Rick Halsey is in search of senile shrubs.
He rolls up California 79 in his Chevy pickup across the high tablelands of eastern San Diego County. Past a little adobe chapel from the Mexican era, he turns onto an unpaved road. He bumps along in low gear as the road rises into the granite mountains as a brilliant sliver of scarified earth, passing through gnarled stands of manzanita, red shank and chamise.
In a shallow basin called Indian Flats, he comes to an abrupt stop.
"Let's say hello to this guy," says Halsey.
The rangy naturalist strides across a ditch as if he's meeting a long-lost friend. He climbs the side of a boulder, crouches in the shade of a 15-foot manzanita and gazes at the burnished red skin of its bark against the mountain sky.
"This guy might be 125 years old," he says, giving it a pat.
He knows many forest managers would call this old hardwood "senescent" or "decadent" -- terms for native vegetation that has supposedly gone un-burned for too long and is thus an unnatural fire hazard.
Halsey, 53, likes to point out the absurdity of this theory, as he sees it, by simply calling the plants "senile," as if the manzanita were in an advanced state of dementia.
Chaparral, he says, does not need to burn to the ground every 30 years to remain healthy. Just the opposite. Too much fire will eventually decimate the native flora -- some of the most diverse in the nation -- leaving a biological wasteland of invasive weeds.
Many people might not know the difference, viewing chaparral as a brown, dead thicket of thorns and brush.
But with the help of top botanists and fire ecologists, Halsey is on a campaign to correct the record about California's most widespread, misunderstood and maligned type of vegetation.
In doing so, he hopes to limit brush clearance plans to the edges of suburbia, away from the backcountry.
In the heat of the fire season, this might seem a futile mission. But Halsey is a true believer.
Like the shrubbery he promotes, he is a bit quirky, with a child's mix of untethered imagination and energy that is labeled eccentricity in an adult, and that his wife lovingly tolerates. He built his family home in Escondido to resemble a medieval castle, with a watchtower and a working drawbridge and a long, dark den filled with swords and suits of armor.
But he and his ecological research are respected by leading minds in the field.
