best-known and most popular writer of fiction, Jacqueline Winspear).

Winspear’s iconic character of Maisie Dobbs is a private detective, working in a land haunted by the Great War, but she is about as far from the gun-toting American hard-boiled private eye as can be imagined. Dobbs, a dignified former nurse known among her devoted patients for her “soft hands,” turns out to be a caring soul who solves mysteries with insight and the building of trust, often with fellow women. No weapons required.

In an interview, Winspear stressed that she doesn’t set out to write a book with an ideological agenda.

“The one goal I have when I set out to write a book is to lay down the story I’ve been mulling over for some time,” she said. “That’s it really — I just want to tell a good story.”

In this Winspear has succeeded, probably beyond her wildest expectations, writing dozens of international bestsellers. Yet the success of the series doesn’t seem to change the caring nature of Maisie Dobbs, who repeatedly swims alone into deep psychological waters, exploring the Great War’s deadly shadows. In that light, Winspear speaks up for her genre.

“I don’t think of my Maisie Dobbs books as murder mysteries,” she said. “I think they are true mysteries, meaning the journey through chaos to resolution, where something is learned.”

As to the question of why her books, set in a very different world a century in the past, appeal to so many people today, Winspear puts in a word for seriousness, and for nostalgia.

She said many of her younger readers have told her that the Maisie Dobbs books helped them understand how their parents and grandparents suffered in the world wars, and what they endured, whether their forebears talked about it or not.

OQ / WINTER 2024-25

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OQ | OF F T HE S HEL F “Nostalgia is big. It’s an underestimated emotion.”

— Jacqueline Winspear “Grief and love are two sides of the same coin.”

— Jack Adam Weber

“It never occurred to me that ‘The Care and Management of Lies’ would not be taken seriously, Winspear said of her first standalone book outside the Dobbs series. “War is a serious matter, especially when we are still dealing with the fall-out of World War I some 100 years after the fact.”

The writers Ojai fosters tend to be searchers for deeper truths, such as Winspear and her Maisie Dobbs character, or thinkers, like Ojai’s late philosopher Robert Wolfe, who pursued the thread of non dualistic spirituality through many scholarly books.

Wolfe even found an example in Christianity, in the character of the Apostle known as “Doubting Thomas.” Wolfe believes that Thomas’ writings about Christ — which didn’t resemble the other Apostles’ stories of His death and resurrection — weren’t included in the Bible because they didn’t fit a monotheistic faith, as he wrote in a fascinating book called “The Gospel of Thomas.”

love are two sides of the same coin.”

(As it happened, the very same Clinton — who turns out to be one of Winspear’s biggest fans — reportedly optioned the Maisie Dobbs series of 18 books for adaptation, back in 2021.)

Not far away in Matilija Canyon in more recent years, an ecological thinker named Jack Adam Weber published a book on global warming called “Climate Cure,” arguing that we can heal the climate but healing ourselves. Weber, who as a younger man lost a farm in Hawaii to a lava flow, believes that by sharing the grief of loss in community we can find a resolve to make the changes we need, for our own sake and for the planet’s.

Although Ojai has a reputation as a progressive town, few (if any) of its notable writers show an interest in electoral politics.

“Embracing our sadness softens our hearts and engenders compassion,” he writes, “allowing us to connect with others. Grief and

“I’m 69 years old now and I wake up with purpose every day,” Chambers told me in 2016. “I write and work for my kids but also for my adopted family in Cambodia.

I feel like I have connected to the ancient wisdom of this place, and I want to bring that understanding to my own country. It’s touching to me that after all the bombing and landmines and misunderstandings the people of Vietnam and Cambodia still thank me for coming to their country.”

At the end of the interview in 2015, Winspear added this reflection.

“Nostalgia is big,” she said. “It’s an underestimated emotion.”

Even Winspear could not have guessed how right she would turn out to be, a year later, when an entire successful presidential campaign would be conjured up out of a nostalgic era of supposed American greatness (along with relentless attacks on Hillary Clinton).

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To right wrongs drives the work of many Ojai writers. Larry Chambers, for example, was a much-honored U.S. Army Ranger in Vietnam. He went as a gung-ho anti-Communist and warfighter, but came believing that he had been badly misled. He couldn’t let the injustice go. He devoted his retirement to healing the wounds of the war, writing books such as “The Betrayal of Vietnam and Cambodia: 1945,” and agreeing to support a Cambodian family with four children, in part to make amends for the horrors he saw in the war.

Ojai writer “day OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

“To be funny is in a way just to keep my own interest.”

— Franz Lidz “I feel like I have connected to the ancient wisdom of this place.”

— Larry Chambers

jobs” vary, but often writers in Ojai focus on new solutions to old problems. Gay Hendricks, a psychologist who has published many popular books on “conscious living,” wrote on the side a series of mysteries featuring an ex-monk and “Dharma Detective.” Instead of cynicism, the detective Tenzing Norbu opens his mind to find answers. As Hendricks said, “There is no problem you can’t wonder your way to the solution of.”

In downtown Ojai a few years back could be found the quietly inspirational Deb Norton, a playwright and theater director.

In 2016 on a Simon & Schuster imprint she published “Part-Wild,” a book to help writers unlock their creativity. She describes it as a practice — “Yoga for the brain.” Norton’s clever and supportive teaching methods evolved out of years of leading writing groups at the former Theater 150.

“I started wanting to find new ways to approach the work of creativity,” she said.

“I don’t mind hard work, but we make it so much harder than it has to be.

My

hope is that these exercises are ways to slip through the door rather than bashing it with your head until it comes down.”

Writers in Ojai have been known to work long hours into the night, be it for scholarly research (such as David Odorisio’s literary excavation of the world-famous writer and monk Thomas Merton’s final work, “Thomas Merton in California.”) Or for journalism, as seen in the reporting of The New York Times’ leading writer on matters archaeological, Franz Lidz, who from his home in Ojai brings unexpected wit to stories about scientists trying to make sense of the distant past.

“To be funny is in a way just to keep my own interest,” Lidz said. “I have trouble reading straight science writing or just about anything straight through, without a sense of humor — I think it’s hugely important.”

But of all the writers to be found in and around Ojai, none works harder — it seems fair to say — than T.C. Boyle, of nearby Montecito, who since the l970s as published 20 novels, with another on the way, and hundreds of short stories, many in The New Yorker. Unlike many fiction OQ / WINTER 2024-25

writers for that much-honored magazine, Boyle’s stories have blunt language, snappy plots, often crazed characters, and — virtually without exception — surprising conclusions.

Because Boyle lives not far away, and draws from reality to create his fiction, and because he’s relentlessly prolific, he’s almost unavoidable to curious local readers. He’s written books about two of the Channel Islands — “San Miguel” and “When the Killing’s Done,” about the eradication of wild pigs on Santa Cruz Island — and local events often inspire his fiction. In January of 2005, a series of catastrophic storms hit our region, resulting in road closures and slides throughout Ojai, and a deadly landslide that hit the small town of La Conchita.

I happened to read a story Boyle wrote about that disaster, called “La Conchita,” which was published in The New Yorker in December of that same year, 2005. I half-expected that Boyle, who frequently explores potential environmental disasters, including climate change — most recently in his novel “Blue Skies,” and perhaps most spectacularly in a novel called “A Friend of the Earth” — would see the horror of the future in a landslide.

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OQ | OF F T HE S HEL F To some extent Boyle does, as he sharply describes the collapse of the 600-foot cliff overhanging the tiny town of La Conchita — saying that most people have no idea what a “mudslide” of that nature means.

“Maybe it was the fault of the term itself — mudslide,” Boyle wrote. “It sounded innocuous, almost cozy, as if it might be one of the new attractions at Magic Mountain … but a mudslide, as I now know, is nothing short of an avalanche, but instead of snow you’ve got 400,000 tons of liquified dirt bristling with rocks and tree trunks coming at you with the force of tsunami. And it moves fast, faster than you think.”

But the writer’s imagination then goes not to the horror, but to the reaction of his narrator, a delivery driver rushing a human liver from LAX to a hospital in Santa Barbara for an emergency transplant. To his own surprise, the driver finds himself turning to help a frantic woman dig her trapped family out of a nearby house buried in mud. Despite the liver waiting in his trunk. “Again, as I said, I’m not a hero,” declares Boyle’s anti-hero driver. “I’m barely capable of taking care of myself, if you want to know the truth, but I fell in beside her without a word ...

I snatched up a length of two-by-four and began to tear at the earth as if I’d been born to it. The dirt flew. I knew nothing.”

In a preface to Boyle’s 915-page second collection of short stories, “Stories II,” Boyle talks frankly about his method of writing short stories, which he continues to publish for the pleasure of story-telling, despite the well-known fact that there is little or no money in writing short stories.

“To me, a story is an exercise of the imagination — or, as Flannery O’Connor

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that followed devastated Boyle’s town of Montecito, claiming 23 lives. He wrote an essay for The New Yorker about the disaster, and agreed to an interview with me, to think out loud about our environmental future, a favorite topic for Boyle.

But not because he has a message or an “answer” for the fact that the climate has begun to change rapidly. Because he enjoys challenging his characters. How will they manage? Will they survive? Learn? Despair?

“Fiction is for dramatizing the problem, which also humanizes it.”

— T.C. Boyle has it, an act of discovery,” he wrote. “I don’t know what a story will be until it begins to unfold, the whole coming to me in the act of composition as a kind of waking dream.”

To surprise the reader, the story must surprise the writer, and that process helps explain why Boyle’s work consistently defies expectations.

“I want to be playful and serious, investigative and imaginative, curious and more curious still, and I don’t want distractions,” he declared in the preface. “I don’t write articles or film scripts or histories, I don’t play sports or do crossword puzzles or tinker with engines — it’s all too much. The art — the doing of it — that’s what absorbs me to the exclusion of all else.”

The Thomas Fire burned past much of Ojai in late 2017 and continued to burn up the coast, past Montecito and into the backcountry. A torrential rainstorm

“When we look at global warming as a present fact, we get beyond the rhetoric of the environmentalists and the obstruction of the oil company shills occupying the White House,” Boyle said in 2018. “Fiction is for dramatizing the problem, which also humanizes it.”

And that focus — on dramatization, and humanization, on crazy human life itself — drives Boyle’s art, and in part explains his appeal. He can laugh at almost anything, even death, and mourn nearly anything, even the tiniest of lives. All mortal creatures live in an existential state; some of us know it, but most of us do not, or choose to forget.

In his most recent novel, “Blue Skies,” Boyle depicts a Santa Barbara family coping (or not) with climate change, and suffering — in vivid detail — harrowing personal consequences. Yet despite their suffering, like Boyle they continue to care in their personal way for the world and the creatures around them, including the endangered Western Monarch Butterfly. Will the butterfly make it? No one knows. It’s the depiction of that inescapable struggle — the human drama, often with unexpected humor — that makes the work of Boyle and other Ojai area authors come alive.

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OQ | A RTI ST S P OT — c hr i stop her noxon

ABOUT THE ARTIST Christopher Noxon, a writer-turned-artist, captures the spirit of place in his artwork, inspired

by Ojai Valley’s landforms and wildlife. His works have been featured at the Santa Paula Art Museum and Sullivan Goss in Santa Barbara.

Active in the local art community, he serves on boards for the Ojai Studio Artists and Ojai Valley Museum, teaches painting at Help of Ojai, and donates pieces to various community organizations. Noxon’s writing and illustrations have been published in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, and New York Times Magazine. His books include “Good Trouble,” “Plus One,” and “Rejuvenile.”

ABOUT THE ART: I made the first picture titled “Awha’y”

(named for the Chumash word for Ojai) the year I moved here, trying to capture some of the magic and energy I feel living here. I tried to summon the feeling of making art or building Legos with my kids when they were little, fitting together pieces and creating big shapes of color. It was pure play, like drawing an imaginary map or building a world of things unseen. Every summer since I’ve done a new “Awha’y,” venturing further into the made-up world and looking deeper for “the thing behind the thing.”

HOW’D YOU BECOME AN ARTIST? I started painting seriously in 2020, though I’d been making art (sketching in reporter notebooks, doing quickie watercolors) while raising kids and working as a journalist in Los Angeles.

I made the switch to art full time during a painful period. I moved to Ojai during the pandemic after the sudden death of my eldest son, Charlie. Art offered an escape from the pain, where I could get out of the way and make room for something new. I painted to get lost, to lose myself, to connect with something beyond me.

to me that I could do what she did — and I’m so grateful that I found my way to full-time practice in midlife.

I still don’t think of myself as a capital-A artist — I just make things. Art is a feeling I get looking at work I love and making pictures that stir something in me. It’s a verb not a noun.

ChristopherNoxonArt.com, IG @noxonpics

With no formal training, I learned to paint by looking closely at pictures by artists I admire — the Fauves, David Hockney, Alice Neel, Charles E. Burchfield, and, especially, my late grandmother Betty Lane. My whole idea of what an artist does was formed growing up looking at her work and visiting her little A-frame house in the woods of Cape Cod. She was a witchy, stylish, near-mythical figure representative of worlds far removed from where I grew up in sunny, showbiz-adjacent LA. It never occurred 44

OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

The Ivy rst opened its doors on Ventura Blvd in Studio City in 1993 and closed in 2011 as so many corporate stores were opening, and it didn't feel right for The Ivy a nymore. But now we discovered the magical town of Ojai and thought that this would be the perfect place for The Ivy to re-open. Our wide range of items includes antiques, ne estate jewelry, sterling silver, European porcelains and pottery, linens, and exceptional antique furniture from around the world. As always at The Ivy, tabletop a ccessories abound in ne dishware, crystal, and silver to nish off your table in style. Come see our newly expanded showroom featuring exclusive, very modern, and unusual furniture, art, rugs, and accessories. If you need to nd the elusive "perfect" gift, The Ivy in Ojai is the one-stop-shop for all your needs.

Come join us, after all: 'Everyone shops at The Ivy.'

MIMI GILBERT

STORY BY BRENDAN WILLING JAMES PHOTOS BY BRIDGETTE WINTEN

“Who am I, who am I, who am I without you?”

These two questions form the potent chorus in Mimi Gilbert’s new single, “Police Checks.” It’s a stunning, gut-punch of a song that tackles the difficulties of navigating homophobia in family, community and government. After years spent hiding her deep inner knowing behind scores of lyrical metaphors, she’s ready to sing a more direct truth and explore all that comes with operating from radical honesty.

MIMI GILBERT

BY BRIDGETTE WINTEN

Writing from personal experience is a brave and sometimes reckless expedition into the network of caves that make up heart and mind. While pointing a searchlight into your own darkness can reveal treasure, it can just as often be full of monsters and dead ends. Mimi guides me through her process and family history as we discuss her upcoming full length album, “Undrowning.”

Mimi has an easy, disarming smile, and her green eyes are so brilliant they appear to be backlit. She is soft spoken and deeply thoughtful, which effectively belies the tenacity required to write songs from such personal truth, let alone to perform them in public. She recalls developing a painful shyness in adolescence that rendered her terrified that anyone she knew might hear her sing. The discovery of a random patch of wild palms on the outskirts of the family’s property provided the necessary privacy. A secret box stowed out there harbored a classic composition book full of early lyrics written in pencil. She would learn a valuable lesson in acceptance when rain drenched the box and the book, erasing every word.

“I was such a private kid. Always afraid that someone would like, find me out. I’m sure those lyrics were horrible, but they were my first originals, gone forever.”

After the Northridge quake, Mimi’s family moved north to Oxnard for a spell before settling on a few acres of orange groves in east Ojai. The move suited her father Troy well, him being a “country boy, farming kind of guy,” but her mother Heidi, a Chicago native, voiced a requirement: If the children were going to grow up more Country than City, she wanted them to appreciate high art, and especially to know music. So once or twice a year, she drove them down to L.A. to experience musical theater.

Mimi was 5 when she first witnessed “Les Miserables” at The Pantages Theate — an indelible experience that kindled instant fascination with the little orphan girl, Cosette. When they got

home from the show, she immediately draped herself in Troy’s oversized clothes, sneaking outside to do her scenes on the adjacent street corner. That spirited cosplay would prove prescient.

The Gilbert family was heavily involved in the local church where girls would learn to sing and do cheerleading, but she can’t recall girls being encouraged to play guitar. At home, friends of her father’s were regular visitors, and evenings would often end with playing and singing around a bonfire. One of them, a “gorgeous, gentle giant of a man” named Ken Link, noticed Mimi’s wide eyes and offered to teach her some chords. It wasn’t long before she was playing “stupid pop-punk-rock” in her brother Cody’s bedroom, where they covered Sum 41, Green Day and an angsty version of CCR’s “Proud Mary.” Absent any of the impending pressures of sharing original music, those were simple, blissful times.

“We were just having fun as kids playing music. That, to me, was pure in the same way that I think about riding a bike around a neighborhood, or T.P.ing someone’s house. It was just fun noise, and didn’t tap any emotional space for me.”

This resonates: Music can be made, music can be written, but music is often at its most joyful when it’s simply being played.

In the world of music and art, some version of the phrase “The Universe Works in Mysterious Ways” is ever-present. Connective threads of fate, like tentacles of a man-of-war, hang suspended– weightless, invisible, patient, infinite.

Mimi recalls a particularly fateful afternoon kicking around Ventura’s Main Street and being mesmerized by a boy performing on the street. She was 15, and he was maybe 12, playing a Stratocaster through a tiny battery-powered amp called The Cube.

Waves of formative synapses fired, and a dramatic collision of threads became permanently entangled, revealing the path. This

was how she could sing her songs in front of people.

“The anonymity was so exciting to me. I wasn’t afraid to share if I didn’t know the people. I went home that night and bought the exact same amp on eBay. Street Performing has this really special thing … where you observe the scene and really meet who runs what. You don’t just pick a spot and go wherever you want if there are other people panhandling or street performing … there’s an order to things. Maybe give a tip, chat a little. When you get in, you’re kind of protected. So I could go find a bathroom and leave all my stuff and somebody would watch over it.”

Our paths first crossed at the late, great Zoey’s Cafe. Mimi’s chance meeting with a newsie cap-sporting musician named Matt Zeltzer led to an invitation to play the cafe, among her first opportunities to play an indoor stage. I would have been in my mid-twenties then, and immersed in masculine, overly ambitious rock culture. Onstage that night was a humble, spritely teenager with this gorgeously earnest voice, playing her original music and completely owning the room. Our worlds were pretty different then, and we didn’t connect again in person until this conversation, but we both remember the competitive format of that night particularly well.

We agree that the American Idol-ization instilled an unpleasant air of competition and overt capitalism to music.

It can be taxing to interact with that energy, especially with a guitar strapped on, having just finished performing one of your own compositions. Mimi recalls some well-meaning offenders: “Oh, I hope you make it, I hope someone discovers you. Don’t stop!” There’s a lack of situational awareness in those words that’s frustrating, even if the intent is inherently good.

“When I would get tired of it I would sometimes answer in a nice but snarky way — ‘You just discovered me!’ Or, you know — ‘I’m making it right now!’ Like I’m literally making music right now, what are you talking about? I felt like if I was going to soak that energy up, it would destroy my joy.”

We talked more about ambition and its many facets — the

grinding, the climbing, the conquering, the fatigue ... the un-

ending and degrading feeling of it all. To an impressive extent, Mimi’s kept the beast at bay.

“I’ve always felt like I entered music backward, like I was kind of just skirting in. I really didn’t set out to be a musician. For me, ambition in music is so dangerous. I’m sure it’s something that every artist struggles with … the difference between passion and ambition … in the sense that ambition feels like you’re going to the marketplace with your hat out to make deals and find the best stock price or something. I’m constantly trying to turn that drive off because I am passionate about music. Sometimes I’ll feel ambitious in the way that I plan tours and want to, you know, get out there ... and I’ll get out of balance and realize that the ambition has turned into this beast or something.”

I’m all too familiar with this struggle, and I’d bet that most anyone who has ever stepped into a recording studio, song in heart

can relate. We’re compelled to write, create, play, and sing … but for who, and how often, and why? The slope is far more slippery than we’re aware when we first marry art to market.

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Mimi’s life as a full-time troubadour eventually led her to New Zealand, where she met the person who would become her wife. It’s a moment she describes as “the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” After a decade of touring down under, she ultimately landed for a spell in Melbourne, Australia to record “Undrowning,” before moving back to California. Mimi found sanctuary down there in the relaxed music culture, and the shared aversion to hustle culture paradoxically led her to engage more head-on with her career by connecting with producer/kindred spirit Edvard Hakansson, a manager, and indie label Cohort Records. All of this pesky ambition certainly messes with her mind sometimes, but she admits the best way forward could be through.

She leaves me with one final, relatable quote:

Coming soon: A deeper dive into Ojai Valley Music (OVM) — the new coalition music group wins a four-year contract with the City of Ojai to manage the Libbey Bowl.

comprises two locals: Ojai Playhouse owner David Berger and Ojai Noodle House/Hotel Café owner Marko Shafer, along with veteran music promoter Martin Fleischmann. While some voiced public support in favor of renewing the existing contract with Lance Sterling (Sterling Ventures has had the Libbey contract for the past eight years) and even those not in favor were quick to praise his key support in resurrecting the venue, the room was stacked for the local upstarts. In the end, a unanimous motion passed the council and the contract was awarded to OVM. While the news created a ripple of trepidation with some in the community, I expect 2025 will usher in a diverse and exciting new chapter of concert and event experiences for all at Libbey Bowl.

On October 22, Ojai City Hall was packed with musicians, young gymnasts and animal lovers alike for a spirited evening session. Mayor Betsy Stix playfully reminded the room numerous times to hold all applause, and instead use “jazz hands” to show support for any public comments. Notable resident attendees included Donald Glover, members of Wilco and Modest Mouse, all of whom spoke in support of the new OVM proposal and to the experience and trustworthiness of its creators. The group

“I’m learning how to just really trust myself and give myself permission to really feel ... feel my experience as a human.”

I nodded, and stifled a wry ‘Amen’ that had bubbled loose from the murk of my own semi-religious childhood. I agreed to meet up for coffee soon to give her a proper chance to pry into my past and balance things out.

You can find more, including an official video for “Police Checks,” at mimigilbert.com.

UPCOMING SHOWS OF NOTE: Friday November 29 - Char Man Record Release show at Deer Lodge Saturday November 30 - Rose Valley Thorns at Deer Lodge Monday December 9 - Mapache (Duo) at Deer Lodge Friday December 13 - Allegra Krieger with Ella Hue at Deer Lodge Saturday, December 14 - Danny Boy Wright and Friends at Deer Lodge 50

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Krotona Institute of Theosophy

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OQ | W I NE & DIN E

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Chilly Outside? Chili Inside!

food, beverages & more

Bean There For a Flavorful Response to Ojai Gatherings

By Ilona Saari

Ojai’s Essential Restaurants, Products

By Staff

62 Chef Randy Taste of Morocco for Cozy Day Cuisine

By Randy Graham OQ / WINTER 2024-25

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OQ | FO O D & D RI N K

A VERY CHILI OJAI WINTER 56

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Spicy Stories & Festive Flavors for the Winter Season — STORY BY ILONA SAARI —

N

O, NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH CHILLY.

Here in the Ojai Valley, chilly is a relative term — though to be fair, we drop down to freezing a few times in the winter. But, with a zillion Mexican and barbecue restaurants in California, chili is a staple. When I think of a winter meal, however, chili recipes don’t jump from my cookbooks. I think of pot roasts, rib roasts, or legs of lamb surrounded by crispy-onthe-outside, mushy-on-the-inside roasted potatoes or homemade soups enjoyed in front of a blazing log fire. My mind deliciously drifts to sumptuous winter holiday parties with baked turkeys to feed the multitudes, maybe a honey-baked, fresh or canned ham – perhaps a few roast ducks, or brisket!

Autumn was in full foliage in Northern California as my husband, Richard, and I drove up PCH to Marin County where we were introduced to Deer Valley Chili at a small dinner party hosted by my high school BFF, Gisela, and her husband. We loved the dish and copied the recipe. Back home in L.A., winter (such as it is) was fast approaching along with its holiday

season. It was time to start preparing for our huge holiday party, ranging anywhere from 25-50 people, depending on who flew off to Aspen or back home to New York (like us, many of our friends were transplanted New Yorkers). Their kids were welcomed and grew up as part of our Christmas Eve tradition. In fact, when we sold our house to move to Ojai, we threw a goodbye pool party for all our friends and invited our home’s new young owners.

Dear friends’ twin daughters who were twenty-something at the time, told our buyers they would see them on Christmas Eve, explaining that they had celebrated that night in our, now their, house every year since they were 5. The new owners were charmed, if not a little wary that they would indeed show up ... but I digress.

As Richard loves to cook (lucky me) and is quite the chef, the menu for our yearly holiday party was his domain. That year he decided to try a different approach to his holiday buffet to feed a hoard.

We’d become more health conscious and environmentally ‘woke’ by cutting down on red meat. (We also own a hybrid car, so we cut down on car gas and cow gas!)

So, he decided on something poultry — free range, of course, but, no, not a OQ / WINTER 2024-25

“Thanksgiving” turkey with stuffing, but, a chicken or turkey cassoulet. Light bulbs flashed ... why not a poultry chili (though I’m not sure the French think of any vat of chili as a cassoulet or even a casserole, but I’m digressing, again). From sea to shining sea, chili parties are always popular, so he opted to make Gisela’s Tex-Mex turkey Deer Valley chili.

OK, Deer Valley, Utah is not noted for a large Hispanic (less than 25 percent last count) or a transplanted Texas population, but this turkey chili (chicken can be a substitute) checks all the Tex-Mex cooking boxes ... tomato, black beans, corn, onions, and chili beans (of course) ... so Richard multiplied Gisela’s recipe to feed a crowd of 30-40 with a side red cabbage and walnut salad (holiday colors) and cornbread ...

Mexican cornbread, of course.

Whether you chili-out with a few friends or with a village, everything you need can be found at Ojai’s Sunday and Thursday farmer’s markets, Rainbow Bridge or both Westridge Markets where you can also order your free-range chicken or turkey.

(For Richard’s recipe, see following pages.)

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DEER VALLEY CHILI

Southwestern Tex-Mex Chili Variation SERVES: 6

PREP TIME: OVERNIGHT

COOK TIME: TWO HOURS chopped onion, celery, bell peppers, leeks, garlic and oregano. Cook until vegetables soften, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes. Reduce heat to low. Add flour, chili powder, cumin, coriander, salt and sugar and cook 5 minutes, stirring frequently. Add 4 cups stock and bring to simmer, stirring frequently. Puree 1-1/4 cups corn w/ remaining ½ cup stock in food processor. Add puree to chili. Mix in black beans, turkey and remaining 1 cup corn. Simmer chili 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

chili recipes which use ground turkey.

(Richard roasted a turkey for the occasion)

INGREDIENTS: 2 cups dried black beans, rinsed 10 cups water 1 teaspoon pepper ½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter 2 medium Anaheim chilies, seeded & chopped 2/3 cup chopped red onion 2/3 cup chopped celery 2/3 cup chopped red bell pepper 1 large leek (white part only), chopped 2 garlic cloves, minced 2 tablespoons dried oregano, crumbled ¼ cup all-purpose flour 2-1/2 tablespoons chili powder 2-1/2 tablespoons ground cumin 2 tablespoons ground coriander 1 teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon sugar 4-1/2 cups chicken stock or canned broth 2-1/4 cups frozen corn, thawed 4 cups diced cooked turkey or chicken — it’s this diced turkey or chicken that makes it different from traditional turkey

TOPPINGS: Grated cheddar cheese Chopped red onion Sour cream Chopped fresh cilantro Corn Chips

DIRECTIONS: Place black beans in large pot with enough cold water to cover by 3 inches and let soak overnight.

(Can be prepared a day ahead. Cover and refrigerate. Reheat before serving.)

Drain beans. Return beans to pot. Add 10 cups water and the pepper and bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer until beans are tender, stirring occasionally, about 1-1/2 hours. Drain beans.

Place toppings in individual bowls on the table for everyone to pick and choose.

Makes 6 servings.

Obviously, Richard more than tripled the recipe to make enough to feed the ‘throngs.’

Recipe is easily doubled or tripled. For 30 servings, multiply by five.

Melt butter in same pot over medium heat. Add Anaheim chilies, 2/3 cup

— Mexican Corn Bread — INGREDIENTS: 1 cup butter, melted 1 cup white sugar 4 eggs 1 (15 ounce) can cream-style corn ½ (4 ounce) can chopped green chili peppers, drained ½ cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese ½ cup shredded cheddar cheese 1 cup all-purpose flour 1 cup yellow cornmeal 4 teaspoons baking powder 58

cornmeal, baking powder and salt. Add flour mixture to corn mixture; stir until smooth. Pour batter into prepared pan.

¼ teaspoon salt

DIRECTIONS: Preheat oven to 300 degrees F (150 degrees C). Lightly grease a 9x13 baking dish.

In large bowl, beat together butter and sugar. Beat in eggs one at a time. Blend in cream corn, chilies, Monterey Jack and cheddar cheese In separate bowl, stir together flour,

Bake in preheated oven for 1 hour, until a toothpick inserted into the center of the pan comes out clean.

Makes 6 servings. Richard, of course, made more than one batch for our party.

CHILI OUT! HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND A WONDERFUL NEW YEAR!

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Proudly serving our small-batch, fresh roasted coffee to the community for 28 years!

337 e. ojai ave. ojai, ca

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www.ojaicoffeeroasters.com

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Sea FreSh SeaFood 533 E. Ojai Ave • 805-646-7747

Restaurant - Sushi Bar Fresh Fish Market Heated Patios & Full Bar

Open Monday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Breakfast Saturday & Sunday, Open 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.

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CHEF RANDY | LIFE OF SPICE

a taste of morocco This vegan dish has an excellent combination of flavors. Whether enjoyed for lunch or dinner, it is a complete meal. Serve it with fresh, warm pita bread or naan. For a real treat, turn the lights down low, put on the ZBS audio production “Moon Over Morocco,” and imagine you are in the heart of Casablanca as you enjoy this unusual dish from North Africa.

INGREDIENTS: 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil 1 large yellow onion (chopped) 3 carrots (cleaned & chopped – no need to peel) 1 clove garlic (minced) 16 ounces of organic extra firm tofu (cut into 1-inch cubes) ¼ teaspoon fresh ground pepper 1 tablespoon paprika 1 teaspoon cumin 1 teaspoon cinnamon 16 ounces of vegetable broth 1 teaspoon Better Than Bouillon Vegetable Base 1 teaspoon harissa 15-ounce can of garbanzo beans ½ cup dried apricots (chopped) ¼ cup raisins ¼ cup fresh cilantro (chopped) ¼ cup fresh mint (chopped) Salt to taste

DIRECTIONS: Plug in your slow cooker and set the heat to high.

Randy Graham is a writer, author, and private chef. He enjoys cooking for friends and family using ingredients from backyard vegetable and herb gardens. His food is often called “vegetarian comfort food.” He and his wife, Robin, live in Ojai, California, with their dog, Willow. Robin and Willow are not vegetarians.

Healthy 62

In a 3-quart sauté pan, bring oil to medium heat. Add onion, carrots, garlic, and tofu — sauté over medium-high heat for about three minutes. Add a balance of ingredients (except salt) and cook, stirring frequently for another four-five minutes.

Add the contents of the sauté pan to the slow cooker, cover, and cook for 3½ hours. Before serving, taste and adjust the salt to taste.

Slow Cooker

Winter

Vegan OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

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Explore Ojai Valley’s History, Art and Culture Thursday – Sunday 10am – 4pm 130 W. Ojai Ave. 805 640-1390 OjaiValleyMuseum.org

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OQ | y ester day & tomor row

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76 A liFE Aloft Famed Aviator Retraces Historic Routes

By Robin Gerber

84 LA, In two houses

92 ecosystem engineers

108 have wrench, will travel Erickson’s Mechanic, Driving Skills Take Him Around the World

By Mark Lewis

In a City Obsessed With the Future, Abodes of Past are Preserved

By Jerry Camarillo Dunn Jr.

Carrizo’s Giant Kangaroo Rats Dig Deep For All Species

By Chuck Graham

110 nocturnal submissions A One-Woman Play, Dedicated to Dame Maggie Smith

By Sami Zahringer

OQ / WINTER 2024-25

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Erickson driving the Fiat 8V in the 2000 Mille Miglia

THE AGE OF THE SELF-DRIVING CAR IS ALMOST UPON US, OR SO SAYS ELON MUSK. BUT OJAI CAR GUY BILL ERICKSON STILL PREFERS THE DIY APPROACH, WHICH HAS TAKEN HIM ALL AROUND THE WORLD IN VINTAGE VEHICLES.

THE HOMES along the westernmost fringe of Oak View perch atop a steep cliff overlooking the Ventura River. But to knock on Bill Erickson’s door, you would have to wend your way down a driveway which descends to the bottom of that cliff, where sprawls a former ranch turned open-air garage that the Ventura County Star describes as Erickson’s “rustic classic sports car rejuvenation resort.”

There, amid a profusion of Ferraris, Jaguars, Bentleys and other imports in various states of repair, sits a 1925 Buick Roadster, resting in a field facing the river. What adventures this car might have had during its first 82 years are lost to history, but in 2007 it carried Erickson all the way from Beijing to Paris. Not bad for an octogenarian car with a damaged suspension.

The history of Erickson’s own adventures is better documented. That drive across Asia and Europe is the

highlight, but there have been many other memorable escapades, and they all involve cars.

BILL ERICKSON WAS BORN in Alameda, Calif., in 1950, and grew up in Spokane, Wash. He and his friends were into cars long before they were old enough to drive, and his best friend was especially fascinated by sporty European imports.

“Somehow he caught the bug, and he gave it to me,” Erickson says.

His first car, however, was not a Jaguar or a Fiat, but something more prosaic.

“It was a ‘41 Ford Business Coupe that my mother gave me when I went off to college,” he says.

That college was in Walla Walla, Wash., where Erickson soon graduated from the Ford to a series of sports cars imported from England, including four Triumphs, two Jaguars and an MGB. (“Robin’s egg blue,” he recalls wistfully of the latter car.) These cars were not famous for their mechanical reliability, which is how Erickson stumbled into his future career as an auto mechanic specializing in imports.

“It was by default,” he says. “I couldn’t afford to pay anyone to fix them, so I had to learn how to do it myself.”

While in college he began working for the local Saab, Datsun and Subaru dealer, adding Swedish and Japanese cars to his areas of expertise. Then he got married, and that was the end of his college days. He needed a full-time job, and his new fatherin-law had a friend who owned a Chevrolet dealership in Bishop, Calif. So, around 1971, Erickson and his bride pulled up stakes and headed south on U.S. Highway 395 to the Owens Valley.

A year later, he partnered with one of his brothers to open an auto repair shop, located alongside U.S. 395 in Bishop. His brother worked on domestic cars and Erickson handled the imports. Among these was a very rare Ferrari 250 GT that belonged to a local high school teacher.

“It had been in a collision,” Erickson says.

As it happened, 1972 was the year the Ferrari Club of America sponsored the first Virginia City Hill Climb, a time-trial event in which drivers race against the clock over a steep and twisty course near Virginia City, Nev. As the day of the event approach, U.S. 395 though Bishop was filled with northbound Ferraris heading to Virginia City. When the drivers stopped for gas, they could not avoid noticing the 250 GT parked in the driveway of Erickson’s shop. It was hardly in mint condition — it had an Oldsmobile engine, among other deficiencies — but nevertheless, some Ferrari Club members were happy to buy it

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from the teacher with the idea of restoring it to its former glory.

specializing in used imports — Porsches, Ferraris, etc.

Erickson didn’t realize it at the time, but this episode demonstrated two things would help guide his future path: 1) That there was good money to be made in buying and selling vintage imported sports cars, and 2) that these buyers and sellers tend to congregate at fun motorsports events like the Hill Climb, where they can mix business with pleasure. One day, Erickson would be one of them.

“Now I’m wearing a suit,” Erickson says with a grin. “We sold ‘em as fast as we could get ‘em.”

He found that Ojai suited him, so he put down roots here.

Then he met and eventually married the Ojai glass artist Teal Rowe, who would join him on a series of overseas motorsports adventures.

But not yet. Around 1974 he moved south to Thousand Oaks, where a family friend had the local Jaguar dealership. Erickson signed on there as a mechanic. One day a man brought a car in that really caught Erickson’s eye.

“It was an Austin-Healey Bugeye Sprite with a Cobra engine,” he recalls.

The Sprite’s owner was Pince Richman, whom Erickson describes as “a gentleman farmer” who grew strawberries on the Oxnard Plain. Richman also collected exotic cars.

“He would keep his exotics in the strawberry cooler when it wasn’t strawberry season,” Erickson says.

Richman hired Erickson to work on his cars. Then he proposed that he and Erickson start a dealership in Camarillo

After the dealership closed in the early ‘80s, Erickson launched his own shop, Real Motor Cars, in Thousand Oaks, where he repaired foreign sports cars, and occasionally bought and sold them too.

But he stayed in touch with Richman, who in 1989 invited Erickson to shift his base of operations to Ventura, where Richman had acquired a building to stash his car collection. Erickson could work on Richman’s cars and also run his own repair business out of the same location. Erickson accepted the offer and moved his business to Ventura — and himself to Ojai.

WHY OJAI? Because the peripatetic Richman was now residing in the old Baldwin place on Shokat Drive in Rancho Matilija, which had a bunkhouse on the property. Erickson was now single again, so he bunked in at the bunkhouse for a time, while commuting to Ventura for work. He found that Ojai suited him, so he put down roots here. Then he met and eventually married the Ojai glass artist Teal Rowe, who would join him on a series of overseas motorsports adventures.

The first was the celebrated Mille Miglia car rally in Italy. (Mille Miglia is Italian for “1,000 miles.”) Originally it was a race, which was discontinued because too many drivers and onlookers were being killed by car crashes. Now it’s a rally, the point of which is to complete the route safely and have fun along the way. It runs from Brescia in northern Italy to Rome and back again, and all the entrants must drive vintage sports cars.

In 1999, Erickson and Rowe were among the onlookers in Brescia as that year’s rally began. Erickson had organized an Italian vacation for a group of car enthusiasts, and watching the start of the Mille

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Bill Erickson with his 1925 Buick Roadster that completed the 8,000 mile Peking to Paris Rally

Erickson and the ‘54 Ford from the Carrera de Panamericana

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Despite severe mechanical challenges, Erickson completed the centennial Peking to Paris Rally

Miglia was part of the itinerary.

“It’s like a two-hour parade of the most exotic cars in the world,: Erickson says.

One of the people on the tour, Don Kozyk, suggested that Erickson and he should enter the event themselves. One year later they were back in Brescia in a 1956 Fiat 8V. Erickson already had been working on the car in his Ventura shop when he realized that it would qualify for the Mille Miglia. Its owner agreed to loan him the car for the rally, so he and Kozyk shipped it off to Italy. Rowe came along for the ride — literally. She drove the rally course at the wheel of a van that served as the team’s chase car.

Afterward, back in Brescia at the postrally banquet, the question arose of what other vintage-car rallies might be fun to try. As Erickson recalls, it was Rowe who proposed that an actual race might be

72

even more fun than a rally: “So Teal says, ‘Is there any place where they really race these things?’”

The answer was yes, in Mexico. La Carrera de Panamericana, like the Mille Miglia, was originally a road race, designed to showcase the Mexican portion of the Pan American Highway.

Also like the Mille Miglia, the Carrera was cancelled in the 1950s because too many people were dying in car crashes along the way; and it too was later revived in the rally format. But, unlike the Mille Miglia, the Carrera is a speed rally, conducted in stages where the drivers compete to have the fastest times.

Thus it was that in 2003, he and Rowe made their way to a town on the Mexico-Guatemala border, donned fire suits and crash helmets and strapped themselves into a ‘54 Ford. The route would take them north across the entire length of Mexico to Nuevo Laredo on the Texas border. They didn’t finish first,

but they finished, and in one piece.

“That was my first real ‘race’ race,” Erickson says.

Next up for Erickson: The 2007 Peking to Paris Motor Challenge. This event marked the centennial of the legendary Peking to Paris auto race of 1907, which inspired the even-longer-distance Great Auto Race of 1908, which in turn inspired the 1965 Blake Edwards film “The Great Race,” in which Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Natalie Wood motor from New York to Paris in 1900s-vintage jalopies.

The 2007 version would be a monthlong road rally with an emphasis on endurance. The challenge was how to keep your vintage car purring along for 8,000 miles over some very challenging terrain. One answer was to put an expert vintage-car mechanic in the driver’s seat.

Erickson nominated himself for that role, and for a wingman he enlisted his

OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

old friend Steve Dole, a retired airline pilot living in Pacific Grove. (Dole had done the 2003 Carrera Panamericana too, in a ’53 Buick.)

The two men acquired the carcass of a 1925 Buick Roadster, spent nine months fixing it up, then shipped it off to Beijing (as Peking is now known). They dubbed themselves Team Yakity Yak, because the route would take them across Mongolia, where the yak is a beast of burden.

“So, we fly to Beijing, get the car, fill it up with gas, and right away there’s a leak,” Erickson says.

They fixed the leak and started the race.

The going was smooth from Beijing to the Mongolian border. Then they crossed into Mongolia, where roads were almost non-existent.

“You’re in the sand,” Erickson says.

“There’s no curbs or sidewalks, just a path through the desert.”

That would be the formidable Gobi Desert. Team Yakity Yak ran into difficulties west of Ulaanbaatar, the capital (and the only major city in Mongolia).

“The suspension on the Roadster broke twice, forcing the pair to camp out alone in the desert for two nights,” reported the Ventura County Star, which was providing regular updates of the team’s progress.

“We were out of water, and I was very concerned,” Dole told the Star.

But Erickson jury-rigged the damaged driveshaft, and they made it to the next village, where the local blacksmith put his electric welder to work on the car’s undercarriage.

“And we’re on our way again,” Erickson says. “But now we’re playing catch-up.”

Crossing into Russia and racing across Siberia, they caught up with the the group.

“Team Yakity Yak Makes Yekaterinburg,” the Star announced in mid-June. “Dole estimates about 45 people are out of the race due to mortally wounded cars, but, because Erickson can fix anything, he said, they are still in it.”

Yekaterinburg, near the Ural Mountains, is best known as the place where the Bolsheviks executed Czar Nicholas II and his family during the Russian Revolution. Erickson and Dole received a friendlier reception, which included the gift of a new set of wheels and tires liberated from a Russian Army jeep.

They dubbed themselves Team Yakity Yak, because the route would take them across Mongolia, where the yak is a beast of burden.

Thus equipped, they pushed on into Europe and across that continent to Paris, arriving 35 days after they left Beijing. Rowe was on hand to greet them at the finish line in the Place Vendome, in front of the Ritz Hotel.

“That was the only time in the whole trip we put the top down,” Erickson says.

He and Dole then donned tuxedos and swanned into the celebratory blacktie gala. Champagne may have been involved.

There was no bubbly for their trusty Buick Roadster, but then it wasn’t very thirsty, having required no major topping-up of its engine oil during the 35-day race.

OQ / WINTER 2024-25

“As it turns out, we went literally around the world and consumed one quart of oil,” Erickson says. “Which is amazing.”

THE BUICK ROADSTER is now almost 100 years old, but it’s still operable, and Erickson occasionally drives it in Ojai’s Fourth of July parade. But mostly it sits in that field near the Ventura River, resting on its laurels.

Of the 25 cars in Erickson’s collection, the Buick is one of only two that are not imports. The other is the ’54 Ford he drove in the Carrera de Panamericana with his former wife Teal Rowe.

Erickson is now married to Maria, with whom he shares the house at the foot of the cliff in Oak View, surrounded by his car collection. (Erickson has a son and a grandson from his first marriage to his college sweetheart.)

He still participates in road rallies.

Earlier this year he did the Mille Miglia for the fourth time, and he was “pretty sure” that one of the other cars was the same Ferrari 250 GT that once belonged to that high-school teacher back in Bishop. (It now sports a V12 instead the Oldsmobile engine.) Still on Erickson’s bucket list: the famous Targa Florio road rally held each year in Sicily.

Closer to home, Erickson is a stalwart of the Ventura Sports & Race Car Club.

And he’s a regular at the annual Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance car show.

Given his history, it comes as no surprise to learn that Erickson is not thrilled about the advent of driverless cars.

“I will never get used to the idea of being in a car that no one’s driving,” he says.

“What’s lost is the reward of being in control. If you just get in a box and close the door and look at your phone, you miss the whole tactical experience of driving.”

The fun, in other words.

73

We’re not just guests at nature’s table, we’re family.

We don’t live beside nature, we live within it. Humans, animals, and plants alike share our valley, and to keep our community thriving, we all need to be at the table. When we work together to conserve nature, everyone benefits. We invite you to join us at nature’s table to celebrate a brighter, more resilient future where people, plants, and wildlife unite.

Please consider making a gift today to support a brighter, more resilient Ojai Valley with a big abundant table of native habitat for all.

DONATE TODAY AT OVLC.ORG 74

OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

OQ | A NI M A L N EI GHB O R S

1 TURTLE CONSERVANCY

turtleconservancy.org info@turtleconservancy.org.

The Turtle Conservancy, located in Ojai’s East End, is dedicated to protecting threatened turtles and tortoises and their habitats worldwide, and to countering the illegal trade in such animals, which is decimating their numbers. Working with partner organizations, they’ve purchased land and established preserves for endangered turtles in Africa, Asia and Mexico. They’ve established a captive breeding center with the ultimate goal of re-wilding species to their native habitats when it is safe to do so. The Turtle Conservancy depends on donations to fund its programs, and welcomes volunteers to help out with numerous projects at our Ojai facility.

2 LOCKWOOD ANIMAL RESCUE CENTER

info@lockwoodarc.org phone: 661-220-5505

CLOSED SINCE PANDEMIC: The Lockwood Animal Rescue Center (LARC), founded by Dr. Lorin Lindner and Matt Simmons, offered a therapeutic work environment for returning combat veterans and a “forever home” to wolves, wolfdogs, coyotes, horses, parrots and other animals. Located on a 20-acre facility, they offered both the veterans and animals an opportunity to heal and thrive in a back-to-nature setting. “Though not open to the public, we cater to veterans suffering from trauma, and are welcome to participate in our work therapy program. We offer an immersion program for veterans to stay and participate, and to learn basic skills for caring for animals and self healing,” Dr. Lindner said.

3 OJAI RAPTOR CENTER

ojairaptorcenter@gmail.com phone: 805-649-6884

ORC was founded and is directed by Kimberly Stroud, who started her training at the Raptor Rehabilitation and Release Program in 1992. In 2000 she went on to found Ojai Raptor Center. First and foremost, Ojai Raptor Center is a fully functional and permitted wildlife rehabilitation center, specializing in birds of prey. Every year they take in 500 to 1,000 sick, injured or orphaned birds (including many non-raptor birds, and a small percentage of mammals) with the hopes of rehabilitating them and releasing them back to the wild. Our four-acre campus is comprised of a medical room and hospital, as well as outdoor flights, aviaries and mews. The center also features the largest flight in California.

4 HUMANE SOCIETY OF VENTURA COUNTY

animals@hsvc.org phone: 805-646-6505 or 805-656-5031

Nestled in the rolling hills of the Ojai Valley lies a 4.4-acre hidden haven for wayward animals.

Founded in 1932, the Humane Society of Ventura County has been serving not just the animals of the Ojai Valley, but all of the animals in Ventura County. Traditionally, an animal shelter is thought of as solely a place for animals to seek refuge until a permanent home can be found.

While here at the Humane Society of Ventura County they provide this safe refuge, they also strive to remedy the greater problem of animal overpopulation, abuse and neglect.

A LIFE ALOFT & THE QUEST FO

STORY BY ROBIN GERBER COVER PHOTO BY RYAN SCHUDE

OR THE WILD BLUE YONDER

TRACEY CURTIS-TAYLOR REFUELING IN HUNGARY

are people who want to fly. I don’t mean get in a plane to go to Chicago. I mean, they choose to go aloft. They want to live their life as much as possible in the air, rather than keeping their feet on terra firma. They are dreamers and adventurers.

CURTIS-TAYLOR’S BOEING STEERMAN, “SPIRIT OF VICTORY.”

Wilbur and Orville Wright were the first to succeed, obsessed with the idea of life lived in the air. These flyers are our Icaruses, lofting themselves towards the heavens whatever the cost. They are aware, yet oblivious to the dangers of falling uncontrolled back to earth. Sometimes they disappear into vast remote expanses. Most are men, but there are women. Their desire to fly is a kind of madness, a heroic obsession to skirt danger for a rare perspective and unbridled exhilaration. They live in history, but they also live among us.

Tracey Curtis-Taylor, a recent transplant to Ojai from England, is a woman pilot. Speaking to her I get a sense of history come alive. Her obsession isn’t just flying, it is flying vintage planes, and beyond that, recreating the flights of famous women aviators in the past.

Tall, confident, beautiful, Tracey could be Amelia Earhart reincarnated, or any of dozens of aviatrixes lost to history. They would recognize her as one of their own. She lives high up Nordhoff ridge because, as she says, “These elevated views of mesmerizingly beautiful vistas and the searing thrill of 78

moving in three dimensions are the very essence of why I fly.

It is the bird’s eye view of the world as seen from an open cockpit.”

Tracey was a teenager in the 1970s living in the north of England when she was captivated by her first flight from Britain to Canada. She was entranced as she gazed down on the icecaps of Greenland and the Arctic tundra.

After landing, she spied a sign at the local airport offering introductory rides for $15. What would normally have been a short flight around the field covering the rudiments, became a glorious afternoon of aviating. “Unable to shake off his madkeen student,” says Tracey with a laugh, “the poor instructor was persuaded to include me on a charter flight to Vancouver Island and when we finally landed back three hours later, I was flushed with excitement and absolutely transfixed with joy. It was as if somebody had put a pearl in my hand.”

But flying is an expensive obsession. “I never thought I would fly,” Tracey remembers.

OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

THE PLANE IS POWERED BY A 300 HORSEPOWER LYCOMING 9-CYLINDER RADIAL ENGINE

“Growing up we had no money, there was no option to fly.”

There was a flourishing chapter of the Air Cadets in Tracey’s area, but they only allowed boys. The British military also shunned women as pilots. “We watched the movie, “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines” every year as a family at Christmas, but I never thought I could be like those men,” Tracey says. She completed her A levels at age 18 with the career advice to try getting a job as a hotel receptionist or to take secretarial training.

When Tracey’s twin emigrated to New Zealand, she followed.

She worked as a waitress to earn flying money, and soon had a private and commercial pilot’s license, and instructor certification. She also had her first experience with the grief and death that accompany a dangerous obsession. The day before she took her commercial flying test, she was first on the scene as a friend crashed and died at the airfield. He wouldn’t be the last friend who perished in flight.

CURTIS-TAYLOR WITH JACQUES HOLENDER, WHILE ENGINEERS JEFF THOMAS AND EWALD GRITSCH WORK ON THE PLANE.

Tracey joined the New Zealand Warbirds, an all-male group, mostly ex-air force, who flew old military aircraft. She started flying replicas of a single-seat Se5a biplane, the First World War fighter which was pitted against the Red Baron over the battlefields of Western Europe. Years later, back in England, she learned to fly formation and displays in a 1941 monoplane used by the U.S. Army Air Corps.

Tracey notes, “It was, of course, ironic given that I could never join the military myself.” These were old stick-and-rudder planes called ‘taildraggers” because the tail is down on the ground so the pilot can’t see over the nose. Tracey says, “To me this was real flying and very few people have done it.”

OQ / WINTER 2024-25

79

As Tracey learned more about flying vintage planes, her interest grew in early female pioneers of the air. She became determined to spotlight and celebrate their unique but under-rated contribution to aviation. “Even today,” Tracey notes, “just five percent of commercial pilots are women.”

Tracey had harbored dreams of flying in Africa after seeing the scene in the movie “Out of Africa” where Robert Redford flies Meryl Streep across the spectacular African landscape. “That’s what I wanted my life to be,” Tracey says, “Romance, beauty, adventure in that great setting.”

She decided to fly her Boeing Stearman biplane from Cape Town to England in 2013 following in the slipstream of Lady Heath, an Irish aviator who was the first person to fly solo on that route in 1928. Tracey had been given a book about Lady Heath, who was also an Olympian and engineer and had won the King’s cup against all-male military pilots. Tracey says, “When I read her story, I knew I had to do the same flight as Heath’s.”

and pure beauty of this valley encapsulates all I have been about these many years. Every time I walk out onto my terrace overlooking the valley, I feel as if I could fly straight over the edge.”

She laughs. “Perhaps my next reincarnation will be as a turkey vulture.”

Tracey believes that flying the expeditions, and all they entailed, enabled her to cut loose from everything that had gone before, to “get above” her own life.

She says, “I got distance and perspective and the ‘overview’ in time and space which I now realize is one of the most valuable things to achieve in life.”

Tracey planned for four years. She made an intense effort to raise the money for a support aircraft and film crew to make a documentary film.

And then she flew.

With a mixture of amazement and intensity Tracey says, “I was transfixed by the beauty of the African landscape, flying over the Sahara at 200 feet. No one gets to do this, and yet I had done it, just as Lady Heath had.”

THE STEERMAN BEING REASSEMBLED AT VAN NUYS AIRPORT.

In 2015, the BBC screened the documentary “The Aviatrix: The Lady Who Flew Africa,” about Tracey’s flight.

The next year, Tracey flew England to Australia following Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo to Australia in 1930 in a flimsy Gypsy Moth. “I did not attempt to duplicate Amelia Earhart’s ill-fated world flight in 1937,” Tracey says, “but Amelia was a significant part of the story. Apart from her many flying achievements, she was friends with both Lady Heath and Amy Johnson and invited them to America.”

Tracey has secured three years of sponsorship in the U.S. and is creating a school outreach program focused on encouraging more young women into aviation. She says, “With a global shortage of pilots and engineers, the opportunities for women have never been greater.”

Tracey lives in Ojai now because, as she says, “the landscape 80

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OQ | HI K I NG M AP 1

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RIVER PRESERVE 0-7mi VARIES | Elev. Gain: ≤ 520 ft Wills-Rice Loop is the longest trail.

PRATT TRAIL 8.8mi STRENUOUS | Elev. Gain: 3300 ft | Goes to Nordhoff Peak.

GRIDLEY TRAIL 6-12mi MODERATE | 3 mi to Gridley Springs (Elev. Gain: 1200 ft) 6 mi to Nordhoff Peak.

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SULPHUR MTN. 22mi MODERATE | Elev. Gain: 2300 ft | Sulphur Mountain Road.

LOS AN Story by JERRY CAMARILLO DUNN, JR.

IN

TWO GREA

People from Los Angeles have discovered Ojai — place to park, an open table for coff

Well, turnabout is fair play, so why n It’s easy to find great restaurants, keep your

eyes peeled for celebrities, and get photos of

“only in L.A.” sights like roller-skating electric guitar players at Venice Beach. But to

understand where Los Angeles really came from takes a bit of exploring. Partly this

is because L.A. has the unhappy habit of

erasing its past — paving paradise to put up

a parking lot — and this path of destruction leaves few traces in the dust.

What does often survive, though, is notable

houses. The city’s oldest residence, the Avila Adobe, still stands downtown on Olvera

Street where Californio rancher Francisco

Avila built it in 1818. He fashioned adobe walls three feet thick and sealed the roof

NGELES

N

Photographs by GRAHAM DUNN

AT HOUSES

— as you’ve probably noticed when searching for a fee, or a familiar face on weekends.

not head to Los Angeles for a change? with horsehair and black goo from the La Brea Tar Pits. His home became a social

center in the early days of El Pueblo de la

Reina de Los Angeles, and as a survivor re-

minds us that today’s multicultural city was once solely Hispanic.

Two other remarkable houses also tell a

story of Los Angeles. One is the home of a flamboyant writer and regional booster of the late 1800s who drew dreamers to

Southern California. Another is the mansion of the lucky man who drilled L.A.’s first oil well, struck it rich, and lived the California Dream.

Let’s take a ride to Los Angeles.

THE LUMM

A writer, editor, and activist for historic p Charles Lummis arrived i He had walked 3,500 miles from Ohio — in his street shoes. On his tramp through new and strange lands, the prejudices of his New England upbringing and Harvard education dropped away, and he fell in love with the beauty and cultural diversity of the Southwest.

Along the way he wrote a weekly travelogue for the Los Angeles Times.

Lummis’s articles earned him a national reputation, and on arriving in Los Angeles he became the first city editor of the Times. A pioneer of personal branding, the flamboyant Lummis dressed in a sombrero with a rattlesnake hatband, buckskin leggings, a Navajo sash and an ammunition belt. His employer at the newspaper, Harrison Gray Otis, observed that Lummis’s garb “was not reassuring to the mind” and may have been “calculated to excite the curiosity of the police.”

After a mild stroke left him partially paralyzed, Lummis moved to New Mexico in 1888 to recuperate. Here he wrote articles about the Southwest, at least until his exposé of corruption in his adopted town, San Mateo, put his life in danger. Lummis wisely decamped to the Indian pueblo of Isleta — where an assassin followed and shot him, but not fatally. You can’t say Lummis wasn’t a colorful character.

early California.

For $650, Lummis bought three acres east of downtown in today’s Highland Park, and in 1897 started building a 4,000-squarefoot “castle” he named El Alisal, or “Place of the Sycamore,” after a towering tree nearby. The house served as his love letter to the Southwest: A round tower was inspired by Hopi designs, and he incorporated New Mexico-style corner fireplaces, huge log beams and Ameri-

By 1895 he was restored to health and living again in Los Angeles, where he fought for the preservation of California’s missions. He also edited the magazine Land of Sunshine (later Out West), which he elevated from a promotional rag for the chamber of commerce to a literary magazine that showcased regional writers and artists and celebrated the romance of 86

OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

MIS HOUSE

preservation and American Indian rights, in the Southland in 1884. can Indian rugs.

a piece of folk art.

He also wanted to celebrate the humble and handmade.

His sprawling, rustic house was clad in stones lugged from a creek in the nearby Arroyo Seco (now the Pasadena Freeway) by boys visiting from Isleta Pueblo.

It was also a social center, thanks to Lummis’ talent for networking. At his parties, luminaries who ranged from pioneering naturalist John Muir to movie idol Douglas Fairbanks might talk with a survivor of the Battle of Wounded Knee. They might see Will Rogers perform rope tricks, or drink up with artists and musicians.

Lummis called his parties “noises” and designed the house’s main room with a concrete floor so after a bash it could easily be cleaned with a water bucket.

Lummis handcrafted his own charming and quirky wooden doors, windows and cabinets. His home, utterly unlike the Victorian houses of the day, looked like

Also colorful were Lummis’s moral shortcomings. During his life he had three wives, two divorces, and some 50 extramarital affairs (scrupulously recorded in a notebook, coded in Greek). He battled alcoholism and alienated his children.

Yet Charles Lummis managed to write hundreds of influential articles and 16 books. He documented the vanishing cultures of the Southwest in photographs and rare recordings, headed the Los Angeles Public Library, and founded the Southwest Museum, whose fine American Indian artifacts included his own collections.

High spirited, eccentric, flawed, but deeply sympathetic in intent, Charles Lummis had an enduring love for the Southland that still permeates his house.

He was a trailblazer in the residential history of Los Angeles.

OQ / WINTER 2024-25

87

DOHENY M

Having been a mule driver, drifter, and fa possess the résumé you’d expect for t The son of an Irish immigrant, Doheny grew up

met, and soon married.

searching fruitlessly for gold, and in 1891 ended

The couple moved

in a boarding house with an unhappy wife, an ill

of L.A.’s first gated

in Wisconsin, wandered New Mexico Territory

up in Los Angeles flat broke. He lived downtown young daughter who soon died, and overdue bills he couldn’t pay.

Then one day he happened to see a passing

wagon loaded with an oozing black material. The driver said it was brea, or tar, that came from an empty lot west of downtown and was used for fuel.

Intrigued, Doheny borrowed money to lease

three lots nearby and dug down 150 feet with

just a pick and shovel. Then he sharpened a tree

to Chester Place, one communities, near USC. They plunked down

$120,000 in cash for a 22-room mansion de-

signed by Sumner Hunt and Theodore Eisen

in a grab bag of styles:

French Châteauesque, California Mission,

Moorish, and simply over the top.

trunk, used it for a drill, and in another 50 feet

When House Beautiful

successful well and opened up a field that would

about the mansion,

struck oil. His discovery became the city’s first produce half the state’s petroleum.

Now prosperous, Doheny would soon soar into

the stratosphere of riches. His company in Mexico drilled a well that shot a gusher of oil 600 feet in the air when it came in and eventually yielded 57 million barrels, the most productive oil well

magazine ran a story

tourists began showing up on the lawn and

knocking on the door.

So Doheny quietly bought up the other 13

properties in Chester Place, assuring his family’s privacy.

in the world. It would make Doheny richer than

Using water brought by canal from the Los

$100 million.

that took 17 full-time gardeners to maintain.

John D. Rockefeller, with a fortune of more than

Along the way, in 1900, something sweet blossomed. The now-divorced Doheny regularly

telephoned New York to raise money for his en-

terprises, placing calls through a central operator named Estelle. Doheny found himself charmed by the sound of her voice on the phone. They 88

Angeles River, the Dohenys created vast gardens To entertain Los Angeles society with elegant

dinners and dances, they added the Pompeiian Room, which had Italian marble floors and an

iridescent glass dome made by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Great wealth, though, couldn’t shield Doheny OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

MANSION

ailed prospector, Edward L. Doheny didn’t the future richest man in America. from tragedy. He was

three cooks, a kitchen maid, a server, a parlor maid,

convicted) in the political

woman, two housemaids, three chauffeurs, and several

implicated (although never bribery scandal called Tea-

pot Dome, badly damaging

two second maids, a laundress, a seamstress, a cleaning secretaries.

his reputation. His son

Always generous, she often helped her staff with their

murder-suicide. In 1935

public good: libraries, schools, a state beach, a re-

Ned died in a notorious

Edward L. Doheny expired, a broken and reclusive invalid, at age 69.

Estelle continued living

financial troubles and also gave bountifully for the

nowned eye-care foundation. In a final act of charity,

Estelle Doheny bequeathed Chester Place to the city’s Catholic diocese, and today it is a campus of Mount St. Mary’s University.

at Chester Place until

You could say the California Dream came true for the

household staff included

their good fortune.

her passing in 1958. Her

Dohenys, and they were gracious enough to pass along

COMPASS POINTS

WHERE:

➞ DOHENY MANSION:

➞ LUMMIS HOUSE

200 East Avenue 43, Highland Park 323-226-1620 Open Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

LAParks.org/historic/lummi

Mount St. Mary’s University, 10 Chester Place 310-954-4000 MSMU.edu/about-the-mount-filming -and-rentals/doheny-mansion-tours

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K A N G A R O O RAT

STORY AND PHOTOS BY CHUCK GRAHAM

bounced along the edge of Soda Lake Road at a frenetic pace, but within the beam of my headlamp and plumes of dust wafting into a starry night, there were moments where I crept to within inches of the eco-engineers of the Carrizo Plain National Monument.

Moving slowly, I kept my impact tremors down to a minimum and was literally nose to nose with the most important species across the last of California’s semi-arid grasslands. Giant kangaroo rats (Dipodomys ingens) have a direct effect on a high percentage of the flora and fauna throughout the Carrizo Plain.

Since April 1987, they’ve been on the Endangered Species List.

Like so many other species, they’ve been subjected to acute habitat loss. The Carrizo Plain holds more endangered species than anywhere else in California, and the grasslands represent the last, best grassland bastion in the state for this keystone species.

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SODA LAKE, CARRIZO PLAIN

The Giant Kangaroo Rat’s Home “The population of giant kangaroo rats is critical to the Carrizo Plain for a number of reasons,” said Craig Fiehler, environmental scientist for California Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). “Primarily they are ecosystem engineers. They remove vegetation, especially non-native forbs and grasses, allowing native forbs and grasses to escape competition and germinate. The giant kangaroo rats also create an abundance of underground habitat for other species from invertebrates to snakes to antelope ground squirrels. These burrows provide refugia for these species which is critical in a harsh environment like the Carrizo.”

LONG SPOOR I’d be surprised if anyone drove slower than me out on the Carrizo Plain. Often, I’m putting along in my van at five to 10 mph. With a great, mobile vantage point, I stop, scan, and slowly drive some more. It’s a great way to experience all the wildlife concealed among the saltbush, green ephedra and grasses. With giant kangaroo rats, they are most active the first couple hours after dark. California has experienced two wet winters in a row.

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TULE FOG - CARRIZO PLAIN OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

RAINBOW, CARRIZO PLAIN

CARRIZO PLAIN, CALIENTE FOOTHILLS

TULE FOG, CARRIZO PLAIN

CARRIZO PLAIN OQ / WINTER 2024-25

95

RED TAILED HAWK, SODA LAKE ROAD, CARRIZO PLAIN

The winter of 2022-23 was an El Niño winter. The winter of 2023-24 wasn’t as wet, but still significant. Those consistent rains induced a profusion of grassland flora enhancing giant kangaroo rat populations. On some night drives over the last two years, I was counting 30-plus giant kangaroo rats on the edge of Soda Lake Road alone, between the KCL Campground south to Pipeline Road.

“After two wet years, the productivity of the plants has been correspondingly well above average,” continued Fiehler, who has managed the North Carrizo Ecological Reserve for 12 years.

“The annual non-native grasses such as bromes and non-native forbs such as filaree are heavily utilized by giant kangaroo rats. This surplus of food has allowed the GKR numbers to increase dramatically over the past year particularly. This is evident even during the day when you drive through the monument and see the mini ‘crop circles.’”

These are the areas around the giant kangaroo rat precincts that are clipped of vegetation. These areas stand out particularly well this year because the surrounding grass height is still relatively tall. Giant kangaroo rats are a boom-and-bust species whose

THIS PAGE: A GIANT KANGAROO RAT TAKES A NIGHTTIME BATH 96

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A FERRUGINOUS HAWK ON THE HUNT

numbers fluctuate greatly from year-to-year. During the last drought, the GKR population numbers dwindled to almost zero in the core areas of the Carrizo Plain. Now, in 2024, those number have rebounded and then some.

KEYSTONE PHYSIOLOGY Being a keystone species of an entire ecosystem comes with many responsibilities. For giant kangaroo rats, they are prey items for all the predators across the grasslands. Kit foxes, American badgers, long-tailed weasels, western Pacific rattlesnakes, barn owls, coyotes, red-tailed hawks and ferruginous hawks all rely on giant kangaroo rats for their survival. So, over time, they’ve developed several physical characteristics while sharing the same habitat with an array of predators.

Giant kangaroo rats weigh about 4.5 ounces, and despite their small stature they have strong hind legs, enabling them to leap up to nine feet to avoid predators.

With their long narrow feet, they jump like kangaroos. They also look like rats with their long tails that enhance maneuverability through thick brush. Their tails also act like rudders, allowing them to change direction in mid-air while leaping away from predators. Their tails are actually longer than their heads and bodies combined. Despite all these similarities between kanga-

roos and rats, they are related to neither.

“The Carrizo is one of the best areas for contiguous giant kangaroo habitat,” said Fiehler. “The other locations would be western Kern County and Panoche Valley. Both of those locations have good habitat and high numbers of GKR at times. These areas of core GKR habitat roughly coincide with the core areas of San Joaquin kit fox habitat.”

And although they only live on average two to seven years, giant kangaroo rats have adapted well on the semi-arid grasses across the Carrizo Plain. The biggest advantage is they can go their entire lives without drinking a drop of water. They get all the moisture they need from their food sources, mainly seed caches and insects. In fact, drinking water can be fatal for them because it flushes out bodily liquids and vitamins, nutrients required for their survival.

ABOVE: THE RATS HAVE LONG TAILS, WHICH PREDATORS DO NOT SEEM TO LIKE OQ / WINTER 2024-25

97

Mostly nocturnal, they have excellent hearing and can even detect the silent sound of an owl approaching inflight.

Giant kangaroo rats have large, almond-shaped eyes that give them incredible eyesight at night. However, they can be seen before sunrise, hopping from one burrow to the next while foraging within their precincts. After they fill their cheek pouches, they dive into their burrows to cache seedlings for long, cold winters on the grasslands.

They are also excellent burrowers, and because they repro-

duce quickly several times a year their burrows ensure their survival.

However, much of the wildlife that preys upon giant kangaroo rats also depends on those burrows for their own homes, or for refuge from other predators and for escaping the midday sun on the Carrizo Plain. Kit foxes, badgers, antelope ground squirrels and burrowing owls make abandoned burrows their own. Bluntnosed leopard lizards, and other reptiles use giant kangaroo rats burrows to escape raptors, and hide from the heat of the day.

GIANT KANGAROO RAT FORAGING ALONG SODA LAKE ROAD 98

There are several ways biologists monitor giant kangaroo rat populations. Much of it occurs on the North Carrizo Ecological Reserve, just north of the Carrizo Plain National Monument.

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ABOVE: PORTRAIT OF AN ECO-SYSTEM BUILDER

RAT DIVES INTO ITS BURROW

A RAT WARMS ITSELF ON THE STILL-WARM SODA LAKE ROAD OQ / WINTER 2024-25

99

KIT FOT DAD CARRIES A DOUBLE-HAUL OF GIANT KANGAROO RATS TO ITS HUNGRY BROOD OF SIX PUPS

The study plots on the reserve have gone on for almost 20 years.

“That’s been the most accurate GKR monitoring that occurs on the monument,” said Fiehler. “The researchers use mark/ recapture techniques on populations on each plot.”

Marking and recapturing is a method commonly used in ecology to estimate the size of a population of a specific species. Where it’s impossible to count every individual, portions of a population are captured, marked, and released. Out on the National Monument, live trapping, mapping precincts, and satellite imagery to identify precincts are also used to track giant kangaroo rat populations.

“Personally, I have begun mapping precincts on the North Carrizo Ecological Reserve,” said Fiehler, “because GKR are beginning to colonize/recolonize the area following the cessation of tilling around 2010.”

Life on the Grasslands

At 4 a.m. I was situated behind a lichen-covered boulder, about 75 feet away from a busy kit fox den. There were six pups within their burrow near the KCL Campground.

At first light, the kit fox dad wasn’t the only species above ground. Several giant kangaroo rats were bounding within 10 feet of me. For two weeks I sat near the den, and giant kangaroo rats hopped near the kit fox den seemingly without fear, just foraging for seeds for the winter ahead.

Still, they are a favorite prey item of kit foxes, and this sleek male kit fox was a prolific hunter. Each time he left the den he was successful in bringing prey back to his hungry pups. It was mostly giant kangaroo rats, but in between he’d return with antelope ground squirrels.

On several occasions, the adult kit fox returned with two giant kangaroo rats at once. He’d take them to his pups, the dominant ones getting first dibs on the fresh giant kangaroo rats. And still, there were more than enough of this keystone species for this family of kit foxes, but also the entire Carrizo Plain.

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The CREW’s Green Valley Project Date: Sunday Times: 9 a.m. to 12 noon.

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109

OQ | NO C TU RN A L S U BMI S S I ONS

TEA T

A One-Woman Play by Sami Zahringer I always said to the children “Shoot me before you put me in an old folks’ home!

Hahaha.” But I’m really only here for the skilled nursing facility bit until I get over my operation.

The real old folks’ section is the next corridor over in “Bedpan Alley” as they call it. Bit vulgar, in my opinion, but I smiled politely. I told myself, I said “Edie, think of it as a bit like camp. An adventure! It’ll fly by! You’ll be home in no time.”

And I’ve got my phone, of course. World at my fingertips! I’m on all the socials. Wouldn’t expect that of a 82-year-old woman, would you! If you go by the ads I receive on social media, though, I am a 37-year old depressed mother of 4 with clogged drains who is working on improving her gut biome, adaptogen-curious, and suffers from calloused heels. Logarithms apparently. My son Richard has explained it. He’s very clever.

I’m in here temporarily because I’ve had complications following my surgery. But I’ll be home in a few weeks just as soon as I’m tickety-boo again. It depends on the results, of course. They removed an awful lot, they said. But there is no reason to suppose everything won’t be just fine. I can’t wait to be home again among my own things.

(Pours from teapot into matching fern-decorated teacup) Rachel did bring some of my things over though, like my tea set, and my dresser and photographs 110

and a lot of clothes. I told her, I said “That’s more than I will ever need for just a short stay!” It’s nice to have them though.

Rachel can be very thoughtful. We have our differences, of course — what mother and daughter don’t but she’s really such a lovely girl. If a bit unfocused.

I don’t want to push her. I don’t, whatever she might tell you. I’m not that sort of mother. I’m very proud of her in lots of ways. But I do worry about her.

She’s an artist. How’s she going to support herself doing that? And at 35, you’d think she would have started looking for a nice man. I do like some of her still lifes — she undoubtedly has a great eye. Less so the “paintings” where she covers herself in oil and writhes naked over old copies of the Wall Street Journal, then throws axes at the result. Well, of course, it’s hard to know what she’s saying with that and I have raised an eyebrow occasionally. I will admit that, but, well, I’ve never been one to criticize. She knows that deep down …

Rachel’s brother, now! My son, Richard! He’s at CU Boulder.

Incredibly clever. I never have to worry about him hahaha.He’s been reading Hannah Arendt at school, and says things to me on the phone like “Bureaucracy is special sort of violence,” and he means it too. He’s just launched an app to stop you accidentally dating your cousin.

“I told her, ‘That’s more than I’ll ever need for a short stay.’”

OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

(Pours some more

TIME WITH EDIE into teacup)

“Think of it as a bit like camp.

An adventure.”

But ANYWAY! I’ve got a lovely en-suite here and they’ve let me have my little dog stay with me! Isn’t that wonderful! I was surprised.

It’s usually only the long-term residents who can have their pets here but they made an exception for Molly. Who could resist her eh? Eh, Molly? Who could resist you?

Molly is special needs, you see. She’s two years sober next week but we have to be very careful still with her around (cover’s Molly’s ears and whispers) whisky.

When the charity WAG! found her she was in an awful state.

She was actually my friend Monica’s dog first. Monica was in (mouths quietly) a recovery program for alcohol. Lovely woman when she wasn’t beating middle-aged men with a rhino-whip and ordering them eat her edible fishnets off.

(Mouths theatrically) Sex Worker. Tragic life. But very intelligent. Eloquent, which you don’t always expect, do you? From that sort of woman. (You don’t say prostitute anymore apparently. She taught me that. It’s “sex worker” now.)

Well, you’re probably wondering how a woman like me would even know a woman like Monica! Funny story! I happened to meet her, completely randomly, outside the AA meeting hall one day as I was having a dizzy spell and leaning on the railing. We were having a nice chat (I didn’t know about the rhino-whip at this point) and then it started to rain. “Come in for a cup of coffee!” she said. Well, I didn’t really have any choice at that point. I was soaked!

After that, I used to go along with her to AA meetings just to keep her company. She was a bit of a lost soul and I felt it was the charitable thing to do. I like a tipple, of course, who doesn’t? Hahaha, but me? I can take or leave the stuff ! The meetings were very interesting though so I just kept on going. To support her, you know.

Well, Monica and I began to have tea in the afternoons. To keep her from drinking, you see. She was a hoot. She said when she was young she was known as the classiest prostitute on the ranch because she was the only one with her tattoos spelled right so she got all the guys who walked in wearing a tie — isn’t that funny? Monica was really funny! She didn’t laugh very much but she told me the most outrageous stories. Sometimes about people I know in the town. Men. Important men. One of them is in here now, just down the corridor. I won’t mention names. Former contractor. “Pillar of the community,” as they say. I know him and his wife, Pam, well — lovely woman, but you, know, plain.

But he’s pretty far gone in his mind these days. Angry. You hear him shouting terrible

OQ / WINTER 2024-25

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things at the nurses. Just an old sausage, sizzling and sputtering in his own grease now. Poor Pam.

got my Rachel and Richard.

I’ve also got Dean, my eldest, of course … But. Well. I haven’t seen Dean for four years. He always blamed me for Ronnie (the children’s father) leaving us for my best friend and her family. Apparently, I am an old soak with as much warmth in my face as a dowager duchess being asked to contribute to the Communist Party and that the only time there was any animation there was when I was full of gin and saying something spiteful. “You patrol the family psyche like a bossy traffic warden, trying to keep everybody in line when you’re the one with the big unspeakable problem!” he said.

“No wonder Dad left!”

Monica really opened my eyes to a lot of things and oh, she made me laugh! I mean, I know she was a sex worker, but she really was was lovely. Not what you’d expect at all.

She was a really good listener, most of all.

Didn’t judge people. Refreshing. Not a lot of people like that.

AA and WAG! paired Molly with Monica.

Molly gave her a new lease of life and they helped each other enormously! Monica’s daughter moved Monica away to Wisconsin last month and they couldn’t take Molly, so I thought to myself, “Edie, why not!

Monica might be gone but you and Molly can still grow old and doddery together hahaha!” Monica had been just about to introduce me to marijuana, too. Perhaps it’s just as well they took her away. I do miss her though. Ha.

Why am I telling you all this? Where’s my teapot gone?

(Unsteady teapot action. A little more sloshing when poured this time) (Quietly) Maybe I was like Dean says. I don’t know. I was just trying to keep some standards. I was on my own. Well, what can I do about it now? Monica used to say “Dean’s a grown man now, he can’t blame you for everything,” and I mean, she’s right, but … Ugh! I’m so sorry, I’m blubbering again hahaha. Honestly!

(Pours from teapot to teacup) Oh. Please excuse me! Blubbering away at my age, honestly! I don’t even even know why! I mean, I miss Monica but, you know, it’s not like we had anything in common. I think it’s just being so far from home. Unsettles me a bit. But not long now and I’ll be back in my own bed! Where’s my tea?

(Pours teapot. Hiccups. Peers into teapot) Between you and me, I have to say that some of the other residents are a bit (whispers) past it. In the day-room, this one man, Chuck, just stares at his Oreo cookie as if trying to decipher ancient runes. Former plumber. He’s probably seeing U-bends and flanges in there. He thinks he’s a spy but he couldn’t find a crow in a bowl of milk!

Sits there muttering things like “The red fox trots softly at midnight.” The other day, he grabbed me by the lemon-infused water station and said, “Go to Sam’s Place and ask for Mr. Ramirez. Tell him ‘The pigeon will be pecking at the feeder tomorrow.’ He will 112

(Takes long drink from teacup) I mean, I know Ronnie did have a difficult childhood. To say the least. Perhaps I could have been more patient with him.

know what to do.” Well, I reported him of course and they moved him. I didn’t expect they’d do that! Now he’s in another dayroom and, funny thing is, I miss him.

His family aren’t much. Rough sorts. I don’t like to judge but, you know — some people are just … well … Daughter is slovenly.

Mean eyes. Looks like a hen laying razors.

She gave him psychiatric gift vouchers for his birthday! What does that tell you, eh?

Her husband, ha! He’s just a walking marvel of insipidity. Always smiling at me and asking how I am today in too loud a voice.

No wonder Chuck’s gone mad. Glad I’ve

Family was rich but he was a troubled boy, by all accounts. Practically feral. His father had always wanted a boy but his mother (heiress, dotty/insane) had wanted an Airedale so he had largely been raised in an outdoor kennel learning about knots and reindeer-castration from the Finnish gardener and his fundamentalist Catholic wife who regarded Pope Pius VII as a Calvinist Bolshevik. This system was actually cantering along fairly well until one cold winter Ronnie grew gravely ill in his kennel, the

OQ / WINTER 2024 -25

hairs on his chest that this was all supposed to encourage still being about five years off. The family doctor thought it was exposure but his mother thought it was distemper.

“Maybe I was like Dean says. I don’t know. I was just trying to keep some standards.”

With neither parent willing to give any ground, treatment was withheld from both doctor and vet but

by Spring he had got better on his own anyway, leaving him with no more damage than a borderline malevolent distrust of all authority and a slight whistle in his left lung.

And some occasional bedwetting, a stethoscope phobia, and a clinically concerning amount of tiny, folded paper cranes in his kennel. Oh, and a fetish for flicking mashed potatoes off a barbed-wire crucifix onto naked women, something he carried into adulthood. (Shudders) Along with his money, thank God, because he could never make the work thing stick. Ugh. Honestly, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. Just feeling … something. Tired, that’s probably it. This place makes me tired.

(Pours more tea. Nothing. Peers into teapot.

“Damn.” Unsteadily reaches over to cupboard and pulls out bottle of whisky which she pours into the teapot.)

Sssh. Don’t tell anyone about the whisky, will you? I’m not really supposed to with the medication but the days are very long in here sometimes when Chuck isn’t shouting about having uncovered a viper’s nest of West Coast espionage! Hahaha. I wish I

hadn’t complained about him and got him moved.

I do miss Monica, though. Very much. Perhaps Rachel would introduce me to marijuana.

I mean, I’m her mother but it’s all legal now, isn’t it? And what have I got to lose at my age?

And Rachel actually said to me last week that marijuana might help me with the pain in a few months … I mean, if the tests don’t come back normal that is, but, as I say, there’s only a very slim chance of that.

Yes. Slim. I really don’t want to stay here forever.

Maybe I could find Monica online and we could get high together on FaceTime hahaha! What would Dean make of that! They all think they know me but I believe there’s still time to surprise people!

Molly, where’s Molly? Oh dear my glasses are steamy. Molly! Get out of that teapot! Molly that’s not for you! You can’t! Oh Molly! Ugh. Thank God I’m going home soon.

— Dedicated to Dame Maggie Smith — OQ / WINTER 2024-25

113

E IGHT A CRES D OWNTOWN WITH V IEWS

Nestled in Stewart Canyon between North Signal Street and Foothill Road, this hidden 8.3 acre wonderland is an ideal canvas for your dream project. With breathtaking views of the valley, downtown, and mountains to the south, it offers ample space for a main residence, guest house, studio, pool, pool house, barn and stables. Enjoy privacy, the Pink Moment and easy access to Shelf Road and Pratt Trail. The property boasts mature oaks, native shrubs, a stream, and vibrant spring flowers. Explore in person to fully appreciate the grandeur of this very special opportunity.

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Over 25 years of experience matching people and property in the Ojai Valley

© 2024 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties (BHHSCP) is a member of the franchise system of BHH Affiliates LLC. BHHS and the BHHS symbol are registered service marks of Columbia Insurance Company, a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate. BHH Affiliates LLC and BHHSCP do not guarantee accuracy of all data including measurements, conditions, and features of property. Information is obtained from various sources and will not be verified by broker or MLS. Buyer is advised to independently verify the accuracy of that information.

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www.pattywaltcher.com pattywaltcher@mac.com @pattywaltcherrealestate (805) 340-3774 DRE# 01176473

© 2024 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties (BHHSCP) is a member of the franchise system of BHH Affiliates LLC. BHHS and the BHHS symbol are registered service marks of Columbia Insurance Company, a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate. BHH Affiliates LLC and BHHSCP do not guarantee accuracy of all data including measurements, conditions, and features of property. Information is obtained from various sources and will not be verified by broker or MLS. Buyer is advised to independently verify the accuracy of that information.

Over 25 years of experience matching people and property in the Ojai Valley

PINK MOMENT ESTATE

A modern, Mediterranean luxury villa and vineyard estate providing the ultimate in architecture, design, setting, views, and location. The brand new 5100 sqft, 4br/5ba, home is inspired by historic Ojai Spanish Colonial, playful Balearic Islands villas, and modernism.

Includes marvelous landscaping, pool and spa, and a 100% organic vineyard. More information and photos available inside the magazine.

2259McNellRoadOjai.com Price Upon Request We will help you w w w. patty waltc h er.com pa tt y waltc h er@mac .com discover the home helpttyou discover the home y waltc h errealestate that brings peaceI will @pa that brings peace to3your and heart (805) 40-37mind 74 to your mind 17647 3 and heart ( 8 0 5 ) 3 4 0 -3 7 7DRE 4 ~# 01pa ttywa ltc her. c om © 2024 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties (BHHSCP) is a member of the franchise system of BHH Affiliates LLC. BHHS and the BHHS symbol are registered service marks of Columbia Insurance Company, a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate. BHH Affiliates LLC and BHHSCP do not guarantee accuracy of all data including measurements, conditions, and features of property. Information is obtained from various sources and will not be verified by broker or MLS. Buyer is advised to independently verify the accuracy of that information.