Drawing invisible lines on the Sierra Nevada can sometimes contribute to the general peace, but the lines seem to have a power of their own, or as Abe once told me, “you can mess around with a guy’s wife, take his money, and that might all be all right, but if you start fooling with his property it means war.” Over and over, we have found this to be true.

Here in California, where the westering pioneers finally ran out of horizon and the Pacific Ocean turned them back into our fertile valleys and lush foothills, we have become a State of shifting restless natives and as the once wide-open spaces become divided and re-divided into smaller and smaller lots, we find ourselves face to face with our neighbors and ourselves and the invisible lines become tangible; fences, walls and the territorial boundaries of our own creativity.