"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
On approach to the airport in Salt Lake City: A storm was moving over the area, and we had flown a long northerly leg over the eastern edge of Great Salt Lake to what appeared to be the edge of the storm before looping back down south–the direction we’re headed here–to the airfield. If you take a look at the FlightAware track of the flight, it looks like we had flown a loop well west of the airport, too. It rained buckets afer we landed
Here’s the trip slideshow
This morning I took a 6:35 flight from Oakland to Seattle–the packed zoo-ish Southwest Airlines variety–then, in the company of my son Eamon and daughter-in-law Sakura, made a sharp right turn (if you’re looking at the map with north on top) and headed over the Cascades and well beyond on Interstate 90. We wound up in Butte at nightfall. I figure the day involved about 750 air miles and another 600 on the road. All set up with two hours of sleep, the result of a push to get some work done yesterday evening. That seems like a long time ago.
From out of the overload, one image that there’s no picture for: a pair of sandhill cranes winging across the Interstate, somewhere in that last hour on the road, an apparition in the long light of the last day of May, after crossing the Cascades, the Palouse, the first low passes of the Rockies, with rivers in every valley running full, the higher peaks all gleaming mid-winter white. Kind of hard for me to figure what season we’re in. The cranes have a bead on it, though.
Tomorrow? There’s talk of the Little Big Horn and Deadwood. We shall see.
Two much more prosaic snapshots go into the book for today, though. Above: On the Palouse, west of Spokane. Below: Serious advice from the state of Washington for a certain class of drivers and their friends.
Today’s adventure, after walking the dog this morning, football on TV, drowsing on the couch, puzzling over this and that: We went out on a half-afternoon of creek exploration. Our original destination was Damon Marsh, near the end of 66th Avenue in Oakland. Several creeks flow out to San Leandro Bay near there, including Arroyo Viejo, which comes down out of the hills and crosses the East Oakland flatlands near where Kate teaches.
So we drove down there, and just as we sped across the Lake Merritt Channel on the Nimitz Freeway, I spotted a blimp down toward the Coliseum. The Raiders were playing. So, figuring we’d soon be engulfed in a traffic maelstrom, we decided to cut our visit short and go to our backup destination–San Leandro Creek, near Pinehurst Road up in the hills. We did stop at a place signed “Oakport Field,” which featured a scabby baseball diamond, some beaten-up soccer goals, and a big flock of geese. The site is close enough to the stadium that you could hear the field announcement of each play, including the touchdown that put the game out of reach for the home team.
The shoreline here is well described by the Oakland Museum’s excellent “Guide to East Bay Creeks“:
“A lot of debris of human life is deposited in this area, thought provoking and instructive to the contemporary ‘archaeologist.’ Before human garbage, the creeks washed plant and animal debris down to the mudflats where it became part of the “fertilizer” for the natural productivity of the marshes. Today’s debris is recognizable — items we have all unthinkingly tossed away. Urban runoff entering the creeks through the city’s storm drains is also deposited here, a major source of Bay pollution. The juxtaposition of garbage with wild life, highways and industry with wetlands, forcefully demonstrates the need for people to assume active responsibility toward their natural environment.”
We left and took took a meandering path through up to Montclair to Skyline Boulevard then dropped down Pinehurst. We parking at the hairpin where the road’s gradual ascent up San Leandro Creek ends and the climb up the canyonsides toward Oakland begins. Always a key point on the bike ride up the road.
It was only about 4 in the afternoon, but you’re at the bottom of a deep canyon here, and it seemed to get dark quickly, especially with clouds closing overhead. We walked up a fire road from the hairpin, and it felt like deep twilight. The forest here was wet, the tree trunks and some rocks covered with a thick layer of moss. As we headed up an occasionally slick, muddy trail on the north side of the canyon along San Leandro Creek–which eventually flows down past the town of Canyon into Upper San Leandro Reservoir–we could hear hikers on a trail across the canyon and, further up, a couple of great horned owls hooting. Eventually, we broke out of the heavy cover of laurels and alders. Once we were in the open a little, we could locate roughly where the owls were calling from–a eucalyptus -filled side canyon across the way. We turned back–a light rain had started, and if we’d climbed to the top of the trail, we would have walked back down in almost total darkness).
We walked back down to the car, then drove back up Pinehurst and north through the hills to the Lawrence Hall of Science, where we had a little in-car picnic. Back home, I checked out a topographic map of the area, and was surprised to see the name “Eastport” at the place we had parked. One thing I can tell you for sure after having passed the spots scores if not hundreds of times–there’s nothing you’d put on the map at that spot.
But looking for information on Eastport quickly turned up an astonishing series of photos of a railroad that used to emerge from a tunnel from Oakland and run down Pinehurst and, eventually, all the way to Sacramento. The line was abandoned a little more than 50 years ago. The tunnel entrance was apparently buried in a landslide during one of our rainy winters in the 1980s, and most traces of the line have been swallowed up in the undergrowth.
Of course, if that railroad had not been abandoned, if it had been part of the landscape as I had encountered it, I would not be shocked to encounter some virtual sign of its presence. Naturally, I’d take it for granted. If steelhead still fought their way up this creek to the last deep canyon carved into the hills, I’d think they were just part of the place, as they apparently were until the loggers, dammers, and railroad builders–all those people preparing the way for us, the consumers and critics–arrived.
Finding the railroad pictures, though, makes me reflect a little on all the changes we work on the world, everything we build, re-engineer, re-form, and disrupt, then lay aside for nature–improved nature–to reclaim as it will; on everything we invent, manufacture, market, buy and discard for the tide to carry away. The imperative to build and invent, to disrupt and discard, seems so ingrained to our culture that it feels almost impossible to step outside that culture and see it. Every once in a while, we get glimpses. And it is astonishing.
I’m sitting at the forward end of the car, the last coach on the train, riding backward, on my way to work late Tuesday morning. The door from the next car opens, and a voice says, “Go on–get in there.” A girl of 12 or so and a woman maybe in her 30s come through the door and walk down the aisle, then stop about a third of the way through the car. The woman starts up, and I realize immediately I’ve heard her spiel before.
“Good morning, BART riders,” she declaims. “My daughter and I have been homeless for two and a half months because I am a victim of domestic violence. We’re getting put out of our shelter at 11 a.m. My daughter hasn’t even eaten today. I have a hearing today at 2 o’clock, and I’m trying to raise forty-three ninety-nine for food and a place to stay.”
That’s it. The number catches my attention: $43.99. It’s part of the hustle–a number that’s supposed to be more persuasive for being so oddly specific. I’ve closed my eyes because I don’t want to see what happens next, whether or not anyone forks over some money. When I encountered the mom and daughter a few months ago on BART, I thought the girl looked stricken, humiliated.
The train pulls into the West Oakland station, and the pair get off. Most people in the car are sitting alone with their thoughts about what they’ve just seen. Several people sitting near the door discuss it.
“She does that all of the time,” a man says. “Every day. It’s a good scam.”
“But her poor daughter has to go through that every day,” the woman across the aisle says. A second man: “Her baby should be in school.”
“They use them kids,” the first man says, “they use them kids as a lure. It’s a good scam. She’s probably got more money on her than you have in you bank account. Yeah, she’s got a stash on her somewhere. She’s probably over on the other side right now getting on another train.”
My recent forays into the world of California water and fish, along with a couple recent stories I did, resulted in an invitation to be a panel member on KQED’s Forum program (a daily news discussion show we do). I was on an hour-long segment entitled Salmon vs. Jobs (if I had been editing that, I’d have added a question mark) that centered on Senator Feinstein’s announcement that she wants to amend a federal jobs bill to guarantee minimum water levels to a section of the San Joaquin Valley. That water must be delivered, she says, notwithstanding a drought and the threat to endangered fish and despite the fact a scientific review of actions taken to protect the fish–a review she instigated last fall–is still in progress. After being asked on the show Thursday evening, I stayed up late doing some homework on the issue, then followed that up with a nervous (i.e., lousy) night’s sleep. But the show went OK once I remembered that I had to breathe to talk. The audio is here:
And once I got through with that … I ran back to the newsroom and finished the prep work for a feature story I did on a short-track speedskating club in Oakland (I had done the reporting a couple weeks ago, didn’t managed to get the piece written in time for air before the Olympics, and finally got it done this week, and it was broadcast yesterday). The audio for that one is here:
What is the connection between those two stories. My good pal Coach Bobby Knight says the common thread is water, liquid, then frozen.
The Temescal district, the neighborhood surrounding Telegraph Avenue and 51st Street in North Oakland, has become a contender for the title of East Bay Hipster Gulch. By which I mean the area is characterized by lots of young folks hanging out, sporting the latest in fashion and barely rideable bicycles. In fact, the first Friday of the month is a phenomenon all the way up Telegraph from downtown to 51st. Galleries are open late, clubs are thronged, and except for the very wide well-paved street you might think you were in non-colonial Williamsburg–the one in Brooklyn.
But traces of the avenue’s up-and-down history persist. Smack in the middle of a block that features an odd but cool gallery (it featured a live Halloween display with a young woman making like Norman Bates’s mother and spooking some visitors), a Burmese restaurant, and a good pizza-and-beer joint, you’ll find a rent-by-the-week motel. But like the rest of the area, it’s going through changes. I prefer to think of it as the Maya, but that’s because I formed my impression facing north. South-facing viewers see the Telegraph-Shattuck (those two streets meet, or diverge, a block away).
A sighting on our weekly Friday night stops in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood. One of many restaurants in the area and part of an almost equally large group we have not yet tried. “New Ho Ho”? Somewhere, there’s an original Ho Ho Restaurant, I guess. And the “Ho Ho” part? The Chinese version shown below, shot with exceedingly slow shutter and excessively moving hands, gives a hint. The character for “ho” is repeated (you can just make that out in the red characters above the awning). “Ho” apparently means “good.” I don’t know whether doubling it means “extra good.” Or maybe “greasy spoon.”
I took the day off, so tonight Kate and I rode the boat from Oakland to San Francisco together, stopped and ate at the Ferry Building (Taylor’s Automatic Refresher), then took the last run back to the East Bay. The sun was just setting as the boat left the dock at Jack London Square. Sky and water shone with a gorgeous light all the way across. (And hey: It was by brother John’s birthday today, and I didn’t call him. Happy birthday, JB. You would have loved the ride today, but I’m sure you had a good time in Brooklyn.)
My significant spouse couldn’t make it to the ferry last night for our usual Friday night ride, so I went it alone. Left the office exactly an hour before the 8:25 p.m. sailing time of the day’s last boat, usually plenty of time to make the three-mile hike from the western slope of Potrero Hill to the Ferry Building. But in the interest of trying new routes, I wandered through the UC-San Francisco Mission Bay campus and then along the outside of the right-field stands at Phone Company Park and added about two-thirds of a mile extra to the trip, stopped to take a picture or two, and wound up having to run (or power-shuffle, as a casual observer might have called it) up the Embarcadero to the ferry slip. I made the boat with five minutes to spare.
The usual routine is to buy a glass (plastic, actually) of white wine for my shipmate and a beer for myself and sit under the heaters on the second deck. But the boat bar is cash only, so I climbed to the top deck, stood in the lee of the pilothouse, and watched the trip go by sans beverage. The light was striking, as always, with the low evening cloud cover moving in off the ocean and a much higher layer of clouds catching the last of the sun; the tide was ebbing in the Oakland estuary, moving so fast that it looked like a river current, though not as extreme as the flow you see in New York’s East River.
