"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
Kate recorded this the other morning while walking The Dog in the neighborhood. The audio contains two distinct calls from one bird. When she got home, she said, “Listen to this — what do you think it sounds like it’s saying?”
I listened to Part 1, a two-syllable call, and I said, “[deleted to maintain suspense.]” Kate said, “Yes!”
I listened to Part 2, one syllable, and I said, “[DTMS].” Kate said that’s what she heard, too.
So you tell me, what is this bird saying?
The under-appreciated Crassula ovata, jade plant, reportedly native to South Africa and ridiculously easy to grow in our mild dry climate. It tolerates lots of inattention. The highlight every year: in the late winter and early spring, it flowers. I usually think of the bloom as a modest thing–the flowers burst out of tiny buds about the size of a match-head and I don’t think the individual flowers are even half an inch in diameter. But there’s so much to all these little organisms when you stop and look up close.
There were three mockingbirds flying from tree to tree and from post to post in the neighborhood on the Spring-Ahead morning. I got out my audio recorder but they flew on before I got much. Then we went out for a walk with The Dog, and on the way back encountered another mockingbird setting up a determined racket along the old Santa Fe right-of-way. I say “racket,” but there are few bird sounds (I hesitate to say “songs”) I enjoy more, especially when you’re watching one of these birds jumping straight up and down atop a telephone pole or TV antenna (yes, there are still some of those around). The northern mockingbird is Mimus polyglottos; that is perfect — a polyglot mimic.
A few years ago, Kate discovered a poem, “Thus Spake the Mockingbird,” by Barbara Hamby (worth checking out that link). It captures the energy and life-force in the mockingbird’s song. It ends:
… Open your windows, slip on your castanets. I am the flamencoin the heel of desire. I am the dancer. I am the choir. Hear my wildthroat crowd the exploding sky. O I can make a noise.
Anyone who has ever read this blog regularly — not a huge group, but one that I sort of know — have seen for awhile that the posts come less and less often (or do I mean more and more infrequently?). Part of the explanation won’t be surprising: Like just about everybody else in the world, I’ve been busy with other stuff.
Part of what I’ve been busy with, though, is another blog. About six months ago, I took over as the proprietor of a daily news blog for my public radio employer. On one hand, can you believe it? I’m getting paid to blog. On the other, I find myself at the keyboard and on the net for sometimes unhealthy amounts of time (when news has actually been happening, such as when we had transit strikes last summer and fall, the job has come dangerously close to being 24/7), a reality that sometimes leaves me feeling a little spent and brain-addled.
What that has meant for this personal blog, which I’ve kept at for more than 10 years, is that I’ve had less energy and attention for it. The time available to sit down and post something thoughtful (or even a nice picture) has grown shorter, and a lot of evenings I feel I need to have that time away from a keyboard and screen.
Among the handful of folks I know who have checked in here over the years are a few I know have been blogging on a daily or nearly daily basis for longer than I have. I know everyone who does that has a lot of stuff going on in their own lives — at work, at school, pursuing other interests or answering other obligations. I have seen the different strategies people have adopted to make the pursuit more manageable. If I wore a hat, it would be off to everyone who keeps on with their personal mission to communicate the news from their small corner of experience or their thoughts about the world beyond to people like me who, even if I can’t (or at any rate don’t) read every day still am fascinated and informed by what they say and suggest.
I’m not announcing the end of this blog or anything portentous like that. But I am just trying to figure out how to maintain some meaningful continuity for myself and for those who have stuck to this small adventure with me for so long.
More later.
Yeah, we’re one of those outfits — we let The Dog get on the furniture. And here he is today, Day Four of the Return of Winter to the Bay Area. It seems that every time we’ve been out since Wednesday evening it’s been wet. He actually seems to enjoy the weather and the process of us toweling him off before we come inside again. But he does a great impression of a sad dog in the too-long intervals between walks. For extra points, he somehow splays his front paws in opposite directions.
It’s so dry that …
Well, by way of the California-Nevada River Forecast Center, go-to source of data on winter storms during winters when we have those, here’s the latest attention-getting drought note:
TODAY MARKS THE 44TH CONSECUTIVE DRY DAY OVER SACRAMENTO…WHICH TIES THE ALL TIME RECORD FOR DRY SPELLS OVER THE WET SEASON. WITH NO PRECIP IN THE FORECAST FOR AT LEAST THE NEXT 6 DAYS…IT APPEARS THIS RECORD WILL BE FAR SURPASSED. THE RECORD IS LIKELY TO STRETCH TO WELL OVER 50 DAYS.
Checking the site for the Sacramento office of the National Weather Service, I find a slightly different take on the history:
There may be a change on the horizon: Forecasters say models are showing a change in the weather pattern at the beginning of February, and we may see rain then. This late in the season, anything short of the deluge the state saw in the winter of 1861-62, when San Francisco got 24.36 inches of rain in January alone, will fall short of being a drought buster. Longer-term analyses say that the odds are good the next three months will be drier than normal here. But at this point, any kind of rain would be refreshing to see.
Thanks to the miracles of software and the Internet, I put together a short slideshow comparing scenes at Lake Oroville as I shot them late last March and yesterday. If I’d known back then to what extent the lake would empty out, I would have taken pictures all along the shoreline. As it was, the pictures I did take of the lake were an afterthought, something to do before we started to head home.
The big surprise in the “after” pictures, the ones I took yesterday, is the landscape revealed by the receding waters. There’s no hint looking at the surface in March what the underwater topography looks like. And it’s amazing looking at the exposed landscape now (it was drowned in 1969, when the new reservoir was first filled) and how completely it’s been scoured of anything that might suggest that before Oroville Dam was built, these were canyons choked with oak, pine and brush.
Here’s the slideshow which includes a few bonus shots at the end):
Kate and I went up to Lake Oroville for a couple days last spring. We found a great campground on the south side of the lake, which is the main water storage facility for the State Water Project and at 3.5 million acre feet, California’s second biggest reservoir (Lake Shasta, at 4.5 million, is No. 1). Our real purpose was to go further up into the foothills for a hike out to a falls we had read about. But before we headed back home, I took a few pictures down around the boat ramp nearest our campground, in an area called Loafer Creek.
Before I drove back up there today, I checked the Department of Water Resources data for the reservoir level both on March 27 last year, when the top picture was taken, and today. The numbers show that despite the dry second half of last winter, the lake was about 85 percent full on the day I was taking pictures. The elevation of the lake surface above sea level was reported at 860.37 feet, and, with the help of a couple of small storms that blew through in April, the lake level kept rising for the next several weeks, with the surface topping out at 871.75 feet above sea level.
In the current water year, which for the Department of Water Resources runs from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30, Lake Oroville has seen 2.44 inches of rain. Just a guess: that’s about 10 percent of average for this date. Of that 2.44 inches, 1.96 fell on Nov 19th and 20th. The last rain was recorded Dec. 7, six weeks ago today. Not a drop has come down during the weeks that are typically the wettest of the year in this part of the world.
Which is why I went to take another look. The lake’s surface elevation today — drawn down by 10 months of water releases to generate power and send supplies down to the southern end of the Bay Area, the San Joaquin Valley, and those big cities far to the south — now stands at 701feet, 159 feet below where I saw it last time. That’s roughly 35 percent full. I wondered how dramatically different it would look.
The truth is that if I didn’t have the earlier set of pictures and some fixed landmarks, I would have hardly recognized it as the same place. Here’s one example (and here’s the full Flickr slideshow: Lake Oroville, January 2014):
Lake Oroville at Loafer Creek: March 27, 2013
Lake Oroville at Loafer Creek: January 18, 2014
There it is: what you might refer to idiomatically as the sum total of Berkeley rainfall — or at least the rainfall we have seen here in the North Berkeley flatlands — for the entire month of January so far. When the drizzle started coming down last Saturday, I grabbed the camera and ran out to take a picture. It was just enough to moisten the pavement or the bottom of a rain gauge or, as above, to bead up on windshields.
And from what the weather forecasters, the paragons of prognosticatory pessimism, are saying, this is the only rain we can expect to see through the end of the month. Which means we’re starting 2014 with the driest January on record. Here’s a brief synopsis of where the rain season stands from the National Weather Service’s Bay Area forecast discussion:
SAN FRANCISCO`S CURRENT WATER YEAR TOTAL IS 2.11" WHICH IS NOW THE THE DRIEST WATER YEAR TOTAL TO DATE ON RECORD. THE OLD RECORD WAS 2.26" THROUGH JANUARY 15TH SET BACK IN 1917. SAN FRANCISCO IS RUNNING AROUND 9" BEHIND AN AVERAGE YEAR. IF NO ADDITIONAL RAINFALL IS RECORDED BY THE END OF THE MONTH, SAN FRANCISCO WILL BE 11.50" BEHIND NORMAL. SAN FRANCISCO AVERAGES AROUND 8 DAYS IN JANUARY WHERE MORE THAN A TENTH OF AN INCH OF RAINFALL IS REPORTED. THIS YEAR WE HAVE HAD ZERO DAYS SO FAR. IF THAT HOLDS, IT WILL MARK THE FIRST TIME IN SAN FRANCISCO`S HISTORY THAT AT LEAST ONE DAY IN JANUARY DID NOT PICK UP MORE THAN A TENTH OF AN INCH.
And that, friends, kinds of puts things in perspective. What we’re seeing now hasn’t been seen since 1849, the beginning of San Francisco’s rain record.
With all sorts of bad news about California’s long, long dry spell — flows on the American River will be squeezed down to a relative trickle this week, suburban Sacramento is facing draconian water restrictions — here’s my favorite drought story. The Roman Catholic bishop of Sacramento, who leads the state’s conference of bishops, has issued a call for “people of faith” to ask God to make it rain. (Here’s the post I did on it for the KQED blog earlier today: “As Drought Deepens, Catholic Bishops Say ‘Pray for Rain’ “).
There are no atheists in foxholes, the saying goes, a simple way of communicating the notion that everyone gets religion when their mortal ass is on the line (or they think they’re about to meet their maker). But there are plenty of atheists in droughts, like the person who said to me this evening they can’t believe there’s a god who messes around with the weather. Myself, I don’t scoff at the notion of praying for rain and actually found something moving in some of the language in the bishops’ suggested entreaties to “the Almighty.”
Here’s my favorite, not least because it’s said to have originated in a 1950s volume called “The Rural Life Prayer Book” from the National Catholic Rural Life Conference:
Almighty God, we are in need of rain. We realize now, looking up into the clear, blue sky, what a marvel even the least drop of rain really is. To think that so much water can really fall out of the sky, which now is empty and clear! We place our trust in You. We are sure that You know our needs. But You want us to ask you anyway, to show You that we know we are dependent on you. Look to our dry hills and fields, dear God, and bless them with the living blessing of soft rain. Then the land will rejoice and rivers will sing Your praises, and the hearts of all will be made glad. Amen.
I admit I’m not crazy about the “you want us to ask anyway, to show You that we know we are dependent on you” part of that plea. Assuming we’re not dealing with Zeus and his ilk, what kind of a scheming, manipulative jerk of a god is going to hold back the rain just to maneuver us into begging? (Yeah, I know, scripture is probably chock full of examples of god in his/her various guises acting the jerk.) But what I do like about that prayer is the sense of wonder at nature: “To think that so much water can really fall out of the sky, which is now empty and clear.”
I’m of the mind that help is welcome from whatever quarter it arrives. We have fish runs struggling, pastures withering, farms going fallow, streams dwindling, and forests drying out. Native shamans, do your stuff. Bishops, priests, ministers, rabbis, imams, clerics and monks and religious practitioners of all sorts and stripes — likewise. Let’s clap in the presence of our local kami, Shinto style. Pray, if you’re moved to. Ponder this dry place of ours and all that’s beautiful in it. Then look west, or north, or east, or south — that’s where the rain will be coming from.
