Category: Berkeley

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Two from the Road

Weedyreka

Drove back from Eugene last night and this morning. Started at 5 p.m. or so, stopped at the cheap gas station (a 76 station just south of town that is always at least a nickel or a dime a gallon cheaper than what you find near the university), then got on Interstate 5 southbound. The Sunday of Memorial Day weekend: I recommend it for your long highway trips. Very few people were on the road, and by the time we started the climb up toward the last Oregon summit on I-5, in the last hour before the sun set, it was like driving in the middle of the night.

Most of the way through Oregon we drove through sunlit showers, and for a while saw a rainbow around every bend in the road. The shot above is from the stretch between Yreka and Weed, in far northern California: Rain refracted in the last light of the day, a semi-rainbow. The peak near the center is Black Butte, a small volcanic peak just to the west of Mount Shasta. The shot below: from the climb up the northern side of Canyon Creek Summit, a little more than halfway between Eugene and the California line.

I5Rainbow

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Gratuitous Dog Picture

Scout052406

OK — here’s our pal again. This was the pose he struck when I was trying to get him to come back in the house when I was headed off to work the other day (yes, he’ll stay in the house and behave himself, unless he’s making popcorn and watching pay per view behind our backs). This went on for a couple minutes and would have lasted longer if I’d let it. I especially like the teeth.

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About a Dog

Scout, upon his arrival in Berkeley.

I mentioned, more than a week ago, that I’ve got a story about a dog. Here it is:

A week ago last Saturday, we were down in Paso Robles, a town at the southern end of the Salinas Valley. For me it was a bike-riding trip: I was signed up to do the Central Coast Double Century, a ride that starts from Paso Robles, crosses the Coast Range at a relatively low spot and goes out to Highway 1, then north to the lower end of Big Sur. From there, it recrosses the mountains at a much more rugged and much higher spot, then descends into and tours the valleys and hills to the east. Two hundred and ten miles in all, and something like 14,000 vertical feet of climbing.

While I was doing all that, Kate went with a big group of people from Paso Robles down to a wild place called the Carrizo Plain. Carrizo is a national monument, a big, open expanse of rangeland at the eastern foot of the coastal mountains. It’s dry, remote and forbidding, The last California condors soar there, and pronghorn (antelope) and elk have been reintroduced.

A long story made short: The group found an abandoned dog at the edge of a dry lakebed on the plain, 10 miles from the nearest highway and 20 miles from anything you might call a town. and we wound up taking him home to Berkeley with us. We named him Scout. He’s gotten his shots and been checked out by a vet and is smart and sweet and so far very calm, which makes it all the more mysterious how he wound up out in one of those places that really is the middle of nowhere.

We’ve been checking online lost and found listings for San Luis Obispo and Bakersfield, the nearest cities (though “near” in this case means about 60 miles to either place). Lots of dogs reported lost, though none in this area and none bearing any resemblance to Scout. After a week, I called the Carrizo Plain visitors center to ask if anyone had reported a dog missing.

“No,” the woman at the center said, “and let me tell you what happens with these dogs. People come out here and just leave them, no water, no food, nothing. It’s a real bad deal.” Occasionally, she said, herders will shoot the strays to keep them from harassing sheep grazing in the area. Starvation or thirst or coyotes take care of most of the rest, though occasionally the monument’s rangers will catch a dog and take it to the animal shelter in San Luis Obispo.

“This is far enough off the road that you can put the dog out and drive away and they can’t chase you,” the visitors center woman said. “People split up and decide they can’t keep their dog, or they don’t want to take it to the shelter — over in Taft you just put the dog down a chute and they usually just put it to sleep. But this is a bad deal. You wonder what people are thinking.”

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Naked Guy

One Saturday back in the last decade, I stood at the corner of University and Shattuck avenues, downtown Berkeley’s always faintly shabby main intersection, waiting for the light to change. I noticed a tall, well-built, handsome young guy on the opposite corner. I think he wore sunglasses and sandals, and nothing else. His name was Andrew Martinez, and by the day I spotted him he’d become a local celebrity known as the Naked Guy. He came by the name through his one-man campaign to liberate the human spirit by going naked to class at Cal (and just about everywhere else, including a court date to defend himself against a charge of indecent exposure).

Anyway: Me and Andrew Martinez, Shattuck and University. I wish I could say I high-fived him as we passed or said something memorable, but all I recall is trying not to stare. For me, the idea of being naked in public is the stuff of unpleasant dreams, not liberation. That was the first and last I saw of the Naked Guy. Sooner or later, Martinez left Berkeley. I remembered him, though I never thought about what became of him.

Today’s Chronicle had the story, or at least its end: Martinez, who was 33, died in jail in San Jose last week, an apparent suicide:

“… After his days as the Naked Guy, Martinez spent the next decade bouncing among halfway houses, psychiatric institutions, occasional homelessness and jail, but never getting comprehensive treatment, his family said. His life ended in an apparent suicide Thursday morning.

” ‘It was an endless cycle of trying to get answers but never getting any,’ said his mother, who requested that her name not be used. ‘It was endless, endless, endless.’

“… But before his mental illness wreaked havoc on his and his family’s lives, Martinez was a bright, charismatic, sweet-natured youth with a promising future.”

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Dog

Katescout

There’s a story that goes with the picture, really. But not for telling now — too tired after another hard ride, and a long drive to and from Central California on top of that. But the dog — he’s at our house. The picture is from a stop we made at a park down in Santa Clara County on the way north. The rest will wait. But I will say this animal’s arrival in our lives makes me want to re-read the Paul Auster novel “Timbuktu.”

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Requiem for a Road Bike

Fifteen years ago, after having done a few long rides, including the Davis Double Century, I bought a bike I had developed a lust for (a lust, but only the chaste cycling kind). It was a Bridgestone RB-1, and was well-known for being a relatively light and sporty lugged steel road bike with a nice mix of components for a relatively modest price. I bought it at The Missing Link, a co-op shop in downtown Berkeley with a vague counterculture reputation, for about eight hundred dollars. I picked it up the week before the Grizzly Peak Century, a hilly 100-mile ride, and wondered during and after whether I had made a mistake. The bike worked fine, but it was geared sort of aggressively for a non-hill climber like myself. Back then, it wouldn’t have soon occurred to me to change the components to make it easier to ride, and I just got used to riding hills with what for me was an uncomfortably large smallest gear — 42×23 in cycling jargon (meaning my smaller front chainring had 42 teeth and my biggest rear cog had 23 teeth; in practical terms, that meant the rear wheel would turn about 1.85 times for every revolution of the cranks; that’s a big gear for a mere mortal struggling up a steep hill).

Crackedframe1Crackedframe2

Since I bought the bike, I’ve had years where I rode a lot and many more when I did not. Sometimes the RB-1 would sit so long between rides that I had to dust it off before I took it out. But in 2003, when I decided to try to do Paris-Brest-Paris, the quadrennial 750-mile, 4-day ride in France, I decided I’d do it on the RB-1 rather than spring for a fancier and more expensive bike. By then, the bike had been out of production for nearly a decade, and it had sort of a cachet to it. I decided to strip off the original parts, have the bike repainted (by Ed Litton, a framebuilder up in Point Richmond), put new components on (including a triple crank with some low gears for when I started to fade) and ride it as new during the qualifying brevets leading up to PBP as well as during the main event. Ed’s paint job was simple but elegant — a dark green with a single ivory panel that displayed the Bridgestone decal. The bike’s spare, classic appearance and relative rarity — first that it was an RB-1, second that it was a lugged steel frame at a time they’re disappearing from the road in favor of titanium, carbon fiber and aluminum frames — drew some comment. Eventually, I, or maybe it was Kate, even gave it a name: Tir na nOg, Irish for “Land of the Young” (see the movie “Into the West” — the reference is explained there), which is where you get to on long, long bike rides.

PBP ’03 was a great experience, but then with one thing and another, I rode less in 2004 and 2005 before ramping up again this year in anticipation of PBP ’07. A couple months ago, though, I started to have some problems with Tir na nOg — the front derailleur seemed to not want to stay in adjustment. I fiddled with it myself, and so did more than one of the folks at The Missing Link. On April 1, I did a 300-kilometer brevet from Santa Cruz, through the mountains near town, and down to the Pinnacles and back. At the end of the ride, the shifting problem was bad. I put the bike aside afterward and have done some long rides since on my son Thom’s bike — a more modern steel Bianchi. I finally decided to take the RB-1 in to get looked at, again, yesterday. When I described what was going on, and how the crank seemed to be warped, Chuck, the mechanic, took a look at the frame near the bottom bracket.

“Here’s your problem,” he said. “You’ve got a cracked frame.” He pointed to a 1-inch fissure in the down tube — the diagonal one from the bottom bracket to the head tube. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before, but then neither had anyone in the shop. Chuck said he’d strip the frame so I could bring it to a framebuilder for repair. I went back today, and he said, “I want to show you something.” Taking the components off the bike, he had discovered the crack ran a couple inches farther than we’d seen yesterday: Through the bottom-bracket lug where it receives the seat tube. The crack was so big I could see daylight through it. “I think it might be game over for this frame,” Chuck said — though he suggested I show it to a framebuilder in Oakland just to see whether there was any chance at fixing it. In any case, that’s the end of the long rides for this bike. As it happens, I have another freshly painted RB-1 frame I bought at the end of 2003 that’s just been sitting here in our house. I’ve been hesitant to spend the money to get it built up with all new components; now I’m going to have Chuck put it together with the gear from the old bike. If ti all works out, that will be my ride for next month’s Cascade 1,200 — a 750-miile, four-day ride in Washington state.

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My Beautiful Blogette

I’d love to be able to say I’m above being self-conscious about this, My Beautiful Blogette (as an aside, try the following as a one-evening Daniel Day-Lewis triple bill: “Last of the Mohicans,” “A Room with a View,” and “My Beautiful Laundrette”).

Alas, I am self-conscious, mostly about the recent attenuation of the previous steady stream of smart, not to say indispensable, Infospigot observations about the world both in and around my navel. I mean to say I haven’t been posting a lot the last few weeks.

The principal reason: I’m spending lots of time working on The Personal Bee, the little Web publishing startup I signed on with in January. We just launched our live test site (beta for those in the software development world), and there’s lots and lots of refinement to do. Nearly all of The Personal Bee work is online, and often the last thing I want to do is sit down in the evening (or early in the morning) and start tapping away at the keyboard some more. So that’s why you’re seeing more pictures and less of the brilliant dissection of reality that has come to typify work associated with this site.

For now, anyway. The Bee is a startup project with startup funding, and it has emerged at a time when everyone and his Uncle Moe has decided that Web news-and-information sites represent a business opportunity. We’ll see (and I’ll write more about the Bee later, too).

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The Birds

A couple of towhees — they’re sparrow-like little brown birds, common here — showed the shocking lack of judgment to build a nest in a potato vine on our back porch. They must have worked fast, too, because one day I had no idea they had moved in and the next they were fighting a scrub jay to protect their place. Kate and I heard the commotion early Sunday morning, and even our neighbor on that side of the house commented on it.

California TowheeTowhee nest, with eggs

The towhees seemed to have two tactics to try to fend off the jay, which we figured was trying to get at any eggs they had in the nest. First, one of the birds would try to distract the jay by fluttering weakly along the ground near the nest; second, if the jay took that bait, both birds would fly into a bush nearby, puff their feathers up, and try to counterattack the bigger bird. But the jay wasn’t to be distracted, and kept coming back to the next despite a local human’s attempt at intervention. He, or she, was scared off several times, but kept returning. When he was gone, one of the towhees would return to sit on the nest. But eventually I looked out and saw the jay was standing on the little round of twigs and pecking at something.

I chased him off and climbed up to take a look inside the next. Sure enough: two pale blue eggs, one perfect and one broken. With the jay gone, the smaller birds returned to take a look. They didn’t leave, but neither did they sit on the nest again. The jay come back once more and got at the second egg, and after a little while, the towhees were gone. The last time I looked in the nest, the ants were already at work on what had been left behind.

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New Jersey Elected Official …

… And other notes:

Apropos of — well, you’ll have to figure it out: Al Prazolam, mayor of the Jersey shore town Swamp River Island Beach.

Berkeley has designated the barn owl as its official city bird. Oakland concedes it has no city bird but says through a spokesperson that it “welcomes and embraces all birds.”

Triptych

This has nothing to do with the famous Dr. Shabubu. (But it is part of a long-running Telegraph Avenue poster drama.)

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