Natal Aesthetic

This is another post for today’s collective blogging endeavor at the Ecotone Wiki.

I travel with the image of the place I grew up in. The house—built on a slope, with five half-levels descending from the front entrance, stairs opening to a church-like living room resplendent in wood, beams peaking to ceiling nearly twenty feet tall, the deck at back overlooking a little canyon where I could scramble and slide to the creek below through toyon and fallen oak leaves with spines that always got you. The streets winding along the contours of the hills, interconnected by many dozens of paths cutting straight down, their steps often now warped and broken by the processes of soil creep and tectonic movement. And a canyon but twenty minutes away on foot where I could walk in solitude and wildness for hours and miles. It is a walker’s landscape, a landscape where the winter greening of the ridge across the canyon from my grammar school spoke of possibilities—not to mention hikes where boots would get all sticky with clay.

The Berkeley Hills landscape I describe, I now know came about through an early twentieth-century aesthetic and image of place, the Arts and Crafts movement finding its way into California architecture and urban design. The house I grew up in was designed by Bernard Maybeck, whose work stressed organic form. Maybeck was an important figure in Bay Area architecture and a founding member of the Berkeley Hillside Club which had a large role in the layout of the streets and houses of North Berkeley. The paths of Berkeley, which I would follow on innumerable meanders, were an integral part of an urban landscape designed before the popularity of the automobile, their role being to provide rapid pedestrian access to the electric trolleys of the Key Route System running up the several main streets into the hills. And though many battles would be fought along the way, something about the culture of this aesthetic movement together with the nascent environmentalism of John Muir and kindred souls would eventually ferment in the remarkable preservation of so much open space in the Bay Area.

I carry this image with me; indeed it defines the sort of place I aspire to live in. A house, not a large one, built with character and craft. Places to roam—a walker’s landscape, not one solely for the automobile. Nature, both in the backyard and nearby. Hills to climb, cycle up, and cycle down. And when I fancy myself an inheritor of the Arts and Crafts tradition, I needn’t look far from home to realize why.