I've never seen the San Rafael Valley half green before. Not sort-of green. Two toned, very green and very dry-yellow. My host and friend keeps nudging me to be here during the monsoons when it becomes a different world, not the great yellow and arid grassland next to the Mexican border that I know it to be, but a green, wavy sea like the Palouse of eastern Washington, a few miles from the Canadian border. Today it is both.


Isn't it weird how much of my full time RVing career, ten years long now, has been spent admiring these antipodes of the West? And yet I haven't even bothered to go to the Grand Canyon.

Somebody had a controlled burn. Why don't they do this all the time? Is it the objections of retired hobby ranchers? Or is it the legal tie-ups caused by an environmental foundation, based in a skyscraper in downtown San Francisco?

It is Fire that makes Grassland grassland. Grass grows from the roots, instead of from the tip and bud like most things. Without fire the chaparral invades and conquers the San Rafael.

Fire is a catharsis, a Zoroastrian or Hindu fire of purification. From the ash new green springs forth. From a distance these white flowers looked like litter snagged on the grass.


But looking closer, would you call them twittering? Fluttering? No, they billow like the canvas canopies of prairie schooners crossing the Plains of the American West, four generations before our generation of pygmies.