Driving home from the office yesterday, I had to pull over to capture this small gathering of Roosevelt elk on a thin peninsula of grass in the middle of Big Lagoon. Just a bit further north a larger herd massed behind a falling-down barn across from the small state park visitor center setting a similarly picturesque scene. This morning, through the fog and rain, the full Big Lagoon herd grazed the narrow strips of cut grass along the old Redwood Highway at Stone Lagoon.
Some may wonder at the sense of a 35 mile, one-way commute every day, but for my money the half hour drive past Clam Beach, Trinidad, the lagoons and the redwoods has to be among the finest drives to work in the country.
I'm thinkin' I could get used to all this hope and optimism. Feels good after the last eight years, doesn't it? I couldn't help singin' along with Pete Seeger on this one....
Monday morning postscript: Do kids learn these American standards in school anymore? A while back, When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again (Hurrah! Hurrah!) came up on my Ipod. (Thank you Ken Burns.) My kids, 10 & 15, hadn't ever heard the song before and frantically rolled up the windows while I marched out the tune as we drove past the Arcata Plaza.
Do the public schools still teach the music of our collective heritage? Do kids today open dog-eared music textbooks after morning recess to learn America the Beautiful, God Bless America (favoring Kate Smith's Broad Street Bullies rendition over the Bronx Bomber's 9/11 Irish cop tenor), This Land is Your Land, The Star Spangled Banner, America America ("Oh beautiful for spacious skies"), and We Shall Overcome? Have these standards fallen victim to music program budget cuts and political correctness? Did I just answer my own question?
Sure, some of these songs glorify war, or a particular god, or contain subtle racism in the second or third verses, yet they are essential elements of the American soundtrack, no? And, I believe, there is tremendous value in learning our collective history behind the music, including its sordid or shameful elements.
It's lonely (not to mention hard on the ears) being the only one singing along with our national heritage as we drive along those ribbons of highways. Lord knows I need the accompaniment. Do I sound curmudgeonly enough yet?
The ocean is an almost unnatural hue of royal blue resting under an equally brilliant and cloudless sky. Gently curling, bright white breakers roll and trill on a bed of cascading pebbles.
Reading Rock, nearly five miles offshore, is squashed to half its usual size and has been dragged at least a mile closer to shore - or at least it appears so in the optical tricks played on this shimmering mid-winter day.
The temperature at the office reached 73 degrees shortly after 12 o'clock, only to plummet 11 degrees before the bells chimed half-noon.
Few travelers pause here on their Redwood Highway journey today, and most that do are in splendid moods - a tangible benefit of sunny and warm winter days. That the visitors are few allow me dive deeper into Thoreau's Walden, fast becoming my unreachable ideal for the mental meanders some read here.
White gulls dot the sapphire ocean a few yards offshore. Little Girl Rock stands stately and calm, the proverbial ship in a calm harbor.
There's little time to enjoy the beach on this most glorious of days. Try as I might, my presence is requested at an interagency meeting about soil. I can think of no better way to spend the finest day in months than sitting in a windowless conference room discussing the bureaucracy of dirt. (My apologies to those earnest soil scientists out there among my readership.) I aggressively tried to avoid this entanglement, but I was discovered before I could wander too far off.
I've been scanning the ocean for whales all morning. Though today's becalmed sea is ideal for spotting southbound spouts, none desired discovery today. If only I could've been as fortunate.
Driving home from the office yesterday, I had to pull over to capture this small gathering of Roosevelt elk on a thin peninsula of grass in the middle of Big Lagoon. Just a bit further north a larger herd massed behind a falling-down barn across from the small state park visitor center setting a similarly picturesque scene. This morning, through the fog and rain, the full Big Lagoon herd grazed the narrow strips of cut grass along the old Redwood Highway at Stone Lagoon.
