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Live at North Berkeley BART: The Dan Nhi

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I’ve been seeing this man at the North Berkeley BART station for, gosh, at least a couple of years (time flies when you’re halfway paying attention). He’s one of a number of musicians who show up and perform for a few spare bucks during the evening commute. He plays a two-stringed instrument that I’ve always guessed is from eastern Asia, and I’ve always guessed that he’s Vietnamese.

I wouldn’t consider the guesses well-informed. Maybe sometime in the distant past I saw this instrument played somewhere and learned its origins. In any case, when I played the audio above for Kate and described what made it, she went online and quickly found a description of a two-string Vietnamese “fiddle” — the dan nhi.

I wanted to ask the man, who was wearing a Raiders cap, about himself, the instrument and his playing, which I found quite beautiful. But our conversation was very brief. When I asked whether he’s speak to me, he pointed to one of his ears and said, “I — no English.”

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California Fire Season: Goofing with Maps

I don’t really have too much time on my hands. I have actual work I might be doing and undoubtedly will do. But wildfires have been a major professional preoccupation this summer — here’s a current example of what I’m talking about. And visualizing where the fires are and how big they are (in both absolute and relative terms) has become part of that preoccupation.

There are lots of maps out there. For instance, both Cal Fire’s site (maintained by our state firefighting agency) and Inciweb (the site reporting fires on federal lands) both feature maps of each and every conflagration. And there are independent mapping sites — for instance, the one that created this rather amazingly detailed map of the King Fire currently burning northeast of Sacramento — that provide details that most people would never even think of (for instance, overlaying wind data on the area where the fire is burning).

But of course, if you have a map, you want another map. So I started goofing around with a site/service a colleague introduced me to several months ago, Mapbox. My original purpose was to create a map that overlaid the footprint of the King Fire (which as of today has burned 82,000 acres, or 120 square miles) on the Bay Area. In theory, that would allow Bay Area people to envision better what that burned area means in a context they may understand better than a) “82,000 acres” and b) 120 square miles. I discovered that it’s easy to find the data showing the footprint of the King Fire and others, and I wound up making the map above. Plenty of room for improvement there. For instance, including the date and size of each fire.

The execution of my original concept, accomplished with my crude beginner’s skills in Photoshop, is below. I tweeted that image, and someone out there on the twtinternets suggested I could make this image more interesting by rotating the overlaid fire footprint so that it’s aligned better with the San Francisco Peninsula. Well, maybe I will.

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Along the Road

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I have just gone an entire calendar month without a post on The Blog. I supposed that’s been a long time coming — I have been more and more occupied by my paid writing activities and have had less and less energy for my spare-time quasi-literary activities. So here it is, the first night of September, and I see that I went 0 for August.

I was on the road a little bit the last few weeks. A trip up to Yosemite to pick up Kate after a weekend science-teacher seminar. A trip down to San Diego to pick her up after a weeklong science-teacher training. Then last week, in a trip that had nothing to do with Kate’s science teaching, I went up to Northern California to do some reporting on a salmon-and-water story. Being up there, I also did some exploring, tracing the Trinity River its entire length below the last dam on its waters, then following the Klamath River as far as the Interstate 5 bridge north of Yreka. That river journey was on two highways — 299, which runs northwest from Redding out to the Humboldt County coast, and 96, which follows the Trinity River north from 299 up to its confluence with the Klamath.

That part of California has been a big blank space in my personal map of California, and I tried to stop and take a look at the countryside and the communities along the way; of course, that was a little bit of a challenge because I had set myself a nearly absurd amount of ground to cover in one day of two-lane driving, something approaching 400 miles. But I did take in towns like Weaverville, where I stayed for one night long ago, and places I had never seen, like Hawkins Bar, Burnt Ranch, Salyer, Willow Creek, Hoopa, Weitchpec, Orleans, Happy Camp, and Seiad Valley. To be honest, I think I’d need to go back again two or three times before any of them is imprinted on my brain, though I can tell you that Hawkins Bar has a saloon named Simon Legree’s. I did not get a picture of the place, and I did not stop to ask for an explanation of how the villain of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” wound up being the inspiration for a roadhouse.  

I did stop briefly in Willow Creek, where Highway 96 turns north from 299. From the superficial passing-motorist’s glance, it’s a pretty tidy-looking small town with a manicured business district (the town promotes itself as a capital of all things Bigfoot). I stopped because I had seen a couple small roadside memorials — crosses with flowers and other mementos — on the side of the road into town. The first memorial, at an old truck scale on a bluff above the river, included a rubber duck but didn’t have a name visible. The second memorial, about a mile and a half up the road, appeared recent and included a name, Alejandro Garcia.

Here’s the story of what happened to Mr. Garcia, as related by the North Coast Journal in late June:

Willow Creek Hit and Run Victim Identified

The pedestrian killed in a hit-and-run collision in Willow Creek on Saturday has been identified as 22-year-old Manuel Alejandro Garcia.

Humboldt County Deputy Coroner Roy Horton said Garcia appeared to have been walking on the shoulder of the westbound lane of State Route 299, where it makes a sweeping left-hand turn in front of Buddy’s Auto Center, when he was hit. Horton said Garcia lived close by, with his mother and brother, and appears to have been out walking his dog.

“I found a dog leash and chain at the scene,” Horton said, adding that the dog returned to Garcia’s home after the accident, which occurred at about 10 p.m. Saturday.

The California Highway Patrol responded to a call reporting the accident and found Garcia dead, but the driver had fled the scene. A short time later, officers found a car believed to have been involved in the accident parked behind Ray’s Market in Willow Creek. With the help of a dog from the Arcata Police Department, officers spent four hours searching the scene but were unable to locate the driver.

California Highway Patrol officer Michael Berry said officers used the vehicle’s registration information to track down its suspected driver, Daniel Roy Jones, 36, of Arcata, who was arrested at his home without incident at about 11:30 Sunday morning and booked into jail on suspicion of driving under the influence, hit and run, manslaughter and delaying or obstructing an officer. …

That was more than two months ago. The only postscript I find in the local media is that the suspect in the case posted bail, apparently the day after he was arrested. You kind of wonder what the legal consequences will ultimately be.

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Passers-By

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Just remembering: It was two years ago today that our dad passed on. I’m not sure a day goes by that I don’t have some thought of him (and yes, of our mom, too — she died in August 2003, and it’s hard to believe it’s been that long).

Here’s a reading for them, two lifelong Chicagoans: Carl Sandburg’s “Passers-By,” from “Chicago Poems” (1916):

PASSERS-BY,
Out of your many faces
Flash memories to me
Now at the day end
Away from the sidewalks
Where your shoe soles traveled
And your voices rose and blent
To form the city’s afternoon roar
Hindering an old silence.

Passers-by,
I remember lean ones among you,
Throats in the clutch of a hope,
Lips written over with strivings,
Mouths that kiss only for love.
Records of great wishes slept with,
Held long
And prayed and toiled for…

Yes,
Written on
Your mouths
And your throats
I read them
When you passed by.

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Dining-Room Visitor

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Earlier this month, Kate spotted some wild fennel stuffed into a yard-waste bin here in the neighborhood. Wild fennel, which has become profuse here, is kind of weedy and annoying; once it takes root, it’s very hard to get rid of.

But it’s also a host plant for a butterfly called the anise swallowtail (Papilio zelicaon), whose image has graced this blog before. It’s a largish black-and-yellow beauty, at least in the eye of this beholder.

So, having spotted the fennel in the bin, Kate took a look to see if any anise swallowtail caterpillars might be there, too. To her surprise, she found 10, including a couple that were probably close to going into their chrysalides. So she brought the caterpillar and their host sprigs of fennel back home, where they took up residence in our dining room.

Within just a few days, one of the caterpillars crawled onto the vase that held the fennel and began preparing to go into its chrysalis. We left town for a couple of days, and when we came back, the chrysalis was complete. (See the photos below; click for bigger versions of the images.) That was less than two weeks ago. Since we’ve sometimes watched chrysalides for months and months before a butterfly appears (if one appears at all), I was kind of thinking we’d be into the autumn before anything more happened.

But this morning, Kate got up, walked into the dining room, then called out, “We have a butterfly out here now!”

So now, it’s doing what it needs to do for the next stage in its life cycle. We’ll watch.

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No Tools Required

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We have a bathroom sink with a broken stopper — or at least a stopper I’ve been ineffective at fixing. So I followed up on a months-old resolution and bought an old-fashioned rubber stopper. To cover all bets, I got one that fits a range of drain sizes. And it works great. I run water into the sink, and the imperturbable stopper makes sure it just stays there.

I admit I thought the device was self-explanatory. But Kate pointed out after I’d removed the stopper and left the package just lying around on the kitchen counter that it came with installation instructions. Or “installation instructions,” since nothing there really tells you what you need to do with the drain plug to achieve total stopper satisfaction.

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Audio Experiment: Talking Groundwater

OK, here’s another little experiment. I spent part of the last 10 days or so taking a little bit of a crash course in California groundwater for a radio feature. The feature’s done, but I still need to do a web post for program I did the story for (“America Abroad,” distributed by Public Radio International). I’ve had a hard time sitting down and writing again after crashing for the radio deadline, so I decided to just record some of the stuff I’ve packed into my brain on this topic. The result is what might pass for a podcast, though I’m not betting that the world is waiting for 30 minutes of talk on a resource that’s mostly invisible.

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Polyester Pants

I was out for a walk with The Dog late this afternoon. We hit several of the usual stops: the house of a neighbor who is a soft touch for dog biscuits; the schoolyard where every once in a while other dogs are running around; the chicken coop in the adjacent school garden. Then we looped around a long block and started to walk down the street past the school’s track. A man was approaching. Maybe my age (mid-Baby Boom), wearing a sort of black sea captain’s hat, a black pea jacket and heavy black trousers. He had big mutton-chop whiskers and was otherwise rather roughly shaven. He looked — well, not quite like he was living on the street, but like he was used to living outdoors.

As we passed each other, he stopped and said, “Can I ask you a really random question?”

“Sure,” I said, thinking that I was about to hear a roundabout request for any money I could spare.

“Do you know where I can buy some polyester pants?”

“Uh…”

“You know, some slacks, some polyester dress slacks.”

That did qualify as a really random question. But I tried to think of where you could go in Berkeley, even late on a Sunday afternoon, to find the desired item. Ross in downtown Berkeley. Or maybe the Halmar work clothes store on University Avenue. Or the J.C. Penney up at Hilltop Mall …

And that was it. Maybe that line of questioning would have led to the subject of money. But my new acquaintance just thanked me, turned, and walked up the street. The dog and I walked on toward home, and I’m still wondering if I’ve ever worn polyester pants.

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Air Blog: Utah

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From USAirways Flight 718, en route from San Francisco to Philadelphia at 33,000 feet, somewhere between east of Capitol Reef National Park, west of Canyonlands National Park. I’ve got to see this from ground level sometime.

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‘Living a Quiet Life’

Desultory Twitter browsing led me to the following obituary from Lake County. The county is home to Clear Lake, California’s largest wholly contained freshwater lake — Lake Tahoe is much bigger, but is split with Nevada– and is oddly isolated. Its seat, Lakeport, is less than 100 miles as the crow flies north of downtown San Francisco and about 40 miles from the northern end of the tourist-overrun Napa Valley. But the county occupies rough, highland country bypassed by the main north-south routes to the west and east, so it’s a little bit of a job to get there. Despite the lake, tourism hasn’t taken off; one recent report says it ranks among the lowest of California’s 58 counties for visitor-generated tax receipts. And according to the Census Bureau, it’s significantly poorer and whiter than the surrounding clutch of agricultural counties and the state as a whole.

Anyway, the obit, from the Lake County News, for one Bessie Wilds, who has passed at the age of 85. She was born on a ranch and grew up in Lakeport. The notice picks up the story there, and I would never have thought twice about it except for the mention of the police scanner:

During her high school years she helped her father operate a Shell Oil Gas Station located at 11th and Main streets in Lakeport.

She was devoted to her mother, who did not drive and had difficulty walking.

Bessie graduated high school in 1948 and married Junior C. Wilds. They made their home outside of Kelseyville and raised their son and daughter on a walnut ranch.

Bessie was a member of the Kelseyville Women’s Club and also active in the local Lions Club.

During the 1970s and 1980s she was a waitress at Anne Card’s Coffee Shop in Kelseyville.

In 1986 Bessie and Junior sold their walnut ranch to Beringer Winery and downsized to a small parcel near the vineyard. They watched the transformation from trees to vines.

After the loss of Junior in 2002, Bessie became a solitary person, preferring to live a quiet life.

She loved to sit at her kitchen table listening to KNBR or KGO and the police scanner, and watch the traffic. Her cats and the hummingbirds gave her great pleasure.