After
leaving Santa Cruz Island, I spent three days at Midland School, the
small rural boarding school I attended for high school in south-central California that
emphasizes self-reliance, simplicity, lifelong learning, and responsibility to
community, the outdoors, and to your own needs. As many of you know, it is very near and dear to my heart.
As the years pass since I graduated, familiar faces start to fade away and new
faces appear, which creates an air of awkwardness that is both comfortable and strange.
I still feel like a part of the community but in a distanced way. I still
consider the teachers there my mentors but I also get to call them my friends.
I still see students who are just like me when I was there, but they are not a
part of my Midland story, nor am I much a part of theirs other than as an
occasional friendly face wandering the campus nostalgically. I have found
myself returning to Midland frequently throughout the years (and heard the
comment “it’s like you’ve never left!” far too often) and each time I go back I
feel farther removed from the social community but more deeply engrained in the
land. This spring, the vibrancy of the emerald fields, yellow mustard flowers, harlequin
Coast Live Oaks, golden-orange poppies, lupine-colored lupine, olive-y jade
serpentine outcrops, and the buttery rage of the sun made for a whole lifetime
full of sensory memories.
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| Grass Mountain from the Midland School Organic Garden. Photo courtesy of Dewey Livingston. |
I
camped on an oak speckled mesa with my good friend Amelia. We spent the days
catching up on each others lives, hiking in the dry heat, drawing the smells
into our long-deprived nostrils, and soaking up the many bird songs, rustlings
of branches and grasses, the hoots and hollers of lacrosse games, and the joyful
reunions of old friends. On our last day we hiked Grass Mountain, the school’s
solid, solemn yet soothing idol. On our long, hot, arduously steep, but
completely satisfying hike we encountered a few expected and familiar “faces”
like wildflowers and fence lizards but we were surprised when we startled a
perfectly camouflaged Coast Horned Lizard in the crumbly shale trail.
Coast
Horned Lizards, Phrynosoma coronatum, live
in grasslands like the open slope of Grass Mountain, as well as warm, dry
habitats where woody shrubs dominate, and in open forests, both coniferous and
broad-leaf. They primarily eat ants but consume other small insects as well.
They are covered in little spiky scales that are colored very much like the
environments they live in: sandy tan, dusty brown, irony red, and charcoal
gray. In fact, sometimes they blend in so well and keep so still when you are
near, you might not see them until they skitter away from the shadow of your
boot!
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| Coast Horned Lizard, Phrynosoma coronatum. |
Once you do see one, though, you wont be able to take your eyes off it. Their
squat appearance has earned them the nickname “Horny Toads” even though they
are reptiles, not amphibians. Like many reptiles, they have a few interesting
defense mechanisms to scare off predators: they will swallow air to inflate
their abdomens to make themselves look better so when they jab at the attacker
with their horns they seem like more of a threat, and they also can squirt
blood out of their eyes (Stebbins 138)! Apparently multiple Phrynosoma species have a large
(relative to their head, that is) cavity behind their eye (called a sinus, just
like ours), and the blood is squeezed through a pore on the eyelid and can
spurt quite far. According to an article entitled “The Blood-squirting
Variability of Horned Lizards (Phrynosoma)”
in Copeia, a quarterly journal published by the American Society of
Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, the blood-squirting response is largely
exhibited during interactions with animals in the canine family like foxes and
coyotes, but has also occurred during aggressive incidents with humans
(Sherbrooke et al. 1114). Had we known this beforehand, we probably wouldn’t
have picked this little creature up so not to stress it out. This particular
herp, only about 2.75 inches long (towards the smaller end of their average
length of 2.5 to 4 inches, possibly indicating a younger lizard), was
relatively calm in Amelia’s hand, and when it opened its mouth as if to gulp
air, I quickly snapped a photo and we released it. It scuttled away only to
disappear before our eyes within feet of us. We knew it was there, but it was
so well blended in to the trail, it was difficult to keep track of!
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| It's amazing how well it blends in! |
By
the time we reached the top of the mountain it was just before one p.m. and it
was hot. The large sprawling oak on
the northern edge of the triangular peak blocked the breeze so the midday sun
beat down with no relief. Despite the stifling heat, we sat at the top amongst
the California Poppies and the Silver Bush Lupine to enjoy the view. If you’ve
ever sat next to a blooming poppy, you’ve probably felt the golden glow of
their vivid orange petals reflecting the sunlight back towards the sky or onto
your skin. Perhaps you didn’t notice. Next time, on a hot sunny day, try to
feel it. It’s like butter—real fresh-churned farm butter—but in the form of
butterfly kisses on your arm or cheek. Sounds goofy, I know, but just you wait—you’ll
feel it.
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| A California Poppy, Eschsholzia californica, in the shale at the top of Grass Mountain |
The California Poppy, Eschsholzia
californica, is native to the western states, ranging from the southern
coast of Washington all the way down to the very southernmost tip of Baja
California (Clark). Apparently, when Spanish explorers first encountered what
is now California, they sailed in at the peak of Poppy bloom and it seemed to
them that the land was on fire. This may be a highly romanticized version of
the truth, but I imagine the sense of wonder and amazement anyone must feel
seeing a flower so radiant blanketing the green hills, reflecting the setting
sun: the illusion of hills ablaze. E.
californica also has medicinal properties: California Indians like the
Ohlone people used a concoction made of poppy petals to get rid of lice
(Smith), and it can also be used in tincture form or as a tea infusion as an
anti-spasmodic to help children with colic sleep, or can be applied topically
as a mild painkiller ("California Poppy Herbal Information and California
Poppy Uses."). Now that you know this, don’t go out and harvest a bunch of
poppies to make tinctures out of: E.
californica is the California State Flower, so it is illegal to pick!
The
other wildflower whose glory we basked in, Lupine (Lupinus sp.), added perfect purple compliments to the green and orange
flaming poppies (I’ve been told that purple and orange are most definitely not complimentary colors, though I
personally think they go together quite well). I wasn’t able to identify the
exact species of the small Lupines that were intermingling with the poppies
(see here
for all the Lupinus species in
California) but further down the trail we found Silver Bush Lupine, Lupinus albifrons, which grows as a
round shrub with large flower stalks sticking up above the green leaves below.
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| The unidentified Lupine, Lupinus sp. |
 |
| Silver Bush Lupine, Lupinus albifrons. |
On
our trip down the mountain (which took only 1/6th of the time it
took us to hike up the mountain), we
counted the number of Western Fence Lizards we saw. I think we counted upwards
of nine individuals, but the interesting thing about these lizards is not how
many there are on Grass Mountain’s narrow trail; it is what these lizards’
blood does (this is really the week of learning about reptiles and blood, I
guess!). In 1998, Scientists from UC Berkeley discovered that the Western Fence
Lizard, Sceloporus occidentalis,
has a particular protein in its blood that kills the Lyme Disease bacterium, Borrelia
burgdorferi, that is found in Western Black-legged Ticks, Ixodes
scapularis. When the poppy seed-sized tick nymphs feed on the blood of the
lizard (sometimes 30-40 nymphs will feed simultaneously on the same lizard),
their gut is cleansed of the disease causing bacteria, thereby decreasing the
rate of Lyme Disease in the western states! Read the SF Gate article to learn
more about the chemistry behind it.
I left Midland on Monday morning amongst an
early-morning coastal mist that threatened to smother the valley in a colorless
cloak of water molecules, but the glowing colors of the mustard-filled pastures,
though muted, desperately fighting the fog, couldn’t be washed-out.
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| The view from the top of Grass Mountain |
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| Sunset over the Santa Ynez Valley from Figueroa Mountain Road. |
Works
Cited
"California
Poppy Herbal Information and California Poppy Uses." Bulk Herbs, Bulk
Spices and Herbal Teas - Monterey Bay Spice Company. Monterey Bay Spice
Company, n.d. Web. 5 May 2012. http://www.herbco.com/p-364-california-poppy-plant-cs-organic.aspx
Clark,
Curtis. "Eschscholzia californica." The Genus Eschscholzia.
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, 4 July 2000. Web. 5 May 2012.
<http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/poppy/cal.html>.
Russell,
Sabin. "Lizards Slow Lyme Disease in West." San Francisco Chronicle,
17 Apr. 1998.
Sherbrooke,
Wade C., George A. Middendorf III, and C. Guyer. "Blood-Squirting Variability
in Horned Lizards (Phrynosoma)." Copeia 2001.4 (2001): 1114-1122.
Print.
Smith,
Chuck. "Ohlone Medicine." Cabrillo College. Cabrillo College, n.d.
Web. 5 May 2012. <http://www.cabrillo.edu/~crsmith/OhloneMed.html>.
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