Above: A sighting just after getting off Interstate 5 to cut over to Highway 99 on our way to the desert and (eventually) the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The irony of the sign — one of dozens or maybe even hundreds by this time scattered across the southern two-thirds of the Central Valley — was too good to pass up. The area has had about 2 inches of rain in the past week, benefiting from the big storm that swept through the rest of Southern California.
We’re in Barstow tonight after about seven hours on the road today. Thinking we’ll be in Flagstaff tomorrow night.
A friend shared the video below of Jimmy Kimmel paying tribute to Cleto Escobedo, a lifelong friend and the bandleader on his show who died earlier this week. “I feel like you’ll appreciate this,” my friend said. “It’s apropos of nothing relevant, but I found it pretty moving.”
It is moving, for sure. Kimmel takes 22 minutes to recount his friendship with Escobedo, which started when he was 9 years old, and how they came to work together on late-night television. The story is both funny and wrenching as Kimmel makes it clear how much he loved his friend and how heartbroken he is at losing him.
I wonder whether honest displays of sadness and grieving and genuine expressions of love like this can have a wider impact on our culture, much of which is dominated by phony, ginned-up histrionics designed to provoke outrage and stir our sense of grievance. Which isn’t to say there isn’t plenty to be outraged by in this world of ours. But we might live in a healthier, more humane world if we learn to talk honestly with each other about all our joys and sorrows, not just the stuff that enrages us.
The Oxford English Dictionary definition of “retirement,” sense 4.a, which is said to have been in common use since the mid-18th century:
“The state or condition of having left office, employment, or service permanently, now esp. on reaching pensionable age; the period of a person’s life after retiring from office or employment. Also: the state of having withdrawn permanently from one’s usual sphere of activity. Frequently in in (one’s) retirement.”
I’m looking that up because — here’s my buried lede — I’ve worked my last day as a staff reporter and editor at KQED in San Francisco, and, having reached my early 70s, the popular notion of what lies ahead is retirement. I don’t think the OED definition quite fits me, though. I refer to the “condition of having left employment … permanently.” As I’ve been telling people, I don’t feel like I’m done with journalism, where I’ve spent nearly all of my adult life. I feel like I’ll always have stories to tell and will find ways of telling at least a few of them. But maybe that’s insecurity speaking, prompted by all the uncertainty I feel about what really comes next.
I’ll leave The Retirement Chronicles there for now. More to come.
San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is attempting to identify this man, who was found deceased in a vacant lot on 5th Street in October 2024.
It’s not important to say how I got to the website for San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. But I will say that I was following a line of research on the number of traffic fatalities in the city going back to the 1950s or so. Just part of some history I’ve been gathering.
I forgot about that purported mission when I got to the chief medical examiner’s home page. It features sketches of deceased people the office has been unable to identify. The sketches are arresting because they take people who have been found in the worst of circumstances — dead on the street or in a park restroom, for instance — and portray them as they might well have looked in life and as their friends and loved ones might imagine them. Clearly the artist is attempting more than creating a likeness. The work here is an exercise in trying to restore dignity and humanity to those denied it at the end of their lives.
The man pictured above was found in October 2024 in a vacant downtown lot, lying in a pool of water. The medical examiner’s office released this sketch about three months later, along with a brief description of the case:
The decedent is a white male, approximately 50 years of age with brown hair and brown eyes. He is 5 feet and 6 inches tall and weighs 168 pounds. He was found in an abandoned lot that was filled with water at 348 5th Street, San Francisco. The decedent was found in the water dressed in multiple layers of clothing including an AJAX East Bay sweatshirt, a Kobe Bryant #24 jersey, and a Lakers #8 jersey.
Several news outlets around town duly published the sketch and the medical examiner’s press release, which noted that this was a rare case of it being unable to identify a decedent. Sometimes, publishing the sketches pays off with a relatively quick identification. Late last year, a woman lying unresponsive on a downtown street was identified just a few days after her drawing was posted; in late 2023, it took about three weeks before someone supplied a name for a man who’d been found dead on the roof of a parking garage.
So far, though, the man found lying in the water wearing the Kobe Bryant jersey remains unknown.
Conor McGregor, as seen in central Derry, May 2025.
What’s going on here?
Conor McGregor, the former cage-fighting champion and Irish whiskey entrepreneur, has become de facto leader of an Irish anti-immigrant campaign with strong echoes of the U.S. MAGA movement. Further MAGA parallels: McGregor, who lost a civil suit alleging sexual assault earlier this year, has announced he’ll run for the Irish presidency. See: “Conor McGregor, MMA fighter, alleged rapist, Ireland’s next president?“
The first day of our trip to Ireland, back in late April, we ran into the aftermath of a McGregorite anti-immigrant rally in Dublin. It was staged just two days after the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, which opened Irish nationalists’ initially failed, ultimately victorious effort to end British rule. Rally participants wrapped themselves, literally, in the Irish tricolor, and some chanted slogans like “Ireland for the Irish.” In Trumpian fashion, McGregor claimed a vast throng of more than 100,000 people turned out. Having been in the area where the rally was held, there ain’t no way a crowd anywhere near that size was present. Most sources estimated it at about 5,000.
The anti-immigrant gathering was followed immediately afterward by a smaller anti-racist rally and march that began in front of the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, hallowed ground in modern Irish history as the site where the Easter Rising of April 1916 began. We walked alongside the march a few blocks to its end point outside the Garden of Remembrance, dedicated to the memory “of all those who gave their lives in the cause of Irish freedom.”
Why were we seeing a sign mocking Conor McGregor and his followers in Derry, a place where he won’t be running for anything? I think it’s because McGregor’s rhetoric touches a nerve in a place that at least outwardly is still closely linked to the struggle for Irish independence and the associated fight to achieve civil rights for the minority Catholic population.
The city is part of the six counties partitioned from the rest of Ireland in the early 1920s, which remain part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. The very name of the place is contested; in United Kingdom parlance, the town is called Londonderry. It’s famously divided along sectarian and the associated political lines, Protestant/Loyalist and Catholic/Republican. In Catholic/Republican parts neighborhoods, which is mostly what we saw, the ideology expressed in street art is still strongly, even radically, Republican, and embraces other liberation causes (Palestinian nationalism, for instance) and rejects McGregor’s narrow, reactionary, anti-immigrant nationalism.
Newly painted Palestinian nationalist/Irish Republican mural in Derry’s Bogside neighborhood, May 2025.
Hussey’s Folly, Dingle Bay, County Kerry, Ireland. May 2025.
“If you ever find yourself in Dingle” sounds like the start of a joke. I don’t know what the rest of it would be, but if you do ever find yourself there, there’s a beautiful walk out from the town’s harbor, past this tower, and then to the cliffs beyond.
The date given for the tower, called Hussey’s Folly, is 1845. That was the first of Ireland’s devastating famine years. The construction was a make-work project, something devised by a local landholder for the poor and hungry to do in return for wages or food. Similar projects, often involving exhausting physical labor like road-building, were carried out all over Ireland as the country starved. Here’s a decent writeup on the “famine roads,” some of which are still used as part of the national road network: www.frrandp.com/2025/01/famine-roads.html.
What I really wish I had right now was a picture of 19-year-old me getting ready for my very first airplane flight, O’Hare to JFK, on the first leg of a trip to Ireland, my first time out of the country. But no picture from that day in September 1973 exists, so I’ll have to content myself with the memory of my excitement as the plane left the ground — I was actually whooping as the plane made a big turn to head east toward New York. Flying really was pretty cool.
That trip lasted three months. I left Chicago with two friends, Dan Shepley and Gerry Valenti. Dan peeled off for Germany and Oktoberfest a few days into the trip. Gerry and I spent the rest of September, all of October and November and most of December hiking and hitch-hiking around the country, mostly on the western coast. The centerpiece of the trip was a visit to Clare Island, at the mouth of Clew Bay off County Mayo. It was home to part of my mom’s family, O’Malleys and Morans, who had left for Chicago in the 1880s and ’90s.
We stayed with a second cousin of mom’s, Michael Joe O’Malley, for several weeks, getting more of a glimpse of what island life was really like than we had bargained for. There is a lot more to be said about Michael Joe and that stay, which I’ll try to do in the coming days. But the reason for remembering all of that today is that Kate, our son Thom and I are flying to Dublin in just a few hours for three weeks in Ireland. It’s my first time back since that trip I made as a teenager.
(And why haven’t I returned before? Maybe that’s something I’ll explore, too — an interior travelogue.)
We’re staying tonight in Independence, the seat of Inyo County, along U.S. 395 near all sorts of history. Manzanar, the World War II concentration camp for Japanese-Americans, is just to the south. We’re in the middle of the Owens Valley, a place defined in modern times by the loss of its water to sharp operators from Los Angeles.
More immediately, one thing that strikes me about staying along U.S. 395 is the all-night truck traffic. It’s not a constant, relentless parade. But every few minutes or so, an eighteen-wheeler rolls through, either headed north to connect with Interstate 80 in Reno or south toward Los Angeles or maybe the desert routes to Phoenix.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS seen from Mono Lake, Eastern Sierra Nevada.
We started the day by driving down to O’Shaughnessy Dam and Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, the facilities that impound the Tuolumne River in a once pristine Sierra valley and bring water to 2.5 million people in the Bay Area (and as part of a larger system including hydroelectric facilities also supply power to some city operations in San Francisco and elsewhere). I hadn’t intended to spend much time there, but we got to walking the trail on the north side of the reservoir and pretty soon it was early afternoon.
We took our time driving over Tioga Pass and down to Lee Vining and checked into a motel and had dinner at the local Mobil gas station — it’s actually a well-known eatery and just what you need if you’ve spent a long day hiking or driving or both. Then we headed to the south shore olf Mono Lake to see whether we could sight Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS again. There was a nearly full moon lighting up the tufa formations along the shoreline, but yes, the comet was still clearly visible naked-eyewise and more so with any kind of camera. I didn’t bring a tripod on this trip, so I have to resort to handheld phone-camera shots. There were several guys along the lakeshore shooting the spectacle with professional gear — I imagine we’ll see some of those shots soon.
Along the road to Hetch Hetchy, snags still stand eleven years after the Rim Fire swept through Stanislaus National Forest and parts of Yosemite National Park.
To keep it short and sweet: We’re taking a quick trip over to the Eastern Sierra. The past few years, this has involved a drive from Berkeley and a sunset stop along the road near Tioga Pass. This time we splurged and stopped at one of the lodges west of the park. We got here in time to take a quick before-dinner walk — a walk, not a hike, since it was along the road toward the long-drowned Hetch Hetchy Valley (drowned by San Francisco, but that’s another story).
Highway 120, the main road into the park from the Bay Area, goes through part of the area that burned during the Rim Fire in 2013. Much can be said about that — I happened to be up in Yosemite on a quick trip with my nephew Sean the day the fire really blew up, and we had to get home by way of Fresno. The fire burned for a very long time and at the time became the third largest fire by area in California history. It was an epic. Just eleven years later, it ranks as the state’s twelfth largest fire — nine bigger ones, including a couple about four times as large, have occurred since 2017. The point of mentioning that is that even though the Rim Fire has probably faded from most people’s memory in the wake of all the large, destructive and deadly fires that have occurred since, the evidence of the blaze is all around us in this area.
After our walk and before dinner, we went out to try to find evidence of another spectacle, Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. I was really kind of blown away by it.. Reasonably bright as the dusk deepened, with a fantastically long “tail” (or so it appeared to me). Looking forward to more sightings.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over the Tuolumne River canyon, October 14, 2024.
