I thought it was time for a change, I’d been looking for something to represent all four seasons, but hadn’t settled on anything beside Winter Snow and Autumn leaves. Now I have a Spring / Summer photo with some of the local flowers blooming.
The photo was taken on a nice day walking the dog. He ended up on the cutting room floor because he managed to have only his tail in the photo.
Here is another photo of him from that day. I was a good walk and a good day for both of us. We hadn’t been walking around this particular area for a while. Part of it burned a couple of years ago. I’d stopped doing our walks down there, because I didn’t want to think about a mostly white dog running around in a mostly black charred mess. I’d have gone broke in groomer fees. (OMG! I just used a term that’s banned on some platforms!)
This is the problem with redefinition of words and subsequent censorship of those words.
I digress…
I like this photo for its contrast and it also provides commentary on the county’s efforts to rehabilitate what they did to the wash behind the house.
This is the wash after the county spent 10 years working on it. The gash is 20 to 30 feet deep. Straight as an arrow and looks a lot more like a log flume than a flood control project. It was supposed to prevent erosion and manage occasional floods. In the distance you can see a bridge. For Years, the county resisted putting that bridge in. Building the bridge was the county admitting they were wrong.
There had been a bridge built over this wash in the 1930’s or ‘40s. It had washed out in a particularly nasty spring thaw/rain event. The county, instead of putting the bridge back, decided to dig a log flume. Then they decided to simply have the road surface drive through the wash bed.
In an effort to slow the water down they built a series of concrete and rock steps into the wash and subjected the residential area along the wash to 2 years of living in a construction zone.
The subsequent 10 years the neighborhood was a heavy equipment / construction zone for 3 to 5 months out of the year. An added bonus was that the roadway washed out pretty reliably, closing the road to town.
After a decade, the county redid the math and figured out if they put a bridge across the wash it would save them money. DUH!
The residents had been telling the county this from the beginning and because we were a bunch of rubes who knew nothing, the county ignored us entirely!
This is what the wash looked like before the county started messing about. There was water in it much of the year. The dogs and I would hike up the wash about 3/4 of a mile and play in the pools of cold clear water. We’d be dry by the time we’d walked back home but we’d all be happy. In late Summer there were wild blackberries to eat along the wash bank. It was rugged, natural, beautiful and ever changing.
Yes, rocks moved around through the years but usually not very far. This was due to natural erosion. That being said, the erosion was minimal and honestly seemed to be flattening the wash bed out, so the water was slowing down naturally. The wash bed was also meandering more so the water wasn’t rushing quite as much.
There was also a lot of wildlife that used the wash as a highway, water hole, and hunting ground. One of the reasons I liked this neighborhood and specifically this house was the proximity of the forest and the wildlife.
For years before the county’s destruction of the wash and its surrounding habitat there was a coyote that I could set my watch by. We called her the 6 am coyote and If I saw her, I was running late for work.
The lone California Poppy growing on what looks like the surface of the moon is my reminder to never trust a government agency.
San Bernardino County Flood Control promised that they were going to restore the wash to its natural state.
Originally the wash was lined with trees. There were some pine, some mountain oak, there were even a few aspen like trees. There was also a really nice trail that meandered through the trees. All of this was literally 1000 ft from the back of my home. I loved it, the dogs loved it, and hearing the owls hooting at night was comforting. My home was an oasis from the insanity of LA
All of that was destroyed by people who did not live in the area, who KNEW better than everyone actually living here. People who didn’t ask questions, and who didn’t consult history.
People who used the phrase, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.”
They gave us more heat, more dust, a scar in the ground that looks like the surface of the moon, and a single California poppy.