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Witness to Terror: The Great East Coast Quake of ’11

Pre-post update: At 11:37 p.m. PDT, just as I was about to post this, we had a little five-second earthquake I could feel in Berkeley. Amazing — I felt shakes on both coasts today.

Update 11:52 p.m.: The U.S. Geological Survey says this evening’s quake was a 3.6-magnitude shake centered in the hills about 10 miles south of where we live. Translation: It was a mild event. But the Twitter reaction–the locals are falling all over themselves to report their experience–sort of proves the point of how adrenaline-producing this is even for folks who live astride dangerous earthquake faults.

Original post: I was at the airport in Newark early this afternoon, tending to a tuna fish sandwich in Terminal C and contemplating my next social media communique, when a gentle but pronounced shaking started. It went on for about 10 seconds or so and got stronger. I looked at a guy sitting near me who didn’t seem to have registered anything unusual. “I’m from California,” I said, “and out there we’d think this is an earthquake.” He looked up, but didn’t say anything. Meantime, the shaking got still more intense–by now, I knew that this wasn’t a matter of a piece of heavy equipment doing something outside the terminal. The flat-screen TV mounted near the gate started to rattle. A group of people sitting nearby started to ask, “Is this an earthquake?” I did in fact send out a Twitter message as the shaking subsided:

“At Newark airport, I could swear we just had an here in Terminal C.

OK, I concede I wasn’t really selling the story of the century there. But the shaking continued for about 10 seconds or so even after I sent the message; I would guess that I felt some movement for a full 60 seconds. Allowing for how easy it is to overestimate the duration of a temblor, I’d say now “more than 30 seconds.” In either case, that was longer than any quake I’d felt here in California since April 1984, when there was a a 6-point-plus earthquake down near Morgan Hill in Santa Clara County. I remember that quake as having last a good 45 seconds. (For comparison’s sake, the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, which was a 7.0 event, lasted 17 seconds; the 9.0 earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan last March is said to have lasted six minutes).

I didn’t see or hear any real alarm in the terminal–just excitement. Afterward, I heard many people discussing it or describing it during cellphone calls. In other words, It was a lot like the California earthquakes I’ve gotten to know since arriving here in the mid-1970s. (On Facebook, my friend Pete posted a piece from The New York Times on how the seismically-tough West Coast scoffed at the East Coast’s reaction to its less than devastating quake. Don’t buy that line at all: people here jump up and down everytime the earth gives a little shudder, and the news people here practically wet themselves every time we have a quake.)

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Brooklyn: Apartment View

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Shot from my brother John’s place, a 15th story apartment in a publicly owned co-op building on Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn. This view is to the north; the roadway in the left foreground is the Brooklyn Bridge approach/exit; the girdered structure in the middle left is the Manhattan Bridge approach/exit (and train lines); and the East River is beyon in the left distance.

Top row: Saturday night, Sunday morning. Bottom row: Sunday night, Monday morning. It was warm and humid Saturday night, with a temperature hanging around 75 even at 3 in the morning. Sunday morning: warm and humid. Sunday night: thunderstorms and more thunderstorms. Monday morning: pristine air, much cooler, much dryer. (Click for larger images.)

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Road Blog: New York at Night

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Assertion: New York is a city meant to be seen after dark. Well, you could say that about a lot of other vertical, well-lit cities. Tokyo comes to mind among those I have eyeballed. Chicago maybe. Paris? No–there’s so much texture there that’s lost at night. In New York’s case, the city’s night-time allure is partly about lighting and partly about the fact you encounter other walkers everywhere you go at all times of night.

The thought about New York occurred while my brother John and I went out for a stroll that turned into a three-hour hike: from his place near the Brooklyn Bridge to the Manhattan Bridge, over that span to Manhattan, past the government center and the World Trade Center site to the Hudson (I never knew before tonight that there is a memorial over there commemorating the Irish Famine), then back across downtown to the Brooklyn Bridge to John’s place. Something was up on the bridge as we started up the walkway from the west side. Traffic was halted and didn’t start moving at all until we had nearly finished our crossing. It turned out the police had shut down the bridge because of an abandoned SUV and a body that had been found in the roadway. Or at least that’s what we heard from walkway kibitzers viewing the scene.

We got back the apartment about 2 in the morning, and now it’s insanely late. More later today. Or tomorrow. Or whenever it is.

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Road Blog: Sandy Hook

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After spending a shocking portion of a beautiful summer day inside, we went out to Sandy Hook. That’s the hook-shaped peninsula that juts north toward Long Island from the top of the Jersey Shore. It wasn’t a long, complicated visit. We walked a little way up a paved trail that was clearly meant for bikes, not pedestrians, then crossed over a park road to a beach area that faced out to Sandy Hook Bay. Along the way we encountered a memorial to a dozen British sailors and a couple of their officers who died at the conclusion of the Revolutonary War trying to bring back deserting crewmates who had decided they would rather stay in the United States than continue service in His Majesty’s Navy. But for the most part, we just noodled along the beach until we found a nice square timber to park ourelves on. I was not above posing the above broken shell for a brief spate of New Jersey landscape photography.

Later, we picked up Eamon and Sakura at the train in Hazlet–they came down from New York–then drove back out to the shore for a (mostly fried) fish dinner. We sat out on a deck adjacent to the Highway 36 bridge over the Navesink River, and were out there when my brother John called to alert us that the International Space Station would pass over in just a few minutes. We got a nice long look at it, finished dinner, then drove back to the city.

Conclusion of the foregoing.

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Road Blog: Home to Brooklyn

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We flew out to New York from the Bay Area on Sunday. It may be the last 6 a.m. flight I ever take, because I have so poorly mastered the logistics of an early morning departure that I wind up getting almost no sleep the night before I leave. In the current instance, I wasted much of the eve of the trip screwing around with entirely gratuitous family history stuff; task avoidance if I’ve ever seen it, and believe me I have. The net effect was I was up until after two in the morning doing all manner of stuff I had planned on doing earlier and which I was convinced had to be done. I got about an hour of real sleep (Kate got a bit less), then got up for our cab ride to the airport. We did manage to sleep some on the plane.

Then we landed at Newark. Eamon and Sakura drove bravely through the rain from Brooklyn to pick us up and take us back to their place in Brooklyn (Cobble Hill, just down Court Street from the Borough Hall). We walked out into the storm to eat at a place on Atlantic Avenue, splashed back to the apartment, where I napped for an hour. Then, since the rain was still pounding down, we all took the subway to my brother John’s new place next to the Brooklyn Bridge. He and his wife, Dawn, had lived in the same apartment in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood for 20 years but just this past year landed a spot in a big co-op-type apartment building. We all hung out for a couple hours and checked out the new digs. Outside it had finally stopped raining. the Cobble Hill contingent walked home.

Next morning: No rain. We met John and his kids (Sean and Leah) for coffee and a post-breakfast bagel, then walked to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and up to the new park at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Kate and I later cleared out and came down to visit her family in friends in what I describe as the northern Jersey shore area–Holmdel and Hazlet townships in Monmouth County. But let’s stay in New York for a minute: The strangest thing for me about our arrival wasn’t the sleepless haze that enveloped parts of the first day but the feeling that I’m visiting a place where my family, through John and Eamon, has put down roots. It feels like home territory, though my zip code still begins with a 9.

(Photo: east tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, shot from Evert Street outside the headquarters of the Watchtower Society (a.k.a. Jehovah’s Witnesses.) You think of the Witnesses as quaint fringe Bible thumpers? You probably won’t after reading about their immense and hugely valuable Brooklyn real-estate holdings and the part they’re playing in local property wheeling and dealing (involving that same new park I mentioned above.))

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Takeoff

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Part Two of our late summer family/friend visits: We flew out of San Francisco yesterday for the New York area. We started by sweating through long check-in lines (United is merging with Continental: “Hey, we can be *twice* as slow!”) and a ridiculous wait at security (not enough staff on the checkpoint, and the guy reviewing IDs had a certain leisurely approach to his work). When we got on the plane, we sat on the runway for about an hour: weather in the East was causing delays. But then we were airborne, and the morning was beautiful. Above: Mount Diablo just under the wing at left. Below: Los Vaqueros reservoir in the Diablo range in eastern Contra Costa County (click for larger images).

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Jesse Winchester, You’re on My Mind

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A while ago, I made plans with Randy, an old friend who lives far away, to meet someplace to enjoy one of our shared enthusiasms, a singer-songwriter named Jesse Winchester. It’s not literally true that we grew up on this guy’s music, but that’s how it feels. The idea was we’d go someplace where Jesse was performing–Austin, Texas, say–catch a show and enjoy a weekend catching up. It was a great plan, but we both got busy with other things and it didn’t come to pass.

Still, I check Jesse’s tour dates just to see if he might be coming back to the Bay Area soon. The last time I saw him was in Berkeley, with another high school friend, Gerry. A hIghlight of the show for me was when Jesse asked for requests. The crowd answered with a chorus of titles, but Gerry’s voice–he just said, “Mississippi!”–rang out above the others. “Well, I heard someone say ‘Mississippi,’ ” Jesse said. And that’s what he sang.

Sometime in the last month, in the midst of the ongoing political disaster better known as the 112th Congress, I was thinking about another Jesse Winchester song, “Tell Me Why You Like Roosevelt.” It’s a tribute to and a twist on a gospel-infused 1940s number that remembered FDR as a friend to African Americans and the poor (and here’s a gem: Bob Dylan introducing an older version of the song).

In looking for the lyrics, I stumbled across Jesse’s website, which I hadn’t looked at in a long time. And for a while, anyway, I forgot all about my song research. The front page carries an announcement that he’s canceled his performance dates because he’s undergoing treatment for advanced esophageal cancer. The good news in the story is that so far–as related by family members on an online journal–the treatment appears to be going well, and the patient sounds like he’s amazingly resilient.

So: Here’s to a full recovery, Jesse Winchester. I hope my friends and I have a chance very soon to hear you in person.

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Family Photo Odyssey: Sjur Ingebrigtsen Brekke

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We spent a couple hours scanning in some family pictures from albums that Kate and my mom put together from the big mountain of family snapshots that had accumulated for decades and decades. A lot of what we’re scanning is stuff from our own lives, scenes and experiences that the images recall vividly and instantly.

And then there’s the photo above. That’s my dad’s father, Sjur Ingebrigtsen Brekke. who passed on long before I was born. A note on the reverse in my grandmother’s handwriting says, “Lake Michigan, July 31, 1911.” (Maybe such inscriptions are passe, but if you want your own virtual mountain of digital snaps to be a little more intelligible to your posterity, leave some hint of who, what, when, where, etc.)

This man has always been an enigma. Here he is at age 35, ten years before my dad’s arrival in the world. He died a little more than ten years after that event, at age 55. I haven’t seen a picture in which he actually cracks a smile–at least not in any sense I’d recognize. Here he looks a bit put off by whoever it was talked him into coming out to the dunes in his suit. He was a Lutheran pastor in Muskegon at the time, and maybe that was the official beach uniform of his calling. (By all accounts, which means what my dad has told us, he was a kind and gentle soul and a reserved and quiet one, too.)

The photo’s composition is curious, too. Here we are in a picturesque stretch of the Michigan dunes, and the picture is framed in a way that directs attention to the smoke-emitting building in the background. (Later researches showed that the building in the background was the Muskegon waterworks. That building and the dunes in the distance are no more (the dunes were mined for sand, which removed the natural barrier that had protected the city’s harbor from westerly winds off the lake). 

Below: A picture of Sjur at age 26, a little more relaxed looking, about the time he was completing his studies to become a minister.

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Chicago: Toilets, Rainwater, Seagulls, Dogs

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Last Thursday, we went out to the north end of Lincoln Park–Wilson Avenue up to Ardmore Avenue–and happened across a nice new beach house the park district put up next to the Hollywood curve on Lake Shore Drive. In making use of the facility’s public convenience (restrooms), I was confronted by the sign above. I was simultaneously happy to be informed that I was making use of an environmentally aware facility and alarmed at the need to advise the public that water in the urinal is not safe for drinking. (I’m reliably informed the same sign was posted over the toilets in the women’s restroom. A Chicago Park District “beach ambassador” we met outside the beach house opined that the signs wouldn’t be there unless there had been an issue with patrons using the water for purposes other than flushing.)

The reason we would up talking to the beach ambassador was because I was checking out a diagram of the rainwater capture/retention/pumping apparatus posted outside the restroom. She explained she’s part of a campaign funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, through its Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, and by the park district to educate beachgoers about water quality issues and beach health. In fact, she asked us to sign a pledge to do our part to keep the beaches and adjacent waters clean. We did.

dog080511.jpg One of the campaign’s specific goals is getting gulls off the beaches. That’s because studies over the last decade have found that gull droppings are a major source of E. coli in beachfront waters and perhaps the bigges factor in the contamination that often shuts down Chicago beaches. Part of the evidence for the seagull factor is what happened to E. coli levels in South Side waters when trained border collies were used to chase gulls off the beaches. According to a Natural Resources Defense Council report issued earlier this summer, the number of water samples that exceeded state standards for E. coli fell sharply when dogs were on dawn-to-dusk patrol to keep the birds away; the E. coli levels rose again during a summer when the dogs were not on the beaches.

So the dogs were brought back. We heard that one of the places they’re on patrol is at 63rd Street, Jackson Park, one of the beaches with the highest incidence of closures due to near-shore bacterial contamination. We went down there early Friday afternoon. There weren’t a lot of people on the beach, and there were no gulls on the sand at all in the quarter-mile beachfront. After a couple minutes, we spotted a couple dogs with their handlers, watching for birds at opposite ends of the beach. We watched one of the dogs, and when a gull landed about 50 yards away, it locked on to it and advanced. The gull knew what was up and took off before the dog got close.

The dogs are only part of the solution to keeping the gulls away. The park district is trying to keep uncontained garbage off the beach by a thorough daily clean-up and by beachgoer education (below: a sign posted in the restroom at 63rd Street).

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