Around the turn of the year, some moderately respectable rainstorms greened foliage around the Central Coast, which, like other parts of California then, hadn’t seen much moisture since last winter. Thanks to this moisture, and the young grasses holding it, the Aromas Tri-County Fire Protection District set the pointer on its “Fire Danger Today” sign to “Low.” Hillsides were gorgeous and appeared pretty much the way John Steinbeck once described them in a passage from “The Promise,” one of the Red Pony stories about the boy Jody Tiflin coming of age on a valley ranch. Included in his 1938 collection, The Long Valley, Steinbeck’s description of Jody’s world is set at pretty much the same time of year as our recent rains:
The winter fell sharply. A few preliminary showers, and then a strong steady rain. The hills lost their straw color and blackened under the water, and the winter streams scrambled noisily down the canyon. The mushrooms and puffballs popped up and the new grass started before Christmas. (203)
Of course, Californians know this lush abundance is fleeting, a precursor to the golden cover of dried out annual grasses that follow in late spring and summer and which bring their own beauty.
To many Californians, the sight of grass covered valleys and hills feels natural, part of a familiar landscape that can stretch over miles to distant horizons which set the green grasses of winter and spring against dark, cloudy skies or, later in the year, these same horizons setting the golden undulations formed by drying and dead plants against the azure skies of summer and autumn.
Maybe only Californians, however, appreciate this dry but golden panorama. That’s a question Dana Gioia, former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts and onetime California Poet Laureate, poses in his 1986 poem “California Hills in August.” Thinking of “an Easterner especially,” he writes:
I can imagine someone who found
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
wishing a few more trees for shade.
For Gioia, though, the arid landscape holds not harshness but gentleness and hope:
And yet how gentle it seems to someone
raised in a landscape short of rain—
the skyline of a hill broken by no more
trees than one can count, the grass,
the empty sky, the wish for water.
Gioia’s hypothetical Easterner, ironically, holds something in common with California’s annual grasses. Many—most?—of the grass species that thrive in California’s relatively arid regions and seem so typical of California hillsides and valleys are really from somewhere else.
Writing for Bay Nature, David Amme, a founding member of the California Native Grass Association, describes the natural history of grasslands of the Bay Area, but he also brings a writer’s sense of natural beauty to the task. Explaining that two-thirds of Alameda and Contra Costa counties were once open grasslands and oak savannas, he says, in a passage that harmonizes with Steinbeck’s writing, that these landscapes still define the East Bay:
On a brisk spring day when our grasslands are green and soft, they appear boundless, rolling with quick waves in the wind, as hawks soar above. Later min the year, summer’s golden brown reminds us that our grasslands endure almost six months of drought, the longest sustained dry period of any Mediterranean climate region in the world.
Amme traces the history of this landscape, recounting how European grasses arrived here:
The seed came stuck to the hides and wool of the livestock and from imported feed and ballast accompanying the new livestock in ships’ holds. Beginning with wild oats, waves of new annual grasses arrived in California one after the other. After the oats came ripgut, then the annual foxtails, Italian ryegrass, rat-tail fescue, soft chess, cheatgrass, the dreaded medusa-head, and the most recent arrival, barbed goatgrass.
These plants often outcompeted California’s native bunch grasses, including purple needle grass (Stipa pulchra), which, according to Amme, was once
. . . the most likely component of the foothill grassland. This long-lived, deep-rooted bunchgrass may very well have been the dominant grass of the sunny valleys and hills, growing in rich adobe soils. In many ways purple needlegrass typifies the classic bunchgrass of California’s foothill grassland open space.
The naturally fast growth of the non-native annuals coupled with their supercharged production of seed (seeds which, moreover, can be up to ten times larger than seeds of native bunch grasses) have given them a competitive advantage. So now our California’s state grass—that is, purple needle grass—though still abundant in places, can be hard to spot amongst the non-natives, especially from a distance.
Over decades, the result has been not only an altered—though still visually compelling—landscape, but also potentially a more volatile one.
Annual grasses burn. Fast.
Scientists Carl E. Bell, Joseph M. DiTomaso, and Matthew L. Brooks explain that “. . . the presence of weedy non-native invasive plants creates an abnormal situation that can influence wildfires.” Thus these “invasive plants” increase the frequency of fires by creating fuels that ignite easily.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander has seen the results of this evolution. The October 2017 Tubbs Fire in Napa and Sonoma Counties burned almost 37,000 acres of terrain hard by Gander’s home. In his poem “Wasteland (For Santa Rosa),” he traces this seemingly relentless cycle that leads to devastating conflagration.
Fifteen three line stanzas weave back and forth on the page, creating a pattern which evokes waves of unleashed energies. The structure of the poem makes it almost impossible to quote without losing the sense of dynamism at its core. The poem unfolds quickly; clauses begin in one stanza and carry through into another, black print and white space leading a reader’s eye down and back and forth, creating a process that mimics the leading edge of a brushfire as it spreads. I’d refer you to the whole piece to appreciate that quality. It’s an astonishing poem with an astonishing finish. And it begins with “Green spring grass” on California hills that cure quickly in summer months.
Soon, the poem offers details of setting, “an infestation” of tiny oak moth larvae feeding on leaves, producing the “fine dandruff of excrement,” the falling “frass” making a quiet sound, “You/could hear it twenty/feet away, tinkling.”
The colloquial “you” centers the poem on the voice of the speaker, attending to the minutiae of the surrounding landscape. But the ninth stanza introduces a new voice, emerging across a valley, and below Sugarloaf Ridge, where the terrain is dominated by smoke and flame: “I rose, swaying.” The next stanza:
and tottering on my
erratic vortex, extemporizing
my own extreme weather sucking up
acres of scorched
topsoil and spinning it
outward. . . .
As the poem moves to its finish, it offers a natural fusion, the speaker’s energy and the fire’s energy merge into a single voice: “I came for you.” Perhaps, amongst the fierce and sometimes terrifying dynamism of the natural world there’s no steady state and only an imagined boundary between the realms of the human and the non-human, native and not.
The ending of the poem, though apocalyptically Californian, is one Walt Whitman might have admired. As he wrote,
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. (89)
Sources
Feature photo by the author.
Amme, David. “Grassland Heritage.” Bay Nature. April-June 2004. https://baynature.org/magazine/spring2004/grassland-heritage. Accessed 22 December 2025.
Bell, Carl, E., Joseph M. DiTomaso, and Matthew L. Brooks. “Invasive Plants and Wildfires in Southern California.” Wildfire Zone. University of California, County of San Diego, and the USDA. https://ucanr.edu/sites/default/files/2011-05/96680.pdf. Accessed 17 February 2026.
Gander, Forrest. “Wasteland: on the California Wildfires.” 2020. Poets.org. https://poets.org/poem/wasteland-california-wildfires. Accessed 22 January 2026.
Gioia, Dana. “California Hills in August.” Daily Horoscope. Graywolf P, 1986. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/dailyhoroscopepo0000gioi/page/n15/mode/2up. Accessed 28 January 2026.
“State Symbols.” State of California Capitol Museum. 2025. https://www.library.ca.gov/california-history/state-symbols. Accessed 20 January 2026.
Steinbeck, John. The Long Valley. 1938. Penguin, 1995.
“Tubbs Fire.” Cal Fire. 2019. https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2017/10/8/tubbs-fire-central-lnu-complex/. Accessed 17 February 2026.
Wahl, Diana. “Observation of Stipa pulchra, Crystal Springs Watershed.” CC-By-NC 4.0. The Calflora Database, A Non-profit Organization, 2023. https://www.calflora.org/entry/occdetail.html?seq_num=po253870. Accessed 20 December 2025. Cropped from original.
Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” Leaves of Grass. 1892. Eds. Scully Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. Norton, 1973. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/leavesofgrassaut00whit/page/n7/mode/2up. Accessed 29 January 2026.
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