Surveying the Landscape: A New Approach to Nature Writing

Abstract

It was an old, rambling house. “Garcia's” we called it, after the name of the owner. It used to be a Mexican restaurant on a lonely country road, but it had become the home to a group of recent college graduates who were pausing a few years before the rest of their lives caught up with them. There was a splendid arbor nearly twenty feet by thirty, with grapes draping down in late summer over the picnic tables and horseshoe pits. A small garden nearby gave rise to some vegetables and not a few weeds. Across the road were the rolling slopes of the foothills of the California coastal range: dry dusty grass, a few live oaks, a few tired horses. Downhill a ways was Rosatti's outdoor tavern, while in the other direction the road stretched up toward the ridge crest, narrowing and finally dying out before it reached Skyline Boulevard. Farther west, the land fell toward the Pacific, redwoods rising in the misty air. Summer of 1972.