BYOP

...Which of course stands for Bring Your Own Pestle.  I posted about this place before but since that post lacked photographs it was essentially useless.  Which distinguished it not at all from most of my posts.  Not four miles from where I'm sitting is Morro Bay State Park.  The park's wonderful little Natural History Museum is tucked behind a huge rock outcrop.

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Carved out of the bedrock, as the sign helpfully points out, are mortars used by the indigenous Chumash people to grind acorns into meal and flour.  If you squint through the trees you see the water of Morro Bay.  What a life that would have been!  Sitting overlooking the bay and visiting with friends while grinding a year's worth of nutrition.  And yes, they each brought their own personal pestles.  Here's a better shot, sans signage:

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How, you ask, could they have overlooked the bay when sitting astride these mortars, what with all the vegetation in the way?  Let's look up, shall we?

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I don't think these bloody eucalyptus were here when the Chumash were actively using this site.  I think that perhaps a little "ground line pruning" would be in order here.

My son's elementary school toured the Natural History Museum and the guide made a special point of showing them these mortars.  I first learned of them several years ago, long before I had any idea that fate would land me just around the bay, when on a business trip to the area I stopped by the San Luis Obispo Chamber of Commerce and asked if they knew of any bedrock mortars nearby.  The woman there told me of this spot, but I was crushed for time and didn't get a chance to visit back then.  No doubt her recollection springs from a childhood visit to the site as well.  It's very cool to know that school children in this area are made aware of this amazing place, right at the age when such things make a deep impression on them.

Looks like pizza

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When I took this photo of a trio of California white oaks (Q. lobata) growing in a clump on a hill surrounded with wheat (photo taken near Creston, CA) I was all set to launch into a rant about the stupidity of beating the snot out the soil to produce a cereal crop on land that for centuries supported its inhabitants with acorns.

But in light of the previous post I'm seeing this photo in a whole new light.  Acorns plus wheat equals... pizza dough.  Or really, really good bread.

The problem, to me, is one of scale and proportion.  I hope I live to see a day when oaks will be the primary crop on land like this, wheat is an afterthought, and the farmer spend a lot more time sitting in the shade with his friends than sitting on a tractor burnin' oil.

I wonder if the farmer knows that he can produce a different, more nutritious flour from the bounty of this field that fetches 18 bucks a pound?  For some reason I doubt it.  But in field after field - be it a corn field in central Minnesota with a magnificent bur oak or a vineyard in Tulare, CA with a giant California white oak - I see oaks left standing where they arguably detract from the productivity of the target crop being grown, and I often wonder why.  Yes, there are regulations here in CA and probably elsewhere restricting the removal of mature oaks.  But I don't think that's the answer.  I think something deep in our psyche finds reassurance and comfort in seeing those oaks.  We subconsciously know - even if our conscious mind has long forgotten - that the crops we are laboring so hard to grow are fragile and foreign, and are one water shortage or disease away from disappearing.  The presence of these "farm field oaks" tells our subconscious that even after we beat up the soil beyond the ability to produce row crops there will still be food.

Well what do you know?  I managed to get my rant in any way!

Acorn Pizza Devoured

So I walked into the kitchen last Friday afternoon to find a couple of smallish people – smallish people who theoretically have ½ of my DNA but whose good looks and love of cooking argue strongly otherwise – kneading dough.

“Whatcha makin’?”  I asked.

“Pizza dough,” came the reply. 

Thoroughly confused I asked, “Why, is our phone line disconnected?  Because where I come from you can just make a phone call and a guy will literally bring pizza to your door… and it’s already cooked.”

For about the nine thousandth time these smallish people looked at me with that peculiar mix of scorn and sympathy that I have come to know so well.  “Papa, that pizza has all kinds of junk in it.  And it has too much salt.”

“Heaven forbid,” I said, reaching in the cupboard for the chips.  “OK, but why is the dough so… brown?  Are you using that special spelt/millet/amaranth flour again?”

Look of scorn/sympathy #9001:  “No papa, we mixed in a cup of your acorn flour.”  At that very moment I knew that my life has been a complete success, despite its myriad failures.  What an amazing feeling. 

How was the pizza you ask?  Awesome.  Not awesome only after taking into account  its unconventional ingredients, or awesome in the self-righteous/delusional way newly minted vegans eat a bowl of quinoa and black beans sans flavor and call it awesome.  I’m talking awesome to an avowed pizza lover, awesome to a guy who would (and, in fact, has) become a vegetarian with the only and inviolable exception of pepperoni.  (Can life without pepperoni be considered “life?”at all?  I think not.)  I mean awesome on the same laudatory scale in which, for a native Minnesotan like me, the phrase “not bad” is considered high praise.

Where did I get the acorn flour you ask?  At my friendly neighborhood hot dog and acorn flour shop.  They don’t have those where you live?  They’re pretty much on every street corner here it California.  Right next to Starbucks.  Actually the one and only Sue’s Acorn Café & Mill is located in Martinez, CA, about 5 hours from me.  Luckily business takes me by there regularly.  And it really is a hot dog joint.

A couple days before to the pizza epiphany we ran short of whole wheat flour when making our usual honey wheat bread.  I keep saying that the white fluffy Wonder Bread and Roman Meal I was fed as a child clearly never did me any harm, but for some strange reason the more I say that the more my kids demand homemade. 

We substituted a cup of acorn flour for one of the 3 cups of whole wheat, and otherwise did everything exactly the same.  Don’t ask me what “exactly the same" means.  I am only the designated kneader.  I am banned from the kitchen until it’s time to knead, and am quickly banished thereafter out of (well justified) concern that I’ll do/spill/drop/burn something to ruin the whole batch.

The bread turned out beautifully, and tasted great.  The acorn flour added a healthy dose of healthy fat and protein to what is otherwise a carb-fest.  The kids loved it and were clearly inspired to add the acorn flour to the pizza dough.

By the way, acorn flour fetches about $18 a pound.  Anyone sense a business opportunity, or is it just me?  Hopefully it’s just me.  Forget I said anything.

Prettier than any rose...

Took this at a park in San Luis Obispo this morning...

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California (coast) live oak (Q. agrifolia) flowers, pollinated and ready to become acorns over the course of the summer.  I have mentioned that where I live near Morro Bay it is generally quite cool, with highs in the 60s pretty much year round, and thick morning and evening fogs, while just 20 miles inland at Atascadero or Paso Robles it gets colder in winter and cooks at 100+ in the summer.  In between is San Luis Obispo, just beyond the curtain of fog that so often shrouds the coast, but with enough coastal influence to keep from overheating.  In other words, just about perfect.

Which is why no one can afford to live there.

But back to the flowers.  To me this is what it's all about.  These inconspicuous flowers - so inconspicuous that 99.4% of the visitors to this park wouldn't even recognize them as such - are more beautiful in my eyes than any rose or lily.  Because to me - and to the Chumash people long before me - these flowers represent the promise of this:

Which reminds me of a little known fact.  Most American Indian tribal names mean "The People" in each given language.  In contrast Chumash, loosely translated, means "People of the dented skulls."

OK, I made that up.

I get to this park quite often.  I will be tracking the development of these acorns over the course of the summer.  And eating them in autumn.

Evening Oaks

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I had to take this shot one evening last week on my way home after a day on the road.  Highway 41 just west of Creston, CA.  Hillside of California white (a.k.a. valley) oak (Q. lobata) and coast live oak (Q. agrifolia).  Lay a tarp under these trees in August/September and you'd eat like a king for a year!

I have been amazed at how late the California white oaks leaf out in this area.  As I have said there are no white oaks where I am on the coast; they start about 10 miles inland and up the hill.  Where the white oaks are there has been plenty of weather that Midwestern oaks would kill for - several 80 degree days.  Midwestern oaks, "knowing" that every degree day comes at a premium and is precious, leaf out as soon as it is remotely safe to do so.  But these white oaks are taking their time to leaf out.  Probably because they "know" (I should probably delete the quotation marks - oaks do know things, a lot more than us!) that degree days are not a problem.  Here on the coast it rarely breaks 70.  Go ten miles inland where the white oaks are and a month from now it will be pushing 100 or more.  Why rush things?

They are well adapted for the area.  I, apparently, am not.  I'm still the one softball parent wearing a t-shirt when everyone else is in parkas.  I might as well wear a neon sign that says, "Transplanted Northerner."

The Chapel-Oak of Allouville-Bellefosse

Amazing oak to get your week started: The Chapel-Oak of Allouville-Bellefosse.

... although something tells me that treatment of this tree over the years might have violated one or two of the things I learned in my Urban Forestry courses.  Apparently, when the already-500 year-old tree re-sprouted after a lightening strike/fire that hollowed it out in the late 1600s the people of the village considered it a miracle (since oaks, of course, rarely withstand fire... gah).  And proceeded to memorialize the tree's miraculous survival by... subjecting it to an incredible amount of additional abuse.  For instance I think I see an incorrect pruning cut about 1/3 of the way up on the left.  The staircase and shingles might be problematic as well.

It is cool, though.

The Timber Baron of Montana de Oro

The year was 1892.  It was late morning and the coastal morning fog was lifting to reveal a breathtaking panorama.  Alexander S. Hazard reined in his horse to pause and soak up the view across his spawling ranch; to the east were the golden hills that would later give this property a new name, to the west the Pacific Ocean, to the south the towering monolith guarding the entrance to Moro Bay.  He saw the live oaks dotting the hills – stunted near the coast but growing huge only a mile or two inland – trees that had given sustenance to both the Chumash Indians and their wildlife quarry for time out of mind.  He saw the blankets of wildflowers dotting the coastal scrub out to the bluffs.  As he reflected on this natural bounty, Hazard took a deep, satisfied breath, rubbed his chin, nodded sagely and said, “Needs eucalyptus.”

And so he planted eucalyptus.  Goo-gobs of them, in neat rows, down one side and up the other of the canyon that would one day bear his name.  Hazard knew for an absolute certainty that these trees would be worth a fortune someday, preferably someday soon (see also: Guaranteed wealth, Ostrich and nutria farmers).  They would become a new type of gold produced on ground that would later be known as Montana de Oro State Park.

Except… they were worthless.  When is the last time you constructed anything out of eucalyptus lumber?  Exactly.  Can you imagine investing so much blood, sweat and tears - not to mention cold, hard cash - in an enterprise that turned out to be worthless?  Actually, I can.  And have.  I can only hope that Hazard recovered from the disappointment and was as blessed in other ventures as I have been.

To descend into the eucalyptus grove of Hazard Canyon is to enter another world, an eerie monocultural world that is – or at least appears to be – utterly lifeless except for the towering eucalyptus trees that are Hazard’s legacy.  I always feel a sense of foreboding when driving through the canyon, and breathe a sigh of relief when we emerge back into the sunlight on the other side, with views of the oaks to the west and ocean to the right.

Regular readers know that I am no strict nativist when it comes to species selection.  We must make decisions about what to plant where based on the world as it is, not based on the world as it was.  Even 120 years ago Hazard wasn’t planting his Australian arboreal white elephants into a pristine, “native” setting.

That’s because 100 years before him someone reined his horse to a stop, looked over this landscape which had supplied every need of its inhabitants for eons, nodded, stroked his chin and said, “Needs sheep.  And cattle.  And crops.”  Except he said it in Spanish.  Hazard’s was a simple, classic and oft-repeated miscalculation of “if you grow it there will be a market for it.”  Heck, I might be making the same mistake with the oaks I plant.

I know nothing of the silvics of eucalyptus in general and of this species – whatever the heck it is – in particular.  Based on what I’ve seen I’d say it is a pioneer species to the nth (yes, Scrabble players, that is a word – my daughter looked it up) degree; no understory regeneration at all.  It is also extremely alleopathic – nothing, and I mean nothing, seems to grow beneath it.

I can’t wait to see what the next 60 years have in store for Hazard’s Folly (as I think of it) – if, when and how the live oaks and coastal scrub reclaim the canyon.  And I intend to see it in 60 years.  I only turned 45 last fall.