Driving out of Chico on the way home this morning, I turned a corner and spotted this.
Undoubtedly provoked by stories like this and this, and quotes like: "The generals love napalm. It has a big psychological effect."
Yes — yes it does.
Brief Road Blog
In Chico (just west of Paradise) after a quick un-air-conditioned ride up Interstate 5 in a red ’93 Honda Civic hatchback (aka “The Machine Messiah) to visit a Sacramento Valley monastery celebrating its 50th anniversary. Temperature: 106. Relative humidity: 9 percent. The backstory: The monastery figures in a long tale involving Leland Stanford (in a cameo), William Randolph Hearst, and a 12th century Spanish abbey. I’ll relate all — as many others have done — later. With dramatic photographic evidence.
Flying Home
Airline travel has become endlessly irritating and uncomfortable most of the time. The snack boxes they used to give away as consolation that those bad hot meals weren’t served anymore? Now you have to pay five bucks for one, and various combinations of chips, jerky, whizzed cheese, pretzels and cookies have been given cute names like QuickPick, JumpStart, Biafra, and Moe. But now I’m wandering.
I always take a window seat if one’s available. I can deal with the confinement as long as I have a chance to look out the window. I’ve always found the view of the world outside and below full of a beauty so singular and surprising I don’t feel fit to express it. So, Monday evening on United Flight 863 from O’Hare to San Francisco: Somewhere over Iowa we flew past this wall of storm clouds growing into the summer sky to the north. Even though I was pretty sure a picture would only hint at the play of light and texture and shadow, I pulled out my little digital camera and took a couple of shots. Glad I did.
AirBlog: LAX and After
6:40 p.m. PST: Exclusive coverage of the delay of American Airlines Flight 1519, nonstop service from Los Angeles to San Francisco, brought to you from seat 4A of a Boeing 737 (sorry, I don’t know the tail number. I can probably find it, though).
We’re parked in what I heard one of the cabin crew people refer to as “that remote area” of Los Angeles International Airport. The reason: Stormy weather up around the Bay Area has caused inbound flights to back up. So air-traffic control had American load this plane, then pull it away from the gate (which was needed to debark passengers from another flight). The pilots drove it over to this “remote area” — actually, we’re alongside a runway and taxiway and see a steady stream of planes passing — to sit for an hour or so before taking off for tne north. (Part of the problem during stormy or foggy weather around San Francisco International, as anyone who uses the airport or lives in the area knows, is that the airport must close one of its two parallel runways. Normally, planes land side by side, separated by about 250 yards when they reach the runways. That’s too close when visibility’s poor. The solution to this is building additional runways, but that’s proven to be expensive, time-consuming, and fraught with environmental controversy. I’m not complaining about the delay or the runway configuration myself. I figure it’s something of a miracle that planes can fly through storms at all, let alone find a runway through clouds and fog and actually land on it.
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One last thing about the trip: As I think I mentioned somewhere before, I wound up with something of an accidental first-class ticket. I like it. I’m not jammed in with the rest of the poor saps apprehensively trooping to the rear of the plane. Uniformed persons are solicitous of my welfare. They’re anxious to hang up my jacket, bring me food and drink, laugh at my jokes, and hear my life story (well, the jacket and food and drink parts are true). I dread my next flight, when I go back to being one of the poor saps.
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One other thing last thing: We finally landed in San Francisco at 9:15 p.m., about an hour and a half later than scheduled. In addition to getting grounded in Los Angeles, we also happened to arrive in the Bay Area at about the same time as a very intense weather front, and got put in a very bumpy holding pattern. I looked out the window the whole way. Occasionally the moon would break through the clouds as we jolted along, then we’d plunge back into a blinding combination of what looked like snow and rain. It was one of those situations you just know the only way the flight’s viable is because the planes got real good navigation technology on board; in the olden days, I think the option would have been to bail on the airport socked in by rough weather and land somewhere else. Anyway, we kept circling, and after 20 or 30 minutes of that, they told us we were cleared to head to the airport. The only alarming thing was that the weather got wilder the closer we got to the airport, so that the wings were rocking and the plane was pitching all the way down to the runway. The landing itself was the hardest one I’ve ever been aboard for, though no oxygen masks fell down and the window shades stayed up (Dad talks about a flight he took once that ended with such a heavy landing that all the shades slammed down and oxygen masks dropped).
AirBlog: O’Hare
A quick word before getting on my plane to Los Angeles, to connect to another plane to San Francisco, on my way home to what we fondly refer to as B-town in our gangsta way.
I’m in a small food court here in the American Airlines terminal. Its crowded. Lots of laptop computing going on. Starbucks is doing a good business. So’s Cinnabon and the place across the way that’s selling Michelob Ultra. An older (than me) middle-aged couple sits across the table from me with their coffees, unwrapping a couple of sweaty and deflated-looking sandwiches from Subway. “That looks like salami to me,” she says to him. They swap. I’m not letting them in on the fact they’re being quoted, for the record.
Behind them, a bearded young guy in a black hooded sweatshirt, black-and-white do-rag, black roadster cap and a stud in his lower lip sits with ear buds in place, sipping from his Michelob and reading a paperback. He looks focused.
That’s all for this post. Time to get on the plane.
St. Stephen’s Day Travel
Late Sunday, at my dad’s place on the far North Side of Chicago. Cold out, though warmer here than it has been recently, and there’s an inch or two of snow on the ground. Basically it’s a quick drop-in to see everyone post-Christmas: my brother John and his family are here from Brooklyn, and of course the rest of the family is rooted here in Chicago. The only thing notable about the flight from San Francisco, other than the fact I misplaced by boarding pass at the security check, was that it was the first time I’ve ever flown first class. That was the result of using frequent-flier miles at the last minute and discovering there were no coach seats available; but there were first-class seats if I was willing to pay for a few thousand extra miles to get one. So I did, and wound up getting a round-trip first-class ticket for a couple hundred bucks. There actually is a difference from coach. Lots and lots of leg room. Identifiable food. Refreshing hot towels. Actual glasses and dishes. Free alcohol, though it was a morning flight and I wasn’t inclined to avail myself of that amenity. I betrayed the fact I was a first-time first-class flier when the meal came and I couldn’t find the tray table. The attendant had to tell me where it was. My seatmate, with whom I exchanged not a word the entire trip, couldn’t find hers either. Maybe another upwardly displaced person from the coach class.
That’s all, except to mention it’s St. Stephen’s Day, the feast of my namesake saint. Beyond the name, I was always taken with St. Stephen: First, because he is said to be the first Christian martyr; stoned to death, though I have no idea who stoned him, exactly, or what he did to start the rocks flying. I also always wondered how he wound up with such a plum calendar spot — the day after Jesus’s birthday, a near guarantee that people are going to remember your day if they care. Who gave Stephen the 26th, and what was the process? The answers are out there.
Long, Winding, Four-Lane Road
Just an odd online find: A page that includes a complete sequential listing, with the appropriate signs, for every exit, north- and southbound, off Interstate 5 through Oregon. Having driven the road just a couple of weeks ago, it’s fun to see the trip reproduced. The guy who put it together, who identifies himself as Mike Wiley of San Diego, has created a kind of alternate road atlas for the Beaver State’s main interstate.
And from a more geeky perspective, check out the source HTML for the page (I was curious, because none of the beautiful green signs on the page, including the ones for the town of Drain that I wanted to rip off to use for this post, are downloadable images). The guy coded all the highway signage in HTML (except for the highway number shields — those are actually .gifs) instead of creating individual images in Photoshop. Makes sense, I guess, because the hundreds of signs on the page might have added up to a monster download compared to the HTML.
Road Blog: Eugene
We made it to Eugene. Got up early, but not super-early, and drove up Interstate 5 from Yreka to Eugene. It’s different up north: They actually have an autumn with trees turning color and frost in the air and the whole bit. The country along the way starts out mountainous — you have to cross the Siskiyous (SISK-yoos, to you auslanders) to cross into southern Oregon. Then you travel through the valley towns of Ashland (lovely unto annoyance) and Medford (annoyingly ordinary), then begin crossing a series of divides into the watersheds of the Rogue and Umpqua rivers, their various branches, and lesser streams. North of Roseburg, about 130 miles north of the California border, the road begins flattening out some as you pass towns like Oakland, Rice Hill, and Drain. Eventually, you enter the watershed of the Willamette (wa-LAMB-it) and soon get to Eugene.
We wanted to attend a 1 p.m. orientation session, and we got there in plenty of time to park and get to the Erb Memorial Union (Emu for us auslanders). Since it was a holiday, Veteran’s Day, the session was packed (about 40 or 50 people). We spent an hour hearing how much the University of Oregon cost, what sort of grades and test scores you need to get in, and many, many other aspects of campus life. At 2 p.m., a sophomore business student named Matt Plumb gamely took the whole group on a tour: of the union, a dormitory, a future dormitory (now a hole in the ground), the student rec center, the library, the new Lillis business building, the journalism building, a new science building, and much more.
Quick impressions of campus: Smaller than expected, on a much more humane scale than any of the Big Ten campuses I’ve seen or the UC-Berkeley campus in its present incarnation — maybe more the way Berkeley was through the ’60s (the scale probably reflects enrollment; Oregon’s got a total of about 20,000 students, including graduates; Berkeley’s got about 34,000; several of the Big 10 schools have long since been at or above 50,000 for years). The tallest buildings at Oregon seem to top out at about five or six stories, and there are only a handful of those; there’s just one big lecture hall, and it seats about 500 or so; that’s mid-size by Berkeley standards. The campus is beautifully landscaped; lots of trees, lots of green, lots of open space, still, so it doesn’t have the overbuilt feel you get in some areas of Berkeley. You can’t judge much from a single afternoon, but overall the place felt quieter and less rushed and crowded than Berkeley.
The tour lasted an hour. We decided to drive around Eugene a little to see what flavor we could get. Well — not much from driving, aside from confirming the fact that drive-through espresso is huge north of the California border. Afterward, with no real plan, we decided to drive back south to Ashland to spend the night. But by the time we got there, about 7 p.m. or so, we were in driving mode and after a walk up and down the main street looking for something to eat and deciding we weren’t hungry, we decided to drive all the way home (another 340 miles or so). After stopping for bad Mexican food in Mount Shasta (note: Stay away from Lalo’s, except maybe if you just want a beer), we split the driving (me to Mount Shasta, Tom the next 165 miles or so to Williams — site of the phantom Dairy Queen — and me the last 100 miles) and got back to Berkeley a little before 1 in the morning.
(Pictures: Top: Tom listens to University of Oregon tour-leader guy. Bottom: People, trees, and autumn colors abound on Eugene campus.)
Road Blog: Yreka
Tom and I are staying at the Best Western in Yreka (yes, Yreka, California, north of Weed, east of Krakatoa) tonight. On our way up to Eugene for a tour of the University of Oregon tomorrow. Got kind of a late start out of Berkeley — about 7:30 or so — and arrived here just after midnight, Veteran’s Day. This happens to be the same place Dad and I stopped in October 1990 on our way up to see Mount St. Helen’s (Dad, I asked for the Brekke Suite, but the desk person affected ignorance and eventually threatened to call the sherifff when I persisted; so we’re just in a regular double room)
. Not much to report from the road: Light rain off and on, light traffic pretty much the whole way, and we traveled sans landscape since we got on our way so late. We had Tom’s iPod plugged into the car stereo and sung along with many songs, including hits from the Jackson 5, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen, and many others. The schedule for tomorrow (later today) is up early for the fine Yreka Bakery complimentary breakfast, then over the Siskiyous to Ashland for real breakfast, then up to Eugene for a 1 p.m. campus tour. Further than that we have not planned.
Hey, Why Don’t You Pay ME to Do This?
Wired News is starting a two-week series of reports on a trip down the Mississippi River by one of its writers. Having just driven a relatively short section of the river with my dad, and having had a blast doing it and writing a little about it, I’m envious.