Category: Berkeley

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Berkeley Fourth of July: Taiko Drumming

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For more than the last couple of years, we’ve made a habit of rising early the first weekend of the Tour de France and having a few neighbors over to watch a stage (the first Sunday of the Tour generally features the first full stage; not this year, though, as the race opened with a big stage yesterday and then changed things up today with a team time trial). So we did that this morning with our neighbors Marie and Steve. Then in the course of the rest of the day, first I took a nap, then Kate did amid a series of chores she was doing. Then we took The Dog for a walk up to campus and back.

On the way up Virginia Street, we could hear drumming. Just east of McGee, people were holding a block party, and the group pictured above was entertaining a small crowd. Fourth of July Weekend Taiko Drumming–it was a first for me.

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A Brief Tour of the Fireworks

In my other (paid, employed) life, I also sometimes blog. This morning, I was called upon to blog about which towns in the Bay Area are holding fireworks celebrations. I discovered that some other local media outlets had come up with good lists, so rather than invent the wheel with my limited time and resources, I simply linked to what had been done well elsewhere. Of course, that wasn’t enough for me, so I dressed up the post with a dash of Fourth of July fireworks history. Including part of this widely cited passage (note the mention of future celebrations) from a letter John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, 1776:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

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A Brief Tour of the Fireworks

In my other (paid, employed) life, I also sometimes blog. This morning, I was called upon to blog about which towns in the Bay Area are holding fireworks celebrations. I discovered that some other local media outlets had come up with good lists, so rather than invent the wheel with my limited time and resources, I simply linked to what had been done well elsewhere. Of course, that wasn’t enough for me, so I dressed up the post with a dash of Fourth of July fireworks history. Including part of this widely cited passage (note the mention of future celebrations) from a letter John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, 1776:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

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Journal of Rain-Driving Photography

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A picture made during our storm a couple days ago.

Side conversation: Is this picture illegal? Or maybe just unwise? California has laws against using cellphones while driving (unless you have a hands-free setup) and texting while driving (I never believed that people tried to text and drive until I saw them in action on adjacent freeway lanes. Amazing). But a non-exhaustive search of the state vehicle code (there are only so many hours in the day) does not turn up an outright prohibition on drivers using cameras and taking pictures while driving (the Department of Motor Vehicles admonishes us to avoid distractions, such as eating, doing personal grooming, reading the newspaper, working on Rubik’s cubes, etc., while we’re behind the wheel).

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Isotherm

The noon temperature in San Francisco is 59 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the National Weather Service. Where else is it 59 right about now? According to the NWS, Weather Underground, and Environment Canada:

Gasquet, California
Lakeview, Oregon
Friday Harbor, Washington
Race Rocks, British Columbia
Portage, Alaska
Mayo, Yukon
Norman Wells, Northwest Territories
Isachsen, Nunavut
Maniwaki, Quebec
Rocky Harbour, Newfoundland
Quqortoq, Greenland
Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland
Valentia Island, Ireland
Edinburgh, Scotland
Brest, France
Bronnoysund, Norway
Vaestmarkum, Sweden
St. Petersburg, Russia
Yakutsk, Russia
Adelaide, Australia
Vryheid, South Africa
Kermadec Island, New Zealand
La Serena, Chile
Ezeiza, Argentina

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June Rain

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Nothing remarkable here–if you live someplace where rain or some associated form of precipitation is assumed to be part of your life year-round.

Here, we live by the myth that the rain starts well into the fall and sheds its last drops by the end of April. Rain in the dry months is more common than we like to think. As Jan Null, a Bay Area weather guy who has pored over our precipitation climatology, said in an email yesterday, “It hasn’t rained during the last week of June in San Francisco since… insert drumroll,.. last year! On the June 24th and 25th, 2010 it rained 0.01 and 0.04″ respectively.”

One difference, though: Several places in the Bay Area–Oakland, Oakland Airport, and San Francisco Airport) have already broken their all-time June records for rain (on the strength of a storm that came through during the first week of the month). And several more are on the verge of doing so (Santa Rosa, Napa, Santa Cruz, and perhaps others).

Of course, we’re not talking about a deluge here. Santa Rosa’s record rainfall for the entire month of June is 2.43 inches. In San Francisco, it’s 2.57 inches. That’s a good summer afternoon’s rain in a lot of places east of the Missouri.

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Coast Solstice

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I spent the day out reporting in Sonoma County–salmon stuff, which I’ll write more about tomorrow. The drive back down the freeway, U.S. 101, was brutal, so I took a detour out to the coast and stopped at Goat Rock, just south of where the Russian River empties into the Pacific. The last time I stopped there was 1985, though I’ve passed it many times since. I parked, walked around the beach recording sound. Then on the drive back to Highway 1 pulled over and hiked up a trail to a summit overlooking the coast (the name, it turns out, is Peaked Hill; height given variously at 367 or 377 feet above sea level). Above (looking south, toward Bodega Bay) and below (looking northwest across Arched Rock, left, and Goat Rock) are the views from the top. It was very warm inland today and absolutely perfect on the coast. By the time I was back in the Berkeley, just before 9 o’clock, the sun had just set and a seabreeze was breaking our hot spell.

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Family History

I think it’s pretty common among families to think and talk about the unseen influences on our lives. I”m talking about the little shreds of detail, or sometimes rich, complex stories, about our parents and maybe their parents that we think might explain something about them and about us.

Concrete example: Growing up, I was very aware that both my parents lost their fathers at an early age. My dad’s father died when he was 10; my mom’s dad died when she was 11. I came to assume, through small details I picked up over the years, that these events were traumatic if not shattering events in their families’ lives and that in one way or other they shaped my life and the lives of my siblings and maybe even the lives of our kids.

I was thinking about the biggest incident we heard about growing up, one that I think I heard my mom refer to simply as “the dunes.”

In August 1939, my mom, at age 9, was the lone survivor of a five-member family group swept into Lake Michigan at Miller Beach, in the Indiana dunes. I wrote a little bit about that a few years ago. Her account of what happened was pretty graphic–especially regarding her memories of trying to save a brother who was within arm’s reach and what it was like to have almost drowned (she said that by the time she was rescued she had stopped struggling; she was revived on the beach).

Mom suffered from depression for most of her life. It’s reasonable to think that one of the triggers was this terrible incident in the dunes. But she suffered a couple other major tragedies, too. The early death of her father, as I’ve mentioned, and the loss of a child–a brother of mine, the youngest of the four of us who arrived roughly annually in the mid-1950s, who died just before his second birthday. I saw some of the effects of that last tragedy. I remember that eventually my mom started seeing a psychiatrist–a move that may have saved her life and in some measure changed my life, too.

Something that was tucked away in the back of my head about the psychiatrist: Some years after my mom began seeing him, he suffered his own tragedy in the lake. He was out on his boat with his wife one August evening when a storm came up. The boat capsized, and the doctor and his wife were thrown overboard and separated. He was rescued after seven or eight hours in the water. She drowned. I recall my mom talking about this and overheard her saying that he told her that he simply didn’t want to get out of the lake when he was found.

Thinking about all this just now, I went looking for signs of the doctor online. He’d be in his 80s now, or even older. I checked news archives, and the lake incident came up as the only hit for his name in the Chicago area. And here’s what prompted this post: The date of his accident? It was the anniversary of the 1939 dunes drowning. I wonder if my mom and the doctor ever talked about that coincidence.

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Road Blog: Berkeley

And on the seventh day, I flew home from Chicago. I began and ended the journey at the North Berkeley BART station, and at the extreme ends of the train schedule (last Tuesday, I caught a 4:30 a.m. train to take an early shuttle to the Oakland airport; tonight I arrived back on the very last train of the night and got home about 1 a.m.). Here are some basics:

Tuesday, May 31: Flew from Oakland to Seattle-Tacoma airport; drove with Sakura and Eamon from the airport to Butte, Montana. (Notable stops: Roslyn, Washington; Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; Superior, Montana).

Wednesday, June 1: Drove from Butte to Spearfish, South Dakota. (Notable stop: Little Bighorn Battlefield).

Thursday, June 2: Drove from Spearfish, South Dakota., to Council Bluffs, Iowa. (Notable stops: Deadwood’s Mount Moriah Cemetery, Crazy Horse monument, Mount Rushmore, Yankton, South Dakota (cool bridge there).

Friday, June 3: We split as previously planned. I flew to Chicago from Omaha. Eamon and Sakura drove to Independence, Missouri, by way of Lamoni, Iowa (and if you’re sharp you can tell me the connection between those two towns).

Saturday, June 4: I enjoyed my leisure in Chicago. Eamon and Sakura drove into town from Independence.

Sunday, June 5: Chicago for everyone.

Monday, June 6: Eamon and Sakura drove from Chicago to Youngstown, Ohio. They expect to be in New York today (Tuesday, the 7th). I flew from Chicago to San Francisco.

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Road Blog: Spearfish to Council Bluffs

Every road trip seems to entail one day that gets out of hand, a day you spend a lot more time on the road than you think is wise. Today–yesterday now–was such a day. We bit off a lot, saw a lot, encountered wonderful sights, had a few friendly chats with folks along the way, and wound up with a long grind of a drive east to put us where we wanted to be tonight.

To start at the end: We got where we were going, and I’m sitting in a comfortable motel room in Council Bluffs, Iowa, better than 600 miles from where we started the day. But something happened along the way.

Jump back about 120 miles from here, to Nebraska Route 12, just west of the little town of Ponca. It was dusk. I had been pushing consistently above the 60 mph speed limit in Eamon and Sakura’s new car, a Prius. Part of my brain was doing destination math, whittling down the distance to where I’m sitting now. Part of my brain was watching the road and monitoring everything on the displays in front of me.

The highway took a righthand bend, and my habit is to look through the turn, and I’ve got to think that’s what I was doing, looking right, when the deer appeared on the left side of the road. Sakura saw it first; she said she had seen a dead deer earlier and was watching out for any that might stray onto the road. She exclaimed something, and so did Eamon, sitting in the passenger seat. I saw a brown shape crossing in front of us. “Too late” is as close as I can translate the impulse that went through my head.

Then the impact: It seemed we made impact with the deer with the right front side of the car. It slammed into the front right side of the car, too, near the sideview mirror, as it was thrown up and to the right. The thought occurred that it hadn’t flown into the windshield. That was good. Then it was gone.

I slowed and pulled onto the shoulder about 150 yards down the road. In the car, we were all shocked but otherwise OK. Eamon and I walked back to see if we could find the deer. A man in a pickup truck stopped and rolled down his window. “We hit a deer,” I said. “You all OK?” he asked. I thanked him for stopping, then he rolled on.

Eamon and I walked back, looking for the deer in the ditch. There was just enough light to see it–her, I’m reasonably certain. She had come to rest on her left side, her head to the east. She wasn’t stirring–I’m reasonably certain, too, she was killed instantly. Marvelously intact and irretrievably broken, her left eye open and bottomless. Eamon looked down at her and said, “I’m sorry.” He was stricken and started walking back to the car.

I bent down over her in the dusk. Words came out. “I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry I took your life so brutally. I’m sorry to have taken your life for no purpose. I’m sorry I sent you back to the earth here in this ditch. If there’s a spirit, I hope it has flown and is free.”

Then I walked back to the car. It has some damage to the front end. I hope it’s all cosmetic, as expensive as that’s going to be. I know Eamon was feeling pretty bad about having his new ride banged up on its first voyage. I’m sorry about that, too–really sorry. And of course for the deer and for us I wish I could make the moment different from what it was. And it occurs to me that the moment could easily have been very different, and much worse: If I had swerved and rolled the car, say, or put the car into an uncontrolled skid.

I’ll always remember that righthand curve outside Ponca.