Category: Travel

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South Fork

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South Fork of the American River, along U.S. 50 on our drive back today from Lake Tahoe. We spent an abbreviated yet somehow leisurely weekend with a friend at her family’s cabin on the south shore (and when I say “on the shore,” I mean it–they are right on the lake). Anyway: Lots of snow in the mountains, still–the state estimates the snowpack is still about 150 percent of its April 1 average. That means lots more water will come coursing down the rivers in the weeks to come and that California will enjoy one year nearly free from drought anxiety; “nearly free” because there’s always next year, and who knows whether it will be dry or wet? “Nearly free” because the constant lesson of California history is there will be more people who want the water tomorrow than there are today.

Yes, all that from looking the South Fork flowing by. In other news: gorgeous river; gorgeous day.

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Road Blog: Southering

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We’re back in Berkeley, Alameda County, middle third of the California coast. Spent a total of two nights near Mendocino, took a full-day’s field trip back down to the Anderson Valley, then spent a third night back north in Fort Bragg. Today, we headed south and spent two or three hours around Point Arena, in whose general vicinity there’s a beautiful old lighthouse, pupping seals, a KOA kampground with a sign admonishing kampers that “life is not measure by the amount of breaths we take but by the people and places that take our breath away,” a restored movie theater on the town’s main drag, and a tiny fishing harbor. On the road out to that last attraction, to which we were directed by a sign advertising a “chowder house and taproom,” we happened across the derelict above, perfectly gorgeous in its setting just beneath the dooryard of an equally robust-looking domicile. I call your attention to the cat, aft and portside. The paperwork on the outside of the wheelhouse suggests the boat might last have been in action, or at least permitted for fishing, in 1991.

From there we stayed south on Highway 1 through Gualala, past Sea Ranch (I honestly didn’t realize it goes on for eight or nine miles, but it does), made a detour to the greater Annapolis area to drop in on friends, then south again past Fort Ross, Jenner, Bodega Bay and Valley Ford before heading back to the metropolis along U.S. 101 in southern Sonoma County. Got back into town just in time to grab burritos to go, then home. South again.

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Road Blog: The Great Whale

Well, I could recount a day spent mostly outside at some of the parks along the Mendocino Coast — Russian Gulch, Point Cabrillo, and Mackerricher. Or I could cut to the chase: the whale we saw just as we were getting to leave the last in the series of parks.

Mackerricher stretches for nearly 10 miles north of Fort Bragg. About three miles north of town there’s Laguna Point, with campgrounds, parking lots, and a long boardwalk out to an area where you can view seals during pupping season (that’s right now).

We got there late in the afternoon and walked out to the western end of the point, where we saw maybe eight seas–a half-dozen dozing on some rocks, a couple more that seemed to be playing. I had my audio recorder with me and and was getting some really vivid shore sounds from these thick-bodied dull-black birds that I’m only slightly embarrassed to say I can’t identify. Got a long piece from a little wren going nuts in some underbrush.

We were ready to find something to eat and were walking back to the car when we both saw a whale spout no more than a couple hundred yards off the north side of the point. We watched, and there were a couple more spouts, and the whale (a gray? a humpback?) seemed to arch its back and go under. We watched some more, and it came back up and repeated the performance, except for a finale it raised its tail — which I’d guess was at least six feet across — and go down again. It repeated the pattern about half a dozen times over half an hour or so.

At one point, we decided to go back out to the boardwalk to see if we could get a better look. On the way out, we passed a family coming in. You naturally assume that they’ve seen what you’ve seen, but I asked as we passed, “Did you see the whale goofing off out there?” No, they hadn’t; in fact, they’d never seen a whale, period. So the mom, dad, and two daughters followed us. It’s also natural to think that once you’ve alerted someone to some wonder of nature, it won’t recur. But within a couple minutes, the whale appeared again, did the tail trick, and dove. We saw it once or twice more before heading back to the car just as a squall blew in across the point.

Conclusion of whale reminiscence.

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Road Blog: Little River

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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.

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Approaching Portland

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I have no problem with most of the flight directions airline crews give passengers, except for one. The order to turn off all electronic devices–“anything with an on or off switch”–gets in the way of picture-taking on takeoffs and landing. I have never heard the electronic point-and-shoot photography has even interfered with a plane’s avionics or brought down a flight, and I’ve seen landing videos shot right in the cockpits of big commercial jets, so I persist in the habit. Here’s an example from last Saturday: my Southwest flight from Oakland on approach to Portland airport. The image is looking southeast over Sauvie Island, just west of the Willamette River and the city. How do I know? I spent a while checking my images of the approach against Google Maps satellite images and online maps. I don’t know the area at all, and had to orient myself as to the direction of our approach–some later images corrected my impression that we were landing east-to-west; it was the exact opposite. That upside-down Y intersection at the lower left is where Reeder Road, coming from the left, meets Oak Island Road, coming from the right. I couldn’t find the name of that stream winding through the center of the frame, but you can see the Multnomah Channel, just west of its confluence with the Willamette, at the very top of the picture. Compare the satellite image of the spot.

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Day at the Beach

Below: a slideshow of an afternoon up at Point Reyes (on the Pierce Point Road and at Kehoe Beach, to be more specific). It was utterly gorgeous on the strand, which looked like you could walk it all day and never reach the end. (And by way of explanation, we went out there with our neighbors and friends, Jill and Piero Martinucci, who you see in some of the pictures.)

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Cross-Country

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The Missouri River just south of Chamberlain, South Dakota (about 150 miles west of Sioux Falls).

In some part of my mind, I pleasurably anticipate travel. But I don’t like planning for an airline trip or packing for it. I don’t enjoy dealing with the virtual and physical gauntlet air travel forces us to run. I don’t relish facing the group unhappiness that greets you at the gate and accompanies you as long as you’re in the isolated world of your flight. No, I’m not enamored of any of that.

But from the moment the plane leaves the ground to the moment it touches down, it’s hours of visual poetry (assuming of course I have the window seat I want).

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The approach to O’Hare, just west of the airport.

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Crab and Whine–I Mean ‘Wine’–Days

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Fort Bragg, Pudding Creek in the foreground.

Our son Thom set up a weekend for us in Fort Bragg over the weekend–the beginning of Mendocino County’s annual Crab and Wine Days. The centerpiece event of the weekend was a crabcake cookoff in a big white tent on Fort Bragg’s Main Street. Attendees tried the various crabcakes on offer from local inns and eateries and voted on their favorite, then did the same for wines from county vintners. I will admit that after a while one crabcake seems much like another to me, but I did manage to savor and vote for both a favorite crabcake and a wine I thought was pretty good (neither my palate nor my appetite was improved by a mid-respiratory tract cold I seem to have come down with as soon as my time off from work started).

Much of the Mendocino Coast is given over to high-end tourism. Driving up Highway 1, you pass one small settlement after another that were once logging and fishing outposts and are now mostly given over to expensive inns and restaurants. A few places on the coast–Fort Bragg is one–are in the midst of a transition from dependence on timber and fisheries to tourism and nouveau agriculture (the latter term embracing both viticulture and winemaking and the not-legal marijuana industry). Fort Bragg’s past is everywhere, from its fishing port on the Noyo River (source of the crab harvest) to the barren, cleared parcels on the water side of the coast highway that used to house mills.

Anyway. What I forget in what might seem a bleak recitation of economic realities is the utter beauty of the place. Thom got reservations in The Beachcomber, a motel just north of town. Nice place, dog-friendly and not outrageously expensive, but its principal amenity is that it abuts parkland and beaches and looks right out on the Pacific. When Kate and I got there Friday night, we went out for a walk on the paved trail behind the place. Heading south into town, the path crosses a trestle over Pudding Creek, one of the few streams on this part of the coast said to still have a viable wild coho salmon run. Didn’t see any fish–this would be steelhead time, if any are showing up–but I saw plenty of opportunity for night-time picture experiments.

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Pudding Creek, moonlight.

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Filling in the Map

Sunday was spent noodling with HTML in the morning, then in the afternoon getting in the Tiny Car (the Chicago-bred Toyota Echo) and driving from Berkeley out to Antioch, up the Sacramento River to the Delta Cross Channel, then east to where our local utility district stores our water as it flows out of the Sierra Nevada. The destination was chosen because the East Bay Municipal Utility District runs a fish hatchery on the Mokelumne River, and I wanted to see that. The route was dictated because the Delta Cross Channel is the route by which much of the water exported from Northern California down to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California is diverted from the Sacramento. I’ve driven past and ridden my bike by the Cross Channel gates dozens of times, but, not knowing what the heck they were, I never took note of them. Anyway, the drive was part of a long-term project I think of as filling in my map–touring what is largely terra incognita and figuring out how the pieces relate to each other.

It was a beautiful day, anyway, even with no end in mind. I saw water. I saw levees. I met a lonely bridgetender and photographed him and his antique bridge. I encountered a dead skunk and a curious ostrich. And then when I got out to the hatchery, I was hours too late — it had closed at 3 p.m.