Natural Nipomo: Introduction

Black Lake looked as stunning as ever on the bright Saturday morning, a week after my return from UC Davis. It was my first trip back to the lake since last summer, a welcome way to reacquaint myself with the wild side of Nipomo. It looked unchanged for the most part, aside from the progress being made in an adjacent restoration project and the notable absence of the decrepit truck I wrote about last year.

Walking the familiar looping trail, I soaked in the view the blue lake, scrubby dunes, eucalyptus trees and the Arroyo Grande Valley beyond. Our hike-leader named the plants as we walked along: mock heather, silver dune lupin, yarrow, elderberry, dune mat, and many others. Notable on this hike was the delicate flower of Indian pinks, noted by the Chumash as a favorite of hummingbirds.

We live in a place of profound natural beauty. The constitution of that beauty has changed over the eons due to the ever-working forces of the earth. We’ve also seen significant change on a human timescale, since the arrival of Spanish explorers just a few centuries ago.

Humans are an integral part of nature. As citizens of this planet we must come to understand our place in it. Step one is answering the fundamental question, “where am I?” This summer we will begin to answer that question. We’ll start with a discussion about the way things were, focusing on Nipomo’s geological and anthropological history. We’ll talk about the way things are—places to see and issues of the day. Finally, we’ll talk about the way things could be.

This will be a journey of learning for all of us, I hope. Being one year out of high school I am hardly an authority on anything, and as much as I have been a student of the land I still have a lot to learn. Thus I’ll be relying on input from local experts, and building my arguments on top of the foundation of scholarly knowledge of this area that already exists.

But it is people that make a place. There exists in the mind of every man and woman that has ever walked through Nipomo—or any place—a unique and deeply personal perception of what makes the place. For many visitors Nipomo can be a just another stopping point in a long journey, a place to refuel and move-on. For many residents, Nipomo can be a specific house, neighborhood, business, school, natural place or park, or more likely a combination thereof. I encourage you to send in your own insights, stories, and observations—this column would be naught without a dialogue.

My aim in writing these articles is that Nipomo will become something more to you. There is more than the infrastructure that sustains the human settlement. There is life. There is a deep history. There is a special energy that has made things the way they are today. And there are a multitude of factors, both within and beyond human control, which will shape its future.