In 2016, Nick Neely walked for twelve weeks from San Diego to San Francisco to retrace the first overland Spanish expedition into what’s now the state of California. Led by Captain Gaspar de Portolá, a party of about sixty-three men and their mule train set out on July 14, 1769, in search of the fabled harbor of Monterey, which had been glowingly described by the explorer Sebastián Vizcaíno in 1602. The expedition didn’t quite recognize Monterey Bay, so the men continued on and, as result, “discovered” the San Francisco Bay on November 4 before turning back. Referencing the detailed journals of Franciscan Padre Juan Crespí, Neely left the San Diego International Airport with his backpack on July 14 and walked north at the Portolá expedition’s pace, camping where it had night by night. The following is an excerpt from the resulting book, Alta California, which will be published by Counterpoint Press on November 5, 2019, on the quarter-millennial anniversary of the expedition’s sighting of San Francisco Bay. Here he enters Irvine.
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Past Mission Viejo, past Lake Forest, I walked Irvine Boulevard with an oily grapefruit in my pocket, one I had picked from an overhanging limb in a neighborhood behind me. The road ran through leafy commercial parks, and then, as if emerging from a tunnel of civilization, was suddenly entirely exposed and unfinished on a bare plain that swept south toward the San Joaquin Hills on the coast near Laguna. A white feather lay on a bedrock shoulder, where a sidewalk would exist soon, and I imagined it would become a fossil, the wet slurry entombing its vanes and barbs for others to find in thousands of years, though in truth the concrete would last only a short while.
Beyond a fence was a vast dirt field, once chaparral, and then ranchland, and then Marine Corps Air Station El Toro. Decommissioned in 1999, it was now awaiting houses on its northern fringe, though enormous hangars still loomed. Probably you could see this empty lot and its dust from space. The eight- and ten-thousand-foot tarmacs would look like an enormous cross laid on the land. In the distance, in front of the seaside hills, was a cluster of high-rises — the Irvine Spectrum — and an enormous orange globe. Turns out this is a balloon in Great Park, a developing recreational park of over six hundred acres on the old El Toro land. Thirty passengers at a time can ride the balloon four hundred feet into the air for a forty-mile view on a clear day. Walking along the chain-link between me and those raw miles, I began to imagine all this hard- and soft-scaping as nothing but coastal scrub and chaparral, nothing but coyote brush with white-crowned sparrows and towhees erupting from sprays of pungent green; all twists of manzanita with Anna’s hummingbirds zipping through to draw from bell-shaped flowers.
The land that is Irvine was consolidated by brothers Benjamin and Thomas Flint, their cousin Llewllyn Bixby, and another partner, James Irvine, a San Francisco merchant. Together they bought Rancho San Joaquin, Rancho Lomas de Santiago, and some of Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana, in total eight miles of oceanfront and one hundred ten thousand acres. Like many others, they bought when the 1860s drought wreaked havoc on Mexican-American rancheros. It was a period when there was a major turnover in ownership. At the same time the Civil War generated a demand for wool, so the Flints and Bixby wanted to expand their sheep business, centered around Monterey, to Southern California. Irvine bought out the others in 1876, and the Irvine Company was formed by his son in 1894, not long after Orange County was established. So began the transition from grazing to growing. Beans, barley, and corn; then celery, cabbage, peas, and lettuce. Finally citrus groves went in. All of it created a demand for water that led to the building of reservoirs that now feed homes.
When Los Angeles suburbs bumped up against the ranch, the Irvine Company began to focus on development, at first mainly around Newport Bay. The completion of Disneyland in 1955 and the Santa Ana Freeway further shifted attention from Los Angeles and decentralized the region to the company’s advantage. From 1950 to 1960, Orange County’s population more than tripled to seven hundred four thousand people. At that moment, the University of California also decided to build a new campus, and the company smartly donated a thousand acres for UC Irvine, around which they developed a comprehensive master plan for “a garden city”: a self-sufficient community of interspersed housing, business districts, and open space. The architect, William Pereira, claimed to want to avoid vast parking lots and instead “restore the land to the pedestrian” by lacing it with neighborhood and regional parks. The Irvine Company and others like the Mission Viejo Company imagined they were pushing back on mass-produced, amenity-poor suburbs. Of course there was nothing but money in it, too. The houses were twice as expensive as others in the county and were tailored toward white, upper-middle-class families. Ultimately, for all its gardens, you could argue that at heart Irvine is inefficient suburban sprawl. But people moved in and led rich lives. The Irvine Company is still developing and the population of Orange County is 3.2 million.
Not far from where the Portolá expedition had camped, a Portola Court was springing up between Still Night Street and Irvine Boulevard. Only the corner condos were finished, the rest still in plywood, as if the colony was spreading from an artesian well. Crimson bottlebrush grew on the newly mulched embankment. An advertising banner hung on the noise-canceling wall of textured cinder block and plate glass offered an enormous bird-of-paradise flower. Here was paradise. You could look in, see your future residence. From within, you could look over Irvine Boulevard toward the blinding orange over the ocean. Stacks of tile on the roofs. A construction worker had spray-painted a figure on one plywood wall: two nippled boobs, an hourglass waist, a smiley face. The future owners would never know of this hieroglyph. Across Still Night, behind a row of pines, was a genuine orange grove, one of the last.
As I walked up Still Night, two coyotes began to howl and cackle and the orange in the sky turned a certain ripe intensity and began to rot into the horizon. Eeh, eh, eeeh, eh, one called very close by. Something so hyena in the tenor of the trickster. I crossed the street to try to find them and from the sidewalk looked down at a vacant corner lot, a depression below the road overgrown with brush and grass. At least for this day, they had denned here. Eeh, eh, eeeh, eh. The dogs erupted in reply. A glass door slid open beyond a wall, a man said to his dog: “Get inside — be quiet!” I would have been barking too. One coyote moved into view, then another. They looked directly toward the lava sun as it disappeared. This was their hour; they could gauge the time precisely. Their noses worked the breeze. Cottontails scattered as I moved a few steps closer, and the coyotes heard me, it seems, because they quieted. They looked right at or past me, standing as only a dog can, so still and so comfortably, listening, and then trotted into the grass for a veil. They lay down. One was skinny and mangy, and through my binoculars, I saw it begin to gnaw on its irritated skin as if it wanted its own marrow. It snapped after a fly, twice. I thought of my own dog, Patches. She does that. In my mind, I heard the clack of the jaw. Between the coyote’s ear tips and its nose, you could draw a perfect triangle. Young sycamores were trained to stakes at the lot’s edges, and just fifteen feet from the road, the coyotes sat under them waiting for the cottontails or the night, whichever came first.
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At dusk I reached Tomato Springs, also known as Portola Springs, also once called the Springs of San Pantaleon by Crespí. The martyrologies tell that, in the fourth century, Pantaleon was a physician to the Roman emperor before he was convinced that Christ was the one true physician. “What use are all thy acquirements in this art, since thou art ignorant of the science of Salvation?” he was asked by a priest. He healed several on faith alone and was ordered to die for this magic. He was burned, scalded with molten lead, drowned in the ocean, given over to beasts, stretched on a wheel — in each case, Christ intervened. When the executioner’s sword bent on his neck, the headsman was converted instantly. It was only when Pantaleon welcomed the sword that his head fell and milk flowed instead of blood.
These milk and honey springs, Tomato Springs, were hidden in a cleft below a hillock at the very edge of Irvine’s development, which I suppose is civilization as we imagine it. A little oasis of green announced the water. Beyond was the Foothill Toll Road and, above that, a wilderness or former rangeland depending on your perspective, the Limestone Canyon Nature Preserve, which the Irvine Company opens to the public only for docent-led tours. Beside the spring was a cul-de-sac of freestanding condos three deep. A small rush-grown creek was channeled between levees behind these homes, and a rusted pedestrian bridge crossed over Portola Parkway for speed-walkers and mothers with their strollers.
I had thought to camp farther from the road and the springs, but was deterred by a taut barbwire fence and another PRIVATE PROPERTY sign. So from the walking path, I went up the short knoll above the springs, where I found something: a Portolá historical marker. Many of them are unmapped and unmentioned, and it felt good to have found this one by intuition. There was just enough room to put down a pad at the top. I slung down my pack immediately so that it would seem as if I had just come to this minor prominence for the view. No tent tonight; it would be too conspicuous. It was the kind of spot that teenagers might seek out to drink beer or make love on an old quilt: an endless view of Orange County with the ambient light of the city sifting down.
Across patches of darkness that in a year or two might be lit and filled with homes, the horizon twinkled. To the southwest was the Ferris wheel at the Irvine Spectrum, lit alternately purple and blue and red as it revolved through my binoculars, as well as two neon buildings like something out of Las Vegas. The great balloon of Great Park glowed just as the sun had as it descended into the unseen ocean moments ago. Darkness fell and Portola Parkway below me became an alley of incandescent globes only rarely guiding a car, each with a different shush.
Then in the great distance, far to the north, fireworks erupted: Disneyland. It must have been. Dandelion clocks lifted on the horizon and broke apart; heart-shaped pink arrays, sideways stars, and missile streaks. This was where I would go tomorrow, so far away that the fireworks looked minuscule and I could blot them with a finger. Still, they were uplifting. The show was long, fuzzy in my binoculars. The thud of the explosions was soft, friendlier than the practice mortars of Camp Pendleton. Eventually a fountain of light, the finale, a bouquet that illuminated its own smoke cloud, which must have covered the city for miles. Nothing more to see. I began to rub the dirt from between my toes, but the booming continued in the darkness. Continued for longer than I could believe before it rose to a crescendo and finally died. If thunder travels a mile every five seconds, then I was looking fifteen or twenty miles into my future.
•
Coyotes in the night. I had heard them cackling faintly, and now I pulled out my earplugs and transferred my batteries from my recorder to my flashlight in case the pack preferred this hill and I would need to ward them off. Kneeling in my sleeping bag, I saw their shapes, their motions . . . vague in the city glow. There must have been three or four within a hundred feet, and they were calling tremulously to the ones I had seen earlier a half mile off. But they silenced, and I put my earplugs back in, and my body filled with warmth. They broke into an uproar one more time, but I didn’t budge, just opened and closed my eyes.
Beeping woke me in the morning, two-toned: Uh-uh, Uh-uh. Beeping and the ratchet of tractor plates. The yips of coyotes and cries of machinery bookend suburbia. I opened my eyes and the world was sideways: a long post of green and brown against a thick wall of ashen blue. Earthmovers were working in each direction, grading and clearing. The tanker trucks were suppressing the dust with fans of water behind them. When I opened my pack, ants were crawling over everything; they encircled the grapefruit like miners on an oily planet, searching for a seam.
The Irvine horizon brightened to a dirty lilac. I sat on the low sandstone outcrop that had thrown an extra half hour of shade on my sleeping bag and spread Jiffy on a raisin bagel with the handle of a broken plastic knife. Each house below had a black panel on its roof, a thermal water heater, I thought, to bolster their showers. Trash day: green and blue bins curbside. More joggers on Portola Parkway. A California gnatcatcher, a bird threatened by these suburbs, popped to the crown of a sagebrush and flicked its long tail with a wheeze as it darted after gnats, aphids, other sage insects. Gnatcatchers twitch between islands of brush, sometimes ascending through the weave to look out from a sprig. Blue-gray with a dark forehead. As I began the day’s walk, I kicked open a dried coyote scat and big seeds rattled across the concrete path. I wondered if last night’s pack was bedded down now in these Tomato Springs.
“Happy summer,” I said to a boy on his silver Razor scooter.
“Thanks,” he said.
“How you doing?” I asked an older Indian gentleman strolling under a red “Monaco” ball cap with his hands behind his back.
“Very good morn,” he replied without a smile.
A FOR SALE sign in front of a Portola Springs home had the last word: “I’m gorgeous inside.”
•
After a respite at the oasis that is Starbucks, I walked down City Stroll alongside Mission Bell and hung a left on Iceberg Rose — which wins some kind of award, as street names go — to Nature. Nature Street looked quite similar to City Stroll. Soon I was on Arboretum, which was mainly planted with eucalyptus. A girl pedaled by, said, “Hold on tight, here we go,” to the stuffed animal belted to her handlebars. On a ball field, under some outfield trees, a counselor was feeding Wiffle balls underhand, from about eight feet, to boys hunched over a rubber plate. Finally, his bucket emptied. “You can pick’m up, and water break,” he said. “Water break, Team Awesome. Water break.” The kids scrambled. The counselor stooped to snatch a sycamore fruit, a hairy pompom, out of the grass, and he hit it with his fungo bat, ping, harder than any of his protégés had swung. We watched it sail, the original Wiffle ball.
A real tomato spring is at the corner of Bryan Avenue and Jeffrey Road, a fruit stand lined with sunflowers on a seven-acre urban farm. That is more or less all that remains of agriculture in Irvine. In the nineteenth century, James Irvine gradually converted his grazing land to crops, starting with thirty-one thousand acres of barley. Lima beans also thrived and, in 1911, he boasted that he had “the largest bean field, under one management, in the world.” He laid thirty miles of concrete pipe to raise rhubarb, artichokes, celery, potatoes, and corn; to grow walnut, olive, and citrus groves. Thirty-eight hundred acres of Valencia orange were ripening on the ranch by 1938. But by the forties, agriculture began to give way to development. Come World War II, some of Irvine’s best bean fields became El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. About two hundred fifty seven thousand acres were farmed in Orange County in 1946. Now only seven thousand remain.
Long tables held pints of varicolored tomatoes. I asked after the sweetest cherries. “Either of these,” said Juan, “try them.” “Mmm,” I said. “They’re both good.” For over twenty years, the owner of this farm had been growing organic vegetables on this plot leased from the Church of Latter-day Saints next door. But organic farming in Irvine is a battle. Last fall, a coyote took a single bite out of twenty to thirty watermelons each night. A single bite. The farmers propped a mannequin in a truck, they set up spotlights, they ordered wolf urine off the internet and sprinkled it around. Nothing worked. They also released sixty thousand predatory mites to combat the vegetarian mites that are bloodthirsty for strawberries. There is constant weeding. But the threat of development is the largest anxiety. Land is so valuable in Irvine that a farm can’t expect to lease or last forever.
Juan had a thin mustache like dark peach fuzz under an Under Armour ball cap. Most of his week was spent at farmers’ markets in Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, as far as Escondido near San Diego. “Do you live in Irvine?” I asked.
“No, it’s too expensive. I live in Anaheim.”
I asked about the Disneyland fireworks.
“Oh yeah, it starts around eight or nine. Every night. I used to live, like, right next to Disney. I couldn’t go to sleep, I used to hate it. It was really loud. Right next to Disneyland, but now I live a little bit farther.”
He asked me if I was going to go, and I replied, “Nah, I’ve already been to Legoland.” When I told him I was walking to San Francisco, he raised his eyebrows and let me have a basket of tomatoes, a purple plum, a cucumber, and a squash for three dollars. It was highway robbery. I asked him if he knew of Santiago Creek, where the Portolá expedition had camped next. He didn’t know it. Heading up the long sidewalk, I passed the farm’s rows of tomatoes with many fallen or tossed to the ground, melting wrinkled into the eager soil, doomed because of some blemish. But more hung on the vines: creamy green as they begin, then every slant of yellow, and finally scarlet. I toyed the skin of my sweet cherries between my teeth for miles.
•••
Nick Neely holds an MA in literature and environment from the University of Nevada, Reno, and MFAs in nonfiction and poetry from Hunter College and Columbia University. He is a recipient of PEN Northwest’s Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, a UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship, and an AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award. His first book, Coast Range, was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing. Originally from San Francisco Bay Area, he now lives in Hailey, Idaho, with his wife, the painter Sarah Bird.
From Alta California: From San Diego to San Francisco, A Journey on Foot to Rediscover the Golden State by Nick Neely. Used with permission of Counterpoint Press. Copyright © 2019 by Nick Neely.