Category: Berkeley

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Snail at Work

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One of the surprises of the late summer and fall: A bunch of chrysanthemums I planted last fall have gone nuts (or run riot, perhaps). They were scrawny little things in pots last year with a few promising blossoms, They are big and lush and colorful now. All I’ve done is water them.

I started to realize in the past week they’re also attractive to snails. I could see the shiny aftermath of the snails’ slime trails on the flowers themselves. This morning was muggy and drizzly, and the snails are out there crawling all over the blossoms. Strangely, they don’t seem to be consuming them. Maybe they’re just fanciers of mums.

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Bee at Work

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I wanted a picture of this plant, a shrub in my neighbor’s yard, for a trip to the nursery. It wasn’t until I was standing there that I realized the bush was full of bees. One happened to alight in one place long enough for me to get it in the frame. End of story. Except to mention that the nursery folks opined that the plant is some form of Cuphea; further research identifies this specimen as Cuphea lanceolata Starfire.

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Westering Twilight

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Flew back home last night, a flight that lifted off on O’Hare’s eastbound runway 9R at 6:35 p.m. CDT, circled north, then climbed into a long westering sunset and twilight. We had cloud cover most of the way, but got glimpses of the Fox River, the Rock River, and the Mississippi. More gliimpses: Iowa farms, the North Platte River, Interstate 25 north of Denver. Further west, saw Utah Lake and the cities of Provo and Orem in the dusk. Then mostly blank, dark countryside until we crested the Sierra Nevada, where the lights of the foothills and Central Valley, the Livermore Valley and the Bay Area, all shone.

My seven Chicago days went fast. My dad is prone to what I might euphemistically call confusion about some day-to-day events (a confusion that does not extend to all things, though. When we drive around Chicago, he’s generally pretty quick to answer requests for navigation help). I had told him I was leaving Thursday and reminded him of that a couple times before yesterday. I kept him abreast of my preparations to go yesterday. Still, he twice expressed surprise when I appeared with my suitcase and satchel and said I was heading out. “You are?” he said. “When are you coming back?”

“When would you like me to come back?” I asked. “Tomorrow!” he said. Soon, I hope. But today, here I sit, 1,836 air miles away.

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‘Good Morning, BART Riders’

I’m sitting at the forward end of the car, the last coach on the train, riding backward, on my way to work late Tuesday morning. The door from the next car opens, and a voice says, “Go on–get in there.” A girl of 12 or so and a woman maybe in her 30s come through the door and walk down the aisle, then stop about a third of the way through the car. The woman starts up, and I realize immediately I’ve heard her spiel before.

“Good morning, BART riders,” she declaims. “My daughter and I have been homeless for two and a half months because I am a victim of domestic violence. We’re getting put out of our shelter at 11 a.m. My daughter hasn’t even eaten today. I have a hearing today at 2 o’clock, and I’m trying to raise forty-three ninety-nine for food and a place to stay.”

That’s it. The number catches my attention: $43.99. It’s part of the hustle–a number that’s supposed to be more persuasive for being so oddly specific. I’ve closed my eyes because I don’t want to see what happens next, whether or not anyone forks over some money. When I encountered the mom and daughter a few months ago on BART, I thought the girl looked stricken, humiliated.

The train pulls into the West Oakland station, and the pair get off. Most people in the car are sitting alone with their thoughts about what they’ve just seen. Several people sitting near the door discuss it.

“She does that all of the time,” a man says. “Every day. It’s a good scam.”

“But her poor daughter has to go through that every day,” the woman across the aisle says. A second man: “Her baby should be in school.”

“They use them kids,” the first man says, “they use them kids as a lure. It’s a good scam. She’s probably got more money on her than you have in you bank account. Yeah, she’s got a stash on her somewhere. She’s probably over on the other side right now getting on another train.”

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Ankle Biters, You’ve Been Warned

oaklandfox082410a.jpgAt the Fox Oakland last night, before the Bob Dylan show. Do these folks follow Dylan around, or do they just look for likely rock shows with large gatherings of the soon-to-be-damned? I’m taken by the lists of people who face condemnation in this crowd’s book–a curious collection of life-style misdemeanants (“sports nuts”), other Christians (“Catholics”), even non-humans (“vomit-eating dogs”). And homosexuals, of course. And ankle biters. Ankle biters?

The sign below promises Jesus will destroy “unforgiving liars … effeminate revilers … deceitful adulterers” and so on and so forth. Does that mean Christ will look the other way for liars who forgive, manly revilers, and up-front adulterers?

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Worst of Weeks, Best of Weeks

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The worst: Well, we won’t go into all that here. But we’ve had plenty of fodder for soul-searching the last little while or so. We expect we’re not alone in that, and we also are close to folks who are going through far, far harder times. Maybe we’ll learn something from it all and go on to higher understanding, a more upright life, and great accomplishments. OK–we’s take the understanding, anyway, and maybe some of the rest will follow.

The best: We took a car-camping trip last week, our first in years. Completed an unplanned and somewhat haphazard circuit that happened to encompass the watersheds of the Tuolumne and Mokelumne rivers (the former is impounded by a series of dams and shipped by aqueduct to San Francisco and some suburbs; the latter is dammed and shipped to the East Bay). Some pictures–forgive the redundancies–are on Flickr: Car Camping, August 2010.

Above: Part of the Great Bayshore Viaduct, aka Overpass World. Shot this morning; color manipulated afterward because we needed to do a little experimentation.

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Donner Land

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The Dog and I made a quick trip (I drove) this weekend up to the Donner Summit area in the Sierra Nevada. We went to see my friends Linda and Dave (The Dog got to hang out with their dogs, Dolly and Hannah). Sunday morning, we drove up to what I see referred to on maps as Donner Ridge–on the eastern/southern boundary of the Tahoe-Donner mega-development. We walked a fire trail for an hour and a half or so in actual sunshine (as opposed to the thick gray blanket of overcast still clinging this morning to the coast). Anyway, here’s a shot southeast from the ridge. Interstate 80, descending from Donner Pass, is in the center foreground. On the ridge opposite, you can see the snow sheds of the old Union Pacific line that trains used to take over the pass; I think they now run through a tunnel a little further south.

The first rocky peak in the center is Donner Peak, elevation 8203; and the friendlier-looking flat summit directly behind it is Mount Judah, elevation 8,243. Donner Summit, the heights the 1846 party tried to scale in the snow, with wagons, livestock, families, and various domestic accouterments, is to the right.

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Somewhere It’s Summer …

Well, summer is everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, to be technical. You can tell because it’s hot just about everywhere east of the Berkeley Hills. And I mean everywhere: I hear on NPR this morning that Moscow (the one in Russia) just chalked up its first 100-degree reading in 120 years of record-keeping.

But west of the Berkeley Hills? It’s been a cool, cool summer so far. Jan Null, a local meteorologist, says in a message to his email list that San Francisco just went through the coolest July in decades. He writes:

“With an average monthly maximum July temperature of just 63.1 degrees, San Francisco had its coolest July since 1971 and the 13th coolest in the past 97 years. (See table below) Only one day reached the 70 degree mark (72 degrees on 7/3 and no day after the 17th exceeded 64 degrees.”

I will only add that now we’re into August, which by tradition if not meteorological fact is regarded as the coolest, foggiest month along this stretch of coast. The week’s certainly starting out with a nice cold, gray blanket of clouds–thick enough that we had a light drizzle this morning. (And lest anyone think I’m whining, let me add that most of these chill mornings in the East Bay have been giving way to spectacular, sunny afternoons during which the temperature gets clear up to the high 60s and maybe even nudges 70.)

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East Bay Local History: Rainbow Trout

We wanted a local outing Sunday afternoon, and Kate wanted something that fit into her current interest in local watersheds. So we drove up to Redwood Regional Park in the Oakland Hills, and drove down the east side of the ridge to where Redwood Creek heads down to Upper San Leandro Reservoir. Kate had read about a fishway there–an aid to migrating rainbow trout. I had no idea that the Oakland Hills had any fish populations that would benefit from something like a fish ladder, so I was curious to see what was up there.

And what was up there was a little piece of history. Specimens from the watershed were the first to be identified as “rainbow trout,” back in the 1850s. And then later, fish biologists came to realize that these trout were the same species as steelhead found elsewhere on the West Coast and first collected by European biologists on Russia’s Pacific Coast in the 1730s (for more on that tale, consult Peter B. Moyle, “Inland Fishes of California.” See his discussion of the rainbow trout’s name.

Here’s a little album of the afternoon’s expotition (and if it’s not visible below, check it out here).