A selection of shots, mostly from the Mendocino coast, of our trip last week. Captions and map locations to come.
Clothes Rack
I put that clothes rack
out there yesterday
and it’s been raining ever since.
The Lighter Side of Getting Nailed to a Cross
On Friday night’s “10 O’Clock News” on KTVU, anchor Ken Wayne narrated video showing Christian penitents in Jerusalem bearing crosses through the streets amid throngs of faithful. What did the pictures show? Ken announced that people were re-enacting the “crucification of Jesus Christ.”
Road Blog: Southering
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.
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.
Road Blog: Little River
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.
Tax Night Drizzle
Just came in from The Dog’s nightly patrol. It’s been drizzling since late afternoon. I wondered what kind of picture you might get if you pointed a light–in this case, an LED headlight–up into the rain with the shutter open for 10 seconds. This is the answer. The orange hue suffusing everything is from the city lights; the blueish filaments are the drizzle coming down. I once saw a monster “flashlight” in a Restoration Hardware catalogue; it was actually a portable, battery-powered spotlight that you could probably use in an operating theater (although I think it could run on maximum power for only 20 minutes or so). I’ve fantasized about having one of those lights as an attention-getter. To light up some driver blowing through a stop sign at night, say. But I’d like to try the drizzle experiment with one, too.
A Voice from ’06
Update: About half an hour after I posted this, we had a little earthquake. The U.S. Geological Survey says it was a 3.8 magnitude shake, centered on the San Andreas Fault near the town of Pacifica, about 10 miles or so from where the 1906 quake hit.
A nice feature in the Chronicle marking the 105th anniversary of San Francisco’s signature catastrophe: ’06 Quake Through Eyes of Woman Ahead of Her Time. It’s a glimpse of the disaster from Leonie von Zesch, 23 when the temblor struck and one of the few women anywhere practicing dentistry at the time. (A contemporary newspaper clipping headlined “Woman Wields Forceps” describes her working “night and day” in a field hospital after the quake “battling that arch enemy of comfort–the toothache. [She] … is attractive as she is young.” Further, the article notes, “Race and caste make no difference to this dainty little lady. The dirty foreign boy receives the same gentle treatment as the daughter of a military officer.”)
Von Zesch’s account was part of an autobiography said to have run to thousands of pages, typed on onionskin paper and left among her personal effects when she died in 1944. The Chronicle’s account says von Zesch left her belongings to a niece who stashed them in an attic without looking at them. When she finally did, she discovered the writings, which will be published next month as “Leonie: A Woman Ahead of Her Time” ($19.95 plus shipping and, if you live in California, sales tax).
If the rest of the book is on a par with her description of the earthquake and its aftermath, it ought to be a good read. It’s not clear how long after the fact she wrote her account, but it begins with the scene in the Nob Hill home she shared with her mother rocking violently as china, Mason jars, and a variety of other household goods crash to the floor. “All the while, a seeming eternity of a few minutes, there was an unforgettable humming, grinding sound that not even the walls shut out, the grinding and breaking of myriad things all over the city.” She and her mother ate a cold breakfast–a man from the gas company had already come through the neighborhood to warn against lighting fires–and then “decided to walk downtown to see whether anything had happened to the tall buildings. No one, as yet, seemed to have the remotest idea of the magnitude of the disaster.”
By the time von Zesch and her mother neared Market Street, though, it was clear the city was beginning to burn.
“In spite of the horror, the air was electric with a sort of holiday spirit, either because the disaster was a novel experience which released people from the humdrum of everyday life, or because there were in a mood of thanksgiving and glad to be alive.
“There was something of hysteria in it, too. To Mother and me, everything was fearfully exciting. We did not anticipate personal loss. Our own home on Hyde, now rented, was out of the supposed fire zone; the Sutter place where we lived, of course, would not burn! Why we and thousands of others were so optimistic, I’d like to know. The water mains were broken. People all over town were daring to light gas stoves. The wind was blowing. How could the city fail to burn?”
The Chronicle ran part two of von Zesch’s earthquake reminiscence today. It includes an excellent slideshow of images from 1906.
And while we’re talking about contemporary images and walking through the ruins, a couple of good references came to hand while I was trying to figure out where Dr. von Zesch and her mother lived (she mentions Sutter and Leavenworth, and the ruined Granada Hotel nearby; I can’t get any closer than that, and a rebuilt Granada Hotel, guaranteed at its opening in 1908 to be fireproof, is at that corner today.
Below is a film discovered by way of the Internet Archive. It’s a 1905 streetcar trip down Market Street; the Ferry Building is the structure way down the street in the distance. What’s most arresting here is the life on the street–the mix of streetcars, automobiles, horse carts, pedestrians, and the random cyclist.
That’s an 11-minute tour through the heart of downtown. For contrast, here’s a snippet of some of the same area of Market Street (note the tower of the Call Building to the right) after the earthquake.
And one last graphic take on the 1906 earthquake. The U.S. Geological Survey has published a cool gallery of animations that try to convey the quake’s magnitude and the extent of the destructive shaking in the Bay Area. The image below is linked to an animation of the shaking in San Francisco:
Blue Gum Hill
A favorite walk for years, from our place in the North Berkeley flatlands, up Vine Street, Vine Walk, La Loma Steps, to Buena Vista Avenue. That last street winds up a hill full of stands of immense eucalyptus trees (also known as blue gums in their native Australia; they’re looming in the fog in the shot above) . When I say immense, I”m guessing some are pushing 150 feet in height 15 feet in girth at their base. They’re in many cases unwanted/ I recently came across a neighborhood flyer on a street in the hills that was appealing to neighbors to get together and pay for a “once in a generation” chance to cut down some view-blocking eucalyptus trees; the opportunity came up because the house in the yard of which the trees stood had recently changed hands, and the owner was willing to have the trees felled as long as he could split the expense. The eucalyptus also make locals nervous because when they burn, they burn fiercely. There’s no stopping a fire that’s burning through the crown of a stand of these trees. I remember hearing occasional sharp reports during the Oakland Hills fire of 1991 and thinking they were gas tanks exploding only to be told by an Australian spectator that it was blue gums. Absent fire–and today is anything but fire weather–they’re beautiful.
No Adverse Comment Here
Here’s a beautiful and troubling piece from The New York Times this past week: “As the Mountaintops Fall, a Coal Town Vanishes.”
The Times’ Dan Barry, one of the most eloquent and sensitive voices in American journalism (and a fine reporter, too), writes about Lindytown, West Virginia, a hamlet in the southern part of the state that has all but vanished because of nearby surface coal mining:
To reach a lost American place, here just a moment ago, follow a thin country road as it unspools across an Appalachian valley’s grimy floor, past a coal operation or two, a church or two, a village called Twilight. Beware of the truck traffic. Watch out for that car-chasing dog.
The people Barry meets recount the disappearance of Lindytown and other communities because of coal companies’ preference for mountaintop removal mining. Among the details that stick out: A subsidiary of Massey Energy, the giant coal concern, bought out the former residents of Lindytown. To get payments that amounted to a pittance for most people, they had to sign an agreement “not to sue, testify against, seek inspection of or ‘make adverse comment’ about coal-mining operations.”
“To make adverse comment about”? It’s not enough to forfeit the right to go to court or to promise to let the company do what it wants without seeking the protection of government regulations. You’d better not say anything mean about the mining, either, if you want to get the money the company is handing out. You can’t blame people who have next to nothing for signing away their rights, but you can’t turn a blind eye, either, to the fact this is more and more the way we do business: You can have your First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment and all the free speech and due process you want–but we can buy you out and shut you up. Reading the article, which certainly reflects adversely on the changes the coal companies are wreaking on the landscape of Appalachia, you wonder if any of the people the reporter talked to (including one who called the payment he got “hush money”) will suffer for having done so.
Several times, the story mentions the bedrock argument behind the mountaintop removal mining: we city people and the country at large need the coal to provide the unlimited supplies of electricity we take for granted. Of course, that argument doesn’t justify extracting coal (or other energy sources) at any cost. But our conscious choices and unconscious habits do have an impact in a wider world. Me: I’ll switch off my laptop as soon as I hit send on this post.