Tag: california

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Rain Chronicles

This will not be a banner precipitation season for California–though always keep your eye out for the neighbor building boats and inviting in pairs of every creature. But that doesn’t mean it is without interest. For starters, it could well be a significantly below-par year for rain and snow here, which would make it three such years in a row, and that’s never good news. Already this year, the probability of a third drought year is getting spun by the governor and his water people to bolster their campaign for more dams and fancy plumbing. You have to admire their pluck; with the state $40 billion in the hole just to buy things like bullets for the Highway Patrol, stun guns for prison guards, paper clips for the bureaucrats, and adult diapers for the Legislature, the guv and company are talking about getting the taxpayers to spring for another $10 billion or so.

Anyway. Talking rain at work today, someone produced a list that purports to show that a place called Blue Canyon, on Interstate 80 (and the Union Pacific) in the Sierra, is one of the 10 wettest locations in the Lower 48 states (and the wettest in California). It gets 68 inches of precipitation a year. No way, no how that is the wettest place in California. My money’s on Honeydew, a hamlet on the Mattole River in Humboldt County. With our neighbors, the Martinuccis, we actually drove through Honeydew once on our way up the coast. I have an impression of a general store and a narrow bridge. There’s some evidence–disappointingly scanty, to be honest, but it includes an official-looking listing of each state’s wettest location–that Honeydew regularly gets 100 inches plus of rain a year.

And leaving Honeydew out of the picture for a moment, there are at least half a dozen places up on the North Coast–towns like Fort Dick and Crescent City in Del Norte County–and further south–like Cazadero in Sonoma County–all average more than 70 inches a year.

Not that Blue Canyon doesn’t deserve attention. Some with the Weather Service credit it with being the snowiest recording station in the Lower 48 (averaging 240.8 inches a year). But here’s my favorite: in a table succinctly labeled “Mean Monthly and Annual Number of Hours with Measurable Precipitation, with Percent of Hours and Maximum 1-Hour Totals,” Blue Canyon is way out ahead of any California listing: On average, it’s precipitating there 10.6 percent of the hours in the year–928 hours and 30 minutes, roughly. Of course, that would make it just a run-of-the-mill place in much of Oregon and Washington (Portland’s percentage of precipitation hours per year: 10.9).

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Guest Observation: Upton Sinclair

oil.jpgNeeding to have something in my hands to read the other day, I spotted a book of Thom’s (I think): “Oil!” by Upton Sinclair. It’s a Penguin edition with Daniel Day-Lewis’s picture on the front, because “There Will Be Blood” is “loosely based” on the novel.  

I’ve barely read anything by Sinclair; I have dim memories of “The Jungle,” which I got for Christmas in eighth or ninth grade. The prose didn’t do much for me then. This book opens with an account of a car trip somewhere in Southern California–somewhere from the lower end of the Central Valley over the mountains to the Los Angeles area, probably. It’s immediate and colorful and actually reminds me a little of Tom Wolfe’s fiction: self-consciously thorough about contemporary details and observing the scene with an arched eyebrow. Here’s a passage from the opening chapter, titled “The Ride.”

Fifty miles, said the speedometer; that was Dad’s rule for open country, and he never varied it, except in wet weather. Grades made no difference; the fraction of an ounce more pressure with his right foot, and the car raced on–up, up, up–until it topped the ridge, and was sailing down into the next little valley, exactly in the centre of the magic grey ribbon of concrete. The car would start to gather speed, and Dad would lift the pressure of his foot a trifle, and let the resistance of the engine check the speed. Fifty miles was enough, said Dad; he was a man of order.

Far ahead, over the tops of several waves of ground, another car was coming. A small black speck, it went down out of sight, and came up bigger; the next time it was bigger yet; the next time–it was on the slope above you, rushing at you, faster and faster, a mighty projectile hurled out of a six-foot cannon. Now came a moment to test the nerve of the motorist. The magic ribbon of concrete had no stretching powers. The ground at the sides had been prepared for emergencies, but you could not always be sure how well it had been prepared, and if you went off at fifty miles an hour you would get disagreeable waverings of the wheels; you might find the neatly trimmed concrete raised several inches above the earth at the side of it, forcing you to run along on the earth until you could find a place to swing in again; there might be soft sand, which would swerve you this way and that, or wet clay which would skid you, and put a sudden end to your journey.

So the laws of good driving forbade you to go off the magic ribbon except in extreme emergencies. You were ethically entitled to several inches of margin at the right-hand edge; and the man approaching you was entitled to an equal number of inches; which left a remainder of inches between the two projectiles as they shot by. It sounds risky as one tells it, but the heavens are run on the basis of similar calculations, and while collisions do happen, they leave time enough in between for universes to be formed, and successful careers by men of affairs.

“Whoosh!” went the other projectile, hurtling past; a loud, swift “Whoosh!” with no tapering off at the end. You had a glimpse of another man with horn-rimmed spectacles like yourself, with a similar grip of two hands upon a steering wheel, and a similar cataleptic fixation of the eyes. You never looked back; for at fifty miles an hour, your business is with the things that lie before you, and the past is past. …

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Water, Water Everywhere

We’re in a drought here, or what they call a drought in California, so I’ve been thinking about water. Unfortunately, I’ve been thinking in terms that use lots of words and have led so far to dead ends. (Just a minute: a blog, dead ends–what’s the problem?) Anyway, for now, just a couple of numbers, from Shasta Lake, the biggest of the big network of reservoirs built to turn California’s mountains and rivers into a reliable water bank. In the past month at Shasta Dam, on the Sacramento River just north of the city of Redding:

–More than 20 inches of rain has fallen.

–The amount of water in the reservoir has increased by about one-third, from 1.41 million acre feet to 1.86 million acre feet.

–The amount of the increase over just a month, 450,000 acre feet, is about enough water to supply 2.2 million people for a year.

–But that’s not a lot in term of the demand for water here: About 80 to 85 percent of the “developed” water in California–water that’s impounded behind dams and delivered on demand to customers around the state–goes to farms. The rest goes to industry and residential users. The population of California is 36.5 million.

I’ve got lots more numbers kicking around, but that’s enough for now. In the next installment–soon!–I’ll try to make some sense of them.

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Tour of the Rain

Over the last 10 days, we’ve gone from a dry season, a sort of perpetual autumn, to full Northern/Central California winter. Which means: rain in the lowlands and someplace unseen, far to the east, the Sierra Nevada living up to their name. We have a storm parked offshore now, and the rain has fallen all day without much of a let up. We got out this morning to walk Scout during a break of an hour or so. But a couple of later excursions took place in a pounding-down rain, and the dog was soaked when we got back (he doesn’t seem to mind; and he seems to like the process of us toweling him down before we let him back in the house).

Over in Davis this morning, just this side of Sacramento, Stage 1 of the Tour of California hit the road. The route was 107 miles to Santa Rosa over many of the same roads I’ve ridden on brevets, or centuries or just on rides with friends. The big climb of the day was up Howell Mountain Road. I remember it as a steep 2.5- to 3-mile grind I once did with my friend Pete. The eventual stage winner made one of his big moves on that climb today.

I’ve ridden some of these roads in the rain, but today it looked like the racers got pelted from beginning to end of the stage. You see all everyone wearing rain jackets, shoe covers, tights, and what look like scuba gloves. None if keeps you dry. The longer you’re out in the rain, the more water you get in your shoes, the more sodden your shorts get, the colder you become. Of course, the elite pros in today’s peloton really raced today; it’s very, very rare for weather to interfere with the running of a race (one exception I remember: heavy snow in the mountain passes during a stage of the Tour of Italy maybe 15 years ago caused the race organizers to abbreviate a stage). They raced today, but they were miserable, just like the fraternity and sorority of just regular riding folks.

How bad was it? Here’s the Twitter Lance Armstrong sent out after finishing:

“Holy hell. That was terrible. Maybe one of the toughest days I’ve had on a bike, purely based on the conditions. I’m still freezing.”

More rain in the forecast tomorrow. And some patchy, wild roads, too, including another one I rode with Pete once: Tunitas Creek. It turns into a wild one-lane route through a redwood forest. When we road it, the road was all patches and patches on patches. I saw a report from a local cyclist today that the route had debris on it today. Which makes it kind of amazing to me that the best cyclists in the world are riding it. It’s more than a little like the Yankees showing up to play on your local diamond, complete with pebbles in the infield and potholes in the outfield. Seeing the best on your home field — well, it changes the way you see the field.

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Berkeley Frost

Oh, sure: You, wherever you are to the north or east of the San Francisco Bay shoreline, you have your cold snaps, your big old snowstorms, and your drifts. All that’s enough to make you forget how the cold season started some frosty morning a few months ago. Here on the Bay, frost happens every so often in the dead of winter, on some clear morning after a storm has passed. This morning was one of those frosty mornings for us to come out of our uninsulated bungalows and think that we’re in some kind of wintry solidarity with folks on the Columbia, near the East River, or on the shores of Lake Michigan and Lake Erie.

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Tiny Alpine

Brainstorming some story ideas for my radio news gig, this is where I go: I started out thinking that it might be fun to call a couple of the less populated counties in the state to talk to the county clerks about election day plans. You know–the quaint voice of outback telling the city slicker about the one polling place in the town bar, or something along those lines. And then:

You know, California is big, about three times the land area of my native Illinois. It’s got about three times the population, too, so off the top of my head the overall population density is probably about the same (according to the Census Bureau, in 2006 California had 217 people per square mile; Illinois 223).

The Prairie State is divided into 102 mostly pocket-sized counties. California is split into 58 relatively large ones. California has nine counties with 1 million or more people, Illinois one (Cook). The Land of Lincoln’s biggest county would rank second here, behind Los Angeles County. The No. 2 county in Illinois, DuPage in Chicago’s western suburbs, would rank 11th in California, right after Fresno County. The third most populous Illinois county, Lake, would be 16th in the Golden State. And so on.

But as you go through the list of counties in the respective states, an impression forms: of extremes in California, of relatively even distribution, outside Chicagoland, in Illinois. My county, Alameda, is 738 square miles and has about 1.5 million people. On the other side of the Sierra Nevada passes is a place called Alpine County. At 739 square miles, it’s one of the smaller counties, but not the smallest (that would be, ahem, San Francisco County, at 47 square miles; Santa Cruz is second at 445-point-something) in the state.

Around the old Examiner newsroom, and it deserves to be called that, we had a fellow editor whose family has a summer home up in Alpine County. Whenever something happened in the county–a fire, generally; conceivably some other natural unpleasantness–the Examiner would describe the place as “tiny Alpine County.” The tininess comes from the population: 1,208 in 2000, an estimated 1,180 now.

That’s 1,180 people spread across 739 mountainy, brushy, stream-crossed square miles. One-and-a-fraction human beings per 640 acres. That’s almost as un-dense as Palin-land. My county has something like 1,300 residents for every resident of tiny Alpine County. That’s a lot more, wouldn’t you say? And the density in the city where I live is part about 7,000 times that of tiny Alpine. Just as a for instance of California realities.

Not that you couldn’t find similar extremes if you picked the right patches of Illinois. Cook County has about 5,500 people per square mile, and the city of Chicago is in the neighborhood of 13,000. Statewide, the least populous county is Pope County, at the state’s southeastern tip, with about 4,100 people. Those 4,100 fit somehow into 370 square miles–about 12 people per square mile; I’m guessing that’s the lowest county density in the state. (The second-smallest county population-wise is also the No. 1 smallest area-wise: Hardin County, bordering Pope County on the east. Hardin has 4,600 mosquito-bitten souls–about 27 per square mile.) Those are lonely places judged by the standards of Wrigleyville (or at least Wrigleyville before a Dodgers’ sweep), but they are downright crowded by tiny Alpine County standards.

And that’s where I’m calling, along with Modoc County, maybe, to see how the election preparations are going.

(The point of the foregoing. As I said: Where I go when I start thinking on something. ‘Night. )

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My Club

Because California has joined the national movement to hold presidential primaries no later than the beginning of the previous year’s Christmas shopping season, we had two primary votes this election cycle. On SuperDuper Tuesday, we voted for presidential candidates and a slew of ballot measures. Yesterday, we voted on state legislative races, a couple more initiatives, some local officials, and party central committee members. (Not that I know who the members of the Alameda County Democratic Party Central Committee are, and not that I understand what it is they do. I voted for one yesterday, Wes Van Winkle, because–I know someone who uses this method for betting on horses–I like his name. He didn’t win.)

I felt blasé about the election. I didn’t have any strong feelings about anyone or anything on the ballot. When I finally overcame my inertia to go vote late in the afternoon, the polling place was deserted. The poll workers acted like they hadn’t had much business all day (someone commented that I was the 57th person to vote for the day; they had been open for 10 hours at that point). This is in Berkeley, where people miss no opportunity and spare no effort to express their opinions.

I don’t know the city turnout. But countywide, 24.24 percent of registered voters cast ballots (that includes mail-in/”absentee” ballots). Pretty anemic, but better than the statewide figure, 22.2 percent. In our SuperDuper primary, 57.7 percent of registered voters participated, and 60.1 percent in Alameda County.

That February vote got a lot of attention because of the high turnout. It’s true that it was the highest in a long time (see the California Secretary of State’s table (PDF file) of primary election statistics going back to 1910). But if you go back to the 1980 primary, 63.3 percent of registered voters turned out–perhaps because of the presence on the ballot of Proposition 13, the initiative that slashed property taxes in the state and helped make it much, much harder for counties to raise them. Or maybe not: 1980 itself marked the beginning of a long term trend toward lower primary turnouts in presidential years. The primaries from 1964 through 1976 all recorded turnout from 70.95 to 72.6 percent.

Of course, if you look at yesterday’s statewide participation in terms of percentage of eligible voters, it’s much lower. California has about 23 million people qualified to go to the polls; about 16 million are registered. Yesterday’s turnout was just over 3 million, or a shade over 13 percent. I never thought that by voting I’d be in an exclusive club.

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I-5 Eagle

Eagle033008

Just south of Red Bluff, about 11:30 this morning, northbound on Interstate 5: Thom, who was riding in the front of the van, pointed out a bird and said he thought it was a bald eagle. I looked up and spotted a turkey vulture. Nope, not an eagle. But the bird he was pointing to was flying roughly at our level over a little arroyo within about half a mile of the Sacramento River. We were going 70 mph, but somehow Thom managed to switch his camera on, get the bird in the viewfinder and shoot. It’s not a terriibly crisp frame, but it’s still astounding to me.

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Late-Shaking News

A little reminder of where we live: we had a 5.6 magnitude earthquake this evening, centered about 40 miles or so south of us. I was sitting in my office with my laptop (where else?), trying to do a simple project for Kate. First there was a rumble as the older, front portion of our house started to shake; then the back, which unlike the front is built on a slab, started to shake, too; and things kept rattling, the dog started barking, and I heard Kate, on the phone with Thom up in shake-free Eugene, exclaiming about the experience. In all, the episode lasted about 15 seconds.

I think about earthquakes, for which we and most of our fellow citizens are probably woefully underprepared, pretty often. Several times I’ve awakened to a loud shaking in the house, so sometimes I wonder as I fall asleep whether I’ll be jolted awake in the night. In waking hours, they’re pretty far from my mind. But I always have the same thought as the realization dawns we’re having a quake: How bad will this be?

Tonight: 15 seconds is plenty long to start wondering whether this is more than the hills up yonder having a little stretch. The biggest recent quake that most people outside the Bay Area have heard of, the Loma Prieta earthquake of October 17, 1989, lasted 17 seconds. The longest I’ve ever felt was one that woke me up just after noon one day in April 1984. The epicenter was a good 60 miles away, and the magnitude was a not-devastating-sounding 6.0 or so. But it lasted for about 40 seconds and unnervingly seemed to get stronger as it continued. For a nightmarish comparison, the earthquake that hit Mexico’s western coast in September 1985 and triggered building collapses in Mexico City (about 220 miles from the epicenter) is said to have lasted three minutes. That’s long enough to start believing the shaking will never stop, long enough to make you permanently lose your faith that the ground’s an essentially stable, solid thing.

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