Category: Berkeley

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Oasis

Tunnel Road: The fountain.

Not a great picture, but this is a drinking fountain up along Skyline Drive, just above Tunnel Road, in the Oakland Hills. Here’s what’s unique about the fountain: It’s set up on the shoulder of the road in a place that seems meant to be of maximum use for cyclists. The road is one of the most popular climbs in the East Bay Hills, an almost leisurely ascent that invites you to spin your way up and then gets a little more serious about halfway up the roughly four-mile climb. I’d guess that hundreds of cyclists ride past this fountain on their way up every day; a few locals may stroll here, too, but the road and shoulders are narrow and you certainly don’t see many of them as you pedal through here.  

I went up here about 2 p.m. or so. A nearby weather station recorded the temperature as 95 degrees. I’ve ridden so little of late that even a relatively relaxed climb like this one has become an index of my lack of fitness. Didn’t hurt too much, though, and the reward came on the fun descent from the top of Grizzly Peak Boulevard back into Berkeley.

Anyway, the fountain: I passed it, then remembered a nice little New York Times feature from a month or so back that talked about public drinking fountains and what they represent. I turned around to use this one, and noticed many sets of bike-tire tracks in the dirt at its base. An oasis on a hot day.

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Friday Night Ferry, Sibling Birthday Edition

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I took the day off, so tonight Kate and I rode the boat from Oakland to San Francisco together, stopped and ate at the Ferry Building (Taylor’s Automatic Refresher), then took the last run back to the East Bay. The sun was just setting as the boat left the dock at Jack London Square. Sky and water shone with a gorgeous light all the way across. (And hey: It was by brother John’s birthday today, and I didn’t call him. Happy birthday, JB. You would have loved the ride today, but I’m sure you had a good time in Brooklyn.)

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Temperature Inversion

You know the old rule: Temperature declines as you gain elevation. Here’s an adjunct to that: Except when it doesn’t. It’s fairly common in the San Francisco Bay Area to have cool marine air trapped under a layer of much warmer air. It can be a startling experience to start a walk in the cool damp air in our flatlands neighborhood and cross suddenly–in the matter of just a few feet–into very warm, much drier air.

There’s a beautiful case in point this morning. The lower elevations around the Bay are cocooned in a blanket of cool, moist air. Here in Berkeley, one station has the temperature as 58 degrees Fahrenheit and 91 percent relative humidity. That’s at an elevation of 361 feet–probably up on campus. At the 1,300-foot level in the hills, less than five miles away as the crow flies, it’s 78 F. with 29 percent humidity. Further afield, atop Mount Diablo (about 20 miles to the east; elevation 3,849), it’s 82 F. and 8 percent while at the base of the mountain (in Clayton, 518 feet) it’s 67 F. and 44 percent.

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Canine Excrement: Ethical and Psychosocial Considerations

We have a dog. No, wait: The Dog. We live in a town that has decreed that if your dog does what it’s going to do while you’re out on a walk–take a dump on the sidewalk, in the park, or on someone’s lawn–you’ve got to pick it up and dispose of it. I’ve got no problems with the law. Really, it’s only civilized to make sure you don’t leave a pile of crap where someone else is going to step in it or play in it and curse you and your kind for it. The only thing I wonder about on a practical level is whether we’ve figured out the right long-term regime for disposal. The method I see employed almost universally–picking up the crap using a plastic bag for a glove, then dumping the bagged crap in the garbage somewhere–means that there’s lots and lots of well-preserved canine excrement headed to landfills. Lest you think I’m overthinking the issue, here’s evidence from Ithaca, New York, and Toronto, Ontario, about ways people are trying to deal with it.

But that’s just one dimension of dog waste handling and disposal. There are dimensions that cross from the pragmatic to the social to the psychic that I wrestle with almost every time I’m out with The Dog. For instance?

A simple one: Say The Dog decides a certain lawn has the perfect balance of situation, smell, and texture that he decides to grace it with a deposit. Of course it’s no harder to pick up a dump from a private lawn that from a public lawn in the park But I always find myself thinking, “Is someone watching from inside? Are they upset at the sight of a dog profaning their personal greensward? Gee, I hope not. And here I am to pick it up!

Other sample poop-scooping thoughts:

Someone else approaches as I bend over to pick up a dump: “Oh, boy–I bet I look like a doofus. Picking up a dog shit. I’m subservient to a dog! I’m picking up its crap!”

I’m carrying a plastic bag with a dog crap in it and someone else walks by: “Oh, boy–I bet this looks cool. Carrying a dog crap.” (In point of fact, I met a neighbor once who saw me carrying such a bag. She asked how long I’d carry it before throwing it out. I think she was concerned about the sanitary aspects of the operation, which is something I don’t worry about much.)

I’m carrying a plastic bag with a dog crap in it and I pass a residential garbage can: Big dilemma. I really want to get rid of this. Should I dump it in here? Would the people mind? If they see me do it, will they come out and yell at me? If that sounds ridiculous, let me say I have seen one or two household garbage cans with signs on them saying something like, “Please, no dog poop.” I know why. It stinks after a day or two. In practice, what I do depends on where I happen to be. Since I’ve gotten to know where all the public garbage receptacles are, I’ll use one of those if I’m close by. If not, I might use a residential one or bring the thing home to throw it away. I’ve imagined having someone in full entitled, proprietary Berkeley dudgeon come out and challenge my use of their can. I’ve further imagined complying with a demand to remove any illicit leavings by emptying the entire contents on the sidewalk, removing my share, and walking away. Let us hope it never comes to that.

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Picture Surprise

We have a surprise picture tonight. It’s of either:

a) The sublime scene near Suisun Bay late this afternoon as our odd September storm rolled in. To the east, a window of clear sky over the Valley, with patches of white cumulus. To the south, Mount Diablo in shadow, the peak vanishing and reappearing as dark bands of clouds blew by; it eventually vanished in the rain. To the west and north, veils of rain trailing out of the clouds as they swept toward us. Clear patches among the clouds, about every shade of blue I’ve ever seen in the sky. The landscape: buckskin hills to the north and east, dry as they get. To the north, tidal meadows and forests of tule reeds in the marshes. (Why were we up near Suisun Bay? To find some tules for a class project the Garden Stater is doing.)

So: that’s Picture Possibility No. 1, and you know my penchant for landscape/sky shots. No 2 is:

b) An urban graffito made humorous not so much for its content as its juxtaposition of one pop culture era with another. (You take the trouble to read this, we’re going to give you high-brow analysis.)

That’s Picture Possibility No. 2, and you know my love of quirky urban signs. No. 3 is:

A picture I took while driving this afternoon that shows a woman driving a car on the San Rafael Bridge while reading a storybook to a child, who is sitting on her lap. You know my penchant for strange and occasionally outrageous highway scenes.

If you want to draw out the suspense and create a real genuine community discussion, you could leave a comment about which one of the above is Picture Surprise. If you just want to get this over with, click the link below and go to “the jump.”

Continue reading “Picture Surprise”

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Sky

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So the Friday evening walk to the ferry to meet Kate often–usually–starts with a hike up the west side of Potrero Hill. Once, it was probably a working-class area; the older homes are modest in scale, mostly, and the heights are surrounded by old industrial and warehouse neighborhoods on the edge of the Mission, the south of Market area and (a new one to me) the Dogpatch district on the eastern flank between the hill and the Bay.

Anyway, I go up the west side, usually, and down the north side and then wind my way to the Embarcadero and the ferry slip. The bonus of the walk, which generally takes about an hour,, is everything you see along the way. Tonight, I hit the street just as the sunset color was coming on. I thought, “Ah, it’ll fade by the time I’m up the hill.” But it only got more intense. Above is the view from the upper part of 18th Street, looking down over the Mission. What an evening. End of summer. We’re just a week out from the equinox.

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Door

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10th Street, South of Market, San Francisco. On my way from work up to the Civic Center BART station — a change of pace from 16th and Mission BART. I just liked the door color. And the rest of the palette, too. If you’re not a habitue of the city, this part of San Francisco was once filled with warehouses and light industry. Some still remains, but large tracts have long since been cleared and redeveloped into parks, hotels, condos, retail centers, and the like. This part of the South of Market neighborhood, well west of downtown, has changed more slowly and there’s still plenty of evidence of what used to be.

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Morning Dew

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Saturday evening, he had abundant low, thick clouds scudding in off the Bay. Not unusual. Less common: The air was warm and felt very wet. That gave way Sunday morning to very heavy dew. (The shorthand physical explanation: the air was near saturation with water and when the temperature fell to the “dew point” — in the mid-50s that night, I think — the water in the air was deposited on cars, lawns, and what have you.) On our way back from our usual Sunday morning walk down to the old Santa Fe right-of-way, Kate noticed a patch of grass in one yard on Rose Street, each stalk covered with beads of water. So–that’s where these pictures came from. (Click for larger versions.)

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Bay Bridge: Friday Dawn

bridgedawn090409.jpgSpent the morning — Friday morning, I need to say, with Saturday morning fast approaching — out at the Bay Bridge construction project. I’d love to describe it in detail, and will, but right now I’m just plumb tuckered out. This is the scene at the Coast Guard boat landing on Yerba Buena Island. None of the construction is in this view, and it’s a little out of focus, but it does convey a little bit of the beauty of this morning. More later.  

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Potrero Avenue: PM Clouds

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The other end of the day. Looking south on Potrero from Mariposa. Another warm evening, one that prompted me to run up to the top of Potrero Hill after I left work to watch the city and the sky. (And I mean run: I passed a cyclist who was struggling up the upper part of San Bruno Avenue. We said hi to each other, and she said, “You go!”)