Not to be confused with "Delta Dawn." Thursday morning featured an unusual altocumulus filled sky (as opposed to the usual option: entirely socked in with low clouds, or entirely clear). The week's warm days have given way to cool, breezy, mostly cloudy weather.
Guest Observation: Benjamin Franklin
From his Address to the Delegates of the Constitutional Convention, read September 17, 1787:
“I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error. Steele a Protestant in a Dedication tells the Pope, that the only difference between our Churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrines is, the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong. But though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect, few express it so naturally as a certain french lady, who in a dispute with her sister, said ‘I don’t know how it happens, Sister but I meet with no body but myself, that’s always in the right — Il n’y a que moi qui a toujours raison.’ “
Bail Bond Alley
On Boardman Place, an alley that opens onto Bryant Street and the Hall of Justice, where bail bondsmen (and women) can find plenty of customers. I especially like Sheila’s/Shelia’s flexibility about her first name. (Taken during my walk from Public Radio HQ to the Ferry Building.
The REM Chronicles
Sometimes you get a signal that maybe you’re a little preoccupied or anxious about work. Yesterday, I had the following dream:
I was at the radio station editing the afternoon newscasts as usual. We had a stand-in anchor doing the casts, and our regular anchor was in the office but on some sort of special assignment. We had our lineup ready for the 5 o’clock newscast, but about half an hour before air time, I couldn’t find our sub anchor. She had gone out somewhere and not returned. I couldn’t get her on her cellphone. Newscast time approached, and I asked the regular anchor to do the cast. He was busy and didn’t want to. Still no sign of the stand-in newscaster. I thought I’d better call master control to tell them we were going to have to blow off the cast and they should stay with the network, but I couldn’t remember the master control phone number. No worries—I’d walk down there. Except I couldn’t find it—the layout of the office seemed to have changed. Now it was getting very, very close to air time, and I was hoping that maybe our regular afternoon guy would relent and go and do the cast, but my first priority was to get to master control and let them know we had no cast. I happened upon some other employees and asked them to steer me to master control, as nothing I was seeing looked familiar. Oh, they said, they moved that to the fourth floor (fourth floor? I thought our building only had three floors) and they pointed the way to an elevator. I wound up in one of our TV studios instead, with no elevator in sight. I did see a stairway, though, and started bounding up two steps at a time. But the stairs got narrower and steeper as I went up. I remember thinking, “Whoa—this is a dangerous flight of stairs” as I looked down. I kept going, but soon the stairs were nothing more than strips of carpet hanging from the wall. I thought about whether I could use them as handholds to pull myself up and decided that was a bad idea. I turned and very gingerly climbed back down. I set out again to find master control, but before I did, I ran into the stand-in anchor. “Oh, man—we’re about to miss the newscast,” I said. “Where have you been?” I noticed she was kind of wobbly, like maybe she’d just come from a bar. She said she had been really exhausted and simply had to take a nap and had just awakened. She set off in search of the regular newscaster, while I continued to look for master control, though by this time I knew it was probably too late to warn them. I then started thinking about how I would explain all the above in an email to my bosses.
And then–I was taught in high school never to end a story this way–I woke up. I have to say that this was very vivid, but didn’t feel like a nightmare. Just one of those familiar (to me) stress-type dreams where a relatively simple,straightforward goal continually shrinks from your grasp.
Filling in the Map
Sunday was spent noodling with HTML in the morning, then in the afternoon getting in the Tiny Car (the Chicago-bred Toyota Echo) and driving from Berkeley out to Antioch, up the Sacramento River to the Delta Cross Channel, then east to where our local utility district stores our water as it flows out of the Sierra Nevada. The destination was chosen because the East Bay Municipal Utility District runs a fish hatchery on the Mokelumne River, and I wanted to see that. The route was dictated because the Delta Cross Channel is the route by which much of the water exported from Northern California down to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California is diverted from the Sacramento. I’ve driven past and ridden my bike by the Cross Channel gates dozens of times, but, not knowing what the heck they were, I never took note of them. Anyway, the drive was part of a long-term project I think of as filling in my map–touring what is largely terra incognita and figuring out how the pieces relate to each other.
It was a beautiful day, anyway, even with no end in mind. I saw water. I saw levees. I met a lonely bridgetender and photographed him and his antique bridge. I encountered a dead skunk and a curious ostrich. And then when I got out to the hatchery, I was hours too late — it had closed at 3 p.m.
Today’s Top Exotic, Invasive Aquatic Menace
In case you need a break from worrying abut what Al Qaida is going to do you or the horrors you’ll suffer at the hands of Obama-care,or the devastation in store if the Tea Party takes over, here’s another terror to contemplate: the New Zealand mudsnail. Somehow, this critter has not been on my radar. But my ignorance was altered yesterday during a visit to a fish hatchery on the Mokelumne River (that’s pronounced mo-KULL-uh-me, if you’re wondering). It was a short visit as I arrived a good two and a half hours after the place was closed for the day. But this sign was on one of the gates.
The numbers are eye-catching: the snail could occur in densities of 1 million per square yard (that’s 110,000 per square foot), and the snail propagates so rapidly that a single snail could give rise to 40 million within a year. The damage it does: It can outcompete native species and rip apart the food web that even large fish species depend on. In fact, the Mokelumne below this point is a place that has been invaded and studied as part of conferences on the mudsnail. And in recent mudsnail news, the city of Boulder, Colorado, recently closed a park because of the discovery of New Zealand mudsnails in a local creek. A short history from the state of Colorado says that the snail first invaded streams in the northern Rockies and that Yellowstone was one of the first places infested. And here’s everything else you need to know about the critter, thanks to the U.S. Department of Agriculture: New Zealand mud snail (Potamopyrgus antipodarum).
 |
Post-Weekend Rumination
*Had planned a visit to the East Bay Municipal Utility District’s fish hatchery, on the Mokelumne River northeast of Stockton. But other stuff intervened. We got up late and indulged in our long Saturday morning dog-walk routine. We were due in Fair Oaks, out at the very edge of the foothills on the American River east of Sacramento, to read poetry with friends early in the evening (the picture: dinner before the reading began). So the hatchery never happened.
**And then yesterday, I thought I might make an early start to beat the heat of the day and get out to that hatchery early. But we slept in, did our Sunday dog-walk routine, which is different from Saturday’s, and found a football game on the tube (flat screen, actually) when we got home. We were due in the afternoon at a memorial for a friend who died this summer. I thought maybe I’d finish some take-home work from my Public Radio Job, too. Well, we made it to the memorial, anyway. Maybe the hatchery will happen next week. I’ll be taking the take-home work back to the office.
***Birthdays: Saturday, my brother John (who’s now reached the Double Nickel). (I meant to call.) Sunday, my niece Maddie. (I meant to send something out there, though belated gifts are good, too.) Today, Niko Danko, who I remember seeing the first weekend he was here on planet Earth. That was in 1999. Hard to believe the time has gone so fast. (See note about belated gifts.) Tomorrow — my late identical-twin uncles, Tom and Ed, born in 1934. Still missed.
****You have got to love a poem that starts:
“my grandmother had a serious gas
problem.”
It’s from Charles Bukowksi, here. We did not read this on Saturday night.
*****You also have to love a poem, also from The Writer’s Almanac, that compares the travails of modern office life with a Homeric bloodbath.
“…I too have come home in a bad mood.
Yesterday, for instance, after the department meeting,
when I ended up losing my choice parking spot
behind the library to the new provost.I slammed the door. I threw down my book bag
in this particular way I have perfected over the years
that lets my wife understand
the contempt I have for my enemies,
which is prodigious. And then with great skill
she built a gin and tonic
that would have pleased the very gods,
and with epic patience she listened
as I told her of my wrath, and of what I intended to do
to so-and-so, and also to what’s-his-name.
Berkeley Infrastructure Notes
This probably happens everywhere: An old utility pole reaches the end of its useful life and gets replaced. There are several places in our neighborhood where an old pole has been splinted to a brand new one installed next to it. This one, on Short Street (a little stub of a lane just west of Sacramento Street; it runs between Hearst and Lincoln streets and is interrupted by the North Berkeley BART station), is unique. The old pole is loosely lashed to the new one. The old pole still carries power lines and maybe some phone and cable TV lines. It doesn’t look like it would take much to knock it over.
California Salmon: Oroville Hatchery
I read a press release from the state Department of Fish and Game last week that the hatchery up in Oroville, on the Feather River just below the big State Water Project dam, was about to open its gates to fall run chinook salmon and steelhead. Saturday we drove up there, 142 miles from Berkeley, to see what the show looked like. After several years of disappearing fall salmon runs, it was a thrill to see the fish coming up the ladder toward the hatchery. In the river at the bottom of the fishway–a low dam blocks the fish from going any further upstream–it seemed there were hundreds of salmon, maybe more, churning the water and leaping into the air. The ladder includes a below-grade viewing area so you can see the fish on their way up. We were there for two or three hours, and we saw a steady stream of people, including lots of families with kids, coming to check on the run. Very cool.
Still reporting the story, but watching the fish, one is seized with the feeling where there’s life, there’s hope for the salmon. (And yes, that feeling persists even knowing to what a huge degree humans are intervening in the process we’re watching. A hatchery is really a kind of fish factory after all, though that’s not entirely visible when you’re watching the salmon progressing up the ladder. I’ve had a couple people ask me, “After they come up to the hatchery, what happens?” Well, technicians step in and harvest the roe and sperm from the fish and kill them in the process. For salmon, that’s the same end result as the wild run–though vastly different in the details and perhaps the quality of fish that result. For now, in this place, the hatchery is all we have left to keep the run going. So a celebration is in order despite our heavy-handed intervention.)
Berkeley Butterfly Ranch
One of Kate’s sideline projects the past couple of years–part of her elementary school science teaching–has been to raise anise swallowtail caterpillars to the point where they go into the chrysalis, then harbor the chrysalides until the butterflies emerge. It’s not easy. We had a couple of chrysalides on the back porch that some predator–a bird, probably–came and picked off. After that, Kate improvised some netting to protect the five remaining caterpillars, which in due course changed to chrysalis form.
The last of them changed probably a month ago, and what we’ve had, first on the sometimes very warm back porch and then in a shadier spot in a side yard, is a green plastic box with some sticks in it that have had some dead-looking mummy-type things hanging from them. Honestly–when you look at these objects, it’s a little hard to believe anything living can emerge from them. But we’ve been checking every morning anyway.
Yesterday, a surprise: a newly metamorphosed anise swallowtail butterfly, perched on one of the net-supporting hoops in the green box. We were headed out for the afternoon, but we lifted the netting to give it a chance to fly away when it was ready. When we got home, well after dark, it was gone. I’d like to think it got a chance to feed and perhaps eluded for a few hours anyway whatever out there in the world will look at it and see food. I’d like to think that it might find a like-minded anise swallowtail of the opposite sex and get a shot at perpetuating their kind.
Long damn odds, but beautiful to behold.