Category: Berkeley

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The Week in Birthdays

I’ve got a brother, a niece, a former sister-in-law, and twin uncles who all have/had birthdays this week. If you go back nine months to look at a likely conception date, you find … Merry Christmas!

The first in that line of family birthdays is today, my brother John’s. We haven’t lived on the same side of the Mississippi for decades. I wound up out on the West Coast (“moved to” is too straightforward a phrase for the process) in 1977; not long afterward, John went to New York to stay. We’ve both stuck.

I’d like to be closer, both geographically and in the sense of being better in touch, but for the most part I’d say all of us in the family have done what we can to check in with each other amid family-raising, jobs, and everything else we think of as our lives.

Anyway, John–happy birthday. I’ve been told I didn’t extend the warmest greeting when Mom and Dad brought you home–home being a flat in Hyde Park on the South Side–after your arrival. I had had the run of the joint for all of 17, nearly 18 months, and I apparently didn’t cotton to your sometimes tearful newborn carrying on. I reportedly summarized my objections thus: “Bad wah-wah!”

I certainly haven’t become any pithier since then. But for once I”ll try. Happy birthday, John. Hope to see you soon.

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Boreal Chauvinist Welcomes Fall

The autumnal equinox–I’m letting my boreal chauvinism show–is just an hour or so away (2:05 a.m. PDT, 0905 Coordinated Universal Time. Special treat if you’re up in these wee hours: a crescent moon rising (nearly) alongside Mars).

In other equinox news, an explanation of the equinox by way of a 2007 NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day.

And not strictly equinox-related, but too beautiful to pass by: NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day for today, which features the aurora borealis as viewed in northwestern Canada. If you like that image, there a lot more here.

Update: Well, the sun is up and it’s sure enough fall. I was looking for an apt seasonal quote, and this morning Kate pointed one out; something from John Muir, cited as an introductory quote in a book of Diane Ackerman essays, “Dawn Light”:

“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”

(The quote apparently comes from Muir’s journals, published as “John of the Mountains” in 1938.)

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Jack London Train

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Prelude to the Friday Night Ferry. Southbound Capitol Corridor train pulls into Jack London Square on 1st Street (Embarcadero West). Photo by Kate, before she caught the boat over to the city (by which I mean the other city–San Francisco).

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Emergency Response

Often the late evening finds me pursuing essential researches in my office near the back of our house. The isolation is splendid, but the downside is that I can't hear very clearly what's happening in the front of the house, which I hasten to add is somewhat smaller than Windsor Castle, or outside it.

The night before last, about 11 o'clock or so, The Dog heard something out on the street. What Kate told me afterward is that he went into his alert pose, ears cocked, head turning to try to zero in on a sound. After a few moments, Kate heard someone yelling for help outside.

So she came to the back of the house to tell me. I jumped up and headed to the front door. She called 911 while I grabbed my softball bat and went outside in my stocking feet (I may want to rethink some particulars of my response).

Sure enough, a woman was screaming; at first I thought it was coming from across the street, where our neighbors' houses all appeared to be dark. Then I realized the screams were coming from up the street, from a house on the corner. Some new folks bought the place a couple months ago–I haven't met them–and have been having lots of work done on it. While out for a walk earlier, I had noticed that all the lights on the house were on and the windows open.

The woman was shouting her address and saying she was by herself. She sounded extremely distressed, and frankly I was worried that something very bad had happened. As I headed up the street, I saw a neighbor, Doug, headed over there ahead of me. By the time I got to the house, Doug and Eamon, another neighbor, were both inside and helping the woman, who was in a bedroom.

She had been working on the place and a window apparently came down on her hand, perhaps breaking one of her fingers, and she wasn't able to extricate herself. I saw that Doug and Eamon could handle things without me, and I went back outside. Doug's wife Kay was crossing the street with phone in hand, and Kate also came around the corner (without The Dog). Three other neighbors appeared in the next minute or two, and then the Berkeley police–four or five officers in all.

Quite a turnout for what looks like a minor episode. But of course it was only minor in retrospect. Anyone listening might have reasonably assumed that what was happening was a matter of life and death, and I'm impressed that so many of my neighbors responded so unhesitatingly.

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Birthday Trip

One last summer trip: Off today to Chicago for my dad’s ninetieth birthday. We’ll have a party Saturday to usher him into the Brekke-Sieverson Nonagenarian Hall of Fame (you’re forgiven if you hadn’t been aware that such an august institution existed.) Looking forward to a great weekend with both my sons and my nephew Max coming into town for the occasion.

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Bridge Scene

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In the picture (at right): The suspension tower for the new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, viewed from the old cantilever span it will replace. The extensions to right and left of the tower are catwalks for ironworkers and others who will be involved in stringing the bridge’s main suspension cable. (For context’s sake: that tower is 525 feet tall, and the bridge deck I was driving on was about 200 feet above the water, meaning the tower’s still out there in the distance a ways in this image.)

The new bridge will be a beauty, but the most arresting fact about it is how long it has taken to put up. The original Bay Bridge–both the eastern cantilever section and the immense double suspension section to the west–took about 40 months to build, from 1933 to late 1936. The new bridge has been under construction since 2002 and won’t be done until 2013. And it was underwent about a decade of study and design work before the first hardhat was donned on the project. Lots of reasons for that–new understanding of the seismic complexity of the site, tougher environmental regulations, more complex logistics with so much of the material for the job coming from overseas (the tower sections and most of the other steel on the structure came from China, as did some of the key construction equipment).

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Looniness of the Wrong-Way Runner

“Townspeople acting out.” That could be our town motto. But sometimes one of us emerges from the crowd of zany non-conformity to demand some wider attention and even get some. Today, that person is a guy I’ll call the Loony Runner.

I first saw him a month or so ago. His schtick is simple: He runs along the street, in the middle of the oncoming traffic lane. He is not a shy type. He seems to prefer well-traveled thoroughfares.

So far, we see just the Loony Runner, loping up our less than pristine pavements. But let’s introduce the inevitable: the drivers who are, innocently for once, motoring toward their destinations: headed for a quick stop at the boulangerie, perhaps, or going to pick up their gifted and talented child from an oboe lesson so that they’lll be on time to the Young Grandmasters Chess Club.

There they go, and here comes the Loony Runner. He doesn’t give an inch. He’s not cowed by the several thousand pounds of steel rolling toward him. When drivers don’t swerve far enough out of their lane to suit him, he delivers a crisp critique that can be heard for two or three blocks. “Asshole!” he might say. Or, “F— you, you idiot!” Or, “Bitch!” He never breaks stride.

Late this morning, he jogged down Cedar Street. I thought of snapping his picture as he went by, but thought better of it. Instead, I called the Berkeley police. The dispatcher sounded like she was humoring me–“Yes, sir, we’ll be sure to have someone check that out.” I had a feeling I was supplying raw material for one of those quaint small town police blotter columns we all love.

See you later, Loony Runner. Next time, I’m taking a picture.

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Witness to Terror: The Great East Coast Quake of ’11

Pre-post update: At 11:37 p.m. PDT, just as I was about to post this, we had a little five-second earthquake I could feel in Berkeley. Amazing — I felt shakes on both coasts today.

Update 11:52 p.m.: The U.S. Geological Survey says this evening’s quake was a 3.6-magnitude shake centered in the hills about 10 miles south of where we live. Translation: It was a mild event. But the Twitter reaction–the locals are falling all over themselves to report their experience–sort of proves the point of how adrenaline-producing this is even for folks who live astride dangerous earthquake faults.

Original post: I was at the airport in Newark early this afternoon, tending to a tuna fish sandwich in Terminal C and contemplating my next social media communique, when a gentle but pronounced shaking started. It went on for about 10 seconds or so and got stronger. I looked at a guy sitting near me who didn’t seem to have registered anything unusual. “I’m from California,” I said, “and out there we’d think this is an earthquake.” He looked up, but didn’t say anything. Meantime, the shaking got still more intense–by now, I knew that this wasn’t a matter of a piece of heavy equipment doing something outside the terminal. The flat-screen TV mounted near the gate started to rattle. A group of people sitting nearby started to ask, “Is this an earthquake?” I did in fact send out a Twitter message as the shaking subsided:

“At Newark airport, I could swear we just had an here in Terminal C.

OK, I concede I wasn’t really selling the story of the century there. But the shaking continued for about 10 seconds or so even after I sent the message; I would guess that I felt some movement for a full 60 seconds. Allowing for how easy it is to overestimate the duration of a temblor, I’d say now “more than 30 seconds.” In either case, that was longer than any quake I’d felt here in California since April 1984, when there was a a 6-point-plus earthquake down near Morgan Hill in Santa Clara County. I remember that quake as having last a good 45 seconds. (For comparison’s sake, the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, which was a 7.0 event, lasted 17 seconds; the 9.0 earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan last March is said to have lasted six minutes).

I didn’t see or hear any real alarm in the terminal–just excitement. Afterward, I heard many people discussing it or describing it during cellphone calls. In other words, It was a lot like the California earthquakes I’ve gotten to know since arriving here in the mid-1970s. (On Facebook, my friend Pete posted a piece from The New York Times on how the seismically-tough West Coast scoffed at the East Coast’s reaction to its less than devastating quake. Don’t buy that line at all: people here jump up and down everytime the earth gives a little shudder, and the news people here practically wet themselves every time we have a quake.)

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Air Blog: Back West

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Last night on Delta Flight 1253, Salt Lake City to Oakland. This is along the south shore of Great Salt Lake, just west of the city. We were over Stansbury Island when the picture was snapped. The Stansbury Mountains are in the center distance. And those colored patches on Stansbury Bay at right are salt evaporation ponds. (Stansbury? Who was this Stansbury?)

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Guest Observation: The Salmon

Kate was tidying up around the house yesterday and found a folded sheet of paper under our bed amidst the great clumps of dog hair that had accumulated there (mute testimony to the incompleteness of my periodic vacuum-powered housecleaning). On the paper was the following poem about the salmon, and about other things too. Kate said the paper must have been mine, and it must have, given my sometimes-preoccupation with the fish in question. But I can’t remember how I came by this piece at all, and I don’t really remember having read the poem. David Whyte is a Scottish poet, I believe, whom I know for a book he wrote back in the ’90s called “The Heart Aroused.” It was a call for humanizing the workplace, for recognizing the role of creativity to excite individual passions, a recognition he argues leads to more satisfied employees and more successful employers.
Song for the Salmon
by David Whyte

For too many days now I have not written of the sea,
nor the rivers, nor the shifting currents
we find between the islands

For too many nights now I have not imagined the salmon
threading the dark streams of reflected stars,
nor have I dreamt of his longing
nor the lithe swing of his tail toward dawn

I have not given myself to the depth to which he goes,
to the cargoes of crystal water, cold with salt,
nor the enormous plains of ocean swaying beneath the moon.

I have not felt the lifted arms of the ocean
opening its white hands on the seashore,
nor the salted wind, whole and healthy
filling the chest with living air.

I have not heard those waves
fallen out of heaven onto earth,
nor the tumult of sound and the satisfaction
of a thousand miles of ocean
giving up its strength on the sand.

But now I have spoken of that great sea,
the ocean of longing shifts through me,
the blessed inner star of navigation
moves in the dark sky above
and I am ready like the young salmon
to leave his river, blessed with hunger
for a great journey on the drawing tide.