"Having nothing, nothing can he lose." Bill Bryson's Shakespeare

I took a course on Shakespeare in high school, many, many years back. I've been to Stratford-upon-Avon twice now. Even seen Hamlet performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. One summer, my wife and I took the short drive over to Ashland, Oregon, spent the night in a local B&B and caught Macbeth (I think) via the Ashland Shakespeare Festival. (My wife returned as chaperone for a classfull of 8th graders last fall to see Taming of the Shrew.)

Despite the passing familiarity with William Shakespeare, I don't know that I've ever heard much of his personal history, save for the tourist-drivel bandied about in the Stratford theme park environment. When Bill Bryson stepped into the fray, I figured his wit and casual style would open the door a touch to Shakespeare's life. And so it did, though not exactly as I thunk.

The first 10 pages of Bryson's bio of the Bard lay the groundwork: Almost nothing is known of Shakespeare's life. There are virtually no records, no writings, no accounts from Shakespeare himself nor his contemporaries. There are years where we have absolutely no idea where he was or what he was doing. Short of his plays and his poetry, his name alone appears in a handful of court proceedings and we have six of his signatures - all of them signed with different spellings. Historians can't even be certain that two of the three existing portraits of William Shakespeare are, in fact, portraits of William Shakespeare.

That's it. From an historical standpoint, there is nothing to base a biography upon other than conjecture...though many have tried.

No one even cared enough to attempt a biography of Shakespeare 'til nearly two centuries after his death, and by then near all the materials that might've contributed were gone to the ages or the massive London fire of 1660. The biographies written in the past couple hundred years plucked supposition, innuendo, educated guesses, and wishful thinking out of thin air, inventing the persona we recognize today as the world's greatest playwright.

Yet Bryson crafts an interesting story that illuminates Shakespeare by providing a biography of the times. He's revealed the world Shakespeare lived in through other sources, and told the story of how an actor & playwright likely lived in England at the turn of the 16-17th centuries. All told, a good book...a good Christmas-holiday-off kind of read. Short, interesting, enlightening without being difficult.

A cold morning on the shortest day at the highest tide.

No, I'm not about to get all loopy and new age-y on you with the onset of the winter solstice. We had an 8-foot high tide set for near precisely the time I drive past the beach on the way to my white box government office. I couldn't resist the chance to pull off and spend an hour at the start of a day wandering, not working.

Yesterday was a chilly 35° at just past 8am. It's been like that a lot of these past few mornings. A handful of killdeer met me on the silver-frosted sand as I walked from the car to the shoreline. Out in front of me, a large mass of seagulls and even a couple wintering pelicans swirled over the churning Pacific. Waves were way up yesterday morning creating a wide swath of white foam along this stretch of beach. The wind, brisk and cold, poured down from the hills.

As I approached the mouth of Redwood Creek, western sandpipers (or perhaps semipalmated sp's?) dotted the surfline, scampering in and out of the running waves. The surf came up so fast however that nearly every quick dash into the receding tide was brief, before the next wave sent them all flying off to avoid being washed over by the sea.

At the creek's mouth, a couple hundred gulls massed on the mostly dry south bank. A few more floated on the incoming tide. Unlike times past where you could see the river competing on equal footing with the ocean, this morning, at this time, the ocean was winning the battle. Wave after wave pushed into the placid estuary, raising the water level with each push.

As I walked the estuary's edges, there was a constant tinkling of small waves breaking on the shoreline. One set of waves threatened to trap me on the once-narrow sand bar that separates ocean from creek. While counting seal heads, I heard water rushing in around my feet - from both sides. What was once a dry, 100-foot wide peninsula quickly became a narrow 30-foot slip of sand as the ocean poured over the top and the estuary filled up behind me like a bathtub.

Perhaps 25 harbor seals in the estuary this morning. It's funny how they all float, near motionless, watching my every move on the beach. I can hear their breathing in the quiet morning air, the huffing and puffing of their deep breaths. At least two of the larger ones appear agitated with me. From opposite ends of the large group, these two loudly blow bubbles - like a kid with a curly straw in a tall glass of chocolate milk - and flap their tails on the water. It's hard for to understand why this morning is different than any other walk I've taken on the beach, and what has their dander up, but I choose not to linger here, anxious both to warm up and to avoid annoying them too much.

Walking back to the south slough, more incoming waves filled the channel that was dry just last week. A couple great blue herons, some coots, and a couple buffleheads paddle in the back side of the estuary.

Hasta la proxima.

The Poisonious Seal

This wonderfully, badly written sign was rescued from a retiring employee's office not that long ago, and now decorates my humble workspace. Though the provenance is questionable, the story has it coming from the False Klamath Cove area just off the Redwood Highway in southern Del Norte County.

We're assuming there was just a single seal one should avoid throwing spare change at. And we don't know whether 'twas the seal or the coins that were poisonious.

Climate Change and Our National Parks

After a few years of tiptoeing around the issue, the National Park Service finally appears ready to tackle global warming, or global climate change, or whate’er you choose to call it. From an inside perspective, it’s not as if we were ever told to not talk about the issue, or to use veiled code words so as not to piss off the public, or to bury the discussion. Nothing ever came down from my local bosses nor the higher-ups in Washington telling us to stay quiet.

Internally, our collective reluctance was likely more about witnessing the Bush administration’s efforts at suppressing science across the government, at much higher levels than ours, especially when that science challenged the political perspectives of this administration. In that light, and behind closed doors, we wondered, “What can we say? What can we talk about that won’t get us in trouble? How far can we really go?” Our answer? Let's just wait a bit and see what happens when we get new management in 2008.

But the self-imposed muzzle on addressing global warming in parks appears to be coming off. You’re beginning to see a few parks taking the issue on more directly. The NPS has created a “Climate Friendly Park” initiative with several parks committing themselves to “greening” their operations and facilities. They’ve added climate change as a critical issue on the agency’s website. Regional groups are just now beginning to discuss how and where to incorporate these ideas into the parks’ interpretive messages.

All well and good, but the next step, the more critical step in my idiot opinion, is turning the parks’ rangers and publications and websites and visitor centers loose to advocate for significant behavioral changes amongst us humanoids to slow the inevitable. Our “Climate Friendly Parks” will serve as examples of sustainability for others to follow….but is that enough? Can we save the world by changing light bulbs and driving Priuses (Priae?)?

I don’t think so. I’m also not sure that the NPS is yet fully willing to jump into the contentious fray that argues for steering us away from our petroleum based lifestyle entirely; or to consider looking beyond scenic values or local wildlife preservation to accommodate giant wind turbines on mountain ridges or windy coastlines; or to challenge the existing Americo-Christian ethic that requires human dominion over the planet.

Just one guy’s view of the things we need to be thinkin’ about.

A workshop, presented by a guy we paid to fly down from Alaska last week (in jumbo jets and rental cars), is one example of this nascent attempt at educating us rangers. Unfortunately, it was light on real climate change information, not effectively presented, and didn’t create within our small group eager acolytes running into the streets to warn us all of our impending doom should we continue to drive around our neighborhoods gawking at blinding Christmas light displays from the faux leather captain's chairs of our overheated, middle-east fueled monster cars whilst sucking down corn-filled mega-coffees in plastic cups.

It was not a stellar seminar, but there were a few little nuggets of information or inspiration that found their way into my notebook, perhaps not thoughts original to the speaker, but worthy of filing away in the nether recesses of my feeble mind as we look at incorporating this critical message under the redwood canopy. A few of those quick and cheap revelations follow thusly, transcribed almost verbatim from my recycled paper notebook:

Our global climate has been in a relatively stable for the past 10,000 years. The past 10 millenia have also seen the rise and flourishing of human civilization. Coincidence?

Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for about 100 years. Even if we stop producing it tomorrow, the warming impacts we produce today will remain into the next century. We are still breathing the carbon dioxide emitted from Henry Ford’s first car.

Consider the social element of climate change. How do we, or will we, respond? Consider climate change not as a natural phenomenon, but as a cultural one.

What can we do? What must we be telling people? That we must be able to adapt to the inevitable changing environment, and, we must change the way we live.

It’s under our control. Will global climate change produce a moderate warming that we humans can adapt to, or will it be a catastrophic warming that will change life on the planet forever?

The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones. It ended because we discovered a better way to live.

We don’t need to destroy ourselves to make ourselves comfortable.

Redwood Creek: One Tuesday in December

Tuesday, 11December2007, 930ish in the morning:

I finally get out for what’s become an all-too-rare walk on the beach this morning. The first thing to strike me, besides the strong and cool breeze on my ever-thinning locks, is the large rock just off shore – some call it Little Girl Rock – sitting atop a becalmed sea. The ocean, after several days of storms and wild surf is quiet again. Long swells of regularly spaced waves stretched out the full length of this three or four miles of beach beat out a smooth, regular rhythm on the shoreline.

Little Girl Rock sits atop the blue waters like an anchored ship in port. It’s shore-side peak rises like a unfurled sail drying in the shelter of the high bluff of Orick Hill. There’s no ring of splashing ripples around its rocky hull this morning, no cresting breakers splashing white foam high up its face. It sits quietly, still in a near-waveless sea.

Near the rock’s base, not far out from the mouth of Redwood Creek, five surfers float on long boards. Watching them, you see that the water is not as smooth as glassy as it appears from farther away. They rise and fall on the gentle swells and duck beneath early cresting waves.

Every few minutes a taller set of waves roll in. I get to see what I rarely see surfers doing here: standing up on their boards and actually surfing, riding the six to eight foot waves ‘til they bail out on the sand bar that fronts the mouth of the creek. They’re not simply floating and waiting as they usually do, though that’s never seemed like a bad way to spend a day either.

I’ve never surfed, so I certainly don’t understand the science behind knowing where and when the surfable swells are best along this 100-mile Humboldt coastline. But someone out there does. The five already on the water at 930 am become thirteen by 10 am, new arrivals approaching from both north and south sides of the creek.

Five or six crab boats dot the horizon, none of them too close to the shore this morning. A couple of crab pot buoys bob in the waves, originally confused by this amateur naturalist as floating critters ‘til the binoculars prove otherwise. It’s not quite the forest of colorful lobster buoys in Maine’s Blue Hill Bay, but enough of a presence to briefly transport me east to the summer morning moan of lobster boats hauling in their traps.

The mouth of Redwood Creek is its usual maelstrom of gravity-pressed creek crashing into the persistent pressure of the Pacific. About 100 gulls dot the southern bank of the creek; perhaps a dozen others surf the back and forth waters at creek’s edge. A solitary gull stands atop the larger rock at the mouth, a winged harbormaster for ships, surfers, seagulls and seals.

Turning east to the estuary, the bright sun reflecting off the lagoon waters and the stiff breeze pouring down the creek quickly have my eyes watering. Four small wading birds whose identity is disguised by my weather-induced tears scamper along the shoreline. (Probably western sandpipers, but could just as easily be semi-palmated sandpipers.)

A dozen seal heads pop out of the water, staring me down. I look away briefly, trying to clear my dripping eyes to see the birds. When I turn back to the seals, maybe 30 or even 40 shiny gray heads stare at me.

I wander across the dry channel separating the main stem of Redwood Creek from the south slough. I wasn’t seeing birds at all until I scared up a couple buffleheads hiding in the shadows of the grassy shoreline. A few more coots dot the calm backwaters as well.

Hasta la proxima.

Procrastination Destination: Lady Bird Johnson Grove

Friday 07December07

Standing beneath a millennia-old, 300 foot old-growth redwood in a windstorm is a humbling experience. Ten feet wide at eye level, the eye traces the deep grooves of soft gray bark skyward into the thick green canopy. On windy winter days like this, this tree and every other one surrounding me, bends and creaks and moans as a 30 mile-an-hour breeze effortlessly pushes their highest branches to and fro.

Watching this treetop ballet, you realize how fucking small we really are. It’s in moments like this you witness the power of the earth, of time, of forces we can never dream to match, much less completely comprehend. Even the redwoods, stalwart and timeless champions of terrestrial evolution we wish them to be, seem small and fleeting in relation to earth and space and time.

Perhaps my brain is overly taxed from participating in a global climate change workshop on Thursday, trying to come to terms with the eternal processes of atmosphere and global ocean currents. Add in my current read, Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World, in which massive continental plates and millions of years are tossed about casually within the story. My mind has been pushing those kind of big pictures around for a few days now.

A realization (or is it a revelation? an epiphany?) comes to me as I wander beneath the swirling redwood boughs on a blustery morning. The god we have created, in all his various and variant forms across cultures and continents to explain away our existence, our purpose, our actions, and our thoughts, if he exists, is too small for this world. The one that initiates the global winds and ceaseless ocean tides, cannot be concerned for niggling bipeds scattered over less than a third of this planet, which is itself nothing but a dust particle in the creation that is the universe, much less giving a whit about Super Bowl victories, who falls in love with who, the strongest Republican candidate, what you wear to church on Sunday morning, or how many virgins await you on the other side of that hand grenade pull.

We seek god, but we are myopic. We don’t see beyond ourselves. Listen to the winter wind in the redwood forest. Consider the endless roll of waves against a slender beach. It is there we glimpse, and only glimpse, forever.

A rational humanist searches for meaning on a breezy Friday while avoiding the meaningless minutia of his workday.

In praise of our local bookstores

A nice article in this morning's Eureka Times-Standard on our local bookstores. Curious, no, how we maintain a defense of books and bookstores via the electronic interloping internet. Most of what I learn these days about books comes via the web...reviews, news, and blogs. The saviour of books in our hands may well be the electrons on our fingertips.

There are few joys more worthy than an hour in a small, local, individual bookstore. My kids, avid readers themselves, have grown tired of my now six year old line as we wander past Arcata's Northtown Books..."Hey, I've heard this is a great bookstore. Want to check it out?" At least 30 or 40 minutes later, we wander back on to our intended path, usually with a new book or two in hand. I've also way-too-recently discovered (or rediscovered) the beauty of the used bookstore with the help of the Tin Can Mailman, where I'm finding much of my reading inventory from the distant past. And while I won't turn anyone away from a boxy Borders or Barnes and Noble (though I discourage Amazon 'cuz of there Republican leanings), the adventure of literary discovery arrives every day in the small town bookstore.

Here's the link to this morning's story, Independent Bookstores Persevere in the Digital Age, along with avenues to Eureka Books and one of my new favorite blogs from the new Eureka Books owner.

Mind the Gap

....at least a while longer 'til I figure out what I really want to be doin' with this place.