Category: Berkeley

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More Wildlife More of the Time

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Shot from the car on the road out of the Berkeley Marina: It looks like a northern Pacific rattlesnake — very much like the one I photographed during a bike ride last year). A good-sized snake, too: about 30 inches. But: no rattle. After some reading (here and here), my non-expert opinion is that this is actually a gopher snake.

I drove past it, then backed up to take a look. It was right in the middle of the lane, and I thought about doing a Steve Irwin and picking it up and getting it off the road. But I didn’t. When a car came up behind me, I pointed down at the snake and pulled forward. The driver slowed, then went around the snake. I’ll be surprised if I don’t see it squished flat the next time I’m out there, though.

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Birds and Bicycles

Went for a ride today with another Berkeley guy up Mines Road, a back-country route that runs south of Livermore. As the name implies, it was built as a road from the Livermore Valley to mines (mercury mostly) in the sprawling range of hills to the south. It’s paved all the way through, but after it climbs the side of a high canyon above Los Moches Creek, it’s less than two lanes for more than 10 miles. The country out there has a wild, remote feel to it that sets it apart from the rest of the Bay Area. Live oaks and digger pines. Ranchettes and trailer homes that were off the grid until the last couple of decades. Boars running wild through the hills.

Two amazing bird moments occurred on today’s ride, which was very slow and relaxed (and warm and sunny). The second-most amazing first: As we descended a short and moderately steep hill, a turkey vulture — a hefty bird with about a six-foot wingspan if you’re not familiar with them — swooped down from a tree about 100 feet to the right of the road. My friend David was ahead of me, and the bird headed right for him; I waited for it to veer or soar away from David, but it never did. In fact, it came within a foot or so of hitting him. Then, after we passed, it followed us for 10 or 15 seconds — I was worried that it was going to dive bomb me, too. But it didn’t. I’ve seen vultures close up during rides before, but never anything like this. My guess is that it was nesting near the site we passed and maybe it was defending eggs or chicks (I figure even vultures have to take time out from eating dead stuff to produce a new generation).

That was the No. 2 moment. The most amazing moment happened a little earlier. We had reached the point on the ridge where the road levels out for a while. We were riding pretty casually, when suddenly a big raptor wheeled across the road about 50 yards ahead of us and began gliding straight toward us, about 10 or 12 feet up. I kept waiting to see that it was a red-tailed hawk — by far the most common raptor sighting in these parts — though I could see this bird was pretty big and too dark on its chest and under its wings to be a red-tail. The bird went directly over us, then turned up the ridge and showed its back and the top of its head: a golden eagle. We stopped, and it circled over us two or three times before flying out over the canyon to hunt.

I’ve known for years that golden eagles are out in that area, but until today I never saw one there. I never expected to see one so close that I almost could have reached up and touched it.

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Jays

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If you watch birds at all, you’ve got to feel conflicted about blue jays.

They’re beautiful. They’re bold and tough. I’ve always enjoyed watching their looping, swooping flight.

They’re also noisy to a fault; calling them aggressive understates the case. They’re opportunists of the first order, and if something weaker gives them an opening — like the towhees that built a nest next to our house last year only to watch a jay raid it and smash the eggs — they exploit it instantly. I tried to chase away the jay last year, but it was a lot better at its business that I was. It’s instinct, I know, not Karl Rove-like calculation, that drives the birds’ behavior (and I apologize to the birds, even if they’re mere beasts, for comparing them in any way to Karl Rove).

This spring, a couple of western scrub jays have built a nest within a couple of feet of the one the towhees abandoned, with prejudice, last year. We can just see the new nest near the top of a potato bush growing along the side of our back porch: just a non-descript bundle of sticks. But a couple of jays have been back and forth from that spot for a good couple weeks. It’s too high to see into, and well enough screened that it was hard to see whether there were any eggs up there.

Yesterday, one of the jays flew over my head to the nest. I could hear some weak little chirping. The new jays were hatched. Today, that chirping is a little louder. Now I find myself rooting for this little clutch of birds, even if they’re going to turn out to be a bunch of heartless (if handsome) marauders.

[The picture: That’s one of the parent scrub jays on our back porch this afternoon, along with genuine salvaged Wrigley Field seats, an extension cord, and other flotsam.]

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Local Infrastructure Drama

Macarthur042907

A gasoline tanker crashed on the biggest interchange in the Bay Area, the place where traffic exiting the Bay Bridge from San Francisco gets sent north, east and south to magical spots like Vallejo, Stockton, Hayward, and Fremont (and yes: Berkeley, too). The tanker caught fire after the crash, and the blaze’s intensity caused a section of aerial freeway to collapse onto the roadway where the truck was incinerated. Since the crash occurred at 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning, traffic was light and the only injury was to the truck driver, who suffered serious but not life threatening burns.

The predictable result of the crash: Gawkers, including your faithful correspondent (FC) and close collaborator (CC), were out in force. At the point of the collapse, the freeway maze flies over a collection of railroad and heavy equipment yards, vacant lots, and a sewage plant. It’s not easy to find your way around down there, and the few places that might have given a decent vantage point of the carnage — a couple “Mad Max”-type surface streets and the parking lot for a big home improvement store — were blocked off to prevent the idle legions from satisfying their curiosity. We could see the collapsed section from 200 or 300 yards away from nearby streets, but couldn’t get any closer. The best view turned out to be from the skyway that carries I-80 from West Oakland into Emeryville. The collapse was plainly visible from up there, though I tried to keep my attention on the road while CC snapped some shots.

It’s not the first time something catastrophic has happened at or near this spot. The interchange was reworked after the collapse of an adjacent double-deck freeway in the 1989 earthquake (42 people died there). The new ramp configuration has always seemed a little more challenging than an urban freeway ought to be: three lanes split into two directions — you can use the center lane to either go south on Interstate 880 toward San Jose or east on I-580 toward Stockton. With normal daytime traffic, the ramp is a bottleneck that backs up traffic as much as a mile, into Berkeley. Late at night or early in the morning, when you can go normal California freeway speeds — 70 or 75 mph — the ramp is trouble. You hit it fast, and if you don’t know exactly where you’re going, the sharpness of the turns can throw you. The cops are saying the truck driver involved in this morning’s crash was going too fast and hit a guard rail and support column.

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Last Weekend’s Exercise

… and an explanation of the proprietor’s recent absence: I spent Saturday and Sunday on my bike, riding a 600-kilometer qualifying brevet for this year’s Paris-Brest-Paris; that’s 375 miles, roughly evenly divided between a very rainy Saturday and a beautiful if cool spring Sunday. So: I’ve finished all four qualifiers for PBP, and all I need to do now is maintain my edge for another four months, book a trip to France, get there, ride 750 miles or so in four days in late August. … Wait — let’s just take one thing at a time.

More on the ride later. For now, I’ll flash back to the amateur weather prognostication I posted to a cycling group on Friday afternoon. Except for the guess about how long the showers would last Sunday — they were actually over with early in the day — it gives a pretty good idea of what we encountered:

Light rain is expected to spread across most of Mendocino County by

late morning, then [south] across Sonoma County and into Marin during the

afternon hours. The rain is expected to intensify as we travel north

and west. The area from Yorkville, on the high ridge along 128

northwest of Cloverdale, out to the coast is expected to get about

one-third of an inch of rain before 5 p.m., about three-fourths of an

inch between 5 p.m. and 11 p.m., and another half-inch or so betweeen

11 p.m. and 5 a.m. Sunday. After that, the rain will become showery,

and you can probably expect to encounter brief periods of

precipitation until late Sunday afternoon. Low temperatures are

expected to be in the upper 40s to about 50.

“The silver lining is that a southerly wind (meaning it’s coming from

the south) is expected to build throughout the day Saturday; after the

storm front crosses the coast late Saturday night, the wind is

forecast to gradually turn to the west, then the northwest.”

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Cultural History of The Loner

Partyofone

Once upon a time, the idea of “the loner” extended beyond the way the term is nearly universally used in media today: for destructive psychopaths, after they’ve unleashed some horror or other. I carried on a little bit earlier about the Virginia Tech official who first uttered the term in connection to Cho Seung-Hui. It was true as far as it went — and that wasn’t far at all, as Cho demonstrated both in action and in his special delivery to NBC the other day.

Anyway. Didn’t the idea of the loner once carry an aura of austere self-sufficiency, hardy individuality or at least admirable anti-heroism? In recent decades in pop culture, Clint Eastwood’s the type, especially in the Sergio Leone remakes of the Kurosawa epics. Further back, Humphrey Bogart owned the image in his Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade roles. Film noir is the loner’s genre. I could take a leap backward from there to the James Fenimore Cooper novels and his Hawkeye character. Same thing, though incredibly trying in book form. [Belatedly, I note that all the example characters above carry guns.]

But those are sort of limited, shot-in-the-dark examples and ones that rely on the distortion and romance of fiction. I went looking for a little more evidence and context, and came upon the noble example of “The Loner,” a one-season, mid-’60s western series starring Lloyd Bridges (and created by Rod Serling). Then there’s Neil Young’s “The Loner,” which focuses on the menacing stranger. Still a long way off from real life.

Finally, I hit on this, through Google Books: “Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto.” It’s by Anneli S. Rufus, a Berkeley writer Kate and I know from our time, during the relatively enlightened and carefree days of the Reagan era, at The Daily Californian. It’s a serious consideration of the idea of the loner in history, in culture, in society. An excerpt from the introduction:

“Loners, by virtue of being loners, of celebrating the state of standing alone, have an innate advantage when it comes to being brave — like pioneers, like mountain men, iconoclasts, rebels and sole survivors. Loners have an advantage when faced with the unknown, the never-done-before and the unprecedented. An advantage when it comes to being mindful like the Buddhists, spontaneous like the Taoists, crucibles of concentrated prayer like the desert saints, esoteric like the Kabbalists. Loners, by virtue of being loners, have at their fingertips the undiscovered, the unique, the rarefied. Innate advantages when it comes to imagination, concentration, inner discipline. A knack for invention, originality, for finding resources in what others would call vacuums. A knack for visions. A talent for seldom being bored. Desert islands are fine but not required.”

The Anneli lives less than two miles from us as the crow flies. I haven’t seen her in 25 years, since before she was Anneli. Now I know one reason why. But just one.

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Elegy for a Watering Hole

The first place I went out and had a drink in Berkeley after I got here in the mid-’70s was a bar down under the University Avenue overpass called Brennan’s. “Had a drink” is true if a little off the point, because the reason friends took me there, and the reason the place was probably very profitable, was the Irish coffee it served.

Besides the Irish coffee and beer and the rest of the alcohol, it also featured — still does — a cafeteria-style buffet; and the buffet featured turkey and corned beef and mashed potatoes and gravy; you know, stick-to-your-ribs stuff, and cheap. The bar is a 50-foot-long ellipse down by the buffet line, and the rest of the barn-like room is open and filled with plain, low wooden tables and chairs and a couple big-screen TVs. The walls are hung with large photo portraits of a jowly but good-natured-looking middle-aged guy with assorted family members and an assortment of bovines in cattle-show settings; I figure he’s the Brennan who started up the bar.

When I first started to go down to Brennan’s — often enough but never too often — it always seemed to have a crowd. If you happened in at noontime, local workers (Berkeley had an industrial district back then, though one that was already in decline) were loading up on turkey neck lunches and grabbing beers. Early in the evening almost any night you’d find families enjoying the cheap eats. Later, the place would get going; on Friday and Saturday nights it wasn’t unusual to find virtually every seat at every table taken and a crush of bodies waiting for drink orders that four or five bartenders would be hustling to fill. The business seemed to run full bore nearly till closing time, 2 a.m.

Tastes and habits change. Over time, going into Brennan’s after a softball game, maybe, or when Kate and I would go in for an Irish coffee after an evening out, we started to notice the crowds weren’t quite so big. Some nights, just two bartenders were working, even on the weekends. Then just one. And the place would be virtually deserted by midnight; and then, if you got there at midnight, it would be closed. It would take a long time-lapse to capture the process, but the night-time business has evaporated.

It’s about to change in other ways, too: A developer showed up and bought the property upon which Brennan’s plebeian box of a building sits. A big residential and commercial project is planned for the site. As part of the deal, the bar will be relocated to the old Southern Pacific station across the parking lot, a building that last housed a very good Asian fusion restaurant called Xanadu that went belly up several years ago.

I’m not sure where everyone went. Probably to establishments that are about more than getting a drink, draining it, and getting a refill and another refill and another, long into the night, talking about whatever you’re going to talk about as you get less lucid and more eloquent. Berkeley has some nice bistros that serve food in elegant and pricey bites; you order alcohol off a wine menu or choose from a list of microbrews and retro and nouveau cocktails. Everything is well thought out and modern, everything tastes good, and the atmosphere tends toward the genteel; enough so that I think you’d get a funny look from the sharply dressed drinkologist across the zinc bar if you asked for an Irish coffee.

Last night, after a day of little jobs around the house and finally getting the taxes done, Kate asked if I wanted to go out and get an Irish coffee, shorthand for, “Do you want to go down to Brennan’s?” Through one thing and another, we didn’t leave the house until just after 11. We drove over to University, then headed west toward the freeway. When we got to Fourth Street, the Brennan’s corner, I looked over at the place. The lights inside were on, but there was something about the scene that said “closed.”

We parked and went up to what used to look like the main entrance. The doors were locked. But we could see people inside, and we knew that sometimes those doors aren’t used at night. So we walked to a side entrance off the street. Locked again. Then around into the parking lot, and finally, an open door. It was 11:20, and there were about eight people inside, mostly grouped in pairs.

We walked up to the bar, where one of the proprietors, a woman I believe is one of the founders’ grand-daughters, kept her back to us as she studied papers on a clipboard. Then a guy who might have been the bartender, said, “Sorry, folks, we’re closed.” So no Irish coffee for us. We drove around Berkeley a little afterward and decided that there was no place we could think of that would both serve an Irish coffee and fit our notion of comfort. So we wound up stopping at the store, buying the ingredients, and making our own at home.

But: a real, honest-to-goodness bar locked up at forty minutes to midnight?

On one hand, you can hardly blame the proprietors for saying “last call” as they watch eight die-hards nurse their drinks as the clock drags toward midnight. That level of patronage doesn’t even pay the electric bill. On the other, the whole point of Brennan’s for me was a place you could stop by without thinking about the time. That part of the business is dead, and it’s hard to imagine that new quarters, without some fundamental change in the business — Brennan’s bistro? Chez Brennan’s? — will bring it back.

I know: a small loss in the big scheme. The meaning is entirely personal. Still, the place had a good run, and it gave me somewhere to make a proposal one night a long time ago. Long life to the memories.

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Byline Alert

First, let it be noted that Thom Brekke has a couple music reviews in the weekly arts section of the University of Oregon Daily Emerald: “A Warm Slice of Indiepop” and “New Crime Mob disc is nothing revolutionary.” All I can say is, be ready to get crunk.

Second, I finally pulled everything together on my “Dylan Hears a Who” reporting. The story, “Tangled up in Seuss,” is up this evening on Salon.com.

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Chow Plant

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The building is on Murray Street in southwesternmost Berkeley. The faded lettering is visible from Ashby Avenue, one of the three or four most heavily traveled streets in town. I see via Flickr that other local curiosity-seeking shutterbugs have taken notice of this place; it looks like it’s an artist’s space now now. Unresolved, at least for me, is whether the Hygenic Dog Food Co. ever existed. The signs–this one in the front, another on the east side of the building–look a little too deliberately workmanlike and picturesque not to be someone’s project. The building with the barred windows looks like a candidate for someone’s indie film prison facade, too. The Infospigot Bureau of Investigation will get right on this one.

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Good Friday to You, Too

There was once a lad growing up in a godless university city much like the one in which I reside. His parents denied him the spiritual benefits of Bible tales, Original Sin coloring books, scary Satan stories, and other fundamental instruction in the local religion. Nonetheless, he picked up on one of the religion’s major symbols: the cross.

He wanted a cross himself, so his mom helped him build one. It was made of some left over pieces of cabinet molding. When it was done, He carried it over his shoulder up and down the block. Eventually, one of the neighbors said, “Hey, that’s a nice cross you’ve got there.”

“Thank you,” the boy said. “Now all I need is a little guy to hang on it.”

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