It was not a particularly relaxed weekend, but hey!  I'm up earlier than usual this morning and I'm not even tired.

On Saturday I spent a few hours at an acquaintance's farm, painting the trunks of their avocado trees.  Their home burned to the ground in the recent fires and the damage to their orchards is yet to be determined.  The bark of the avocado tree is very photo-sensitive.  The lush green foliage that usually protects it was burned off in the fire, hence the need for painting the bark a bright sun-reflecting white.  I'd hoped to assist with laying a new irrigation system - something I haven't done before, but would like to learn more about - but I arrived late and the poor scorched trees were clearly in need of assistance, so I didn't get to make my lewd jokes about laying pipe with my fellow volunteers.  Climbing the steep hillside with a sloshing bucket was difficult work, but the painting itself was quite peaceful.  Even with the sounds of repair crews' chainsaws and earth movers carrying across the valley, I felt a sense of calm in the orchard. 

The drive to and from the farm was depressing.  The route past Lake Hodges is one we make fairly often.  The first time I drove out that way, to meet up with some friends at a park, I was so blown away by the landscape, I think I took Mr. Pear out there to take a look at it the very next day.  Huge steep hillsides with boulders the size of buses, or even houses, on one side of the lake and on the other, even steeper hillsides completely covered with greenery.  I often wondered what kind of greenery as it was so lush, it could either have been the tops of towering evergreens or low growing shrubs.  There simply isn't any human footprint on that side of the lake to get a true sense of scale.  All of the green, acres and acres of it, is completely gone.  These hillsides will recover, but other areas of the county, burned in wildfires 4 years ago and then re-burned this past month, may not.  The term being bandied about here is desertification on a grand scale.

Comments

[Mandy]

Hi Kirsten,
It was nice to see your comment on my blog, and it's nice to find your link to yours and get to know you better through your posts (sounds like we do so many of the same types of things, and your commentary of them is fun to read about!). I love the prickly pears at the top and have been trying to get a nice picture of them. I meant to get one of them from the hillsides off the 78, and drove through there yesterday for the first time since the fires and was so sad to see so many of them gone. Hope to see you at AG soon!