Sneak Previews of Forthcoming Books of Special Interest to Southern Californians : At the Hollister Ranch

The following is from “The Ranch Papers: A California Memoir,” by Jane Hollister Wheelwright, to be published in July.

Hollister Ranch, north of Santa Barbara, was established by Wheelright’s grandfather, Col. William Welles Hollister; it was formerly a Spanish land grant. Upon the death of the author’s father in 1961, the family started selling the ranch. This excerpt was written on Aug. 27, 1963.

OLD ROAN DIED the day I arrived at the ranch after a trip to Europe. He dropped dead in his tracks on the beach, from heart failure. “I killed him,” the horse breaker said, with more emotion than I’d thought possible for him. The ranch people were saddened. They loved the horse quite as much as I did. His death, after the signs of his aging on our last trip together, showed clearer than ever that time was moving against us.

After the manicured green of Europe, the ranch seemed outside my reflex system, dwarfed, even provincial. I found little to say beyond how much I missed the roan and that the range was so very dry. But slowly and surely the pale bronze of the range stood out clear against the blue, blue sea. Where else was there such a sight? In the West the sun’s path made brilliant an already glistening sea. Five hours past noon, the sun in its nakedness was advancing. The slight shift toward its winter arc over the water was barely perceptible.

Then I had a new kind of experience that spoke further to the ending of our era. Instead of striking out overland with the roan, I flew by helicopter the length of the coastal ranch. The machine careened over the rough terrain because of conflicting updrafts. A pilot servicing the offshore oil platform had invited me up to see his bird’s-eye view of where I had lived so much of my life, the canyons and ridges I had been observing at such close range and describing in minute detail. We flew from Gaviota to Point Conception and back, stopping from time to time on the rounded tops of our coastal hills to give a close-up “eyeball” to important features, like our gasoline tank.

It was my first view of Point Conception from the sea. I could understand why Cabrillo had called it La Galera; it indeed looked like the galley prow of a Spanish ship. (Vizcaino later called it La Concepcion, because he passed by on Dec. 8, the day of Immaculate Conception, in 1602.)

This sight of Conception revealed what had been a lifelong secret. The bare, uncompromising, hardened, defiant promontory--a consequence of nature’s power--that had been seen from inland and on the map was diminished in size from the helicopter and made mysterious by the bleaching mist and thin fog. I had to interpret its meaning in the few moments that we hovered over it. It had been a great mystery to me: In Chumash legends, it was the point of departure of dead souls into the next world as they followed the sun to its death (and--if all went well--ultimate rebirth). It is called by many Indian tribes the Western Gate. Why?

In my mind’s eye it was a monster’s snout, its snuffling nostrils two large caves hollowed out by the violent sea charging round it all year long and by the unchecked winds up to and beyond 90 knots. Pawing the water into white foam, this great animal, like an angry old bull throwing earth into dust up over his back, refused to be moved; its bold thrust would hold its own.

We flew out beyond and over Point Conception at high noon, between shifts on the oil platform. The pilot told me about his morning passenger: the fellow who bought the Union platform and its company for a hundred million dollars. He had gone out to see what he’d got. It seemed that the pilot was glad to finally have an ordinary citizen with him.

The first look at our 23,000-acre coastal ranch from the air forced me to try to take it in all at once--no birds, no monkey-faced owls, no mice, no tender, tiny sage flowers, no coyotes. Reflection was entirely inhibited by the whirring roar of the machine and the heights. In one sweep: a lifetime of experience. And in that sweep, canyon after canyon looked alike. The prehistoric giant oaks were hardly more than nubbins--as if they could fit in the palm of my hand, as if I could put them in my pocket.

But the sight of the great curving ridge ending in Conception was, as the pilot said, “the point of the whole trip.” I could have ridden the ranch forever and never have seen what I did in one instant. That ranch had never really been ours. It belonged to a much bigger system than the Hollister family.

Copyright 1988 by The Lapis Press, San Francisco. Reprinted by permission.