Tumbleweeds, Bees, and Trees: History Turning Into Nature

When I was a kid, although I was surrounded by square miles of tract houses, tumbleweeds would appear on my street in the fall, blown from the Edison right-of-way to the north of my house or from decrepit pastures in Dairy Valley (soon to be sold off for more houses and renamed Cerritos).

With the wind obsessed tumbleweeds, a cliché of the West rolled into my suburban neighborhood to fetch up against a front yard fence, skitter across South Street in the slanting afternoon light, and move on to somewhere. I expected to hear the Sons of the Pioneers singing in mournful harmony of being "lonely but free" drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the no longer lonely tumbleweeds of my boyhood have grown to become an "infestation" at the end this drought year. What is commonplace in the dry places of the West -- and once iconic -- has become a threat in Los Angeles. Homeowners in valley and foothill neighborhoods are supposed to be under siege from weeds.

"There is an established brush-clearance program in place and we expect homeowners to maintain defensible space around their property year-round," Kevin Johnson, assistant chief of the L.A. County Fire Department's Forestry Division, told the Times. The weeds are "tumbling kindling."

Tumbleweeds -- also called Russian thistle -- are undocumented immigrants. They appeared in the late 1870s in South Dakota, according to some accounts, and in North Dakota and Nebraska by 1880, rolling every autumn before the prevailing winds until tumbleweeds grew wherever over grazed range and abandoned farmland gave them the edge.

By 1885 the weed had reached California, naturalized, and opportunistically crowded out native weeds.

The tumbleweed's short history has turned into our urban nature. And like so much of that nature, we're anxious about losing control of it. Part of our concern may be how ephemeral, insubstantial, knocked together, and easily knocked down Los Angeles seems to so many of us. A place with tumbleweed in place of a heart.

A good breeze was blowing from the south on Sunday morning. Where I live, south is the direction to the sea. It was cool after so many hot days and nights that seemed to kill any sign of life in my neighborhood. The possums and feral cats had lain low. Even the jays, mockingbirds, and crows had been missing.

Sunday was the first true day of our temporary autumn (until the hot, dry Santa Anas begin later in October).

Hummingbirds, which seem more present this year, made aggressive tack, tack, tack calls overhead, warning off interlopers with the sound of tiny machine guns. Bees were at work in the Brazilian pepper trees that the county long ago planted on my street. Only a few have held out all these years to flower in their season.

The bees worked the crowns of the pepper trees with a sound loud enough to be annoying on an otherwise quiet morning. The urgency of their work shook down spent flowers in a steady rain that ringed each tree with a circle of pale yellow debris. There were drifts of it where walkers and their dogs had scuffed through.

I was comforted by the bees after so many warnings of their disappearance, even though the hard bits the bees shook down had to be brushed repeatedly from my hair.

The eucalyptus trees at the end of my block are briefly nude this time of year. The green has mostly gone from the new bark, which has turned a pale tan. In a few months that will change to brown, and strips of this year's bark will fall next winter into gutters or blow onto the front yards of the houses opposite.

Eucalyptus trees shed throughout the year, dropping bark, oily leaves, and sometimes whole branches. They are protectors and perpetrators of an ecology of fire in their native Australia. In alien Southern California, homeowners sweep up the kindling and hope the fire doesn't come.

Not tumbleweeds, eucalyptus trees, Brazilian peppers, or even the bees in them on Sunday morning are native to my block, and yet they are all part of the nature through which I walk. They are as native to me as my memories.

As personal and impersonal histories turn into nature, a kind of intelligence emerges within the affective space each of us inhabits. We have a capacity for this awareness, mapped on the brain's hippocampus by aptly named "place cells" with the aid of a class of memory molecules we share with rats, fruit flies, and even snails.

Other brain structures -- called "grid cells" -- seem to provide a framework for integrating motion with position. Rats have that framework.

With this apparatus -- subtly joined to brain centers for pleasure and avoidance -- we navigate an affective space in which ambient nature, recollection, and habit are integrated. "The city and my body supplement and define each other," wrote Juhani Pallasmaa in "The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses." "I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me."

It's nature's city.