Category: Current Affairs

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‘Land Logic’

When I turned 18, one of the birthday presents I got was a book-length poem called “The Donner Party.” I sold the book during a no-income period in my mid-20s, but as soon as I had some cash I went back to the used-book store that had taken it off my hands. It was still on the shelves, along with another book I’d sold, a picture biography of Yeats. I bought them back, though I was unable to find a third book I’d parted with–“Twenty Years A-Growing,” by Maurice O’Sullivan, which my Uncle Dick had given me. I found a copy of that eventually, but not mine. I still look for it.

Back to “The Donner Party,” which is right here beside me. It’s a retelling of a story of which everyone knows the shorthand version: pioneers, wagons, mountains, snow, death, cannibals. The book’s by a California poet named George Keithley, who taught (maybe still teaches) up at Chico State. The poetry is mostly blank-verse. It feels plain and authentic and sounds like it was transcribed by firelight.

Here’s one passage that has always stayed with me from a chapter called “Land Logic.” It takes place after the party’s disastrous crossing of Utah, with all of Nevada to cross before the ascent of the Sierra Nevada and hoped-for arrival in California’s Sacramento Valley

We wanted only to rest, at this juncture.
Seeing the snows, no one wished to look back
on our bad luck or talk of it anymore.

Reflection only led us to deplore
the sudden end of summer and lament
the time we wasted in this trap. Whole days

spent unloading. Stupid disputes. Delays
caused by the cattle roaming or Hastings’ wrong
advice … We were warned that to survive

we must lay up grass and water for a dry drive
of two days. Which means at worst we might
travel a day and a night—where we instead

wandered a week in the desert and left dead
a third of our herd of cattle. Add a third
of the wagons abandoned, still it doesn’t explain

all the destruction done. We could never regain
the time taken, or our goods or livestock left
on the salt. But this was not the only cost.

There is a land logic which we lost …
A sense of the likelihood of new terrain
to sustain us. The same logic that lives

in our blood, telling us that bottomland gives
promise for planting. Or for example
the simple certainty that we would find

spring water among rocks when the sun reclined
on green slopes gleaming like good pasture.
But we hurried out only to discover

a prickly patch of greasewood growing over
the dry soil, white with alkali…
Nothing in nature was what it might seem!

The promise of finding forage by a stream
proved false as well—both banks were bare
although the current there cut swift and deep.

We lost the last advantage which could keep
our company from harm. It was this sense
of the land that had departed in a dream
while we went on like souls that are still asleep.

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Road Kill and Us

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My brother John’s comment about the previous post–about the picture of the dead fawn–reminded me of a book by Barry Lopez. It’s titled not “Requiem,” as I remembered it, but “Apologia.” Here’s the opening:

A few miles east of home in the Cascades I slow down and pull over for two raccoons, sprawled still as stones in the road. I carry them to the side and lay them in sun-shot, windblown grass in the barrow pit. In eastern Oregon, along U.S. 20, black-tailed jackrabbits lie like welts of sod–three, four, then a fifth. By the bridge over Jordan Creek, just shy of the Idaho border in the drainage of the Owyhee River, a crumpled adolescent porcupine leers up almost maniacally over its blood-flecked teeth. I carry each one away from the tarmac into a cover of grass or brush out of decency, I think. And worry. Who are these animals, their lights gone out? What journeys have fallen apart here?

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Berkeley Wildlife: Street Deer

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I’ve mentioned several times in the last couple of years–here and here, for instance–that it has become pretty commonplace to encounter deer here in the Berkeley flatlands (and in the hills, some deer are getting ornery.) Still, today’s experience broke new ground. First, during a noontime walk, The Dog startled a good-sized young adult deer–I’m guessing it was a male–that had been browsing the plants along a driveway adjacent to a vacant lot or overgrown backyard on Monterey Street. The deer bolted into the trees and watched us. Then a woman pulled into the driveway. She said she wasn’t surprised we had happened upon the deer. “There’s a family of three living in there,” she said. “The poor things are just running out of room.” She also mentioned that a dead deer was lying on the street nearby. Hit by a car? I asked. “No–it must have been sick. It doesn’t look like it was injured.” She added that someone had called Berkeley Animal Control.

Her description didn’t prepare me for the fawn that lay along the sidewalk two doors down. A beautiful animal. Surprisingly, The Dog wasn’t interested. I took a few pictures, and we continued on our walk. When we get home, I called animal control myself. When someone came on the line, I told them I wanted to report a dead deer on a street in North Berkeley. “Would that be the one on … Monterey?” the attendant asked. “Yeah, that’s the one.” “We already know about that,” she said. “Any ETA for when you might be out there?” “No. We have one officer in the field, and emergency calls come first. So ….”

I wonder how long it will take word to spread in the carrion-eating community of the choice meal awaiting out there.

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Digital Existence, Bane of

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I’m still using an iBook G4 laptop I bought six years ago. I’ll knock on wood and note also that it’s not as impressive as it seems. I had a hard drive die when the computer was in its third year, and I’m running on a refurbished one that Apple installed “free”–I had bought the long-term service plan. Although I got a functional computer out of the deal, I hadn’t backed up the big library of pictures on the original drive. That included a bunch of nice shots from a trip down to Southern Illinois my dad and I took in 2004.

Being a bottom-of-the-line machine from ancient times, the iBook doesn’t have a huge hard drive. It’s got about 25 gigabytes of total storage. I now back things up on a 200-gigabyte drive I bought after the Mac died. But here’s the thing about the pictures I download: I always want to sort through them and post some online and maybe someday do something ambitious such as actually make photo albums for relatives or friends. So I tend to keep them on the laptop than dump them on to the external drive (from which I have to transfer them to edit them). Of course, those projects, big and small, tend to get put off. So my laptop drive still gets eaten up, and I have accumulated a big pile of pictures I think about but do nothing with. Such as the ones here.

They’re nearly a year old. I took them during a drive Kate, my dad, and my brother John made to Lake Pymatuning, on the Ohio-Pennsylvania state line during our visit to Lake Erie last August. More specifically, these are pictures of carp that congregate at a spillway between the eastern and western sections of the lake. Why do they congregate there. Because the nice people who stop to see the sights throw them food; a nearby concession stand sells loaves of bread for tourists to throw, slice by slice, into the roiling mass of eager fish. I have about 20 pictures of the scene I took and another couple of dozen from my brother. I would say we documented the scene well. The question remains, do the carp go on to a less hellish-looking existence after the people leave for the day

Maybe now, having posted this, I can store the pictures on some other drive and move on to the next scene from last summer’s travels. After that, I might get to the pile of images still left to sort through from our 2008 trip to Japan. It could happen.

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Up There

A nice little piece in The New York Times a few days ago: “Tweaking a Camera to Suit a Hobby.” The hobby in question is launching balloons with point-and-shoot cameras attached and, as far as I can tell, letting them go where they will go. The folks featured in the article, who go by the handle North Iowa Experimental High-Altitude Ballooning (NIXHAB), use balloons that have reached heights around 100,000 feet. That’s far enough up there to give the impression you’re on the edge of space. (My first question: Do these guys need to file flight plans or consult with the FAA?).

The Times story focuses on the software hacks that allow the balloonists and other hobbyists to set up Canon point-and-shoot cameras to record their images. Here’s one from the NIXHAB site (also used in the Times piece):

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Safe Surrender

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Firehouse on Bluxome Alley, just off Fourth Street, in San Francisco, during my Friday night walk to the ferry.

Bluxome runs parallel to and between Brannan and Townsend, well south of Market. I had never heard of it until the night of the 1989 earthquake. The quake caused a wall to collapse into the street at the corner of Sixth and Bluxome, less than two blocks from this spot, killing five people. I never actually walked along Bluxome Alley until 2001, when I went to work in an office at Eighth and Townsend. Occasionally I’d ride the casual carpool to First and Fremont, or somewhere in the vicinity, and walk over to Eighth. By the time I first strolled down the alley, the building that had partially collapsed was gone and a condominium building had gone up in its place.

(And what’s a Safe Surrender Site? Under a California law enacted in ’01, “a parent or person with lawful custody can safely surrender a baby confidentially and without fear of prosecution within 72 hours of birth.” The law “requires the baby be taken to a public or private hospital, designated fire station or other safe surrender site. No questions will be asked.” People who give up babies this way have 14 days to change their minds. The state says 348 babies have been surrendered in California in this manner since the law went into effect. Also: 46 other states have similar laws.)

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Prop. 16, Slate Mailers, and Voting ‘Green’

For the most part, California politics don’t rise to (or sink to, depending on your perspective) the corrupt heights (sleazy depths) that they do in, say, Illinois or New York. Which is to say, while California may have produced its share of rascals, bums, and incompetents over the years, I can’t think of a single governor here who’s been indicted in the past half-century or who’s been outed as a John.

Still, we have our moments, such as those provided every election season by slate mailers. What’s a slate mailer, you ask? They’re cleverly crafted direct-mail pieces that endorse a list of candidates and issues. If you don’t look at them hard, you might think you’re looking at the official word from your party about who and what it endorses. That’s because you’ll see well-known party figures in their predictable spots at the head of the ticket listed with both statewide initiatives and local candidates and measures. Since voter registration rolls are public information, slate cards go out to voters who have declared a party affiliation. So Democratic voters get slate cards listing Democratic candidates and issues, and Republicans get the GOP cards.

But rarely are the parties actually speaking through the slate mailers. Instead, they’re the work of political pros who have turned slate mailers into an industry; a lucrative one, apparently, given the persistence of the practice. They may list statewide candidates who are unopposed or virtually so–Jerry Brown, for instance, who’s running for the Democratic nomination for governor in next month’s primary. That makes the piece look like a party slate. Alongside those names, they’ll list candidates in contested races who have paid to appear on the same list with the big names.

votegreen.pngOver the weekend, we got one of the all-time best (sleaziest) mailers I’ve ever seen. It bears the legend “Californians Vote Green” and urges recipients to “Vote for a Greener California.” It depicts a scene from one of our fast-vanishing primeval woodlands. The question I had when I first saw it was whether it was from the Green Party. Then I looked inside. Yep, a list of candidates. Most had asterisks next to their names, and the fine print explained that meant they had paid their way onto the list.

But the real surprise was in the list of ballot propositions the mailer suggested “Californians Vote Green” endorsed–particularly Proposition 16. That’s a constitutional amendment bought and paid for by Pacific Gas & Electric Company that aims to make it virtually impossible for local communities to set up competing power districts. PG&E actually supported the 2002 law that permitted communities to create their own utility districts. But with the law’s concept becoming reality–Marin County has managed to get a community power district up and running this year despite PG&E’s efforts to undermine it–the utility has had a change of heart about competition. It not only wrote the new constitutional language in Prop. 16 and paid for the petition drive that got it on the ballot, it’s spending more than $30 million to get it passed.

In fact, a vast majority of environmental groups that have anything to say about Prop. 16 say they’re against it. The California Democratic Party has recommended a no vote. Many liberal (read “green”) Democratic legislators have condemned PG&E’s campaign. And voters who want a “greener California” ought to know that in fighting the Marin power district, PG&E is actively trying to scuttle a competitor set up expressly to provide cleaner electricity (using more renewable sources like wind and solar) than PG&E sells. But none of that prevented PG&E or its Prop. 16 cronies from buying a spot on the “green” mailer.

The California Secretary of State records say the PG&E-financed Yes on 16 committee paid $40,000 to Californians Vote Green for its spot on the slate card. To put that in perspective, the No on 16 side has raised a total of about $50,000 for its entire campaign. (That having been said, $40,000 is a cheap date for the Yes on 16 campaign. To date, it’s spent $630,000 for slate mailers targeting voters of both parties, including $200,000 to California Voter Guide, which has been churning out slate cards since 1986).

Let’s not drop “Californians Vote Green” matter without a tip of the hat to those responsible. If you check out the CVG website, it advises that if you want to purchase placement, you ought to contact rtaylor@californiansvotegreencom. “rtaylor” is Rick Taylor, a long-time Los Angeles hired gun who is now a partner in a firm called Dakota Communications. Check out the pictures of prominent clients on the site. I’d call the outfit connected.

If you feel like sharing your opinion of his handiwork with Californians Vote Green, you might give him a call at 310 815 8444.

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Blank Pages

notebook051610.jpgLet me ask you this: What is it about a nice, new, unwritten-in notebook? I mean: What is it that’s so attractive about the neat, pristine, unopened notebook? My leading theory, being one who thinks a lot about what I might scribble some day, what I might jot down when I grow up, is that all those empty, unspoiled pages represent possibility: Just think of what could be written there. Whole worlds.

I have lots of notebooks from over the years. A handful from long ago–big ones, small ones, steno books, tiny topbound spiral pads, full-sized college-ruled notebooks. Some of them contain actual sequential journal entries. More recent notebooks are filled with to-do lists, project notes, summaries of work hours, the occasional looking-out-the-airliner window notes. (I also have a small collection of reporter’s notebooks filled with a mostly unintelligible scrawl detailing interviews for past stories; reporter’s notebooks are in a separate category.

Most of these notebooks are humble and strictly utilitarian. I picked them up at drugstores and filled them up slowly over months or years. No big deal. However, during the last several years I came across mentions of Moleskine notebooks. Pricey and highly prized items. I think I bought some as Christmas presents a few years ago, and I got one for myself, too. It’s on my desk now, having temporarily found a place atop the surface clutter, within easy reach of my left hand. It’s got a hard black leather cover, lined cream-colored pages, a thin woven black ribbon to mark one’s place, and a black elastic band to hold it closed. But there’s something about this notebook: I’ve never made a mark in it. There’s something about it that seems too–what?–refined and important, maybe, for random jottings. I keep thinking the day will come when I’ll find the words that belong in that book, but so far it hasn’t happened.

Meantime, blank new notebooks maintain their odd attraction. I was reminded today of a Chicago-based design website I used to visit occasionally, coudal.com. Right there on the front page of the site is a come-on for a cool-looking line of mini-notebooks they’re peddling (called Field Notes) Wow! You can get a yearlong subscription to seasonally colored packs of these things, 24 little notebooks in all, for $129. I’m almost ready to go for that deal when the Moleskine comes to mind. OK–that’s one impulse buy I’m not making. For now, anyway.

[Later: One thing leading to another: Rhodia notebooks (they’re from France). Also: musical guest Traffic, with “Empty Pages.” And guess what? The National Stationery Show started today in New York.]

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Arnold’s Choice

We had a little bit of a debate the last few days at work (a public radio newsroom) about how much importance in our newscasts we should give Governor Schwarzenegger’s “May revise” — the adjustments to the state budget he first released in February. I took the position that since we all know that the situation is bad, that the revision would include some new, but predictable, cuts, and that the revision release itself amounts to little more than a political ritual, we shouldn’t waste a lot of time on the event. On the other hand, if we wanted to devote some resources to talking about the real impacts the state’s budget calamity have already had–effects on people and institutions, effects that might tell us something about where the state’s headed with the next round of cuts–that might be worth something to our listeners. My view didn’t sway anyone, and in the event, we wound up doing a smart and well-informed take on the story, though one that focuses almost entirely on the political chess game behind the budget.

As It happened, I was off work yesterday when the governor made his announcement. I caught just a snippet of it–but it was a provocative snippet. The governor appeared before the media, while outside the state Capitol protesters decried more cuts to programs to the poor and sick and to the state’s public schools. Solemnly, Schwarzenegger detaied his bad news and talked about how those around him had failed to heed his cals for budget reform. But one phrase stood out from the rest: “no choice.”

“I now have no choice,” the governor said, “but to stand here today and to call for the elimination of some very important programs.” In fact, Schwarzenegger called his decisions about cuts a “Sophie’s Choice.” He sounds tormented. How tormented? Here’s a glimpse, courtesy of The New York Times Magazine, from last year’s budget crisis (a.k.a., “Sophie’s Choice 2009”): “Schwarzenegger reclined deeply in his chair, lighted an eight-inch cigar and declared himself ‘perfectly fine,’ despite the fiscal debacle and personal heartsickness all around him. ‘Someone else might walk out of here every day depressed, but I don’t walk out of here depressed,’ Schwarzenegger said. Whatever happens, ‘I will sit down in my Jacuzzi tonight,’ he said. ‘I’m going to lay back with a stogie.’ ”

“No choice”? Well, one of the governor’s fellow citizens begs to disagree.

You could step up, governor, and show a little moral leadership and talk about how to raise money while we’re in the crisis. Yes, I mean taxes, which many Californians pay without flinching as part of the cost of living here. Of course, you’ve never been one to tell the voters they might need to pay a little for some of the privileges they enjoy. When the last governor and Legislature reinstated a motor vehicle tax during a crisis, you chose to pander to the anti-taxers who threw a tantrum. That tax alone–which had been suspended during boom times with an explicit provision it could be reimposed if the state’s finances unraveled–would have prevented much of the budget crisis we’re facing today.

So, there are choices, governor. Pretending there are none simply avoids responsibility for finding a way through the mess we’re in.