Ojai

My first evening in Ojai, someone at the inn mentioned the pink moment and I thought it sounded like exactly the kind of soft-focus mystical branding that small California towns attach to themselves to attract a certain kind of weekend visitor. Then I walked to the east end of Ojai Avenue at six-fifteen, stood with about thirty other people on the sidewalk facing the Topa Topa mountains, and watched those dry sandstone peaks turn from beige to amber to a deep sustained rose that lasted about four minutes before fading. No photograph I took afterward looked like what I saw. The colour was too specific, too local, too contingent on the particular chemistry of that valley’s air and that angle of western light.

Ojai sits in a narrow valley in the Topatopa Mountains, twelve miles from the Pacific at Ventura, accessible by one main road that makes it feel more remote than it is. It was a citrus town, and the orange and lemon groves still frame the valley — you can smell them in spring when the blossoms are open, a sweetness that carries for a quarter mile. The town itself is arranged around a Spanish-style arcade on Ojai Avenue with a mission bell tower at its east end, a design that was deliberate — the whole main street was redesigned in the 1910s after a fire, with a unified Moorish-Spanish style that still gives the commercial district a coherence rare in California.

The people who have settled here over the decades are a specific mixture that reveals itself in the storefronts: ceramics studios, a serious independent bookshop, yoga retreat centres that have been here since the seventies, a gallery of contemporary painting that belongs in a bigger city, an olive oil producer whose shop is essentially a tasting room for their groves up the road. I spent a morning at the Ojai Certified Farmers Market, which runs year-round on Sundays, and the produce was so extraordinary in its specificity — a variety of cherry that exists only in this valley, a goat cheese made from an herd five miles away — that I bought more than I could eat.

The Ojai Pixie tangerine is a phenomenon. A seedless, thin-skinned variety developed here and grown almost exclusively in this valley, available for a few weeks in spring, and if you happen to be in Ojai when the harvest comes in and someone hands you one off the tree and you peel it on the spot, the flavour is so concentrated and particular — honey and brightness and something almost floral — that commercial tangerines seem like they were made to approximate this thing and never quite managed. I bought a bag at the market and ate three on the drive out.

When to go: Spring for the tangerine harvest and the citrus blossom scent (March through May). October and November for warm, clear days and the Ojai Music Festival’s autumn programming. The valley can be hot and still in July and August — not unbearable but the mountains are dry and yellow. The pink moment operates year-round, weather permitting, and is most dramatic in October when the desert air is clear.