Wherever you grew up, whether in the Ojai Valley or elsewhere, how many of the surrounding street names besides your own did you know? If you’re like most people, probably not many. The streets are just fixtures of your community, so a detail as minor as the name is unimportant compared to the fact that your friend lives one street over and your school is at the end of another street five minutes away. Riverview Trailhead seems to be a similar fixture in this community.

When I am studying to live up to the title of botanist, I will flip through the names of thousands of plants. What a thing to know, what an expectation for myself to understand! I fumble for genus names, species names, and subspecies. What are their defining characteristics? What detail must I see? Is it the millimeter difference of a bract, or the width and shape of a leaf? Glume, petal, sheath? Answered with study, ruler, and belief. These questions are sought in the heavy Jepson Manual, where the observations of phytophile build upon one another. More importantly, they are found when I kneel before these small cotyledons, exchange the gift of breath, and something less methodical presents itself to blanket the grief of misunderstanding.

Sun shifts through the colossal skeletons of cottonwoods, leaves awaken, erupt. Like ancient text upon crisp paper, soil horizons inches thick enclose seed. Encoded within their furrowed coats are spirits with knowledge deeper than Miocene kelp forests. Piercing light through translucent green foliage greets the soil, welcoming emerging seedlings who carpet the brambled floor. The air thick with the scent of emergence, the anticipation of spring within lignin. We may have never walked across the silty lakeshores of the Pliocene; however, our footsteps make indentations within the Earth in an everlasting, parallel manner.