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.
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.
Monday Walkabout
Above: The big oak in the schoolyard garden at Martin Luther King Jr. MIddle School, just around the corner and up the street from us. School was out today, and of course the occasion I connect the date with is April 4, 1968, the day King was murdered. I don’t remember anything about that day until hearing the announcement, at the tail end of the NBC national news, and I think Chet Huntley read the report, that King had been shot in Memphis. The rest of the evening and much of the next several days is vivid. My recollection is that the show essentially signed off with that report at 6:30 p.m. There was no cable TV to speak of, let alone CNN, so I think our immediate recourse would have been to the radio (not sure if WBBM had adopted an all-news format by then or not).
In any case, I remember that it was already dark, and it was raining. My mom had been out shopping for groceries, and she pulled up within a few minutes of when we heard the news. She had been involved in various civil rights activities and had actually driven by herself up to the South Side one night–in 1965, maybe?–to see King speak at a neighborhood church. I think we–my brothers and I–probably imparted the news in a panicked way and probably passed on the first report that King might have been shot in the head. I think that because of the shocked and despairing reaction I remember from my mother: “Oh, they always shoot them in the head!” I’m sure she was thinking back to President Kennedy. Maybe even to Lincoln. Bobby Kennedy wouldn’t be shot for another couple of months.
The connection, if any, to today. None. The schoolyard was beautiful, the day warm, and that night might never have happened except for what we remember and have brought with us into our future.
Birthday Weekend: (April) Fool on the Trail
Friday, April Fool’s Day: Day 1 of Birthday weekend, on Big Springs Trail in Tilden Regional Park, high above Berkeley’s urban jungle. The advertised weather for the day had been for a bit of a cool-off after several days of increasingly warm and beautiful days that led to record temperatures in many locations on Thursday. But when The Dog and I hit the trail, the day was warm-plus; not oppressive, but hot in the full sun. The hills are at their best right now: green, grasses profuse, lots of wildflowers, water seeping from hillside springs due to recent heavy rains (as a media type, I know it’ll be a matter of days or a week or two until someone says that this summer/fall fire season could be particularly intense because of the thick spring foliage).
Quarry Trail, Tilden Regional Park
Tough Love for Panhandlers, 14th Century Style
We have alluded before in this space to the conundrum of living in a community where — well, where you get hit up for spare change or are otherwise wheedled and baited as part of some impromptu street-based money-raising scheme. We have quoted Walt Whitman’s injunction “give alms to all who ask.” And we have watched as our town and nearby cities have adopted laws–for instance, San Francisco’s “Sit-Lie Ordinance” — that are supposed to address public concerns about getting panhandled.
In researching another topic just now, I found that England’s King Edward III dealt with panhandlers, too. Here’s a section of the Ordinance of Laborers, handed down in 1349 as to deal with the impact of the Black Death that had recently swept the kingdom:
“… Because that many valiant beggars, as long as they may live of begging, do refuse to labor, giving themselves to idleness and vice, and sometimes to theft and other abominations; none upon the said pain of imprisonment, shall, under the color of pity or alms, give anything to such, who are able to labor, or presume to favor them in their idleness, so that thereby they may be compelled to labor for their necessary living.”
To be clear, the law didn’t outlaw begging. It outlawed giving anything to beggars. (I like the phrase “under the color of pity or alms.” Mustn’t give sway to those kinds of feelings or predilections.)
And what could this possibly have to do with the Black Death? you ask. Well, England was facing a severe labor shortage after the plague, and the king was answering demands to find workers. The same proclamation essentially required all able-bodied people under 60 to work; in fact, if someone who was otherwise unemployed was asked to work and refused, they could be thrown in jail; and anyone who was employed was forbidden to leave their position “without reasonable cause or license.” The statute also prohibited laborers, who found themselves in a sellers’ market, from demanding higher wages for their work. That prohibition is said to have become the Common Law precedent for blocking formation of labor unions in the United States up through 1840.
Ephemeral Stream
In the big book of seasons, the last three months is supposed to be one season. It feels like three.
Late November and all of December, it was winter here in our coastal lowlands. Meaning: wet. Consistently, almost insistently rainy.
Climate folks warned it might not last: This is a La Niña winter, and the tap could be turned off just like that. And come the first of the year, it was. It stayed dry, bone-dry almost, for virtually all of January and the first half of February. I’ve infuriated Easterners and Midwesterners by mentioning how warm it got during part of that inter-rain-num, so I won’t talk about that again.
Last weekend: Clear and cool, with rain forecast to return Monday. The weather changed on scheduled, and we got a good six-day dousing. In the Sierra, huge snow, just like December. Along our street, with its 22-year-old pavement slowly going to gravel, we have our ephemeral stream running down the gutter again.
Ephemeral Geyser
Slideshow (34 shots)
Our principal diversion on a cold, drippy Saturday: A water main broke up on McGee Avenue at Buena Avenue, a couple blocks from our house. We were on our way back from a walk with The Dog and saw an unusual amount of water washing down the gutters on Buena and around the corner down California Street and decided to investigate. Just uphill from McGee and Buena, water was pouring through a heaved-up section of pavement. It seemed to be worsening slowly, and after 10 minutes or was fountaining about four feet into the air. We took some pictures, talked to some friends in the neighborhood who were taking in the scene, then walked back home.
As I sat down to look at the pictures, my friend Bruce, who lives a couple doors up from the break, called. He said I needed to get back up there–the water was shooting 80 feet into the air. Kate and I ran back up the street. This was the scene looking up McGee. The water was jetting into the air onto and over a house owned by well-known Berkeley artist David Lance Goines. The volume of water was enough that it caused a flood in his backyard, and he was overheard to say that at least a little water was getting into his home. A couple dozen neighbors gathered to watch the show.
Firefighters on the scene monitored the break while they waited for the East Bay Municipal Utility District, our water provider, to dispatch a crew. One of the firefighters told me they could shut down the flow of water, but wouldn’t as long as it didn’t seem to be a threat; it might help EBMUD diagnose the break if they saw the water flowing, he said. But when the flow broke loose, the firefighters got busy trying to close valves up and down the street. They eventually managed to limit the flow to about a 10-foot column that slopped onto the sidewalk. As soon as they did that, a single EBMUD employee showed up (an hour and 12 minutes after I began taking pictures, by which time the utility had already been alerted). The water guy knew what he was doing. It took him nine minutes to shut down the geyser).
***
Update: After the geyser was shut down, I heard one of the firefighters ask the EBMUD guy, “Do you know how old the main is?” “Yeah, I know–it’s older than you. It’s older than you, and you’d have to be born before 1910 to be older than it.” My friend Bruce, who says his house was built in 1905, said the main must be at least that old. He’s lived there since the late ’70s, and said that when he’d moved in, an older man rooming next door talked about growing up on the block back when the first houses were built there. Buena Avenue was a cow path, Bruce recalled the man saying, and “Farmer McGee,” for whom McGee Avenue is named, used to drive cattle to pasture down to the west.
***
After dark, I went out an took a look at what the EBMUD crew was doing. Bruce and a friend were watching the proceedings. They said there had been an oval-shaped hole in the main not much bigger than two hands held together. That was a pretty impressive show of what water under pressure can do when forced out of a small opening (hydraulic mining, anyone?).
***
I heard one other story about the day: Kate was standing in the gaggle of neighbors that came to watch the geyser. A woman who lives a couple doors down Buena related how she had been out walking her dog when she noticed water bubbling through the pavement in front of David Goines house at Buena and McGee. His car was parked right where the water was percolating up. She knocked on his door and told him he might want to move his car. He did.
Berkeley Weather: High and Low
It’s a little after midnight on February 6. We just walked home from downtown Berkeley with our friends Piero and Jill. It’s warm out. The entirely unofficial reading at our house is 65.1 degrees–up a fraction of a degree in the last half-hour. A UC-Berkeley weather station downtown records 67.8 right now, and most temperatures in the area right now are in the mid 60s up to 70.
The record high for this date in Berkeley, according to data from the Western Regional Climate Centter, is 71, set in 1987. The record high minimum–the highest low for this date–is 55, set in 1963. Hard to judge where we’ll wind up at dawn, but I’d say we have a good shot of setting a new “highest low” record.
Our average high and low for the 6th of February: 59 and 45.
Update (1:30 p.m.): The overnight low at UC-Berkeley’s downtown weather station was 63.6 degrees, recorded at 8:17 a.m. The official station is on campus near McCone Hall, but even given the fact the downtown location appears to be in a warmer spot than the official one, it’s safe to bet the all-time “highest low” record was broken this morning. And high temperature records for the date are being rewritten everywhere around the bay, too. Here’s a map (from the University of Utah’s MesoWest service) and a record summary (from the National Weather Service in Monterey).
Dog Walk Confidential
Today was the first day of two weeks of time off from my job at the major Bay Area public radio station. I celebrated first by going back to bed after Kate left for work this morning, then getting up and doing a work project for my employer that I had promised to do before my vacation started but couldn’t fit in to my normal hours. I understand from a colleague who was home sick that it was a really nice day today. I saw at various points of the late morning and afternoon that it was sunny and clear outside, but by the time I had finished the project, the sun had set in a coral blaze and the moon had risen. The Dog had yet to be taken for a walk.
So as the dusk deepened, we headed out, as soon as I rustled up a check I had to mail. As we walked up the adjacent block on our street, I realized that although I had brought a leash and a light–the latter to help me locate any waste the revered dog might leave along our path–I had forgotten to bring plastic bags to remove said revered waste. “The hell with it,” I thought. “Maybe I won’t need the bags.”
We walked down to the nearby shopping area, where there’s a mailbox. I mailed the check, and we walked up the block. In front of a very nice-looking salon, at the base of a tree directly in front of a window where a woman was getting done up, I saw The Dog assume his waste-dropping position. Perfect. I didn’t have bags, and I wasn’t going to pick up what was being deposited without them. I thought, “Of course I assume everyone’s looking at this when no one really is.” Nonetheless, I got between the window and The Dog and bent over as if I was about to do the civic duty incumbent upon me after the biological duty that had just been performed. Then I stood up straight and walked away, The leavings weren’t on the sidewalk, and I resolved to come back, maybe, and look for the crap in the dark.
A half-block farther up, same routine, except not in front of a nice salon. The dark, steaming canine waste nuggets came to rest on the sidewalk, so I covered them with leaves and brushed them with my foot to the base of a tree. Out of harm’s way from a human pedestrian’s point of view; and objects of immense interest from the perspective of other dogs that would soon happen that way.
I sometimes wonder, as I pick up bag after bag of dog byproduct on our daily walks, how come so much of it doesn’t get picked up. Well, this is how: You forget to bring a bag, or you honestly don’t see what’s going on in the dark, or you figure it’s out of everyone’s way. I figure it’s OK. There’ll be more to scoop up tomorrow, and tomorrow might be another sunny day, and I won’t have any work-type work projects in front of me.
Dog Walk Confidential
Today was the first day of two weeks of time off from my job at the major Bay Area public radio station. I celebrated first by going back to bed after Kate left for work this morning, then getting up and doing a work project for my employer that I had promised to do before my vacation started but couldn’t fit in to my normal hours. I understand from a colleague who was home sick that it was a really nice day today. I saw at various points of the late morning and afternoon that it was sunny and clear outside, but by the time I had finished the project, the sun had set in a coral blaze and the moon had risen. The Dog had yet to be taken for a walk.
So as the dusk deepened, we headed out, as soon as I rustled up a check I had to mail. As we walked up the adjacent block on our street, I realized that although I had brought a leash and a light–the latter to help me locate any waste the revered dog might leave along our path–I had forgotten to bring plastic bags to remove said revered waste. “The hell with it,” I thought. “Maybe I won’t need the bags.”
We walked down to the nearby shopping area, where there’s a mailbox. I mailed the check, and we walked up the block. In front of a very nice-looking salon, at the base of a tree directly in front of a window where a woman was getting done up, I saw The Dog assume his waste-dropping position. Perfect. I didn’t have bags, and I wasn’t going to pick up what was being deposited without them. I thought, “Of course I assume everyone’s looking at this when no one really is.” Nonetheless, I got between the window and The Dog and bent over as if I was about to do the civic duty incumbent upon me after the biological duty that had just been performed. Then I stood up straight and walked away, The leavings weren’t on the sidewalk, and I resolved to come back, maybe, and look for the crap in the dark.
A half-block farther up, same routine, except not in front of a nice salon. The dark, steaming canine waste nuggets came to rest on the sidewalk, so I covered them with leaves and brushed them with my foot to the base of a tree. Out of harm’s way from a human pedestrian’s point of view; and objects of immense interest from the perspective of other dogs that would soon happen that way.
I sometimes wonder, as I pick up bag after bag of dog byproduct on our daily walks, how come so much of it doesn’t get picked up. Well, this is how: You forget to bring a bag, or you honestly don’t see what’s going on in the dark, or you figure it’s out of everyone’s way. I figure it’s OK. There’ll be more to scoop up tomorrow, and tomorrow might be another sunny day, and I won’t have any work-type work projects in front of me.