Shangri-La Is in Our Hearts --and in Ojai

Some years ago, writing about a trip my wife and I took up the coast, I described the lovely valley between San Luis Obispo and Morro Bay as Shangri-La.

Shangri-La, of course, is the Tibetan valley that is perhaps better known to us from the 1937 movie “Lost Horizon” than from the James Hilton novel on which it was based. For one thing, the character played by Jane Wyatt in the movie did not appear in the novel, and her loss to the movie would have been a calamity.

In any case, I received a letter from Brenda Loree, whose column I had often read in the Ojai Valley News, scolding me for calling that northern valley Shangri-La. “The original Shangri-La is here,” she said, “and if you come up here sometime I’ll show it to you.”

It wasn’t until just a week or so ago that we found ourselves free to drive to Ojai. We took the Ventura Freeway and went through Ventura, turned inland and drove another 17 miles on to Ojai, stopping at the Ojai Valley Inn.

At 5 o’clock, as arranged, Loree picked us up at the inn and we drove through the village of Ojai, through cultivated fields and orchards and small ranches and began to climb a road at the eastern end of the valley. About halfway up to the crest we pulled out onto a cleared space that overlooked the valley. It was unmarked. No sign said Shangri-La.

We got out of the car and stood on the ridge. “There it is,” said Loree. “The original Shangri-La.”

It might well have been. It was a long, green valley enclosed by dark blue mountains all around. Rain clouds formed an ominous vault above it and closed down over the peaks of the Topa Topas. But the sun shown down on the valley through chimneys in the clouds, lighting red rooftops and white houses and sparkling on glass. It looked lovely and peaceful.

I have found a few lines in Hilton’s novel that describe it as well as they describe Shangri-La. “Deep below them the valley . . . was like a cloud, and to Conway the scattered roofs had a way of floating after him through the haze. . . . A group of colored pavilions clung to the mountainside . . . with the chance delicacy of flower-petals impaled upon a crag. . . .”

Loree said the film company had at first used another location in the movie, but Hilton said it wasn’t right; a friend brought him right to this very spot, and he looked out over the Ojai Valley and said, “This is it.”

I don’t know whether that story is apocryphal, but of course the whole idea of “Lost Horizon” and Shangri-La requires a suspension of disbelief, and one might as well believe one part of it as another.

Loree said she also wanted to show us the Biblical Garden. “It has all the flowers mentioned in the Bible,” she said.

We drove down through the valley and through the village with its arcades of shops and into a neighborhood of lush green yards and tree-shaded houses to the Ojai Presbyterian Church. It was quiet. The streets were empty and still. The garden was next to the church with a pool and fountain at its entry.

Inscriptions on metal plates identified the flowers with appropriate verses from the Bible.

” . . . and the brim of it was wrought like the brim of a cup, with flowers of lilies.” 1 Kings 7:22.

“I saw by night . . . a man riding a red horse, and he stood among the myrtle trees that were in the bottom.” Zechariah 1:8.

“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” Matthew 6:28.

The flowers seemed tired, but the words of the Bible were mighty in the quiet afternoon.

In a local bookstore we found the last journal of Krishnamurti, the valley’s famous philosopher, who had died not long ago in his Pine Cottage. Among his last words: “Healing gradually takes place if you are with nature, with that orange on the tree, and the blade of grass that pushes through the cement, and the hills covered, hidden by clouds.”

If I hadn’t known she was living in Los Angeles, I might have fancied that Jane Wyatt was still about somewhere, singing and laughing, eternally 29.