March 3rd: That means it’s Thom’s birthday. Hey, boyo: Happy birthday. from me and Mom.
Rain Chronicles
This will not be a banner precipitation season for California–though always keep your eye out for the neighbor building boats and inviting in pairs of every creature. But that doesn’t mean it is without interest. For starters, it could well be a significantly below-par year for rain and snow here, which would make it three such years in a row, and that’s never good news. Already this year, the probability of a third drought year is getting spun by the governor and his water people to bolster their campaign for more dams and fancy plumbing. You have to admire their pluck; with the state $40 billion in the hole just to buy things like bullets for the Highway Patrol, stun guns for prison guards, paper clips for the bureaucrats, and adult diapers for the Legislature, the guv and company are talking about getting the taxpayers to spring for another $10 billion or so.
Anyway. Talking rain at work today, someone produced a list that purports to show that a place called Blue Canyon, on Interstate 80 (and the Union Pacific) in the Sierra, is one of the 10 wettest locations in the Lower 48 states (and the wettest in California). It gets 68 inches of precipitation a year. No way, no how that is the wettest place in California. My money’s on Honeydew, a hamlet on the Mattole River in Humboldt County. With our neighbors, the Martinuccis, we actually drove through Honeydew once on our way up the coast. I have an impression of a general store and a narrow bridge. There’s some evidence–disappointingly scanty, to be honest, but it includes an official-looking listing of each state’s wettest location–that Honeydew regularly gets 100 inches plus of rain a year.
And leaving Honeydew out of the picture for a moment, there are at least half a dozen places up on the North Coast–towns like Fort Dick and Crescent City in Del Norte County–and further south–like Cazadero in Sonoma County–all average more than 70 inches a year.
Not that Blue Canyon doesn’t deserve attention. Some with the Weather Service credit it with being the snowiest recording station in the Lower 48 (averaging 240.8 inches a year). But here’s my favorite: in a table succinctly labeled “Mean Monthly and Annual Number of Hours with Measurable Precipitation, with Percent of Hours and Maximum 1-Hour Totals,” Blue Canyon is way out ahead of any California listing: On average, it’s precipitating there 10.6 percent of the hours in the year–928 hours and 30 minutes, roughly. Of course, that would make it just a run-of-the-mill place in much of Oregon and Washington (Portland’s percentage of precipitation hours per year: 10.9).
Water, Water Everywhere
We’re in a drought here, or what they call a drought in California, so I’ve been thinking about water. Unfortunately, I’ve been thinking in terms that use lots of words and have led so far to dead ends. (Just a minute: a blog, dead ends–what’s the problem?) Anyway, for now, just a couple of numbers, from Shasta Lake, the biggest of the big network of reservoirs built to turn California’s mountains and rivers into a reliable water bank. In the past month at Shasta Dam, on the Sacramento River just north of the city of Redding:
–More than 20 inches of rain has fallen.
–The amount of water in the reservoir has increased by about one-third, from 1.41 million acre feet to 1.86 million acre feet.
–The amount of the increase over just a month, 450,000 acre feet, is about enough water to supply 2.2 million people for a year.
–But that’s not a lot in term of the demand for water here: About 80 to 85 percent of the “developed” water in California–water that’s impounded behind dams and delivered on demand to customers around the state–goes to farms. The rest goes to industry and residential users. The population of California is 36.5 million.
I’ve got lots more numbers kicking around, but that’s enough for now. In the next installment–soon!–I’ll try to make some sense of them.
Berkeley Rain
It started raining about midnight last night and kept up nearly straight through until 10 this evening. I’ve found lots and lots of weather sites online with scads of data to waste my time on, but I’ve never found the “official” Berkeley weather statistics online on a day to day basis; what I see from looking at local home weather stations and several other measurements around town is that we had about 2 inches of rain in the storm. Around the state, I’ve seen numbers over 5 inches along the northern coast and in some parts of the Coast Ranges. Three weeks ago, the universal description of this season was “California’s third dry winter in a row.” It could still turn out that way, but February has been a rainy month nearly everywhere in the state.
We had to get out for a walk this afternoon and decided to go down to the dog park near the Berkeley Marina. The rain chased almost everyone else away, and we got to slosh around by ourselves for half an hour or 45 minutes. The dog highlight of the day came when Scout spotted a jackrabbit on a knoll about 50 yards away. I saw him go after a rabbit once before, and it was a startling transformation from pet to hare-seeking missile. The same thing happened today: he turned into 55 pounds of flat-out speed and actually closed a good bit of the distance on the rabbit before it vanished into some brush and over a hilltop. Scout disappeared, too. He’s usually very controlled but from my earlier experience I knew he’d keep running as long as he had any sign that the rabbit was nearby. We ran after him and spotted him a couple hundred yards away in a meadow, looking around for us.
(Picture above: Standing water in the dog park; below: dog standing over ground squirrel burrow, with clouds moving along the top of the Berkeley Hills; you can see UC Berkeley’s Campanile in the distance.)
After Work
After work, I walked from the radio station, at Mariposa and Bryant streets, over Potrero Hill, down to south of Market, all the way to the Bay, then up to the Oakland ferry. It’s about three and a quarter miles. The walk does lots of things, and one of them is to open up the city to view.
San Francisco is every bit as striking as self-conscious locals and awestruck visitors say it is. What I’ve come to like about it are the hard edges, the things that make the place a city rather than just a post-card vista: the Muni bus barn across the street from the station; Mariposa Street’s steep climb across Potrero Avenue; the way the 101 freeway cuts into the shoulder of Potrero Hill and sweeps beneath the pedestrian bridge between Utah Street and San Bruno Avenue; the view of downtown and the Bay Bridge from the hill; the way streets are flung straight up the hill, and all the rest of the hills, damn the contours; the shopping center on the site of the old Seals ballpark and the fact the ballpark was once there; the Double Play bar across the street from the same dead ballpark (I’ve never been inside); the giant phased electric classic Coca-Cola sign along the approach to the bridge; the bail-bond gulch across the street from the Hall of Justice; block after block of new lofts and flats that fill the old industrial district; the corner, 3rd and Brannan, where Jack London was born, according to the plaque there; the works and ramparts of the Bay Bridge where it’s built into bedrock and begins its thrust out over the water; the roar of traffic on the bridge, 15 or 20 stories above the bay shore, and everything else about the Bay Bridge, now that I think about it; the bayfront, for now anyway tamed and manicured and turned into a long promenade; the Ferry Building which I’ll always see with it’s cupola-top flagpole wrenched askew by the 1989 earthquake; and a thousand other things that I’ve seen, remarked to myself, and have forgotten until next time I come across them.
And what I like most of all–that I’ve gotten a chance to walk through these places and am doing it still.
Jam
Occasionally, once every couple of weeks maybe, I’ll drive in to San Francisco for my afternoon shift rather than take the train in. A midday the traffic is usually light and you zip across. And though it’s unnecessary to drive since I live and work close to transit, it’s nice every once in a while not to do the short hike down to the station at 16th and Mission at 9:30 or 10 at night. That’s another story.
This afternoon the bridge approaches were clear as usual at 1 p.m. But the electronic sign at the bottom of the long incline after the toll plazas said there was an accident two or three miles ahead. Just ahead, the traffic was slowing, and it took a good 25 minutes to get up to the accident site on the west side of the tunnel that opens onto the suspension span that carries traffic into the city. Since traffic was just about stopped, I took out the camera and did some distracted driving.
Cake of the Day
It’s Groundhog’s Day. Also James Joyce’s birthday. I’m pondering how best to observe the latter. In the meantime, I have to indulge an inane while-shaving thought:
‘They Did Not Care’
One of the things that has preoccupied me this month, as I look back from its tail end:
Early the morning of New Year’s Day, a police officer with BART, the local rapid transit agency, shot and killed an unarmed man who was lying face down on a station platform. Even if you live clear across the country, you might have heard about the case. One element made it sensational: dozens of train passengers and other bystanders witnessed the shooting, and several, at least, were recording the scene on cellphones or other video devices. And one more factor added to outrage over what looks like an unprovoked shooting: the cop was white and the victim was black.
So, the past month has been marked by a slow and possibly botched investigation, the refusal of the police officer to answer any questions about what he did or why, multiple street protests that on one occasion turned into a riot in downtown Oakland, a murder charge, and today, finally, the first hint of an explanation for what the cop did.
The police officer, named Johannes Mehserle, was in court for a bail hearing yesterday. Beforehand, his lawyer filed a motion that described some of the events on the BART platform when the shooting took place. The story is simple: Mehserle and a fellow officer were having trouble subduing Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old they were trying to arrest for resisting arrest (one of my favorite circular-logic law-enforcement scenarios). Mehserle decided to use his recently issued Taser on Grant. He mistakenly pulled his semi-automatic pistol and fired a shot that killed Grant. Or maybe the story isn’t so simple: Mehserle reportedly told another officer that he shot Grant because he thought Grant was reaching for a gun.
The judge at the hearing granted bail of $3 million after noting that Mehserle’s story contained some serious inconsistencies. He’s not out of jail yet, and he has a prelminary hearing set in March. Sooner or later, he’ll be tried for some manner of homicide — either murder, as now alleged, or manslaughter.
The defense bail motion consists of nuggets picked out of about 700 pages of “discovery” — mostly interviews with witnesses and other police officers. It’s a document meant to show Mehserle in the most positive possible light so that the judge might see that justice might only be served by turning him loose on bail. My favorite tidbit in the motion’s Mehserle biography is this: “Mr. Mehserle enjoys music and has played the electric and acoustic guitars since age 14. He plays blues, jazz and rock and roll.”
The motion also tries to set the scene on the BART platform before the shooting. Other BART officers describe people screaming and swearing and advancing menacingly. Grant was cursing the cops and defying an order to sit until a BART officer struck him twice in the face. Here’s the situation as one officer recounted it:
Domenici stated she has been in other situations like Raiders games and has handled large amount of crowds. But the crowd on New Year’s Eve night was not a typical crowd. She stated everybody on the train was “out of control” and that it was “just too much.” Domenici stated the crowd did not care and was not concerned with authority figures. “They did not care what we represented as law enforcement figures. The people did not care that we were police officers.”
Domenici said, “You do what you’re trained to do and try to control the situation. But when people are not listening to you, knowing you are in full uniform and you are in authority, and they keep coming at you … I was afraid. I was afraid for my life and the officers’ lives. I kept thinking ‘I need to protect us.’ ‘I need to protect us.’ There’s all these people coming at us, not listening to us. I was afraid for my life and the other officers there. It just seemed like an eternity. We could not control the scene at all.”
I’m happy to say that except for the once of twice I’ve had an officer pull a gun and point it at me, I’ve had a mostly friendly, cooperative relationship with the police. I’ve talked to them as part of my work, I’ve been more than willing to do my part as a citizen and call them when I’ve seen a possible crime in progress, and I’ve never hesitated to call them when I need their help.
But I’m also acquainted with the fact not everyone has such a trusting feeling toward law enforcement. For lots of people–people who don’t live on a quiet little street in Berkeley, people who may be poor, who live in neighborhoods full of violent crime, who fit a certain suspect profile–law enforcement represents something else.
In fact, I can imagine there are those who see police officers, the representatives of law enforcement, as a class of people who believe their uniform confers authority and should command not only respect, but unquestioning obedience; whose default responses to resistance are threat and force; and who seem to believe that their own behavior ought to be tolerated as part of the price of keeping order.
[In case you’re curious: The Mehserle Bail Motion]
A Dull Boy
So here are some of the things that make Jack a dull, or at least non-blogging, boy:
–All work and no play, as so persuasively documented elsewhere.
–A website-building project for a friend, which involves hours and hours of staring into this little laptop screen and plenty of tinkering with “code.” I’m in maybe the 2nd percentile of the code-literate world, but it can be both satisfying and numbing to embark on a day of web-browser trial and error.
–Paying bills. Amazing that that still brings a feeling of having done something.
–Two or three busy weeks at work, what with some new president in office and a local police force making news by killing an unarmed, unresisting man in front of a bunch of people with cellphone cameras running.
–And then there’s the matter of working at a place where layoffs are imminent. My own fate is unclear, but that’s almost — almost, I said — beside the point. Since I left the then-secure world of unionized newsroom employment in mid-90s, I’ve lost count of the number of layoffs I’ve seen firsthand. I’ve had a hand in laying off hundreds of people myself, and even had one of the laid-off people challenge me to a fight. I’ve been laid off myself. Having seen the process close up from different vantage points, I’m only sure that the process is never clean or humane and rarely competently handled. So yeah, that’s on my mind.
–Neglecting my various communication duties. And no, I’m not counting Facebook or Twitter as “communication.”
All for now. Even a dullard needs his sleep.
Rooftop
Finally got around to taking down the “Christmas” lights this afternoon. Late this afternoon. By the time I was done it was getting dark. This is the view to the southwest after a showery, drizzly day that seems to have given way tonight to some clear skies.