Gargantuan Gastropods

All summer long, the tabloids and gossip columns are full of Malibu celebrity sightings, but here's a really big celebrity (or possibly a sea-lebrity) that's been overlooked: Aplysia vaccaria, the California black sea hare, a mild-mannered sea slug that has the distinction of being the world's largest gastropod. Eat your heart out, Orlando Bloom. Unless otherwise noted, all photos are © 2016 S. Guldimann.

Were you aware, dear reader, that the Malibu coast is currently playing host to large numbers of the world’s largest gastropod? While that sounds alarming like the plot of a 1950s B movie, this celebrity among slugs is a peaceful vegetarian, despite a passing resemblance to that movie monster favorite, The Blob.

Although it bears a distinct resemblance to Hollywood's favorite invertebrate horror,  A. vaccaria is mostly harmless. Image: Wikipedia

While the California brown sea hare, Aplysia Californica, is a regular tidepool resident in Malibu, this year, its much larger relative, Aplysia vaccaria—the black sea hare—is turning up in large numbers. No one at the Malibu Post can remember seeing more than one or two black sea hares. It's unclear if the vast number showing up this year is related to the unusually warm water or if other factors are in play.

Brown sea hares are smaller and usually a lighter color than their giant relative. Both species graze on kelp, which they chew up with a rasp-like tongue called a radula. Sea hares get their name from their rabbit ear-like appendages—actually scent organs called rhinophores.

Brown sea hares can grow to be impressively large for a slug, often measuring more than 15 inches from nose to tail.  A. vaccaria, however, can grow to be more than three feet long and weigh as much as 30 pounds. That’s one big slug. The largest specimens rarely turn up in the intertidal zone, but this year’s Malibu crop of A. vaccaria is still impressive, resembling a football in size and shape.

This unfortunate slug was left high and dry by the receding tide. However, sea slugs have adapted to the extreme conditions of the intertidal zone and can survive several hours out of water even in bright sunlight during low tide. The holes in the rock near this slug's head measure about an inch across, giving an idea of the creature's size.

Sea hare eggs look exactly like noodles, but probably would not be pleasant to eat. Both California species contain toxins from their algae diet that make them inedible to almost everything except lobsters—the garbage crew of the sea—and green anemones, which appear to be immune. There's a type of Australian sea hare that is so toxic that dogs have died after coming into contact with it. California sea hare species are much less potent, but it's a good idea not to handle them and to keep dogs away from them. Brown sea hares can release a purple dye that is a skin irritant. Black sea hares appear to depend on their terrible toxic taste for defense.

Sea hares are usually observed grazing on seaweed in tidepools during low tide, like this California brown sea hare, or waiting for the tide to rise while stranded, blob-like, on the beach, but they can also "fly" through the water with their wing-like parapodia—literally "foot wings."

There's actually a third giant gastropod on the loose in Malibu: the giant limpet, which is really another type of sea snail and not a true limpet at all. This species, Megathura crenulata, is the only known member of its genus, making it a monotypic genus. 

M. crenulata can grow to be nearly a foot in length. It may not be much to look at, but compounds in the blood of this primitive snail apparently hold promise as a cancer treatment. According to a 2011 article in the Journal of Immunology Research, "Keyhole limpet haemocyanin (KLH) appears to be a promising protein carrier for tumor antigens in numerous cancer vaccine candidates." 

After a sort of gastropod goldrush in the early 2000s that ran the risk of pushing this rare animal to the edge of extinction, M. crenulata is now being raised via aquaculture techniques.

Megathura crenulata, the only known member of its genus, lives only off the coast of California. The blood of this primitive snail species has become a key ingredient in vaccine research, but the burgeoning demand for the giant limpet blood could push this poorly understood and increasingly rare species to extinction. 

Here's a side view of M. crenulata, suggesting a very old person shuffling along under a large umbrella, and revealing the creature's true snail nature. Sea hares also have a shell, but it is internal and vestigial.

Sea hares are also important for medical research. According to the Aquarium of the Pacific's sea hare page, the California brown sea hare may not have a lot of brain wattage, but it has "the largest neurons in the animal kingdom, making it possible to identify individual nerve cells that are responsible for specific behaviors. They have been and are being used extensively in studying memory, behavior, and learning."

Humans may not find sea hares or giant limpets lovely to behold, but there's more to Malibu's giant gastropods than meets the eye. 

A football-sized specimen of A. vaccaria waits for the incoming tide on the beach at Little Dume.

Living with Lizards

One of The Malibu Post's resident Western fence lizards consents to pose for a portrait. Unless otherwise noted, all photos are © 2016 S. Guldimann

It was dusk and the faint glow of a smartphone screen illuminated the face of a small girl intent on capturing an imaginary animal in the street in front of The Malibu Post. The girl's father, hovering nearby, called instructions: "Wait until there's a green circle, that's it!" The Pokemon was successfully captured and the pair moved on. I felt a certain kindred feeling. I've spent the last several months attempting to track down a full collection of creatures, too, but while my hunt was for real world creatures, several proved every bit as elusive as any legendary beast.

Anyone who lives within the boundaries of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area has lizards among their nearest neighbors. They sun on the rocks in the garden, or zip across the driveway. Sometimes they show up uninvited in the house where they may end up mummified under the couch or on the cats' menu, but mostly the reptile world and the human world occupy the same space largely unnoticed by the inhabitants of each world. That's unfortunate, since human activity can inadvertently take a terrible toll on lizards, and because lizards are beneficial and interesting and worth a closer look. However, just because they often live among us doesn't mean they're easy to find.

The Western fence lizard is the most common reptile in Malibu. It is quite happy to take advantage of garden features like rocks and fences. Those fantastically long toes and claws on the hind feet enable the fence lizard to almost effortlessly climb vertical surfaces like tree trunks.

Seven lizard species can be found in the Santa Monica Mountains. Four of those species can be found even in urban gardens, but the Western fence lizard is far and away the most commonly seen reptile. This small cousin of the iguana lives alongside humans, successfully surviving in even the smallest gardens and yards, but also abundant in the wild. 

Fence lizards are beneficial garden residents. They feast on creatures humans regard as pests, including mosquitos, ticks, scorpions, centipedes, beetles and spiders.  Fence lizards are, in turn, a key food source for everything from hawks and roadrunners, to gopher snakes and larger lizards. 

The Western fence lizard's Latin name, Sceloporus occidentalis, let's you know that this is the Western spiny lizard. Up close, the fence lizard's back scales resemble a pinecone. 

Fence lizards that don't end up on the menu of some larger animal can reportedly live for as much as five or six years. 

The metallic blue stripes on the fence lizard's underside give this species its other popular name: the blue-belly. This is an adult male. Females have much fainter markings.

Some Malibu gardens are also home to another iguana relative, the side-blotched lizard, Uta stansburiana. This small elegant lizard comes in a surprisingly wide range of colors and may have spots, stripes or, sometimes, no markings at all. 

Some Malibu residents have this beautiful lizard in their gardens. At first glance, the side-blotched lizard closely resembles the fence lizard, but this species has brighter, lighter markings and a scale pattern that is much less spikey than the fence lizard's.

Visitors to Point Dume State Park or Malibu Bluffs Park Open Space are almost guaranteed to see the colorful side-blotched lizard going about its business of hunting ants and other small invertebrates. Like the fence lizard, they are an important food item for numerous other species of birds, reptiles, and mammals. Unlike the fence lizard, they are not strong climbers and prefer to stay close to the ground.

The side-blotched lizard's scales resemble a George Seurat painting. 

Fence lizards and side-blotched lizards are active, lively lizards. They dart around the garden in pursuit of insects, sun themselves on rocks, squabble with their neighbors, and often lounge in the middle of the driveway. However, there's a third common Malibu lizard species that many Malibu residents have never seen, although it also lives in our gardens. 

The Western skink, Eumeces skiltonianus, is a sleek, secretive lizard that stays close to the ground, hiding under rocks and dead leaves, and even tunneling underground when the soil is moist.

We rescued this unfortunate Western skink from the cat, who apparently heard me lamenting that I needed a good photo of a skink and decided to present me with one—quite a feat for an indoor-only cat. This little guy clearly had another recent close call, its tail has detached and is just beginning to grow back. Juvenile western skinks have a bright blue tail. Adults like this one are a sedate cinnamon color.

The Western skink has a taste for sow bugs and moths. Possibly because of its secretive ways, it is longer lived than other local species, reportedly surviving for as much as 10 years when conditions are right.

The fourth common garden lizard is the fierce and robust Southern alligator lizard. Alligator lizards are not closely related to true alligators, but apparently no one bothered to explain that to them. They are fierce, grumpy and aggressive. They swallow other lizards whole, devour mice and small birds and have a remarkably painful bite for something that doesn't have teeth.

This is the undisputed Malibu lizard king, the alligator lizard. I photographed this nearly foot-long behemoth at Malibu Bluffs Park. The alligator lizard gets its name from its gator-like looks, but it isn't a close relative of its namesake. This is, however, a fierce and voracious beastie, that will swallow smaller lizards whole, and has been known to go after birds, rodents, and people's toes. 

This juvenile alligator lizard strayed into the bathroom and had to be rescued before it became a cat treat. Juvies are smooth and bronze-colored, and lack the distinctive scale pattern of the adults. Here at The Post we find best way to rescue a lizard from the house is to herd it into a bucket or wastepaper basket, cover the container with a newspaper or book, and cart lizard and container to a safe place for release back into the garden. Many lizard species are territorial, so it's a good idea not to take them too far from their point of entry into the house. Screen doors can help cut down on the number of uninvited reptilian houseguests.


Our fifth native lizard may also be at home in the garden, but it is almost never seen, and when it is it gets mistaken for either a small snake or a large earthworm. 

The legless lizard, Anniella pulchra, spends its life almost entirely underground, tunneling through sandy soil for grubs and worms. We've never seen one here at the Malibu Post, but a new subspecies turned up recently near a runway at LAX, of all places, so it iss a distinct possibility that this small secretive lizard is quietly living its life just a few feet away from where I sit writing this post.

Here's a photo of A. pulchra courtesy of Wikipedia Commons. Although it looks like a snake, it is a true lizard, equipped with a detachable tail-tip to fool predators into thinking they've caught the whole animal. It also has eyelids and can blink, something snakes can't do.

Mystery marks in the sandy soil at the Point Dume Headlands may indicate the presence of legless lizards, but this observer has never seen one at work.

Here's a closer look at A. Pulchra. This photo was taken by Marlin Harms in Los Osos, CA, and appears on Wikipedia.

The remaining two local lizard species are, unfortunately, increasingly rare. The coastal whiptail was already rare when I was a child, but there was a time when this colorful lizard was abundant throughout the area.

Frederick Hastings Rindge, who purchased the entire Malibu Rancho in 1892, had this to say about the coastal whiptail lizard in his 1898 book Happy Days in Southern California:

The long pipe-stem lizards sunned themselves near by, but they are not very harmful; they are so called because, if struck by a stick, their tails fly into as many pieces as a pipe stem when broken on the pavement. The common little lizards are harmless, sometimes being even used for pets. 

I do not like to recall the remembrance of a lady in Saint Augustine, Florida, I once knew, who had such a creature for a pet, feeding it regularly and taking it in her hand. 

A Californian I have known who would catch them, put them on his shoulder, and let them run at will over his back. These things are told to ward off fears of poison. The big pipe-stem fellows, however, I will not vouch for.

We wouldn't vouch for them either, because this lizard has some formidable claws. There are two Southern California whiptail species. Ours is Aspidoscelis tigris stejnegeri, the tiger whiptail. There's also an orange-necked whiptail, that lives in San Diego County.

We had to go into the back country of the Santa Monica Mountains to find this beautiful beast. The coast whiptail was once common in Malibu. Frederick Hastings Rindge talks about this species in Happy Days in Southern California. Habitat loss in Malibu has left it on the California species of special concern list for this area. The whiptail is a medium-sized lizard with powerful legs that enable it to move fast. It also has formidable claws, and despite the dramatic yellow and black markings it has mastered the art of not being seen.

Can you spot the lizard? Finding lizards can be like a cross between Pokemon Go and Where's Waldo. 

Most whiptails are in a fearsome hurry, but this one was surprisingly cooperative about being photographed.

We had to go on an expedition to the back country to find whiptails for this article. This species is a California Species of Special Concern, and can only be found in a few locations in the Santa Monica Mountains. It was May, and we witnessed a strange and wonderful thing, the mating dance of the whiptail, which involved a sort of fencing match, followed by Sumo wrestling. By now, the eggs will have hatched, and a new generation of whiptails will be embarking on the dangerous life of the lizard.

Coastal whiptails engage in a complex mating dance. This photo was taken in Triunfo Canyon in May on 2016.

We never expected to find a legless lizard for this article, but I had high hopes for finding the seventh species, the coast horned lizard, Phrynosoma blainvillii, also known as Blainville's horned lizard.

When I was a child, horned lizards were common in Malibu. I vividly remember the first one I ever saw. It was at the Paradise Cove Mobile Home Park. My friend's mother called us over to see it just outside the door of their Airstream. I was four years old, and enchanted. It looked exactly like one of the plastic dinosaurs I played with at home.

The Malibu Post never succeeded in tracking down a horned lizard for this article, but here's a wonderful image of the dinosaur-like Blainsville's horned lizard. Photo: USGS/Chris Brown

The horned lizard remained a personal favorite, but even so, I couldn't tell you when it began to disappear. Habitat loss and the mass invasion of the tiny Argentine ant, which displaced the native ants this lizard feeds on, are to blame for this this species ending up on the California Species of Special Concern list.

That's why it's ironic to me that after months of hunting for the once plentiful horned lizard to photograph for this blog post, I finally spotted one at Malibu Bluffs Park Open Space, right where the City of Malibu is planning to build new baseball diamonds.

The encounter left me with the uncomfortable feeling that  the day may be coming all too soon when this species will be joining the dinosaurs that it resembles, and that Malibu, in an effort to provide recreational facilities for the community, will be unintentionally hastening its demise.

Pokemon Go has taken the country by storm. A player in New York made headlines last month for reportedly "collecting them all."  It's great that the game is getting people out of doors, but here at the Malibu Post we could wish that our own real live amazing creatures are as valued and appreciated as the imaginary ones currently so highly prized.

Madeleine Ruthven: Poet of the Mountains

More than 70 years ago, poet Madeleine Ruthven captured the spirit  of the western Santa Monica Mountains in her poetry. Thanks to conservation efforts, that landscape has remained largely unchanged and still inspires with its rugged beauty.

In 1934, Hollywood screenwriter and poet Madeleine Ruthven wrote a slender pamphlet of poems titled Sondelius Came to the Mountains. In it she captured the austerely beautiful back country of the western Santa Monica Mountains and painted a vivid portrait of some of the area’s early 20th century pioneers. Today, the book provides a tantalizing glimpse into an otherwise mostly forgotten past.

A portrait of Madeleine Ruthven by legendary photographer Edward Weston. 

I first encountered Madeleine Ruthven in author Lawrence Clark Powell’s essay on living in Malibu called Ocean in View.  Powell stated that her poems describing the beauty and wildness of the western Santa Monica Mountains were one of the inspirations that brought him to Malibu. It would be years before I tracked down her poetry.  

While I was researching a feature article on Ruthven and her poetry for Anne Soble’s Malibu Surfside News in 2010, I found that Ruthven was a pioneer woman screenwriter, a celebrated poet, a Los Angeles intellectual in the early days of Hollywood, a progressive activist, and a victim of the relentless communist witch hunt of the McCarthy era. I was fascinated and continued to hunt for details, but they were frustratingly scarce.  

A poster for the 1934 film Shock, written by Ruthven. Image: IMDB

I found that Madeleine Bunch Ruthven was born in Iowa in 1894. In 1920, the US Census lists Madeleine, 26, living in Houston, Texas with husband Sam D. Ruthven, 35, born in Louisiana, and Ormond B. Ruthven, son, aged 10. 

Sometime during the 1920s, Ruthven moved to Hollywood. She wrote title cards for silent movies, story treatments and screenplays for 16 film projects.

A studio still from the 1927 film Riders of the Dark, directed and written by W.S. Van Dyke, known as One-Take Willy. Ruthven wrote the title cards for this film. Image: IMDB

In the late ’20s, she wrote several westerns, including The Frontiersman. Unfortunately, this film like so many from the silent era, is lost. She also has  credits for writing title cards, an essential part of the silent era storytelling process.

A still of actress Claire Windsor sharing a pensive moment with her horse from the MGM film The Frontiersman. A handful of studio stills are all that is left of this 1927 silent western. Ruthven shares a story credit for this film with Ross Willis. The film was directed by the prolific Canadian-born filmmaker Reginald Barker. Image: MGM Studios

Ruthven published two collections of poetry during the 1930s. Most of the poems first appeared in Rob Wagner's Script, a weekly literary and film magazine that Ruthven contributed to regularly. However, there is little record of her as poet or film writer in the papers of the time. Just a party in 1937 honoring English poet and novelist Ralph Bates, where she rubbed shoulders with celebrated writer William Saroyan and a glowing review of her first collection of poems, Summer Denial, published in 1932, written by journalist and activist Reuben Borough, whom she would later marry. 

Summer Denial is a bleak but compelling collection of poems. There's just one note of levity, and that's a malediction entitled "To a Victorious Rival":

Daughter of a limpet,
Sister of a leech,
Triumphant as a fungus
On a blasted peach,
To you the palm of victory,
Crown of laurel, too!
(They tell me laurel's poison,
And I hope to God it's true!) 

In the 1940 US Census, Ruthven is divorced and sharing a residence  in Beverly Hills with artist and studio architectural researcher Herta Uerkvitz. Both women were blacklisted by the House Un-American activities committee in the  McCarthy era. 

Herta was an artist, poet and an architectural studio researcher. Like Madeleine, she was blacklisted. Herta appeared before the House Un-American committee on September 20, 1951. She took the 5th, rather than incriminate herself. 

According to Robert Vaughn, in his book Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting, Ruthven was denounced by "Mrs Meta Reis Rosenberg, former head of the literary department of Berg-Allenberg," who "introduced into the ‘Red’ record Ruthven 'ex-writer and CP Functionary in Hollywood and its environs.'" 

By the 1930s, Ruthven had switched from writing Westerns to police dramas. This 1936 thriller was directed by Charles Barton. Image: Wikipedia

The 1936 film The Accusing Finger, a detective story about a man wrongly accused of murder, is Ruthven's last film credit. The title seems perversely appropriate in light of the ordeal the writer would face during the McCarthy Era. Image: IMDB.

Unlike many victims of the Hollywood witchhunt, Ruthven appears to really have been a member of the Communist Party. She was also a member of the Women's Shopping League, a socialist organization that promoted consumer and worker safety and opposed war profiteering. 

Ruthven may never have worked in Hollywood again as a writer, but being on the black list didn't prevent her from continuing to work as a political and social justice activist.

She married journalist and fellow progressive activist Reuben Borough in the 1950s, after the death of Borough's first wife.  Borough set several of Madeleine's poems to music, according to documents held by UCLA, but no additional collections of poetry appear to have ever been published. 

Madeleine Ruthven with Reuben Borough (left) and a mystery man during Borough's unsuccessful 1946 campaign for Congress. The couple married some years after the death of Borough's first wife. Borough died in 1970, Ruthven in 1978. Image: USC Digital Library.

There's no record that I could find of when Ruthven visited Malibu. She must have come often in the early years when the newly constructed Roosevelt Highway first opened the area to visitors and adventurers. The finding aid for the Borough's collection lists letters from her that contain pressed flowers. There may be wealth of information on the Santa Monica Mountains within those boxes. She certainly knew the area well and loved it.

A large swath of the western Santa Monica Mountains remain largely unspoiled by development thanks to decades of conservation activism. This is a spring view from the Mishe Mokwa trail that leads to Sandstone Peak, the highest point in the mountains. Photo © S. Guldimann

“Oh wild and lovely country! I am beginning to know you,” Ruthven wrote, describing the “white fire” of the yucca, the “golden tarweed, burned by the summer sun,” and canyons “veiled in a haze of mist-gray sage.”

When she first explored the mountains, they were a true wilderness, roadless and remote. Malibu and the western portion of the Santa Monica Mountains were accessible to the public for the first time only in 1929, when Roosevelt Highway—today’s Pacific Coast Highway—opened.

Massive Balance Rock, a local landmark and popular hiking destination, looks just the same today as it did in Ruthven's time.

Ruthven celebrates a landscape of unspoiled vistas, abundant wildlife, caves that still contained Chumash pictographs, springs of water that were not only safe to drink but provided the only source of water for miles, and the rugged individuals who were the first since the Chumash to make the mountains their home.

Today, the backcountry attracts crowds hikers, bikers and rock climbers, but an early riser can still find the solitude that Ruthven and the settlers she described rejoiced in.

According to Ruthven, Dagon Sondelius was one who loved solitude. He once owned the ridge—600 acres of land—and lived in a cabin made of sheet metal:

 On the crest of Boney Mountain
Where the parapet breaks
And all the world is spread like a map below.

Melted glass from a wildfire glitters on a stark outcropping of stone off Yerba Buena Road. The mountains are filled with evidence of old homesteads reclaimed by fire and repopulated by nature. 

According to Ruthven, Sondelius kept goats and made a hobby of collecting bottles. He was dead by the age of 30, but his goats lived on, veterans of a fire that reduced the cabin to ashes and melted Sondelius’s collection of glass into shapes of “strange fluidity.”

No trace remains now of cabin, but the view still spreads out at one's feet. On a clear day, one can see a panorama of mountains—the San Gabriels, the Topa Topas, and the Channel Islands—the farthest reach the Santa Monica Mountains—with the Pacific stretching away to the horizon.

I like to think this might have been where Sondelius lived. There are the remains of a cabin at this site, and just as it did then, "the world spreads out like a map below."

Other Boney Ridge characters described by Ruthven include Mary La Touche, an Irish woman who came west from Kansas with her husband to homestead in Big Sycamore Canyon, carrying all of her possessions and a month-old child over the rugged spine of the mountains during the heat of summer on pack mules and horses.

La Touche loved the backcountry and kept an inland cabin on Boney Ridge. In summer, when the springs dried up, water had to be carried in by pack mule.

A large section of the backcountry described in Ruthven's poetry has been preserved as part of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, including Bony Ridge, Balance Rock and Echo Cliffs. 

When Ruthven knew her, La Touche,“weatherbeaten and rugged as the land,” still roamed the mountains on her mule, Benny, who was:

...Twenty years old, 

As spoiled as a child, 

And sleek as a cardinal's jennet...

There is scarcely a spot in these hills

Where Benny and Mary La Touche 

Have not traveled...

This is a small section of the epic expanse of shear rock shown in the panorama photo. Instead of homesteaders, shepherds and prospectors, hikers and climbers now flock to Echo Cliffs. 

One of the anecdotes presented by Ruthven is an account of La Touche, her five-year-old son Edward and fellow pioneer Walter Haines who became lost in a maze of arroyos while exploring Triunfo Canyon. They spent a cold and uncomfortable winter night on a boulder above the raging floodwaters in the creek without food or blankets. It was almost night on the following day when they finally found their way home.

Haines, a refugee from the city, lived in a tin shack in a canyon “Where trees grow, and a spring trickles,/ And a gray cat purrs in the doorway. 

In Ruthven's time, the residents of the area called the massive stone “face” above Trifuno Canyon “Walt’s Old Woman,” in honor of the canyon hermit.

Ruthven knew Edward La Touche at 15, “competent, strong, unhurried,” a “true child of the hills.” The La Touches, mother and son, arranged horses for Ruthven and guided her and other visitors through the mountains.

Luxuries like paved roads, water and electricity began to arrive in the Malibu back country in the 1930s. This last bastion of wide open spaces still appeals to individualists who enjoy solitude, dark skies and wildlife for neighbors. Self-sufficiency remains key. Emergencies like fires and rockslides are frequent and cell phone reception undependable. The roads are narrow and steep, and while mule teams have been replaced with SUVs, there are still no quick routes out of the mountains.

Ruthven’s poems appear to provide the only surviving record of the rugged mountain characters like Sondelius, the La Touches, and Walter Haines. The names may have been changed but it's clear that they were real people, members of the tough and self-sufficient homesteader community who carved out a precarious life for themselves, a sort of corner of the wild west, without roads, electricity or running water, in the early years of the 20th century.

She also provides a description of fire in the mountains, and its after effect on the environment and the people who made the area their home.

In her poem Mountain Fire, Ruthven describes a wildfire that traveled almost the same route taken by the 2013 Springs Fire. It's a pattern of destruction and regrowth that has occurred over and over. I took this photo of Boney Ridge just days after the 2013 fire. Photo © 2016 S. Guldiman

Mountain Fire

When we came to the crest of Boney Mountain

All the lower hills and the sea were hidden

Under a cloud of fog.

Mountains and valleys and plains of cloud

Glistening pearl in the moonlight.

We turned to the north and east.

Sixty miles away we saw the mountains burning

In Santa Barbara and Ojai—

White plumes of smoke billowing over the ridges,

And a black wall of smoke,

Smooth and solid as basalt,

Thrust seaward into the horizon.

They have known fire in Yerba Buena, too,

They have faced fire and survived

Stripped and scarred, but still alive,

Ready to begin anew.

Two years ago fire came here.

It licked the thick brush from the high hills,

And filled the canyon with flame.

It leaped from the great parapet of Boney Mountain

And swept the slopes below.

The hill people fled before it.

They left the roads, arched with fire,

And followed the wild things

Seeking safety in the water courses.

The fire roared after

And did not pause in its ravening

Until it came to the sea's edge.

Then the folk went back to the blackened smoking hills.

They had nothing left but their courage

And the stoic strength of the harsh land

Under their feet.

They had no assurance

Save the promise of the rain

And the surety of the seasons

To bring life back again.

They went back—

They belong to the hills.

I revisited the Springs Fire in the spring of 2014. Although it was a severe drought year with little rain, the damage from the fire was already beginning to disappear, even without "the promise of rain." Photo © 2016 S. Guldimann

The people Ruthven described are gone, but if she were alive today she would find the area around Boney Ridge that she lovingly described in verse still recognizable. Her voice remains alive in the poetry that reveals her deep love for the Santa Monica Mountains.

This was the summer when I came to know,

After long years,

My love for these brown hills,

And learned the peace

Their stony harshness brings,

And felt their beauty singing in my blood.

Now in October, warm and dusty-hazed,

I wait serenely for the winter rains

To fill the parched and stony waterways,

Knowing that Spring will follow

In a blaze—

Green fire of grass,

Blue flame of lupin bloom,

And poppies burning on the bare hillsides.

Poppies still bloom on the bare hillsides in spring. Photo © 2016 S. Guldimann

Sondelius Came to the Mountains is out of print and can be hard to find-apparently only 200 copies were printed by the Primavera Press in 1934-but the book occasionally turns up second-hand.

The mountains that inspired Ruthven’s poems are still right here in Malibu’s backyard, and continue to invite exploration and reflection.

Although development has engulfed the valley below and made inroads on the once remote wilderness, the peaks are preserved as part of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, created by an act of Congress in 1978, the year Madeleine Ruthven died, and nearly 50 years after her book celebrating the mountains was published. Yerba Buena Road still invites the traveler to explore Ruthven's mountains. Photo © 2016 S. Guldimann