On Friday night’s “10 O’Clock News” on KTVU, anchor Ken Wayne narrated video showing Christian penitents in Jerusalem bearing crosses through the streets amid throngs of faithful. What did the pictures show? Ken announced that people were re-enacting the “crucification of Jesus Christ.”
Road Blog: Little River
Up on the Mendocino County coast: We drove up yesterday by way of U.S. 101 and Highway 128, through the Anderson Valley to the mouth of the Navarro River, then a few miles north to a place called the Andiron Inn, just south of Little River. Two nights at the Andiron are a gift from our son Thom, who has visited and likes the place. It’s a collection of cottages in a meadow that opens onto a view of the Pacific–hard to go wrong with that. In keeping with sometimes cloying bed-and-breakfast trends on the coast and elsewhere in the Western World, each cottage here has a theme. Ours is named “Read”–there’s one named “Write,” too–and has a sort of library and wordsmith theme. It’s warm and comfortable and well, nice, with some vintage furniture, some vintage and probably long-unread volumes on the shelves (for instance: “Farm,” by Louis Bromfield, and “Magnificent Destiny”–a hard-cover that explains itself as “a novel about the great secret adventure of Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston”), and some vintage games. There’s also a Viewmaster with a nice little library of slides (three-dimensional pictures in full-color Kodachrome. Now showing: “Natural Bridge of Virginia,” one of the seven natural wonders of the world, and “Homes of Hollywood,” including the manse occupied by the late Wallace Beery).
One of the games: Anagrams, copyright 1934, Whitman Publishing Company, Racine, Wisconsin. We opened that up, read through the rules, which were only slightly more complex than your average Supreme Court decision, and played. The object: drawing letter tiles at random (and one at a time), make as many words as possible and be the first to make ten. You can hijack your opponents’ words to make new ones based on the single letter you have in your hand or the discards in the middle of the table. The pool of letters seemed to be oversupplied with vowels; all the better to make words like “zouave.” Like Scrabble, which somehow caught on where Anagrams did not, you can challenge words and resort to a dictionary to resolve contested entries; foreign words and proper nouns aren’t allowed (one player suspected the other–names will not be named here–of making up “zouave.” Thank goodness for the Random House dictionary that awaited on a desk nearby).
OK–four stars for the Andiron and for “Read.” Time to go out and actually experience a little Mendocino now.
A Voice from ’06
Update: About half an hour after I posted this, we had a little earthquake. The U.S. Geological Survey says it was a 3.8 magnitude shake, centered on the San Andreas Fault near the town of Pacifica, about 10 miles or so from where the 1906 quake hit.
A nice feature in the Chronicle marking the 105th anniversary of San Francisco’s signature catastrophe: ’06 Quake Through Eyes of Woman Ahead of Her Time. It’s a glimpse of the disaster from Leonie von Zesch, 23 when the temblor struck and one of the few women anywhere practicing dentistry at the time. (A contemporary newspaper clipping headlined “Woman Wields Forceps” describes her working “night and day” in a field hospital after the quake “battling that arch enemy of comfort–the toothache. [She] … is attractive as she is young.” Further, the article notes, “Race and caste make no difference to this dainty little lady. The dirty foreign boy receives the same gentle treatment as the daughter of a military officer.”)
Von Zesch’s account was part of an autobiography said to have run to thousands of pages, typed on onionskin paper and left among her personal effects when she died in 1944. The Chronicle’s account says von Zesch left her belongings to a niece who stashed them in an attic without looking at them. When she finally did, she discovered the writings, which will be published next month as “Leonie: A Woman Ahead of Her Time” ($19.95 plus shipping and, if you live in California, sales tax).
If the rest of the book is on a par with her description of the earthquake and its aftermath, it ought to be a good read. It’s not clear how long after the fact she wrote her account, but it begins with the scene in the Nob Hill home she shared with her mother rocking violently as china, Mason jars, and a variety of other household goods crash to the floor. “All the while, a seeming eternity of a few minutes, there was an unforgettable humming, grinding sound that not even the walls shut out, the grinding and breaking of myriad things all over the city.” She and her mother ate a cold breakfast–a man from the gas company had already come through the neighborhood to warn against lighting fires–and then “decided to walk downtown to see whether anything had happened to the tall buildings. No one, as yet, seemed to have the remotest idea of the magnitude of the disaster.”
By the time von Zesch and her mother neared Market Street, though, it was clear the city was beginning to burn.
“In spite of the horror, the air was electric with a sort of holiday spirit, either because the disaster was a novel experience which released people from the humdrum of everyday life, or because there were in a mood of thanksgiving and glad to be alive.
“There was something of hysteria in it, too. To Mother and me, everything was fearfully exciting. We did not anticipate personal loss. Our own home on Hyde, now rented, was out of the supposed fire zone; the Sutter place where we lived, of course, would not burn! Why we and thousands of others were so optimistic, I’d like to know. The water mains were broken. People all over town were daring to light gas stoves. The wind was blowing. How could the city fail to burn?”
The Chronicle ran part two of von Zesch’s earthquake reminiscence today. It includes an excellent slideshow of images from 1906.
And while we’re talking about contemporary images and walking through the ruins, a couple of good references came to hand while I was trying to figure out where Dr. von Zesch and her mother lived (she mentions Sutter and Leavenworth, and the ruined Granada Hotel nearby; I can’t get any closer than that, and a rebuilt Granada Hotel, guaranteed at its opening in 1908 to be fireproof, is at that corner today.
Below is a film discovered by way of the Internet Archive. It’s a 1905 streetcar trip down Market Street; the Ferry Building is the structure way down the street in the distance. What’s most arresting here is the life on the street–the mix of streetcars, automobiles, horse carts, pedestrians, and the random cyclist.
That’s an 11-minute tour through the heart of downtown. For contrast, here’s a snippet of some of the same area of Market Street (note the tower of the Call Building to the right) after the earthquake.
And one last graphic take on the 1906 earthquake. The U.S. Geological Survey has published a cool gallery of animations that try to convey the quake’s magnitude and the extent of the destructive shaking in the Bay Area. The image below is linked to an animation of the shaking in San Francisco:
Monday Walkabout
Above: The big oak in the schoolyard garden at Martin Luther King Jr. MIddle School, just around the corner and up the street from us. School was out today, and of course the occasion I connect the date with is April 4, 1968, the day King was murdered. I don’t remember anything about that day until hearing the announcement, at the tail end of the NBC national news, and I think Chet Huntley read the report, that King had been shot in Memphis. The rest of the evening and much of the next several days is vivid. My recollection is that the show essentially signed off with that report at 6:30 p.m. There was no cable TV to speak of, let alone CNN, so I think our immediate recourse would have been to the radio (not sure if WBBM had adopted an all-news format by then or not).
In any case, I remember that it was already dark, and it was raining. My mom had been out shopping for groceries, and she pulled up within a few minutes of when we heard the news. She had been involved in various civil rights activities and had actually driven by herself up to the South Side one night–in 1965, maybe?–to see King speak at a neighborhood church. I think we–my brothers and I–probably imparted the news in a panicked way and probably passed on the first report that King might have been shot in the head. I think that because of the shocked and despairing reaction I remember from my mother: “Oh, they always shoot them in the head!” I’m sure she was thinking back to President Kennedy. Maybe even to Lincoln. Bobby Kennedy wouldn’t be shot for another couple of months.
The connection, if any, to today. None. The schoolyard was beautiful, the day warm, and that night might never have happened except for what we remember and have brought with us into our future.
Salmon for Their Own Sake
Like everyone else, I’m given to enthusiasms. Like everyone else, my enthusiams are too many to list. Thinking about them, most seem to involve a narrative of some kind: the progress of favorite remembered plays in baseball or basketball–any sport, really–to movies and books to roads I’ve traveled and places I’ve visited and on good days to whatever I happen to encounter in the world.
(Maybe something else is at work here; our tendency or need to turn everything into a story. I just came across a poem, “In Praise of a Teacher,” by Nikki Giovanni. She says:
“I always loved English because
whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories
that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a
history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we
think we are; English is much more a story of who we really are.”)
One of my enthusiasms, strange to tell for one who has hardly ever hooked a fish, is for salmon. Specifically, the salmon of the Pacific coast. And going with the notion of story, I think the biggest part of my attraction is to the salmon’s life narrative: birth in cold inland waters, migration to the sea, a sojourn that can last several years in the hostile wilds of the ocean, and then a long homeward journey to find that birthplace stream, whatever the obstacles, spawn just once, and die.
It’s a great story, and my often half-informed fervor to share salmon history and lore for anyone who will sit still for a minute has led my colleagues at our Local Major Public Radio Station (LMPRS) to adopt a “safe word” when they think things are getting out of control. It’s “coho.” At the same time, I’ve probably gotten as much interest (or forebearance) as anyone could reasonably expect when suggesting salmon stories to develop for broadcast. Earlier this month, I got to attend a West Coast fisheries conference and do a few stories on prospects for the coming salmon season.
But that interest from my fellow journalists always comes with a question that I’ll summarize this way: “Salmon? Why should we care about salmon?” It’s a reasonable enough question: Every news story in every news venue contains some sort of explicit or implicit rationale or assumption about audience interest. Falling housing prices? Well, a lot of the audience is in that boat. E. coli in the food supply? We all eat that food. Rising taxes or reduced pensions? You see how it works.
In narrating the plight of California’s once-great native salmon populations, those who seek to save some semblance of the historic fisheries are learning to play that “why should anyone care?” game. In the past couple of years, they’ve brought consultants into play who can quantify what salmon mean economically. Cancelling two straight commercial salmon seasons, they reported, cost boat operators and fishing communities upward of $2 billion and 23,000 jobs.
I suppose the numbers are powerful, and it’s useful to have them when trying to persuade someone else that the decline of salmon is a story that matters. But the power of the statistics only goes so far: Someone else whose ox is being gored in the debate–for instance, the Central Valley farm interests who might not get all the water they want because some is being set aside for salmon–can come up with bigger, scarier numbers. And the numbers are unfortunate in another way: The pure economic impact is important, of course; whole societies have lived their lives around the salmon. But the cost a lost salmon season doesn’t begin to touch on the wonder of the animal and its place in the world or on what’s really lost when wild salmon runs go dead.
As it happens, my schoolteacher wife is teaching her fifth-graders about watersheds this year. Part of the lesson is about fish, and she’s been particularly interested in learning about efforts to restore one of Northern California’s last surviving wild coho runs, up in Marin County. One book in her watershed library is the one pictured above, “Salmon Stream.” The entire contents: a simple narration of the salmon’s life history. What’s wonderful about it is it presents the fish–the “resource”–as something of value for its own sake, without economic justification or cost-benefit analyses.
For me, the answer to why anyone ought to care about the salmon isn’t instantly accessible. The rational piece of the answer is what they represent about the world as it has been, as it is, as it might be, and the toll we’ve exacted from our surroundings to have our lives just so. The non-rational piece is the beauty of the thing itself, from conception to death. And maybe, when the question comes up next, I need to have copies of that picture book handy.
‘Pent Up in Lath and Plaster’
I had occasion over the weekend to open the front cover of “Moby Dick.” (One of many secret shames: I’ve never read it through.) But Kate had suggested that there was a section there we might share with some friends with whom we were going to have a poetry-reading evening. The very beginning of the book carried me away with its description of city dwellers tending toward the sea:
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs — commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall northward. What do you see? — Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster — tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?
(Here’s a decent online annotation of the text for some of the references above, including “hypos,” short for “hypochondria,” which back in Melville’s time meant depression or melancholy.)
For Sale in Berkeley
Just in case you were looking for a ’50s vintage Dodge Wayfarer (my guess: It’s a ’51, which makes it 60 years old. Here’s a better-preserved local specimen for comparison). This one was parked on Gilman Street, just below Santa Fe.
Tough Love for Panhandlers, 14th Century Style
We have alluded before in this space to the conundrum of living in a community where — well, where you get hit up for spare change or are otherwise wheedled and baited as part of some impromptu street-based money-raising scheme. We have quoted Walt Whitman’s injunction “give alms to all who ask.” And we have watched as our town and nearby cities have adopted laws–for instance, San Francisco’s “Sit-Lie Ordinance” — that are supposed to address public concerns about getting panhandled.
In researching another topic just now, I found that England’s King Edward III dealt with panhandlers, too. Here’s a section of the Ordinance of Laborers, handed down in 1349 as to deal with the impact of the Black Death that had recently swept the kingdom:
“… Because that many valiant beggars, as long as they may live of begging, do refuse to labor, giving themselves to idleness and vice, and sometimes to theft and other abominations; none upon the said pain of imprisonment, shall, under the color of pity or alms, give anything to such, who are able to labor, or presume to favor them in their idleness, so that thereby they may be compelled to labor for their necessary living.”
To be clear, the law didn’t outlaw begging. It outlawed giving anything to beggars. (I like the phrase “under the color of pity or alms.” Mustn’t give sway to those kinds of feelings or predilections.)
And what could this possibly have to do with the Black Death? you ask. Well, England was facing a severe labor shortage after the plague, and the king was answering demands to find workers. The same proclamation essentially required all able-bodied people under 60 to work; in fact, if someone who was otherwise unemployed was asked to work and refused, they could be thrown in jail; and anyone who was employed was forbidden to leave their position “without reasonable cause or license.” The statute also prohibited laborers, who found themselves in a sellers’ market, from demanding higher wages for their work. That prohibition is said to have become the Common Law precedent for blocking formation of labor unions in the United States up through 1840.
One Last Thing About That Snow
Before I bid adieu to the subject of the Great Groundhog Eve’s Blizzard (a bullet I dodged, I suppose, but whose trajectory I got to enjoy from afar), a couple final keepsakes. First, a segment from Chicago’s Fox affiliate, Channel 32, which takes a look at its coverage of the 1967 blizzard. Entertaining stuff that focuses less on the weather and its effects than on the way the TV and newspapers covered the events. I had my first newsroom job at Chicago Today five years after these clips were shot–our offices were in Tribune Tower, across Michigan Avenue from the Daily News and Sun-Times Building–and the scenes are familiar.
Friday Flashback: The Chicago Blizzard of 1967: MyFoxCHICAGO.com
And next is a short film of New York City’s Boxing Day Blizzard–did anyone call it that?–that I came across while poking around Roger Ebert’s site today. Ebert went gaga over the film (check out that link for a detailed discussion on how the filmmaker shot and edited the movie), and it’s been viewed half a million times so far, so I’m not sure how I missed it. It’s extraordinary.
Chicago Alley, Before and After the Storm
Right: The wintry scene in the alley behind my sister’s house on the North Side of Chicago, a few days before this week’s storm. Below, the same scene after the blizzard. Those new snowbanks are going to be there for a while (thanks for the picture, Ann).