Edenification
1. A BIT OF HOUSEKEEPING
Hi there. This is Landline. Maybe it wasn’t clear, but yesterday's email — "Joanne Kyger, 1934-2017" —was the initial salvo of this new email bulletin I’ve started, Landline, using this Tinyletter thing.
My name is Jay Babcock. I am the former editor and co-founder of Arthur Magazine. If you were subscribed to the old Arthur Magazine email bulletin, you have been added to this list, as Landline is essentially a continuation of that bulletin and I thought anyone who liked that stuff had a good chance of finding this stuff of interest as well.
What is this stuff? Ideas and nudges, hopefully forming a small bailiwick outside the unceasing current of cruddiness — irregular epistles intended for friends, colleagues, Arthur heads, pastoral people, plant people, rural country people, dharma people, herbalists, gardeners, wild people and other curious sweetfolk.
I hope Landline will be of use to you.
2. SOMEBODY'S TAKING CARE OF IT
I settled in the dirt road rural/wilderness outskirts of Joshua Tree in 2010 after living in suburbs and very big cities all of my life. We didn't realize it at first, but Stephanie and I live inside a wildlife corridor (Kim Stanley Robinson in his latest novel calls them "habitat corridors," which I think is an even better term), a checkerboard of private residential properties and BLM parcels midway between a National Park and a giant Marine base.
It's a good place to be, and I rarely leave. We spend a lot of time trying to steward the land we own as best we can, with the interest of the corridor's inhabitants (both flora and fauna) in mind. Propagating, gardening, de-fencing, re-wilding, propagandizing.
It's good to have land to live on, to work in. As the Great Barrier Reef is killed; as the Sixth Great Extinction Event rolls ever on; as social justice through access to the basic means of subsistence disappears across the planet; despair is reasonable, understandable. I'm there too. But there's more than a few ways to live with that. At a psychological/spiritual/cognitive level, there's Buddhist practice. (Perhaps partying and role-playing and artmaking and bookwriting will help. I dunno. But, maybe try also to find method to achieve greater equanimity.) At a material level, when faced with living inside a civilization that kills life, why not spend your time increasing life, surrounding yourself with it, growing it? Call it (why not?) Edenification.
You don't have to own land out in the country to do this. You don't have to own land, period, to do this. Consider the example of one of my favorite refuge-spaces in Los Angeles—Amir's Garden—which I wrote about in the old LAWeekly years ago (July, 2004). Here it is:
Changing of the Gardener
In the geographical green heart of Los Angeles’ concrete-and-plastic sprawl—deep, deep back in Griffith Park, past the Griffith J. Griffith statue and the pony-ride stable and the old L.A. Zoo and the even older merry-go-round, in the hills above the Boys’ Camp and the double-deck golf-ball driving range—lies a five-acre hidden garden.
Hidden, but not secret. Amir’s Garden exists as two typewritten words and a black triangle on one of the three official photocopied maps of the park available from the visitor center. But there are no signs in the park pointing the way. If you want to find Amir’s—like all utopian spaces, a destination without an address—it’s best to know someone who knows how to get there.
It’s been this way since 1971, when the then-39-year-old Iranian immigrant Amir Dialameh started clearing debris from a serious fire on a hilltop along the park’s Mineral Wells trail. Over the next three decades, Dialameh labored, often alone, often seven days a week, always as an unpaid volunteer, to create an Edenic wonderland: part nature preserve, part sanctuary, part Zen center, part rest stop for hikers and horseback riders. Land was terraced; ground cover, flowers, eucalyptus, magnolia and a grove of palm trees were planted; a drinking fountain, a flagpole, and whimsically painted benches and picnic tables were installed. Eventually sanctioned by park officials, Amir’s Garden became a place where you could contemplate the cars on the 5-134 interchange, or the territory-marking habits of the local lizards, or the red-tailed hawks riding the airstreams above. Here, if you spent a moment, your senses would re-assert themselves. Your smog-caked nostrils could smell again. Your car alarm–damaged ears could hear again: the buzz of hummingbirds, the thwack! of golf balls on the driving range below, the bizarre cries of the peacocks from the zoo across the valley.
And, if you visited at the right time of the day, you might have encountered Amir himself, repairing a broken stair, or watering the ice plant, or reading a newspaper, with a blue jay sitting on his toe: Los Angeles’ own, benevolent Old Man of the Mountain. Soft-spoken and at ease, always interested in chatting with those who’d found their way to his garden, Amir would patiently explain why he did it: It needed to be done. The freedoms we Americans enjoy come through the volunteerism of those before us. With the patriotic zeal typical of immigrants, Amir had embraced America, and just wanted to do his part. “In the land of the free, plant a tree” was his slogan.
Amir Dialameh died last autumn from what were announced as natural causes. He was 71. Recently, wondering what had become of Amir’s Garden without Amir, I called Rob Zabrecky—musician, stage magician and the former housemate who first initiated me into the Garden’s delights—and we arranged, with Rob’s wife, Tommi, to foot it up to the park one afternoon and see firsthand how Amir’s Garden grows.
“You always get a sense here that there are trapdoors and hidden assistants, that there might be other rooms,” Rob says as we wander down the garden’s many paths, peering into the vined, shady alcoves and across the flower gardens full of late-blooming jade, aloe vera, oleander, ice plant, geranium and euryopis. The place looks like it’s being kept up. The American flag may not be flying, but sprinklers are running, most of the benches work, the paths are clear of weeds and overgrowth, the trash cans empty.
“Someone’s been looking after Amir,” says Rob, and he’s right. But who? Could the perennially understaffed park rangers be sending someone up here? A testimonial from a Boys’ Camp counselor named Scorpion is posted on the “Amir’s Garden—Since 1971” sign at the garden’s entrance — the only notice regarding Amir’s passing. Perhaps, I wonder daydreamily, the garden tends itself . . .
Drifting down the garden’s easternmost path, we find our answer. Two women are seated, weeding. Kris Sabo is the younger woman, wearing sunglasses, a hat, and a utility belt loaded with pickax, pepper spray and taser stun gun. She is Amir’s Garden’s new gardener.
“I first came up here at the end of ’95,” says Sabo, standing up to speak, hands on her hips, every bit the 38-year-old alpha-female den mother. I met Amir and said, ‘Oh, this is just bitchin'—let me at it.’”
Lenore Wruck, a couple of decades Sabo’s senior, says, “I was a Sierra Club hike leader, and we used to lead hikes up here. That’s how I met Amir.”
“He and Lenore were working right here on this hillside when I first met them,” Sabo says. “They were hauling out the remains of a fire started by a barbecue.” She stares angrily. “If you go look at the big trees right down there”—she gestures—“they’ve got scars all over ’em.”
Then she softens. “I’ve been well-trained—I know the drill,” she says, chuckling as if she can hear Amir’s instructions. “How to trim, which plants can live around here, when to water . . . I used to live nearby, so I’d run up here the minute I’d get out of work, five days a week. I spent a summer up here putting in stairs with Amir.
“The last couple of years, he did not feel well. Things didn’t get taken care of. There are trails that need to be built, stairs that need repairs from all the soil erosion. But it’s getting put back together. It’s hard work, and I love it, but we certainly could use some regular volunteers . . .”
Quietly, Wruck says, “Kris can’t do this alone, forever.” Occasionally, volunteers do contact Sabo (ksabo@WildWildWest.org) and help out.
“Right now,” Sabo says, “I’m up here for eight or nine hours, two to three days a week. Sundays I try to be here all day.”
That’s a huge commitment, I say.
“Well,” Sabo says, a catch in her voice, “it’s all I can do for Amir now, isn’t it?”
Viva Amir Dialameh and Kris Sabo,
Jay
Joshua Tree, California