No Place Like Home

[Tin Can]

Saw one butterfly at my deck

No wind

Frogs and much birdsong

Almost Heaven

[Michael R]

I agree.

[Drew Wiley]

Well, we have some seasonal uptick butterfly activity here on the coast too. But I consider the mountains my real home, and there a couple weeks ago, down in the canyons at least, both the wildflower and butterfly presence was spectacular. Lots of frog, bird, and cricket music too, along with flowing water sounds, and best of all, no boomboxes within many miles. More eagles than people in the area - both golden and bald eagles.

[Duolab123]

We watched a Red-tailed hawk grab a juvenile squirrel the other day. Nature is awesome, view from our sunny room.

[Duolab123]

We watched a Red-tailed hawk grab a juvenile squirrel the other day. Nature is awesome, view from our sunny room.

[John Layton]

We are so very lucky for our 25 acres of mostly mixed hardwood and hemlock forest with a couple of smaller open fields, surrounded by other properties much larger than ours, also of mixed forests which all connect together, providing great corridors for all sorts of wildlife. Much of this land is protected with conservation measures and so will not be developed further...although as a landowner I do have a right to "improve" our property in any number of ways, like selective cutting and thinning, trail building, limited agricultural use such as tapping maple trees for syrup production, etc.

But our conservation plan is actually very simple...to simply leave our land alone, tread lightly within it, and feel so incredibly thankful for the inspiration and solace it brings to us. Nature left to itself is truly a miracle. How sad that nature left to itself is so very scarce these days!

[Tin Can]

Father gave away 80 acres

so we could not have it

40 were old virgin forest

[Drew Wiley]

My grandfather gave up 22 acres in southern Cal because he couldn't afford to pay the taxes on it, and was dying of TB. That was in 1907. It was worthless land anyway. He had bought it sight unseen, in one of those typical orange grove investment scams. But nothing but tumbleweed would grown on it. Something was terribly wrong with the soil, and it happened to be a substance which rhymes with "soil". That was discovered in 1917; and those 22 acres became part of the US Naval Reserves, in other words, some of the most valuable land on the continent. But I think I enjoyed a better kind of wealth just growing up roaming the hills on the other side of the State, with all their beauty. Too much money seems to ruin the quality of life.

[Vaughn]

But did your grandfather own the mineral (oil) rights under his land?

My grandfather was a Bakersfield oil man around the same time...closer to 1910. He married into the Canfield family (a niece) who had their hand in the oil business in SoCal since day one. My grandfather had a nice a craftsman home built...a now historic Bakersfield house. But not good enough to keep my grandmother in Bakersfield!! She moved with the kids to Santa Monica in 1929. The oil lease (around Taft) my dad inherited paid just enough to keep my grandmother in a home. At one point the Navy was drilling sideways into our lease and a kid climbed one of our oil derricks and fell...and there was a suit. So my dad sold the lease when my grandmother died -- and just before the oil crisis back in the early 70s. So it goes.

I would occasionally go with my dad on his monthly drive to Taft (from LA) in the early 60s -- we'd checked out the oil derricks -- big wooden structures with a huge beam going up and down. The countryside as dead as a doornail, ecologically -- oil sludge running down otherwise dry creek beds and such. The oil museum in Taft had, and might still have, one of our old derricks with my grandfathers name on it.

Sure am glad Taft was not home!

[Drew Wiley]

California was not like Wyoming. You own the land, you own what's under it. But I'm sure once oil was discovered there, there would have been no limits trying steal the property from someone, legally or otherwise. But the Feds took control that particular portion fast enough. Still, anyone with a previous deed would have become extremely wealthy.

I didn't pass through Taft this past month. That oil derrick is still beside the Taft museum. Needed to save gas money this round, so didn't bother to visit the Carrizo Plain etc this year. There were more spectacular blooms on the other side of the Valley anyway, though I don't like giving location details over the web. I enjoyed my solitude, and then headed north into the gold country for some of its winding back roads and interesting people. Too bad the Sonora area has become such a suburbanized sprawl; but there are other areas where I didn't encounter another car on the road for hours. Great lighting and clouds too.

Also got approached for a paid shoot, which I did on the spot for someone with quite an interesting personal mining history. Hopefully that will pay for my mini-vacation gas and film bill, plus a new box of printing paper. But I would have gone regardless. I get awfully homesick for the hills, and Spring is a wonderful time to visit, now that I've sold my own property in the mountains, fortuitously just before the severe fires broke out which now make property insurance insanely expensive, if obtainable at all. People like me, especially now that I'm retired, can sit down with other country types and exchange long interesting stories unintelligible to the typical city dweller. There's more to life than the stock market and cell phones.

Quite a bit of public land has now been preserved to the south and west of Taft, some as large public open spaces, and even more as an off-limits condor preserve. All that area can be lovely in Spring, but once the heat arrives and the smog builds up, not so appealing. Bakersfield still has the dirtiest air in the entire country. But Kern County also contains some of the most pristine wilderness in the lower 48 for those who can reach it. I think my time of deep backcountry treks is now over. I could still do it at 70, but now sense a sea change in my aching joints. I'm back to easier hiking destinations after five decades of the fun stuff, but am not ready to leave behind large format gear yet.