Map in the Dirt, Message on a Tree

I had heard there was a carving on an old tree in the canyon. I had often stopped in the course of my walks to stare at the bark of certain trees trying to discover it. Yesterday, I ran into someone on the road crew out here who knows the backcountry well, and I asked him if he had seen it, and where. He bent down and proceeded to draw a diagram in the dirt.

He ran his fingers over lines and curves and spoke the names of each point like a litany. “Here’s your orchard. Here’s the mighty grandfather oak, here’s the creek. Here’s the turn-off to the neighbors’ house, and here’s the bridge, and there’s the rock outcropping, and the place where the road splits…”

The dusty markings shimmered in the sunlight, becoming the canyon in abstract miniature, a map of a place I know so well, and I followed along effortlessly.

“When you get to the tree,” he said, “face north. The carving is about waist-high. It’s initials and a date. August, 1893. In clear old-fashioned lettering…”

I am fascinated by the vestiges of the past, the little markers people leave behind, like messages in a bottle. Perhaps it’s a universal human impulse to leave some trace of oneself and not disappear entirely. I was resolved to find this engraved little greeting from the nineteenth century here in the place I call home. (And I hasten to add, that although I call it home, I am fully aware that others came before me, and that the spirits of our predecessors linger.)

Anyway, I was also intrigued by the very act of my friend’s crouching down to draw a map in the dirt. It seemed both ancient and familiar. I thought of wanderers long ago etching directions into the ground, leaving markers on a pilgrim’s trail, or paintings on cave walls. I even thought of Jesus, from my Bible school days, bending down in the book of John to write with his finger on the ground, and telling those without sin to cast the first stone. (Yes, it’s all in there somewhere. But that’s how old the practice is.) My immediate fluency in the medium and my intimacy with the land it depicted made me feel like an outdoor kind of girl, and confirmed me as a local, and perhaps I flatter myself, but it somehow placed me in a long procession of others who had wandered through canyons over the years and shared directions without benefit of pen or paper, and I felt pleased. Fortified with the dirt-drawn knowledge, I did the walk in real life that evening.

And it didn’t exactly jump out at me, but I finally saw the carving, and once I did, it was hard to miss. I wondered, of course, who had carved it, where he was headed, what he had seen.

This land, originally Chumash, became part of a vast Spanish land grant known as Nuestra Señora del Refugio in 1791, and was sold off in pieces during the 1850s. By 1866, a partnership of the Hollisters and Dibblees had acquired about 140,000 acres, including Gaviota, Santa Anita, and Bulito ranches, and the portion that became known as the Hollister Ranch was held as the estate of W.W. Hollister beginning in 1886. And so, by the time our intrepid tree carver walked or rode up the canyon in 1893, this was a cattle ranch––as it is, amazingly, to this day.

So it was a cowboy or a ranch hand, most likely. Maybe he was following directions to some landmark or shortcut, directions a cohort had scratched into the dirt with a finger or a stick. Perhaps he had a mission, possibly not, but he saw fit to carve the date, rendering it significant. Maybe he had simply paused to enjoy the shade of that tree, broad and leafy even in its younger days, a sip of water from a canteen, the song of a canyon wren, and it was a moment to commemorate. If so, I know exactly how he felt.