Black tailed deer in the forest near Drake’s Estero, Point Reyes. Robin L. Chandler, 2025.
“What can turn us from this deserted future, back into the sphere of our being, the great dance that joins us to our home, to each other and to other creatures, to the dead and the unborn? I think it is love. I am perforce aware how badly and embarrassingly that word now lies on the page – for we have learned at once to overuse it, abuse it, and hold it in suspicion. But I do not mean any kind of abstract love, which is probably a contradiction in terms, but particular love for particular things, places, creatures, and people, requiring stands and acts, showing its successes or failures in practical or tangible effects. And it implies a responsibility just as particular, not grim or merely dutiful, but rising out of generosity…”
Limantour Estero, Point Reyes. Robin L. Chandler, 2025
“I think of two landscapes – one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see – not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology, the record of its climate and evolution. If you walk up, say, a dry arroyo in the Sonoran Desert you will feel a mounding and rolling of sand and silt beneath your foot that is distinctive. You will anticipate the crumbling of sedimentary earth in the arroyo bank as your hand reaches out and in the tangible evidence you will sense a history of water in the region. Perhaps a black-throated sparrow lands in a paloverde bush – the resiliency of the twig under the bird, that precise shade of yellowish green against the milk-blue sky, the fluttering whir of the arriving sparrow, are what I mean by “the landscape.” Draw on the smell of creosote bush, or clack stones together in the dry air. Feel how light is the desiccated dropping of the kangaroo rat. Study an animal track obscured by the wind. These are the elements of the land and what makes the landscape comprehensible are the relationships between them. One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it – like that between the sparrow and the twig. The difference between the relationships and the elements is the same as that between history and a catalog of events.
The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape. Relationships in the exterior landscape include those that are named and discernable, such as the nitrogen cycle, or a vertical sequence of Ordovician limestone, and others that are uncodified or ineffable, such as winter light falling on a particular kind of granite, or the effect of humidity on the frequency of a blackpoll warbler’s burst of song. That these relationships have purpose and order, however inscrutable they may seem to us, is a tenet of evolution. Similarly, the speculations, intuitions, and formal ideas we refer to as “mind” are a set of relationships in the interior landscape with purpose and order; some of these are obvious, many impenetrably subtle. The shape and character of these relationships in a person’s thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature – the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city, where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf, are known. These thoughts are arranged, further, according to the thread of one’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual development. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of the exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.”
Excerpt from Barry Lopez’s essay “Landscape and Narrative” published in the ebook Vintage Lopez (p.3 -4)
Walking along Inverness Ridge among the new growth of bishop pines after the Vision Fire (1995); in the distance are douglas firs burned in the Woodward Fire (2020). Robin L. Chandler, 2025.
We were afraid to go back
afraid to listen to the stories
ash and bone might tell
We wanted to believe our lives were immutable
untouchable by nature, fate or disaster
At twilight we skirted the base of the first burned hill
reclaimed her scorched shoulder
her ruined slope
The ground beneath our feet released puffs of smoke
“When Sir Francis Drake spent a month in 1579 repairing his ship in the bay that now bears his name, the hills and ridges to the east would have been mostly open grassland or coastal scrub because of the Miwok’s liberal use of fire as a key tool of their ecological management and because of grazing by herds of elk, which benefited from the anthropogenic burning. The same was true when Sebastian Ceremeno, a Portuguese navigator and explorer sailing on the Manilla galleon route, was shipwrecked in Drakes Bay in 1595. Richard Henry Dana, visiting San Francisco Bay in 1840 described the herds of elk he could see on the open headlands.” (p.84)
“The [Mt.] Vision Fire started on October 3, 1995, and burned for about a week in an area mostly designated as park wilderness, eventually burning almost twelve thousand acres. Some local boys apparently thought they had drowned their campfire, but they hadn’t. It’s a story that reminds me of Henry David Thoreau; on a camping trip with a friend in April 1844, their campfire got out of control and almost burned down their hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. Many years later, that experience led Thoreau to investigate the fire ecology of his local ecosystem. He recognized the influence of past Native American burning on the landscape and became essentially the first published fire ecologist through his writing on the subject. The Vision Fire burned an area partly dominated by bishop pine, Pinus muricata. Bishop pine became so familiar with fire that it evolved a relationship that could be called “friends with fire.” (p.86-87)
“With [Charles] Olson his identity with the place, with Gloucester, give his major work, The Maximus Letters, a deep emotional center. The only other American writer who gives me the same sense of responding to a place, in both an historical and philosophic sense is Thoreau in his first book, A Week On the Concord And Merrimack Rivers.”
“Olson, in one of the Letters’ most persistent themes, uses Gloucester as a poetic expression of the realities of history…..the sense of place in the letters is – in a final sense – so compelling because what Olsen is trying to hold on to is the sense of place in time, as well as the sense of the immediate place of Gloucester.”
“The Letters become less of the poet’s expression and more the historian’s as they go on, even though the history is handled as poetic material. In any of the single Letters the history is almost without meaning – odd facts, lists of provisions, inserted paragraphs on the fishing industry – but with the growth of the poem as a whole it is clear that something else is involved.”
“Sometimes I find myself thinking of Olson as an artisan, a worker with his hands, a carpenter, New England journeyman…..It is difficult to be both a historian and a poet, but by using some of his materials as an artisan he is usually able to keep the two together within the poem.”
“The fullest aspect of the poem is still its involvement with Gloucester, but it is also about the painter Marsden Hartley – the period of his work in Gloucester, the powerful, mythic, almost folk paintings of the 1930s. The emphasis of the Letter is still circular – within, from, and to Gloucester – but Olson has separated out a part of this experience, and given it a distinct, separate identity outside of the main currents of the rest of the Letters.”
“I’ve never decided whether or not Olson considers his poems difficult to follow or if he cares, but he is difficult, one of the most difficult of the modern poets to follow…sometimes as in the inner references of Letter 7 its because he doesn’t give enough away – at other times, as in the overall structure of the Letters, because he includes a maze of only distantly related material.
“The glimpse that Olson gives of Hartley does have its inner intensity. Is it only for someone who knows the paintings? Who is already familiar with Hartley’s life? It could be. The response to anything in Maximus has to be personal. For someone already deeply familiar with the painter and his work Olson’s poem, with all it’s rambling and discursion, is a sensitive, moving portrait…..whatever someone decides about the poem any American poet beginning to sort out his poetic background will have to find his own place in the Letters – to find his own place in the American vision of Charles Olson’s Gloucester.”
Tumanguya, also known as Mt. Whitney, in Spring. Robin L. Chandler, 2024.
“In 1750, nearly all of the world’s 750 million people, regardless of where they were or what political or economic system they had, lived and died within the biological old regime. The necessities of life – food, clothing, shelter, and fuel for heating and cooking – mostly came from the land, from what could be captured from annual energy flows from the sun to the Earth. Industries too, such as textiles, leather, and construction, depended on products from agriculture or the forest. Even iron and steel making in the biological old regime, for instance, relied upon charcoal made from wood. The biological old regime thus set limits not just on the size of the human population but on the productivity of the economy as well.
These limits would begin to be lifted over the century from 1750 to 1850, when some people increasingly used coal to produce heat and then captured that heat to fuel repetitive motion with steam-powered machines, doing work that previously had been done with muscle. The use of coal-fired steam to power machines was a major breakthrough, launching human society out of the biological old regime and into a new one no longer limited by annual solar energy flows. Coal is stored solar energy, laid down hundreds of millions of years ago. Its use in steam engines freed human society from the limits imposed by the biological old regime, enabling the productive powers and numbers of humans to grow exponentially. The replacement – with steam generated by burning coals – of wind, water, and animals for powering industrial machines constitutes the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and ranks with the much earlier agricultural revolution in importance for the course of history. The use of fossil fuels – first coal and then petroleum – not only transformed economies around the world but also added greenhouse gases to Earth’s atmosphere.”
The concept of the biological old regime, as discussed by Dr. Marks in great detail in Chapter One of the book, is based upon relationships, such as the rise of civilization and the agricultural revolution, the relationships between towns or cities and the countryside, between elites and peasants (also called agriculturalists or villagers), between civilizations and nomadic pastoralists, and between people and the environment
“…..on a September afternoon…..I return to the Buttermilks, walking about six miles roundtrip on the wash-boarded and rutted road up to the monster boulders known as Grandma and Grandpa Peabody, a favorite haunt of rock climbers. It is an amazing hike. I meet and talk with several people who call Payahuunadu their home. I am hooked on the Buttermilks! Storms linger in the valley and the day is a patchwork of blue skies, rainbows, and occasional downpours, but mostly a sensational cloud cover frames the mountain the Numu Paiute called Winuba (“Standing Tall”). Winuba is known to many as Mount Tom, and at 13,658 feet is the commanding peak of the Upper Owens Valley. I scramble amongst the granite boulders and marvel at their size. Grandpa Peabody is 50 feet high and 65 feet in diameter. Based on analysis of the boulders’ composition, geologists conclude that earthquakes shook these boulders loose from the ridgecrest and they rolled downslope, coming to rest in this field. I made this pastel in the studio from a photograph I took that day; the large pink boulder on the left is Grandpa Peabody.”
Cab compartment of Southern Pacific no. 18, the “Slim Princess.” Robin L. Chandler, 2024
The Slim Princess is an oil fire 4-6-0 “Ten Wheeler” type narrow-gauge steam locomotive built in 1911 by the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This incredible machine is preserved by the Eastern California Museum (in the Larry Peckham Engine House) and has been lovingly restored and maintained in operable condition by a devoted cadre of volunteers who I recently watched laboring on the engine. Working from a photograph I made onsite, I painted this pastel.
“…..the Slim Princess worked the Nevada California Oregon line for 15 years, eventually sold to the Southern Pacific narrow gauge line. Mining and timber and farming in east California, Nevada and points west kept railroad companies going since the 1880s. The Carson and Colorado Railroad Company was incorporated in 1880 running on the narrow-gauge lines.”
“…..a little more than ten years later the Southern Pacific took over the Carson and Colorado. The ever-present hope of a southern railroad was encouraged. Collis P. Huntington, head of the greater company, decided to complete the line through the valley, connecting the transcontinental systems to the south and the north. Before he proceeded with that plan, death claimed him, and his successors held a different view. When the Los Angeles aqueduct required large quantities of freight, the long-wanted [rail]road was built, and its last spike was driven at Owenyo October 18, 1910. It gave the valley a southern rail connection, though the narrow-gauge traversing Owens Valley as far as Owenyo has never been standardized…..the ‘Slim Princess,’ as the narrow-gauge was locally dubbed, would be made a part of a through north-and-south interior system. But those improvements have been completed, and there still remains 134 miles of the narrow-gauge which Mills said had been ‘built 300 miles too long and 300 years too soon.’ “
Excerpt from W.A. Chalfant’s The Story of Inyo (revised edition 1933), p. 313-314
“…there in the empty desert; there are the arid mountains; they shimmer in the ashen heart of noon, or swim in the far elusive colors of evening – a reality that appears unreal, challenging the imagination…you cannot argue with the silence. It returns your questionings to you, to your own inner silence which becomes aware – a mystical something that is neither reason nor intelligence nor intuition, a recognition of some nameless truth that may not be denied.” (p.234)
Quote from a letter written by the artist Maynard Dixon on the occasion of a retrospective exhibit of his work held in November 1945 at the Scripps College art gallery. This is an excerpt from The Life of Maynard Dixon by Donald J. Hagerty
Inspired by Mule Days in Bishop. Robin L. Chandler, 2024
“The reality bequeathed us by centuries of pioneering and its industrial sequel made our great need the creation of a new reality. But only spiritual force can create. Reason directs and conserves. Reason, it follows, was an ideal guide for the progress westward: and remains an ideal preservative for the traditional moods. Pragmatism, in its servility to Reason, is supine before the pioneer reality whose decadent child it is. As a recreative agent of American life – which it claimed to be – it was destined to be sterile: destined to rationalize and fix whatever world was already in existence. The legs of the pioneer had simply become the brains of the philosopher.” (28 – 29)
“America was builded on a dream of fair lands…..in the infinitely harder problems of social and psychic health, the dream persists. We believe in our Star. And we do not believe in our experience. America is filled with poverty, with social disease, with oppression and with physical degeneration. But we do not wish to believe that this is so. We bask in the benign delusion of our perfect freedom. In the same way, the pioneer…..believed only in pressing on. There is this great difference, however. Physical prowess throve best unconsciously and fostered by a dream. Spiritual growth without the facing of the world is an impossible conception.” (31 – 32)
Excerpts from Our America by Waldo Frank published in 1919
alive in the sea of information 