What's In a Name: Honoring my Grandfather

In his youth, my grandfather was a pilot who served during the Korean War, he was not a combatant, but flew cargo planes and told me stories about the native Guances of the Canary Islands who walked around barefoot everywhere. Mysteriously however, he apparently was also assigned to study the weather patterns in the Bermuda Triangle… He never spoke about this to us in life… We only found out about it when the military-issued card in his wallet was discovered, he apparently carried it with him all his life. 

Early one morning seventeen years ago now, my Grandpa and I got up before dawn and readied ourselves for a day’s excursion into the heights of the Los Padres National Forest in Southern California. 

There is a certain mountain pass way up there where there are acres upon acres of open grasslands shimmering in the wind. Below these high sunny meadows drop steep valleys where the quails wail out in the torrid heat of the day, and hot thermals rise from the depths to give lift to the wings of birds. The chaparral hillsides grow thick with Cliffrose, Manzanita, and Live Oaks, while the Golden Eagles of the range alight upon the boulder outcrops and sun-bleached skeletons of pine trees to survey the vast open lands below. 

It is was here in this place in 2008 that I saw my first wild California Condor up close. Grandpa initially became interested in this creature in 1967 when his acoustical engineering company was hired to conduct a noise survey of the gaswells in the Sespe Creek area to determine how they were affecting the birds. As the decades progressed they had become so few in the wild that in my birth year of 1987, wildlife conservationists decided to capture all the remaining wild birds and start a captive breeding program to restore the population. The project was a bold and highly controversial move but it was also a rare and exemplary success -so much so that its procedures and methods were similarly mirrored by efforts to restore the Griffon Vultures in the Judean and Negev Mountains…

Grandpa standing near the National Forest sign at the condor-watching site in the Los Padres. Above is a photo of a condor my father took at the same site on a different occasion.

On this particular day seventeen years ago, Grandpa and I drove up to the site and posted up near a National Forest sign with our binoculars. It was high morning, we had been there for several hours scanning the distances, Grandpa was standing nearby looking East and South, and I was sitting in the shade of the sign looking northwest when all of a sudden I noticed a dark form descend over the pass -casting a leaping shadow across the plummeting earth below. The great bird appeared like a prehistoric specter through the heat-shimmer. It was unmistakable as soon as I saw it -I just knew… ‘There’s your bird Grandpa!’ I cried out. ‘There’s your bird!’ The condor soared rapidly towards us, and in mere moments it arrived to where he was standing -totally awestruck by this mysterious avian apparition. The great being loomed over us with a mighty wingspan of three meters -the triangular leading edges of its wings white as thunderheads and snowclad mountains, its plumage as dark as the midnight hours, and its curious vulturine head and brood patch a dusky pink-orange. For an instant it was directly above him -nearly within reach- looking directly at him with a curious amber-red eye glinting in the sun. 

This moment in time I will never forget -the encounter between my grandfather and the condor… We were gifted with something that was beyond description in power, beauty, and meaning  -as though nature was thanking him for his many years of devoted enthusiasm and interest in this animal. We drove home later that day in silent contemplative amazement. Two years later he commissioned me for this Condor painting, which I completed for him while I was in California. We went back a few times to the same site over the years with other family members, and we saw many more condors there, but from greater distances. 

The California Condor takes flight above a forest of giant Sequoia Trees where they have been known to nest. I painted this with acrylic on illustration board in 2010. Below are preliminary sketches and composition ideas for this painting, and a photograph of a condor in the hollow of a Sequoia tree in 1984 (Snyder). 

José Cipriano Ortega (1929-2024) -a friend, father, brother, uncle, grandfather and inspiration to many- passed away a year ago at the age of ninety-five and is survived by his wife of thirty-four years Natividad Ortega (my Grandma Nati). He was and will always be sacred to me. Now fifteen years later I’ve inherited my own painting again… 

There are times that I go there in my mind -to the moment and place when that magnificent bird flew just a few meters over him. That encounter I was witness to divulged the meaning of the universe for me. In the beginningless beginning as in the endless end, all that matters is the power of love. Galaxies will catch us in a net of stars when the Most High reaps His sacred harvest… it is better to love than to live in fear… 

That’s what’s in a name, I am proud to be your Grandson José Cipriano, I love you forever. 

This is a photo of me at the National Forest Sign on the day the mighty condor flew over us! I was twenty in this picture. Below: the open heights of the Los Padres. Left: Grandpa when he was about fourteen, he grew up in Pittsburg, CA, near the Bay Delta.