"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
On a railroad siding just north of Gazelle, California (a hamlet northwest of Weed and Mount Shasta). Interesting combination of amateur and expert spraypaint use; and if you click on the image, check out the face at the bottom center of the display; I assume it was stenciled, but it’s a pretty nice rendering, at least from a distance.
Technorati Tags: california, interstate 5, travel
Made it back to Berkeley tonight after a perhaps overly ambitious five-day trip up to northern Idaho and back. Total mileage: 2,195. That’s a lot, actually. More details on all that later, perhaps.
In the meantime: On the way south, I had an impulse to get off I-5 south of Yreka to take a couple pictures of Mount Shasta from an overpass. Then I headed down old U.S. 99, which parallels the freeway on the west, and came to the townlet of Gazelle.The pink-painted commercial building on the east side of the road prompted me to stop. According to a couple of local histories, the building was originally part of the Denny-Bar Company, a chain of stores started by three brothers in Callahan, a mining town in the mountains west of Gazelle. One of the histories, “The State of Jefferson,” includes a period picture of the building before the arcade was built onto the front; the date at the peak of the false-front gable is 1898, the same as the modern metal numbers affixed to the same location today. Most of the original details are still visible, though the only evidence the place has ever done business is a Holsum Bread sign painted on the north wall.
Technorati Tags: california, interstate 5, travel
To read: “Eat, Memory: Family Heirloom.” It’s a short essay in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine by David Mas Masumoto on family, land, work, farming and food:
“… Our … farm in California was exploding with life. Peaches and nectarines were blooming, and the grapevines were pushing forth pale green buds with miniature bunches. In three months, if all went well, we’d gorge ourselves on peaches. In six months, the bulbous grapes could be dried into raisins.
“But the weeds flourished, too. Innocent-looking for a day or two, they kept growing, spreading thick over the landscape. Soon a tangled mass of fibers would compete for water, nutrients and sunlight, stunting the development of my crops, robbing fruits of the essentials they need to grow fat.
“The physical work was breaking me. Organic farming is not simple. It’s easy to want to be environmentally responsible, but it’s a damned hard thing to achieve. You cannot replace tedious labor with technology or equipment. If I miss a few worms, an outbreak could ensue. I can’t fix things with a magic spray. It’s like catching a bad flu with no medicine readily available. …”
Technorati Tags: california, organic farming
Early last week, we were in New York. I spent most of one hot afternoon at the American Museum of Natural History, on the Upper West Side, and afterward decided to walk down to Penn Station — nearly three miles on the wandering out-of-towner’s course I took — to meet Kate, who was coming in on a commuter train from New Jersey.
Always striking about New York: the number of people on the street, at all hours; and of course, the effect is magnified at the end of the work day as you go from the placid precincts of Central Park West toward Midtown. A commuter crowd mobbed the area around 7th Avenue and West 34th Street, a block up from the station, all going home to the suburbs.
Standing at that corner (above), I was conscious of something I’d been seeing all along my walk: The New York pedestrian’s habit of stepping off the curb when waiting for the lights to change, crowding right up to the traffic lane in some cases getting ready to hustle across against the light if there was an opening in traffic — unlikely on 7th Avenue, not so unusual on less-busy side streets. For a visitor, the New York walking style seems aggressive, disorderly and even dangerous. But it is fast: The only places I got stopped along the way were major intersections. The key is keeping your eyes open and remembering that the drivers you’re looking at are aggressive, too, and that the laws of physics are against you in a collision, even if you think you have the right of way.
It’s a fundamentally different way of street thinking from the prevalent attitude in the Bay Area. In California, state law gives pedestrians virtually universal right of way (with the obvious exceptions: against red lights, for instance). The law aims to make it safer for pedestrians to cross the street, but its effect actually goes well beyond that: It has created a sense of righteous entitlement among pedestrians, who by their behavior apparently believe that all considerations — courtesy, common sense, drivers’ reaction times, night-time visibility, the aforementioned laws of physics — have been suspended by statute.
Yeah, a less car-centric world would be a much better place in many ways. And we ought to make the streets safe for everyone who uses them. But planting the idea in people’s heads that they can step off the curb into the path of a speeding car — and that the car will stop, damn it — promotes naivete and selfishness more than safety.
Some suggestive stats: According to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration numbers, in eight of the 10 years between 1995 and 2004, the most recent statistical year available, New York state had a lower pedestrian fatality rate than California. On the other hand, New York appears to have a much higher percentage of pedestrians killed at intersections — consistently on the order of 40 to 50 percent of the state total compared to California’s 25 percent or so. For the past several reported years, “improper crossing of roadway or intersection” is the top listed factor in pedestrian fatalities in New York; in California, that factor is in a dead heat for No. 1 with “failure to yield right of way” (which I take to mean pedestrians’ failure to yield).
Technorati Tags: berkeley, new york, california
Drove back from Eugene last night and this morning. Started at 5 p.m. or so, stopped at the cheap gas station (a 76 station just south of town that is always at least a nickel or a dime a gallon cheaper than what you find near the university), then got on Interstate 5 southbound. The Sunday of Memorial Day weekend: I recommend it for your long highway trips. Very few people were on the road, and by the time we started the climb up toward the last Oregon summit on I-5, in the last hour before the sun set, it was like driving in the middle of the night.
Most of the way through Oregon we drove through sunlit showers, and for a while saw a rainbow around every bend in the road. The shot above is from the stretch between Yreka and Weed, in far northern California: Rain refracted in the last light of the day, a semi-rainbow. The peak near the center is Black Butte, a small volcanic peak just to the west of Mount Shasta. The shot below: from the climb up the northern side of Canyon Creek Summit, a little more than halfway between Eugene and the California line.
By way of Pam:
The Californian’s Conception of the Continental United States:
“Despite my public complaints, California is a wonderful place. Its topography is among the most varied in the country, the weather in most of California is by most folks’ standards absolutely perfect, and it’s the birthplace of many global cultural and economic trends, a fact which may not make the state wonderful but does certainly make it both dynamic and important. So, despite my protestations about living here, I wholeheartedly admit that as places on the planet go, California ain’t so bad.
“The people though, fall victim to a kind of provincial snobbery unsurpassed by pretty much everyone except the French. When I tell people in California I’m from Chicago, they look at me with pity. When I tell my Californian students to travel around the U.S. after they graduate, they look at me as if I’m insane. I once was complaining about how poorly many Californians drive in the snow and my soon-to-be father-in-law responded “why on earth would anyone want to live in a place where you have to learn to drive in the snow”. This from a man who spent most of his life on the volcanic, lava-spewing island of Hawaii and from a man who currently lives only a few dozen miles from the San Andreas fault. All this to say that most people who call California home—red blooded Californians, or perhaps more precisely, almond-soy-triple-foam chai latte Californians—suffer from a more localized version of geographic ignorance than most Americans.”
Complete with map.
Technorati Tags: california election
Kate left for a teachers’ conference at a very nice hotel near Portland. Thom’s in Eugene. Eamon’s in Japan. I’m home alone. With the cat.
So I came home after a part-day freelancing for a high-end home furnishings retailer that shall remain nameless. I let the cat in. I checked the mail. Our cellphone bill was stated as being triple what it actually was. I spent 20 minutes on the phone with the cellphone company, which vary graciously corrected the bill.
I polished off the end of a bag of tortilla chips. Had a beer. Then an ice cream bar. No one’s here to tell me not to.
Then I started semi-obsessively checking the election returns. The more conservative counties in Southern California reported first, and for the first couple of hours after the polls closed, two of Conan‘s four propositions — one that would require unions to get annual permission from members to spend their dues on political causes, one that would require public school teachers to serve five years to get tenure, instead of the current two — were leading. But none of the ultraliberal Bay Area counties was in yet. Neither was L.A.
I finally persuaded myself to stop hitting reload on the election returns page. I went out for a walk in the hills. Stopped at the store. Came back. Now all of Conan’s propositions are losing.
Can I get a yee-haw?
Technorati Tags: california election, election, schwarzenegger
Conan the Governor forced an election on the state to give De Peepull of Kollyfawnya a chance to enact his "reform" agenda. I’ve struggled with whether to give in to my utter dislike for Conan and simply vote against anything and everything he proposes — the "Whatever It Is, I’m Against It" approach — or to soberly weigh my responsibilities as a citizen and vote on the measures according to their merits.
I’d like to say I’m taking the high road. But I’m not. It’s mostly because I think that at best, Schwarzenegger has appropriated the language of latter-day populism to bully opponents; at worst, he’s a demagogue. There’s a fundamental dishonesty in his carping crusade against "politics as usual" and "special interests" — the catch-all term for anyone who opposes him, whether it’s Democrats, teachers, other working people, their unions, or union leaders — while he curries favor and raises funds from the state’s corporations and business interests. There’s a fundamental dishonesty in the way he calls for fixing the state’s finances while refusing to even discuss the tax side of the equation. There’s a fundamental dishonesty in his positioning himself as a moderate Republican who stands apart from the party’s conservatives; true, he’s pro-choice, and he straddles the fence on the gay marriage question. But just remember that during the last few days of last year’s presidential campaign, he went to Ohio to campaign for Bush.
So, even having thought about some of the propositions and whether one or two might deserve support (I’m thinking of Proposition 77, which would set up a less-partisan reapportionment scheme), I’m voting no on Conan’s whole list.
On any drive north or south on Interstate 5, Williams is an important spot on our personal travel map. It’s 100 miles from Berkeley, give or take a mile or two; so when we get there on the way home, we’re within a couple hours of our front door at most; or, headed the other way, we’re about halfway to Redding (or about one-fifth of the way to Eugene).
The town sits on the western side of the Sacramento Valley, where Highway 20 comes down from the Clear Lake plateau and heads across the river bottoms to Colusa, Yuba City, and Marysville before it begins climbing through the Sierra foothills to Grass Valley and Nevada City.
Like all the little farm towns up and down the valley, there’s some history there under the surface, which naturally you don’t get at when you’re just passing through. You sort of suspect it when you look at the handsome old brick building a couple of stop signs west of the interstate with its weathered pale green paint, arcade shading the sidewalk and and recently hung fast-food banners.
The only history I know of, though, is what we’ve seen on our short stops through the years: the ghost Dairy Queen (we walked in one day after the place had been shut down, though all the signs and most of the interior fixtures were intact and the front door had been left open); the crummy road meals; the night we stayed in town with our neighbors, the Martinuccis, and drove out to the fields east of town to watch a comet; stopping for gas on the way home from Wilbur Hot Springs in the blaze of October.
