On the Ramparts of Change in Ojai

The Chumash Indians gave the Ojai Valley its first, and most enduring, identity: They believed that the Spirit had endowed this place with such special beauty that it should be open to all people seeking peace. The Chumash imposed only one condition for visitors to this mountain-ringed Shangri-La: Leave your weapons at the pass.

Centuries later, the inhabitants of this mystical place 80 miles north of Los Angeles are deeply puzzled and increasingly disturbed by rumblings from the other side of the mountains. Growth is inching up on us, and we have been looking for ways to defend ourselves.

Carl Sandburg tells us that the fog comes on little cat feet, and we suspect that growth does, too. To attempt to stop growth entirely in cases such as ours has proved impossible. Our task may well lie just in taming the creature.

Valley residents have reason to be proud of their response to environmental challenges in the past. Despite the persistent efforts of Caltrans, the Ojai freeway up from the coast did not come about, and a polluting industrial plant at the entrance to the valley was forced to shut down. Oil rigs do not desecrate Sulphur Mountain, nor did U.S. Gypsum start mining its stake in Los Padres National Forest.

Recently, Caltrans proposed an English-style roundabout to decongest the intersection of Highways 33 and 150. The City Council chamber was packed for the meeting of worried citizens. There was heat and some light: One citizen, familiar with the roundabout in England, reported that the design works well--provided drivers are courteous and willing to yield to one another.

The Ojai Valley exerts a kind of magic on those who enter. During the teen years of this century, Edward Drummond Libbey, the millionaire glass maker from Ohio, came west in his Packard limousine and decided to stay in this sleepy California village. Grateful for what he found here, Libbey in return gave Ojai its signature buildings--the Post Office tower, the Arcade and the St. Thomas Aquinas Chapel--and thereby changed the place forever.

Benefactors still come to the Ojai Valley. Ten years ago a retired Army major general, Frank Norris, joined the effort to “channel growth pressures to public good” in the Piedmont area of northern Virginia. Now an Ojai Valley resident, Norris has been sharing some of the hard-won lessons he learned in Virginia. He says that there are three categories crucial in controlling growth: first, a local press that is aware and speaks out on the challenge presented; second, legal sufficiency in the form of zoning ordinances and the like, and, finally, political clout. We are rich in all three.

Recently I spent time with Ojai’s mayor, Frank McDevitt, a flinty, scrappy man whose commitment to the valley is total. We talked for a while at that place beneath Ojai’s arcade where, time allowing, His Honor meets the voters.

Had I heard about the patriarch of a Ventura County family who recently sold hundreds of rich agricultural acres? It used to be planted in strawberries. Soon, we predict, that land will sprout condominiums and shopping centers, all because the price per acre was impossible to turn down. Will our ranchers up here in the valley be able to resist temptation?

McDevitt is active in the Southern California Assn. of Governments, so he knows well that, like it or not, even we far-flung communities are connected to the problems of all. Air pollution can visit any of us on the afternoon breeze. Traffic is mobile, too.

As cars and trucks backed up on the street in front of us, our talk turned to the roundabout, which would be the first of its kind in America. We recalled the Chumash custom of requiring visitors to leave their weapons at the pass.

“If the visitors to our valley can’t manage to drop their hostility and aggression at our roundabout,” McDevitt said with a laugh, “we’ll just have to let them go round and round until they’re headed home.”

It is an amusing thought, but the last word in any discussion of the Ojai Valley’s future must belong to a resident who speaks for the past. Vincent Tumamait is a direct descendant of the original Chumash and highly regarded as a gentle leader. He presides at ceremonies and gatherings and also speaks to the schoolchildren of the old ways in the valley, the ways of peace.

“Let me know that my only enemies are within myself,” is part of a Chumash prayer that Tumamait speaks on every occasion.

As conservators of this sacred valley, we must learn that Ojai’s true enemies are within ourselves: apathy, greed and lack of feeling for the land.