Under the Cork Tree

Here and now

2010-01-29T16:56:00.000-08:00

Friday, 3pm

It's one of those monochrome afternoons where everything appears as if in an old black and white movie. The dark slate sand set against the steely gray sea underneath a patchwork overcast sky. The horizon doesn't exist between the silvery water and flat and somber clouds. Only the dark shadow of Reading Rock marks the boundary between ocean and sky.

The only hint of color appears in isolated blades of beach grass and the translucent jade in that final line of breaking waves on the shore. Even the redwoods on faraway hillsides appear black on this hazy, late afternoon.

The receding tide is already far out though the official low tide doesn't arrive for another three hours. The beach is wide and long with a steep downhill run to the water. A line of dark boulders marks an almost walkable path out the the Sister Rocks. The Sisters and Little Girl Rock stand taller than usual in the shrinking ocean.

Gray and white gulls, Westerns mostly with a few Californians sifted among them, gather on the north side of the creek. Eight mergansers paddle in the calm backwater outside the mainstem of the cascading creek; One male swims calmly with four females, while three other males hang out and fish nearby. I wonder briefly who are the lucky ones.

A pile of blubbery harbor seals laze on the inside of the spit - silver, spotted, charcoal and vanilla - all shades lie together, unconcerned for the most part. As I stroll by, two scouts slip in the cold creek and monitor my progress past their tribe. The rest crane their thick necks and casually watch me through gentle black eyes.

Dark clouds slowly drift in over the hills from the southeast.

Low tide reveals Redwood Creek's deep channel into the Pacific. Rapids tumble over boulders usually hidden by high tides, or even higher low tides, and cascade a hundred yards out in to the ocean.

Walks on this beach tend to draw me inward, into deep thoughts about time, purpose, what I want to be when I grow up, or what I should have been by now and why I'm not there yet. These thoughts can be consuming, and for far too long I've been consumed by them.

A few days ago, I decided to let those kinds of thoughts disappear for a while, to focus on the here and now, the present and not tomorrow. Somewhere, and I forget where, I read, happiness comes when it's not pursued. It's been a pretty good week since I made that small commitment.

The rain begins to spit as I drift off into these deeper thoughts. Thank you, gray skies. The now of staying dry overwhelms my contemplative nature as I head back to my dry car.

Words

2010-01-15T14:17:00.000-08:00

15 January 2010

Dear Journal,

I apologize for taking so long to write you. Icould say I've been busy at work, or perhaps the madness that is the holidays overtook me. But that's not quite true. I've had the time. I've even had the inclination to write, many times. Yet I haven't. Unsure of what to say, or how to say it, or more honestly, why I would be saying anything at all. I lost my voice. And now I struggle to get it back.

I think I think too much. And by thinking, and rethinking, I stall and procrastinate, diverting my attentions elsewhere, pushing available words farther away from my pen, and very nearly out of sight altogether where they cannot be retrieved.

I wish to write again, and to return to your good graces, Squire. Not, mind you, because I think I write good, but because I enjoy the writing. Over these past weeks and months, I've wandered the same places as I have for years, watching, observing, considering, pen in hand, camera stowed and ready in the pocket, binoculars around my collar, open to discovery, revelation, inspiration. I stroll from beach to creek to estuary, and sometimes the other way 'round, seeking something worthwhile to relate back to you.

Alas, the words that rise to the fore when I walk, at least the fore of my mind if not my pen, began to sound the same as every day prior. And why keep telling the same damned story over and o'er.

Yet in my reluctance to tell a dull story, I've failed to tell any story at all. I've learned enough to know I enjoy the telling, even if I don't know much about what I'm saying.

Ben Franklin said either do something worth writing about or write something worth reading. It's abundantly clear I'm not pre-destined to to do much worthy of another's pen. If Gentle Ben is to be believed, my only chance at eternity lies in leaving a few misshapen words lying about for others to stumble upon. Perhaps a nugget of my verse will land near enough where some word-starved reader may discover it, consider it, and allow in a weak moment for that conjured phrase or image or idea to seep inside their brain. Perhaps at some odd moment in the future, that, those words will be recalled suddenly and for no apparent reason. Is that not immortality?

A change in pseudonym is due, though I've yet to settle on anything. There will be less rangering in this correspondence perhaps. I was never much good at that anyway. And while Humboldt County remains my primary landscape, it's not all that important where these words lay on the map. I'll continue relaying the discoveries of mid-afternoon beach strolls - the birds, the waves, the skies that open my mind to images and possibilities. An occasional rant or veiled memory will appear from no where now and then. I hope as well, to explore new ideas, those of simplicity, time, living in the moment. If there's any chance that writing could ever lead me anywhere, I have to write. I yam what I yam, Popeye says. The only thing I know is me, and even I don't that topic all that well.

Enough with the procrastination already. Hasta la proxima. Until the next time.

J

P.S. The ocean is a churning, steely green gray topped with sediment-laden, beige-tinted foam nearshore. Hundreds of western gulls share the mouth of the creek with colorful, breeding ready pelicans, a horde of 30 lazy harbor seals, and eight mergansers.

Chicago 1968: I was there.

2009-12-08T10:52:00.000-08:00

Recently I picked up Rick Perlstein's book, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. At the moment, I'm deep into 1968....the race riots that convulsed American cities, the anti-war protests that crippled LBJ, the emergence of Nixon's Silent Majority, endemic racism that pervaded all corners of country, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and the violence that marked the Democratic Convention in Chicago.

IN 40 years, it seems we've turned this era of tumult into a romance story of generational change, peace and love, non-violence, Camelot, Make Love Not War, the Smothers Brothers and the Beatles. Perlstein paints a picture of national turmoil, of astounding distrust between races and ages, of violence and uncertainty. It is a picture less romantic than terrifying.

And in the middle of it all, at the geographical epicenter of this Great American Upheaval was us. My family had moved to Chicago in 1967 when Dad entered the Unitarian seminary at the University of Chicago. Mom stayed home with me and my younger sister and brother, and in fairly short order was pregnant with my youngest brother.

We lived in a 2-bedroom townhouse in the Hyde Park area, a few blocks from the University. Two doors over was my best friend Charles. Down the street was a corner drugstore in a small strip mall where Charles and I bought our precious baseball cards - 10 cents for a 10-card pack . (I still have many of those 1968-1970 cards!) In another small group of townhouses adjacent to the strip mall, lived my lone girl friend, Charlotte. Her complex had a small gated park filled with newly planted trees where Charlotte patiently taught me how to pull apart leaves along the stem without leaving ragged edges.

Heading the other way there was a busy street we weren't allowed to cross alone. (52nd Street) I remember testing my adventurousness and walking up to the stop sign on the corner. The buildings over there had a darker feel, more dangerous somehow. Half a block or so up this street lived another best friend, Tony. Tony's mom, Lula, babysat us kids when my parents went out. I realized that Tony and Lula were black, but I didn't think much of it. We just played baseball and rode bikes and talked about the Cubs together. Such is the glory of liberal parents. I do remember that it was always Tony who came across 52nd Street to play with us. We didn't go over there.

But what of 1968? The memories of a five almost six year old moving from Kindergarten to first grade, can't recall anything about the violence of that summer. I know from history that Chicago erupted after the murder of Dr King. I've read about the mass gatherings of students, Yippies, hippies, and provocateurs during the Democrats August convention. I was there, but as a child should be, oblivious to it all.

My few memories of 1968 (or at least thereabouts) are of learning to ride my bike on the circular paths of nearby Washington Park, of climbing the trees outside Charlotte's house, trading baseball cards with Charles on his front steps, the night my brother was born, ice skating at the bottom of the Corn Cob towers downtown, watching the election results with my Mom on our small black and white TV and sensing the disgust in her voice as she tried to explain to me what a President Richard Nixon meant to us.

I've sent both my parents a letter asking them for their recollections of the summer of '68. What was it like for young parents of four young children amidst this chaos? I've heard my grandmother had gone so far as to purchase tickets for our family to escape the city should the violence overrun our neighborhood? Did my liberal-minded parents participate in any of those protests before coming home to make us dinner and put us to bed? Did they fear for us, for our community, our country? What did they think the future held for their children?

We were there. I was there - just a few blocks from the fault line of a changing America. Yet, I only remember being a kid.

Fire! (just a small one, really)

2009-12-02T10:41:00.000-08:00

Rounding the top of the hill early this morning, the smoke was easily apparent on the north side of the creek, even though the sky and the surrounding fog shared the same color. A small fire on this cold early morning, likely started by an illicit camper or early morning fisherman looking for a quick dose of warm. One cluster of smoke rises from behind a large, barkless redwood log that found its way to the beach a long time back. A finger of black traces up the hillside, maybe 30 feet higher into a patch of pampas grass. Heavier smoke floats up as the matted bases of each cluster of the exotic grass smokes then flares. A lone CDF firefighter outfitted in yellow nomex and a red helmet pulls apart the driftwood piles at the base of the big log while a few others watch from the warmth of their vehicles at the end of the dirt road. Otherwise there's not much going on here.

The gulls on the south bank of the creek don't seem to mind the extra activity this morning.

Lost

2009-11-24T08:24:00.000-08:00

Avian interlude

2009-11-17T12:38:00.000-08:00

(It's crappy out there today, but 'tweren't so yesterday afternoon when I'd planned on penning this piece.)

A hazy Monday afternoon. A clear, cool breeze brushes the beach when I'm finally able to peel my arse from the office chair and step out for a post-prandial saunter. Choppy waves are bereft of pattern. The everpresent low grumble of constantly churning water strums the bass as stereophonic trebles from breaking and running waves roll from the left ear to the right.

A dozen gulls at the mouth of the creek become two hundred in a manner of minutes, small flocks diving in from points west. A small California gull coasts the rippling creek from the estuary to the breaking edge of the closest wave, flapping off just in time to return to the estuary and ride the creek out again.

A single seal glides through the narrow channel from the calm estuary to the tempestuous surf, popping up just once to make sure I'm holding to my spot on the bank.

In the estuary, six grebes are joined by a double-crested cormorant for an afternoon of quiet fishing.

An osprey flaps silently above me, his black masked eyes to the ground, heading southward into the wind.

Loud twittering killdeer frantically pace the mostly dry south slough channel.

A great blue heron knows I'm approaching before I get there. He honks away on slow, lumbering wings trusting the cows on the other side of the slough more than me.

The neighborhood northern harrier posts up high above the alders, twirling softly, soundlessly.

A pair of male mallards cruise overhead. Amateur birders everywhere applaud their bright green heads.

Least sandpipers prance and dip in the exposed muddy floor of the draining creek.

An artfully camouflaged Wilson's snipe traces the grassy edges of the south slough. His mate (her mate?) emerges briefly from a hole carved into the deep grassbed before disappearing back inside. Alas, the time has come for me to do the same.

Ken Burns' Best Idea

2009-09-30T14:26:00.001-07:00

So have y'all been as glued to Channel 13 (KEET-TV) the past three nights as I have to Ken Burn's latest docu-series, The National Parks: America's Best Idea. After 26 years in the subject organization, I know I'm a bit biased, but not only am I learning a few things from Mr Burns, in many regards I'm feeling a renewed enthusiasm and energy for the work we try to do. Seems this profession has some merit after all.

A few random thoughts pulled from the depths of the easy chair as I watched the first three episodes:

Why can't I tell stories like Ken Burns? The guy's a genius storyteller. Hours of research, evocative music, compelling stories, intelligent and inspiring interviews. He does a better job of telling you about what we do than most of us do in doing the work that he's telling you about us doing. Of course, I'm just me with a computer and a tiny library and vast and glorious park to wander around. He's a multimillion dollar production company backed by huge corporate sponsors. Be he's just so damn good at spinning a great tale. I want to be able do that.

We do work in a noble profession after all. Though the days are too often bogged down in mind-numbing bureaucracy and frustrating drive-through tree tourists, it is for a worthy purpose that we do what we do. And Ken Burns isn't making a 12-hour history of the life insurance business, is he?

I need to read more on the transcendentalists. From the snippets I see in Burns and through recently read bios of John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau inspired many of the most important 19th century environmental thinkers. I need to go back and read some of their original stuff. I'm beginning to wonder if literally, spiritually, intellectually, perhaps I'm more akin to Thoreau and Emerson than any of my own generation?

Your dad knows a little somethin' after all. It's been fun watching this with the kids and knowing the next piece of the story before Burns tells it. For once, I'm not their idiot dad but someone who's picked up a thing or two along the way.

Did the redwoods miss their chance to be among those first iconic national parks? What if the entire, two million acre redwood range, from Oregon to Monterey Bay, hadn't been stolen from federal ownership before the 1880s? Yosemite, Sequoia, Yellowstone, and Mount Rainier were available to be set aside as our first National Parks in large part because those lands were owned by the federal government, and not by states or private individuals. Jerry and Gisele Rohde have an interesting piece in this month's Humboldt Historian (Fall '09) explaining the land fraud that moved public lands through foreign syndicates and in to private hands in a matter of years. Would we have lost nearly all of this grand and ancient forest as we almost lost the bison had the feds prevented their theft?

Three more episodes and six more hours. A dozen more thoughts to come, at the very least.

And for those wanting more of our local story, KEET-TV received a grant through the Ken Burns' backers, to produce Redwood National Park: Preserving Ancient Forests, the story of the establishment of Redwood National Park. It'll air this coming Sunday, October 4th at 7pm on Channel 13 (then rebroadcast Thursday, Oct. 8 and Saturday, Oct. 10). We'll get the sneak preview at the office tomorrow. Assuming the Claire and Sam have any of the skills of Ken Burns, they will have expunged the rantings of a occasional blogger from their program, thus ensuring its success.

Looking for tsunami tsigns

2009-09-30T11:45:00.000-07:00

"Tug on anything at all and you'll find it connected to everything else in the universe." John Muir.

I'm on the beach early today, a bit before the morning's high tide, curious to see if our beach shows any impact from last night's predicted 24-inch tsunami. Crescent City reported some errant sloshing around within the harbor around 9:30 last night, but I've heard nothing about other points on the north coast. It seems as good an excuse as any for spending a few minutes wandering this lonesome strand on a bright and cool September morning.

The sand is still wet higher on the beach than usual. The overnight surf made deep cuts in the ocean-side slopes. The beach is scoured of human foot prints. Narrow canine tracks in two straight lines and patches of triangular gull prints are all that decorate the beach in front of me. At least a few people normally precede me on mornings like this. There's no sign anyone's been here today.

The sand spit blocking Redwood Creek from reaching the Pacific looks washed over. Perhaps two-thirds of the broad beach is clear of footprints and driftwood. Several dessicated lines of brown foam crease the lee side of the spit, as if the surge tried to reach across the bar, falling short by a few yards. Is this evidence of a small tsunami, or just of strong surf during last night's high tide?

A fast-moving wave reaches my feet on the crest of the berm as I scribble these notes, erasing my footsteps fifty feet down the beach. Always keep your eyes on the ocean! The backing wave seems to retreat farther into the sea than the last set. Does this portend another tsunamic push, or just the oncoming tide? Or am I seeing all these things because I want to see them?

More than a hundred are dead and dozens more are missing in Samoa as I stroll this lonely beach on a quiet autumn morning. It was about this time on their morning that the magnitude 8 quake struck. I think about how easily reversed this moment might be. A few miles off our own shore, three larges pieces of the planet's crust crash and grind and tear at each other. In another moment, it could be the curious Samoan beachcomber that wanders his beach looking for smoothed sands or misplaced driftwood after hearing of an instant tragedy on a distant shore. 300 years ago it happened here, monstrous waves pouring over these very beaches within minutes of thunderous shaking. We hope that our luck holds a bit longer as we feel for those suffering an ocean away.

Huh?

2009-09-11T17:38:00.000-07:00

I've been outed, of sorts.

Surprised to find a mention of these here scribblings in this week's North Coast Journal's Best of Humboldt 2009. Flattered, of course, while recognizing that being Humboldt's Best Blogging Park Ranger is akin to bein' your Mama's favorite only child. Thanks anyways for the shout out, Heidi, but there are so many more erudite and interesting bloggers in our community who deserve notice more than I.

A bit curious too about the potential fallout from such a designation. As a deep closeted introvert, at least in private, not many know I occasionally spill a few words about in here. Good thing I kept the organizational politics and personalities mostly out of my rants and wanderings. For folks in the know, there's enough clues to pin the correct name plate to my rapidly graying chest. I can only hope that coworkers and friends don't read the Journal as closely as I do.

Does this mean I have to end my long summer hiatus and pick up the ol' pencil and keyboard again?

The everlasting pea

2009-06-10T12:53:00.001-07:00

Why does it seem that the most striking flowers of spring shouldn't be here at all? The everlasting pea (Lathyrus latifolius), is non-native. Exotic. Invasive. Unwanted save for those who enjoy a flash of bright color in the sea of grass of the backdunes.

From it's homeland in southern Europe, the everlasting pea has spread across North America and to every state except North Dakota and Florida, thus proving its good taste in travel destinations. Thomas Jefferson noted it on his Monticello homestead in the 1770s and planted it in his gardens (more likely his slaves planted it in his gardens) in 1807 while Jefferson was off bein' president.

It's not supposed to be here, and someday we may do something to eliminate it from this protected landscape. But on a quiet June morning, with the gate locked behind me and the beach to myself, I'm glad it's here.

Her night to shine

2009-06-09T12:38:00.000-07:00

Not that I'm bragging, but check out her stats from last night's 5-0 victory in the semifinals of Mad River Girls ASA 10 & Under tourney:

On the mound: 3 IP - 0 runs - 7 K's - 0 BB including a 3 strikeout bottom of the 6th to shut the door and send us on to the championships. At the plate: 2-fer-3 with a 2B, RBI and a run scored. Add in a nifty running catch at second and it was quite a night.

Kinda like wrapping up both Ellsbury and Papelbon and stuffing them into a 4'6" blonde ponytail.

'Twas her night to shine after weeks of patiently watching her freshman big sister's 25-0 championship season with the St Bernards Crusaders.

Not that she did it herself, of course. She and her teamates saved the most perfect of their 16 games this season for last night, an elimination game that would either end their season or propel them forward to the championships. Timely hitting, smart base running, strong defense, and stellar pitching from my kid and another great li'l thrower all came together on one magical night. That the victory came against the team that embarrassed us a week ago makes it all the more exciting.

It's so easy to be proud of two beautiful kids who seem to excel - in sports, school, and life - in ways that I never have. One has outgrown her dad's coaching skills and taken her game to a new level at a new position under new leadership. (Though I still offer my advice, she knows better than to listen.) The other, still trapped under coach/dad's tutelage, is emerging from the shadow of her big sister as an athletic force in her own petite right.

Can Dad match their glories when Arcata's D-league wood bat season begins next week? Not sure that I can, or that I even care to try. I'm satisfied bein' a proud dad for now.

First of May

2009-05-01T14:13:00.000-07:00

10am, Friday morning, the first day of May, just before low tide.

Unusually calm out here this morning. Almost no breeze to speak of. A flat, gray-blue sky. The ocean quieter than it's supposed to be. Feels more like a summer on Blue Hill Bay than the roiling Pacific coast.

A western grebe sits just out of reach atop the placid sea, wrestling a slender silvery fish into position for the long slide down his white gullet. Further out a black'n'white-backed loon rises and falls on modest swells.

Reading Rock seemingly floats above the ocean six miles out. The ebbing tide uncovers a rocky path from the north side of the creek to the Sisters. Dark boulders, usually unseen, surround Little Girl Rock. A single long wave breaks a hundred yards offshore indicating a shallow sandbar raised by gravels carved from the redwood hills and transported downhill in the belly of the creek.

The sun tries in vain to crack the gray clouds. It never quite makes it through, though the sky brightens and warms my neck nonetheless.

Three cormorants zip by as I reach the mouth of the creek. The waves are taller here and crash more loudly where they meet the creek's rushing waters. The mouth bends to the south, the lack of recent rain slowing its push to the ocean.

Three dozen gulls rest on the peninsula separating creek and ocean. Western gulls, California gulls, and a single Heerman's gull, his orange bill and charcoal gray body distinguishing him from the rest. Two Caspian terns soar above the small seagull gathering, followed a moment later by a solitary pelican gliding inches above the waves.

I follow a single line of heron tracks from the mouth back to the calm estuary. The timeless drumming of the surf gives way to the twittering of a thousand songbirds. This place comes alive in the spring. It’s long past time for me to do the same.

Cathedral Hush

2009-02-04T11:39:00.000-08:00

Perhaps I spent too many years under the spacious skies of the southwest, but I am more often drawn to the wide panorama of the sea or the grassy vistas of high prairies than the secluded depths of the forest. When I dare to enter its lush green underworld, the redwood forest overwhelms me with silence and timelessness. A recent wander along Lost Man Creek roused a vision, yet left me searching for words. Just as an amateur photographer can never capture the majesty of the redwoods, an aspiring scribbler such as I, is hopelessly, shamelessly lost in painting with pen the verdant blanket enveloping the lone traveler. In my wordless stead, I substitute the words of the more accomplished Mr Steinbeck:

"No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time."

"There's a cathedral hush here. Perhaps the thick soft bark absorbs sound and creates a silence. The trees rise straight up to zenith; there is no horizon. The dawn comes early and remains dawn until the sun is high. Then the green fernlike foliage so far up strains the sunlight to a green gold and distributes it in shafts or rather in stripes of light and shade. After the sun passes zenith it is afternoon and very quickly evening with a whispering dusk as long as was the morning.

"Birds move in the dim light or flash like sparks through the stripes of sun, but they make little sound. Underfoot is a mattress of needles deposited for over two thousand years. No sound of footsteps can be heard on this thick blanket. To me there's a remote and cloistered feeling here. One holds back speech for fear of disturbing something - what? From my earliest childhood I've felt that something was going on in the groves, something of which I was not a part."

"And only these few are left - a stunning memory of what the world was like once long ago. Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it?"

A Peninsula of Elk

2009-01-28T07:55:00.000-08:00

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.

Gettin' that feeling good feeling again.

2009-01-18T16:09:00.000-08:00

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?

It's 73 friggin' degrees! I don't want to be responsible today.

2009-01-13T15:25:00.000-08:00

Does it get any better than this?

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.

The Secret of the River

2008-12-31T06:39:00.001-08:00

But he learned more from the river than Vasudeva could teach him. He learned from it continually. Above all, he learned from it how to listen, to listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinions. ...
He once asked him, "Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?"
A bright smile spread over Vasudeva's face.
"Yes, Siddhartha," he said. "Is that what you mean? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future?" ...
And once again when the river swelled during the rainy season and roared loudly, Siddhartha said: "Is it not true, my friend, that the river has very many voices? Has it not the voice of a king, of a warrior, of a bull, of a night bird, of a pregnant woman, and a sighing man, and a thousand other voices?"
"It is so," nodded Vasudeva, "the voices of all living creatures are in its voice."
from Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse

How a Grinch enjoys the holidays

2008-12-24T11:44:00.000-08:00

Holiday happy hour kicks off in 15 minutes! (Of course, by the time this post is complete, I'll likely be somewhere between rounds 1 and 2.)

The insanity that is our American Christmas is over and now the holidays may begin. Mine officially kicked off last night when the first pumpkin pie slid into the oven.

"I hate Christmas!"

My kids will tell you that's been my mantra ever since Thanksgiving dinner was recycled for the final time. It's not Christmas per se that frustrates me as much as the shopping, the imperative to spend money we don't have on doodads we don't need, the traffic, the crap that fills up even my favorite stores this time of year. (Who needs a table sized book of cute puppies or the Seinfeld version of Trivial Pursuit and where do they hide this junk during the rest of the year?)

Jesus is the reason for the season? Yeah, right. Anyone been to the USofA recently? Have you seen any sign of the risen lord anywhere near the hurried and frustrated shoppers, grumpy overworked clerks, and speeding SUV's at the Bayshore Mall?

And it's the endless stream of piano recitals, basketball tourneys, ballet programs, school pageants, office parties, and volunteer board dinners all crammed into the last two weeks of the year. Can't we hold even one of these events in the doldrums of mid-February and allow just one night in December to breathe?

I hate the 6-week build-up to Christmas, the commercialization of Christmas, the greed and rush and selfishness of Christmas. I'm not a believer, so I don't find solace in the birth of a messiah.

This time of year, I find my peace and celebration in the kitchen, preparing a once a year weekend of feasting for the family and occasionally some others. I even enjoy the multiple trips to the Co-Op (for real food) and Safeway (for the not so real food I can't find in the local outlets). I don't even mind the mountains of dirty dishes my creations create.

The kitchen staff (me) clocked in yesterday afternoon and remains on duty throughout today and tomorrow. Short breaks are provided to reluctantly attend Christmas Eve mass and excitedly participate in the Christmas morning gift orgy. First out of the kitchen were the world's best cranberry sauce, 2 pumpkin pies and the cornbread required for the Christmas day stuffing. Today we focus on our not-so-traditional Christmas Eve Smorgasbord...the wife's Swedish heritage celebrated this year Mediterranean style with a little Pasta e Fagioli, fine cheeses and salame, and an experimental spinach and shallot polenta torte, all served alongside a 2006 Oswego Hills Marechal Foch from the Willamette Valley. We'll polish off the aforementioned pumpkin pies around the Christmas tree in our new Christmas pj's. Me and Mrs Claus will enjoy Irish coffees while we wrap the Christmas loot.

Following our traditional crack of dawn present-opening (kids never sleep in on Christmas Eve, do they?) we'll enjoy a simple French Toast breakfast, a rasher of bacon, and mimosas for those of us of sufficient age.

While the others try to break their newest electronic gadget or park themselves in front of season 4 of The Office, I'll don the chef's jacket and cap, and get back to work on the smoked Willie Bird, warmed and filled with a cornbread stuffing. Oregano potato cakes, rosemary yams, green beans with lemon and pine nuts, and green chile gravy will join the bird atop the good China. An '05 Stags Leap Cabernet is set to accompany the meal. When we're too stuffed to see straight, we'll pile on the double mocha pecan pie.

Today's a good day for a holiday. My girls are out of the house leaving me to my Frankensteinian machinations in the kitchen. Christmas tunes play in the background on the computer. The house smells of garlic and sage and kahlua and cranberries.

And my 15 minutes are over! Now where's that bottle opener?

Happy eats. Happy holidays. And we'll see y'all when the leftovers are finished.

A few minutes with a solitary seagull

2008-12-18T11:46:00.000-08:00

A lone seagull floats easily over the calm water, rising and falling on the unseasonably small waves between storms. His bright white head, free of dirty gray streaks, highlights his maturity among his kind. He’s alone, yet unbothered by his solitude. Peacefully, he coasts slowly northward atop a royal blue sea on a cold winter afternoon.

A quarter mile away, a churning flock of his brethren flip and flap above the creek. It is chaos: blurred wings, screeching heard the length of the beach, birds on the water, birds in the air, birds in constant, frenetic motion. They’re busy, every one of them. But busy with what, I can’t tell.

The sun is gold on the horizon. The breeze streaming down from the eastern hills is cold. Tomorrow’s storm appears in the distance, a dark wall of gray rising north of the setting sun. The seagull is unconcerned.

He pauses briefly when I stop to pull out my notebook. Does he wait for me? Probably not, but I imagine a kindred spirit, another soul seeking quiet and calm amid the season’s frenzy. For him, this solitary swim is a moment between storms and raging surf, away from the daily squabble for food and shelter necessary to survive the harsh winter. For me, the solitude of the beach pulls me away from the activity and noise and chaos and crowds and stress that have come to mark our American Christmas.

“Alone among others.” It’s a phrase I stumbled across in a book a couple years ago, and one that could be the pithy caption under my grainy black and white photo in life’s yearbook. In career, home and community, I am surrounded by others. Yet, increasingly, mostly by choice, and especially in this season, I enjoy my own company more than the camaraderie of the crowd. The world swirls around me, and the faster it swirls, the more I seek solitude.

In the couple of minutes I’ve paused to scribble these notes and chill my fingertips, the seagull has vanished. There’s no sign of him on the water or in the sky. The seagull flock flutters in the distance, their wings flashing white in the reflection of the setting sun. Perhaps he’s joined them. Maybe two proved too much a crowd for him.

As much as I want to imagine the gull as a spirit or heavenly metaphor intended for my personal reflection, I realize it’s mere coincidence. The cosmos don’t work that way. Still, it’s heartening to know that the search for quiet and solitude is not mine alone. It’s part of the way things work. For each of us, there comes a time to be together and a time to be alone.

Redwood philately

2008-12-17T11:25:00.001-08:00

Our backyard redwoods will be featured on the US Post Office's 2009 Priority Mail stamps available in January. (Yellowstone's Old Faithful graces the more expensive 2009 Express Mail stamps.) The illustration shows a pair of Eddie Bauer attired hikers (Does the woman look like Jennifer Aniston to you, too?) beneath the towering redwood canopy. The illustration is the digital creation of an Illinois artist under the direction of a southern California art director. These long-distance artists (no locals were available apparently) capture nicely the multi-layered canopy, fire scars, ferns, even an old dead top tree...all indicative of old growth forests. I'd love to find out which of our forests from Santa Cruz to Humboldt and Del Norte served as the model for the illustration.

Though I'm no where close to being a philatelic historian, the redwoods were last featured by the USPS in the 2006 Wonders of America series of 39-cent first class stamps. The only other redwood-themed stamp I've discovered in 12 minutes of exhaustive googling research is a 1964 issue honoring John Muir with redwoods as the backdrop. Though they could be the giant sequoias with which Muir has more of a stronger association, the shape of the trees and their proximity to one another makes 'em look a whole lot more like our neighborhood coast redwoods.

Here's a link to yesterday's USPS press release on the Redwood stamp including directions on where and where to get 'em when they're available: http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/2008/pr08_132.htm

A moment of calm before the storm

2008-12-12T14:53:00.001-08:00

Is this the calm before the storm? I've been following the increasing number of dire warnings all morning: Coast Guard marine alerts, Weather Service hazardous weather outlooks, high surf advisories, special weather statements. Yet from the windows on the beach, it's still surprisingly calm shortly after lunch.

On the beach, there's a cold breeze, but not terribly so. The ocean is churning, but not as dramatically as I've seen. Even the sound of the curling waves is hushed. Gulls raft quietly just beyond the surf rather than flock noisily at the creek mouth. They are invisible but for the binoculars.

The sky is a monochrome gray from one horizon to the other. Everything appears grainy as if cut from the pages of a pre-color National Geographic Magazine. In moments, the sky is not so much colored as it is textured. Low puffy clouds are parted by distant winds temporarily revealing tightly ribbed clouds higher up.

It is a heavy, repressive gray. The dying leaves of the coastal shrubbery are distant memories of their golden autumn brilliance. The only colors to speak of are the red stripes on the flag over the building, the orange bill of a passing cormorant, and the yellow kayaks trailered on the side of Orick Hill. The mighty redwoods are only dark shadows on the hillside.

As I return to car, the first mists of the anticipated storm dot the windshield. Writing this from the bureaucratic comfort of the office less than 30 minutes later, the rain pours down in sheets across the highway.

Four minutes

2008-12-09T15:01:00.001-08:00

It’s 4:40 in the afternoon, two hours since a near-minus tide turned on itself and started its return towards the crest of the beach. Even now the beach is wider than I’ve seen it in weeks. Redwood Creek’s 67 mile run extends several yards farther out in the ocean than normal. Dark rocks usually encircled by ocean waves at the outpouring creek are reachable by dry sand this afternoon.

Don’t look at the sun! Tiny circles of gray temporarily burned into my eyes force me to use my peripheral vision for tonight’s sunset. A cold wind streams down the broad boulevard of sand from the north. One hundred gulls gather at the mouth of the creek. Two large and out of place pelicans do a poor job of hiding amidst the flock of gulls.

At 4:44 the edge of the sun kisses the thin line at the end of the world. A narrow band of distant fog shades a dark line across the sun’s bottom edge. The sky mellows, pale blues slip into soft grays while a fiery orange glows on the horizon.

By 4:46 the sun is nearly halfway gone. Baby blanket colors, pinks and blues, tint the thin clouds. At 4:47, it’s just a rounded orange speed bump, then a thumb tack, then a dot.

By 4:48, the sun is gone. No flash of green. No angel choirs. No great splash or sizzling steam. Just gone. The ocean seems calmer and quieter though I know that’s my imagination. The beach darkens to a cold gray. My northbound footprints at the water’s edge are dark shadows in the sand where they haven’t already been erased by incoming waves.

Four minutes from beginning to end. Four minutes for a burning ball of gas 870,000 miles across and 95 million miles away to slide across the line between earth and sky three miles from where I stand.

In the east, in the fading pink sky, the pointed green tips of the world’s tallest trees serrate the pink-tinged eastern horizon where tomorrow, it starts all over again.

December Sunset

2008-12-03T13:56:00.000-08:00

I closed the gate to the Redwood Highway a little after four and had the beach to myself for an hour. A cool, late afternoon breeze blew down from the north. Hundreds of gulls gathered at the mouth of the creek while dozens more rafted through the narrow outlet to the sea or flittered over the booming surf. The ocean was rough and ragged, a churning white foam stretching well beyond the last rock which stood silently above the fray a half mile off shore.

I've watched sunsets countless times in my two score and six years, but I continue to be fascinated by how effortlessly the sky melds from one color to the next and how fast the sun slides into the black line of the horizon.

Interlude: Atlantis

2008-11-22T08:50:00.000-08:00

It's been so long since I've done much of anything in here. It seems that inspirations for writing only come anymore when I'm far away from the computer, and when I sit down with time to write there's nothing there.

So, at the risk of becoming one of those mindless video re-posters, I stumbled across this clip from a '69 Smothers Brothers episode (courtesy of BoingBoing) of Scottish folk legend Donovan performing his ballad, Atlantis, backed up by the Brothers Smothers and Peter, Paul and Mary.

This was one of my favorite songs growing up, still being played in 1971 when at age 9 I got my first radio. In some strange way, I think Donovan may have helped kickstart my curiosity for history, archeology, and folklore. It was Plato's 4th century musings on this mythical kingdom that spurred, in part, Iberian explorations of the furthest reaches of the Atlantic and the Americas. And it was a fascination with the Spanish colonial period that fueled the eventual pursuit of my history degree 16 centuries later.

My teenage daughter has discovered the joys of this ballad recently and added it to her iPod too. That Donovan shares an almost scary resemblance to a kid from her 8th grade class helps.

Enjoy the holidays, y'all. Hail Atlantis!

An open mouth

2008-11-04T13:43:00.000-08:00

The mouth of Redwood Creek opened during yesterday afternoon's high tide, not long after I finished scribbling my previous note here. Unfortunately, a last-minute call to pick up a kid in town came before I could get back out and witness the event myself.

By the time I got out on the beach this morning, the summertime sand spit had been severed by a five foot deep, 5o foot wide chasm. A rising tide was forcing the Pacific into the fresh gap, scouring the steep sand walls and widening the creek mouth with every wave. Two, then three, then four seals popped their mottled white faces out of the outflowing estuary waters clearly enjoying the easy passage from the ocean to the creek for the first time in months. (The photos above show Monday morning's scene on the left, today's on the right.)

Change

2008-11-03T09:54:00.000-08:00

The first real winter storm has carved a steep edge on to the beach south of Redwood Creek. Weekend waves sliced a ten-foot tall slope from the crest of the sand berm to the roiling white and brown ocean surf. A stiff breeze blows in from the hills to the east, bending the tops of the breakers backward. Thin streams of surf blown off the top of each wave fly back into the ocean like the wispy strands of Joe Biden's combover.

The sky is a dark gray on this early morning, broken only by wind-cleared strips of lighter gray. Over the hills, an optimistic brightness shines through the clouds, breaking through briefly, before giving way to a high monotone gray ceiling.

The breaking waves are tall and rolling steadily to shore. I try recalling the names of colors from the Crayola box - the big one with 128 colors. The ocean beyond the surf opens at a Midnight Blue before easing into a dark Jade Green as the morning progresses.

A few solitary gulls brave the breeze above the choppy surf. One seal tracks my walk down the beach, disappearing beneath the waves whene'er my eye catches his.

Redwood Creek and the Pacific are closer together than I've seen them since the sand spit closed in the early summer. Just a few yards separate the rain-swollen waters of the creek from the ocean. In fact, as I stand here, the easterly wind pushes the creek a few inches closer to the top of the sand berm. Though I've watched the mouth of this creek for several years, I've yet to witness the actual break-through of fresh water to the sea. Today looks and feels like a break-through kind of day.

The pressure of the creek on the sand bar feels ominous. All around the edges of the estuary, thick piles driftwood rafted down on the weekend's rain line the banks like anxious ticketholders at a general admission concert. All of this forest debris will be flushed into the ocean shortly, along with the salmon and steelhead fry that have incubated all summer in the warm fresh waters of the lagoon.

Last night's surf has scoured the sand clear up to the edges of the grassy dunes. Most of the game paths I usually take to connect the beach to the estuary boardwalk are flooded. The wooden walkway itself floats on the swollen waters.

The change of seasons is nigh. The creek is poised to open. Perhaps today on the next high tide. Maybe tomorrow after tonight's continuing downpour. You feel it on the breeze and in the spray of the surf. You see it in the wind-pressed waves blowing off the creek towards the Pacific. Summer's calm is ending, and the dynamic winter is set to begin on this small patch of the planet. Change we can believe in. Change that is inevitable.

Final VP Debate Preparations

2008-10-02T12:12:00.000-07:00

Two overripe avocados, skinned, pits removed, and mashed but still chunky.

One diced poblano chile. (Keep the seeds and veins if you like it extra spicy.)

One diced roma tomato.

Juice squeezed from one lime.
2-3 cloves of garlic, finely diced.

Combine all the above in a cool ceramic bowl and serve with blue corn chips.

From the grille, we're also serving up steamy hot Cincinnati Chili Dogs (made with healthier ground turkey and turkey dogs rather than the beef), complimented with piles of grated cheddar and yellow mustard. Add in a box of frozen TGI Fridays Fried Cheese Sticks and we're ready for the big game.

My friends, tonight the good people of America have the opportunity to witness one of the most anticipated political events of all time. I'll be there, or here actually, in front of my TV, bringing out the munchie menu we usually reserve for the Super Bowl or the final game of a Red Sox World Series championship. (I'll have to do this all again in a couple weeks, I suppose.)

The candidates are finishing up their final practice sessions, listening to tight-assed aides whispering last minute punch lines into their overtaxed brains, and mumbling incomprehensible tongue twisters to loosen their lips before tonight's verbal joust.

The pundits are in a tizzy, predicting and prognosticating the plausible outcome after the 90-minute debate. They say, let Sarah be Sarah, and that tonight we'll see someone other than the bumbling, ignorant, unprepared colonial governor we've seen interviewed over the past couple of weeks. They say that Biden must hold his tongue and his snark to avoid the appearance of picking on a girl or being condescending. They say he'd be best off keeping quiet and letting her humiliate herself as she's proven so capable of late.

I, for one, am hoping for more from Joe. I'm hoping for a "Jane, you ignorant slut" moment where he calls her out on her inexperience, incuriousity, and intellectual incompetence. I believe the McCain campaign has already sunk itself anyway, beginning with the Palin pick and then by letting her out of the Arctic Circle to talk on record to anyone at all.

Americans love a good crash, thus the popularity of Nascar and pairs figure skating. We've got a good one in the making here. 6pm on all the major channels.

Sending him home

2008-09-19T15:36:00.000-07:00

Given a better shortstop, he shouldn't have been on base at all in the top of the first inning of the third game of the wood bat league playoffs. He'd hit the ball well: a low line drive skipping hard off the dirt in front of the infielder. Never field the ball sideways when you can handle it straight on, I tell my spring league softball players. The shortstop sidestepped it though, bouncing the ball off the heel of his glove and into short left field. Our runner stood winded and safe on first.

A clean single to the gap moved our portly yet quick baserunner around second, teasing the outfielder to force a bad throw to third. Instead, the center fielder zipped the ball back to second behind our runner, allowing a nifty headfirst slide underneath the throw. Safe!, the umpire signals. Gotta love a dirty uniform.

Another clean hit up the middle and our runner sprints to third. The third base coach flails both arms wildly signaling a turn for home. The first run, as they say, is the most important, the jump start the team needs to move on in the tournament.

The catcher straddles the baseline, two hands raised high anticipating the throw. Our runner, in that split moment, recognizes that a slide between the catcher's legs leaves him far short of the base. His hips lean ever so slightly to the right. He pivots, carving an angle for a diving approach to the plate. He slices and accelerates to the left. His arm stretches behind the catcher reaching for the dish. The dust flies. The crowd and players all lean in for the call. And....

...and...

...and the walking boot comes off in 6 weeks. It's a simple thing, fortunately. A left ankle that dislocated and broke in a cloud of dust before popping itself back into place amid my cursing and grimacing in the dirt by the backstop. My teammates, their concern focused solely on their fallen comrade of course, drag me and my newly bum ankle across home before the catcher realizes I'd rolled completely past the plate, never coming anywhere close to scoring. The doc tells me I've broken the outer end of my fibula, the smaller of the lower leg bones, and the one, he says, they don't really care about since it doesn't support much weight. I don't even get to take that much time off work.

But the run counted. We went on to win that game and the next one before bowing out and taking home the faux marble plastic third place trophy. The ankle's more annoying than painful, but at least I've got a good story to tell.

Friday morning

2008-09-05T11:24:00.001-07:00

I walk north along the beach this morning, the warming yellows of the rising sun on my right, the cool gray fog blowing softly off the ocean to my left. As the sun slowly slides above the tops of the nearby hills, the alchemy of early morning turns the low-lying silvery haze to gold.

Aggressive waves overtopped the spit last night, clearing the sand of yesterday's footprints and gullprints. Steep banks have been carved into the sloping sands by the surf. A solitary line of tracks left by an early rising fox bisects the beach.

At the edge of the estuary, two pairs of Caspian terns each stake out some private space. In each pair, a larger steely-gray backed bird stands alongside a slightly smaller, mottled brown partner. A mating pair perhaps; Caspian terns partner for life. Or maybe a mother and child, or a father and child; these largest of terns continue to provide food for their children for up several months after they're born.

In either case, my presence disturbs them all. The two closest to me squawk off to join the second pair a hundred yards or so further up the beach, safe from this Converse clad intruder. The foursome is then interrupted by an annoyed gull who chases off one of the larger birds. Moments later, the absent tern is joined in its escape by one of the smaller ones.

The estuary waters shimmer in the morning light. Across the estuary, small frogs leap silently skyward, inches above the water's surface, making a meal of low flying insects before splashing awkwardly back into the green pool. The entire estuary simmers with hundreds of tiny splashes.

Like the seals in winter though, the frogs seem to sense my presence and the splashing diminishes wherever I approach the shore. They hide well in the clear water, waiting until I've moved on or turned away before resuming their breakfast.

It feels like fall. The number of people stopping by has suddenly and dramatically diminished. Our summer staff slowly dwindles, one by one heading off to other endeavours. The hectic pace of summer melts into the reflective calm of autumn. And, once again there's time to think. Time to walk. Time to wonder. Again. Thankfully.

Caribou Barbie Reads Good

2008-09-04T11:14:00.000-07:00

I got home late last night after a thrilling softball playoff game (losing in our last at-bat, goshdurnit) just in time to catch a replay of Sarah Palin's address to the Republican National Convention. I briefly fantasized that she'd announce, "I'm honored to be nominated, but woefully unprepared for this awesome task," then gracefully withdraw from consideration for the good of the nation.

But no, with a sparkle and a grin, Ms Palin blew us a kiss, denied her sordid past, and turned us all on. I'll admit it, she was good, especially if you enjoy red meat political sarcasm and cynicism wrapped up in a tight bun tossled with a healthy dose of resume fluffery and a few out'n'out lies.

But, then again, give me a professional wordsmith, three days of lockdown practice with a team of political image coaches, and expectations so ridiculously low following five days of embarrassing revelations about my family and (brief) political career, and I think even I could've lit a fire under a few thousand previously passionless partisan white folks with exaggerated tales of my hardscrabble suburban middle class life and limited executive experience.

Sarah Palin's highly touted and subsequently lauded speech was, of course, not of her own creation, but the carefully crafted words of bush aide Matthew Scully, read from the rolling screen of a plexiglass teleprompter. In fact, Palin's speech was originally written for an unknown male VP nominee (Romney perhaps?) and later dolled up to fit the new gender and family fairy tale that is McCain's hail mary choice for a ruling partner.

"Not anticipating that McCain would choose a woman as his running mate, the speech that was prepared in advance was "very masculine," according to campaign manager Rick Davis, and "we had to start from scratch." (Washington Post, 9/03/08).

That modern day political speeches are often ghosted by others more clever with words than the candidates themselves, is certainly no secret. But in the midst of her able recitation of Matthew Scully's script, this self-styled pitbull in lipstick had the cajones to attack Barack Obama for writing two books which thoroughly outline his own life story, his political philosophy, and his vision for the nation. Obama has also written all of his own major speeches that represent, (from Palin's lips and Scully's pen) "the idealism of high-flown speechmaking in which crowds are stirringly summoned to support great things".

I'm a lover of words and what words can do to provoke and inspire. Presidential campaigns are most certainly more than mere words. But I prefer knowing that the words coming from the mouths of those who yearn for my vote and my trust, emanate from their own thoughts, their own experiences, and their own dreams, not wholly created by clever underlings to be poured into the mouths of polished and pressed political mouthpieces.

Good times never felt so good

2008-08-06T10:03:00.001-07:00

A week ago this past Sunday, and nearly ten years to the hour that kid number two emerged into this world, we left our downtown Beantown hotel under the gray skies of a threatening thunderstorm. We’d seriously overpaid for a set of unrefundable tickets to see the the hometown Red Sox challenge the MF’n Yankees at Fenway Park, in part to celebrate the kid’s first decade, and in larger part to appease her Dad’s 35 year obsession with all things baseball, and the Sox in particular.

From the tinted window of a nondescript PF Chang’s, we watched as the New England skies darkened, inner city trees bent sideways, and artsy urban fountains carelessly sprayed the sidewalks in ominously foreshadowning winds. Then the Gods, who we reckoned at the time are not true baseball fans, unleashed a torrent of raindrops the size of buffalo nickels. Rush-hour walkers ducked for cover into the nearest shop, bar, or eatery, while our hearts sank. There was no way, even if the rain stopped, no way they could play a game after this kind of downpour.

Now I’m no great believer in fortune, especially those dispensed in stale factory wrapped cookies, but as the deluge continued, and our bithday girl blew out the lone candle on her complimentary scoop of ginger coconut ice cream, I cracked open my fortune cookie. It read:

“Good news of a long-awaited event will arrive soon.”

I put on my finest phony fortune happy face and announced it was time to break free of Chang’s chains and embark on the short, wet hike to Fenway. Rain or no, we're on the road to the Promised Land, kids.

We walked through the showers, heavy at times, joined on each passing block by other soggy yet hopeful pilgrims. Rounding the corner of Boylston and Massachusetts Avenues, the bright lights of the ballpark glimmered through the drizzle above Boston's brownstones. And at the precise moment we handed our tickets to the little old man draped with a cheap Red Sox poncho at Gate E, the rain stopped.

I’m convinced that a large part of the magic of Fenway Park eminates from the experience of walking through the archaic and chaotic stadium bowels, emerging through through the narrow breezeway into the magical world of America's baseball cathedral, with the greenest grass, the whitest uniforms, and the happiest fans. The one hour rain delay gave us time to enjoy an amazing sunset rising over the Green Monster and left field. Paraphrasing Kevin Costner, if there's a heaven, it has to look an awful lot like Fenway Park in late July.

The game did not disappoint. Our valiant Red Sox, mired in disappointing 3-10 post-All Star funk, and losers of the last two to the MF’n Yankees, took control of the game in the early innings. Jacoby Ellsbury's 1st inning running climb up the center field wall to steal a hit from Jeter; a pair of RBI doubles from Manny (the newest Dodger) Ramirez – my now-heartbroken daughter's favorite player; and an Ortiz home run hit on a line directly to us. If only we’d sat in row Q not row QQ we’d have brought that ball home!

9-4 Sox Win!, sending the boys from the Bronx slithering back to NYC.

And, as we returned to the hotel through the dark Boston streets, surrounded by hundreds of exuberant Fenway faithful, the rain began to fall once again. I don’t think anyone cared about gettin' wet at that point. And the Gods were forgiven for their earlier outburst.

Postcript: There’s a curious tradition at Fenway Park, dating all the way back to the late '90s. In the middle of the 8^th inning, the chords to Neil Diamond’s 1969 almost number one hit, "Sweet Caroline", pour from the stadium loudspeakers, quickly drowned out by 37,000 voices singing along in unison and hopelessly out of key. It is in some regards the most joyous part of the evening. Please sing along with us, albeit a few days later,as a damp summer Sunday night crowd of Fenway's faithful croon themselves and their team to victory over the MF’n Yankees. I know you know the words......

Our Seagull Lives

2008-08-05T17:03:00.000-07:00

The afternoon sky’s a monochrome gray as I step on to my beach for the first time in almost a month. The Pacific is only a shade darker than the sky and equally unemotional. The gray sand is littered with footprints, human and avian, as well as detritus from both species. Wave-tossed plastic scraps and sand-scarred cans mingle with cracked crustacean body parts, forgotten feathers and white puddles of bird poop. It’s an underwhelming return to one of my favorite spots of the neighborhood.

The only flash of vivid color comes from the bright orange bills of terns and gulls gathered by the dozens in several large flocks up and down the beach. Large Western gulls and the only slightly smaller California gulls, near indistinguishable from each other, stride between the dual-gray, Heerman’s gulls with deep orange bills. The sleek black-headed Caspian terns appear to stand guard over clusters of smaller, shaggy-haired Elegant terns, the first I’ve noticed in my brief attempts at birding identifying out here.

Sitting here watching the birds, I’m struck by the apparent similarities of our two colonial species. I've started a list of some of those thoughts, wonderin’ if there’s a motivational book that is yet to be written….”A Seagull’s Guide to Life, Love, and Incredible Wealth” ©, or something of the sort. (I call dibs on the royalties if any of y’all write the book before I do, which I won’t, but I can be bought out for a decent bottle of wine, a polite mention in the acknowledgements, and a couple of signed first editions.)

How People and Seagulls are Sort of Alike

We stand around in large groups, looking busy while doing lots of nothing.
At the first sign of discomfort, we all fly off in different directions eventually returning to the exact same spot of sand.
We greedily scavenge from someone else's effort, stealing what we can and squawking from a safe distance over someone else's rewards.
We gather in large groups of many different species, but cluster closely with our own kind.
We soar beautifully.
Occasionally we like to stand alone, off to the side, out on the edge, away from the crowd.
We breed easily with others, creating something new, indistinguishable, unique, and unidentifiable.
We thrive everywhere.

Please feel free to add, delete, adjust, mock, or decry as you wish.

Hasta la proxima.

Back to the fold

2008-08-05T15:42:00.000-07:00

I’m a bad blogger. ‘Twas not quite a year ago, I strolled into this endeavour, wrote an occasional egoistic monologue on nothin’ of utmost criticality, ginnin’ up a mob of two or three fawning fans with a couple of self-described clever turns of phrase, then I disappear for weeks, nay months, at a time. (Nothin’ in July! Absolutely nothin’.)

I’m sure others have said it through the course of history, but I remember reading Stephen King in his book “On Writing” sayin’ something to the effect, “If’n you want to be a writer, you have to write. Every day.” So, if anyone asks why I'm back, it's Mr King's fault.

I can’t promise every day, but I’m on the road to reforming myself, getting myself back on the right side of life and mind and body. Perhaps we’ll need another “Mind the Gap” posting now and again, but I’m stepping back into the pool, whether anyone reads the drivel presented here or not. Summer’s almost over. The crowds are beginning to dwindle. Vacation’s done come and gone. No excuses but those I invent.

Besides, gotta be in good literary standing to get an invite to the picnic, eh?

An end to the week near the end of the creek.

2008-06-27T10:48:00.000-07:00

I have not kept well my promise to record the near-daily story of the mouth of the creek. Spring - season of rebirth, rejuvenation, growth and change - has passed me by again, too much of my spare time willingly spent on a softball field or inside a visitor center coaching young players and young rangers on their new positions. I find only moments now to explore and think and craft selfish paragraphs while autumn and winter seem to allow hours.

In spite of little rain and unseasonable warmth, Redwood Creek stubbornly refuses to give up its path to the Pacific. The raging river of mid-winter is now a modest creek turned casually to the south once again. It flows just a few feet across and only inches deeper than me in its deepest channel, easily swimmable had I the courage to strip down and dog paddle across the chilly waters. Someday perhaps, but not today.

A small island bisects the creek not far from its outlet. Small riffles mark the shallowest edges where upstream sand and cobbles collect on the island's northern shoreline, eventually to choke the creek's path to the sea.

Black-capped, orange-billed Caspian terns congregate at the crest of the oceanside sandbar. The first (for me) Heerman's gulls have returned to the beach as well. Pelicans are few and far between this hazy morning. There's not a seal to be found.

Across the mouth someone has erected a twenty foot tall trunk in the sand next to one of the sister rocks. It's a nifty feat of engineering considering the plumb straightness of the pole and the digging and packing of the shifting beach sands necessary to prevent a Pisa-ish lean.

A smokey haze lies across the redwooded hills this morning, the faint smell of smoke mixing with the salty sea air. A sepia fog tints the coastline like a cheesy Photoshop gimmick.

The estuary is perhaps only days away from being a lagoon, soon closed for a couple of months to the sea. The water is calm, clear and green, more fresh than salt water. Cliff swallows who've established dozens of mud nests under the highest eaves of the nearby visitor center swoop in for a quick drink, slaking their thirst before returning to the requisite tasks of fortifying their summer homes and crapping on the increasing multitudes of European visitors unfazed by Humboldt's high gas prices.

I really do need to get out here some morning soon for a quick swim, before the calm waters stagnate with brown foam and seagull shit. Before the locals wake up for their morning walks among the driftwood. Before my coworkers arrive to greet the summer hordes. Before anyone would be around to notice the withering effects of cold water on this sun- and exercise-deprived body. The creek beckons from its sparkling edge. If only I'd brought a towel....

"Things are more like they are now than they have ever been."

2008-06-04T13:21:00.000-07:00

I was reminded of the Dwight Eisenhower quote above when comparing the photos of our surf fisherman taken on Monday with images of Yurok fishermen taken 80 years ago.

June 2008, 1/4 mile south of Redwood Creek:

1928, possibly at Luffenholtz Beach:

June 2008, near the mouth of Redwood Creek:

1928, 1/4 mile north of Redwood Creek:

(This Thomas T Waterman photo is borrowed from the Online Archive of California.)

Let us begin the work together

2008-06-03T23:05:00.000-07:00

All of you chose to support a candidate you believe in deeply. But at the end of the day, we aren’t the reason you came out and waited in lines that stretched block after block to make your voice heard. You didn’t do that because of me or Senator Clinton or anyone else. You did it because you know in your hearts that at this moment – a moment that will define a generation – we cannot afford to keep doing what we’ve been doing. We owe our children a better future. We owe our country a better future. And for all those who dream of that future tonight, I say – let us begin the work together. Let us unite in common effort to chart a new course for America.

Barack Obama, June 3, 2008

Time to think.

2008-06-03T14:27:00.000-07:00

After weeks of running from one end of the day to the other, I'm finding a few moments like yesterday afternoon to slow down and take a little time to think. A gray day, warm with the slightest of ocean breezes beckons me to the beach. As if that's not enough, I'm further spurred outdoors by the snide rantings of our resident crank who's determined to jerk every chain in the building. I escape to the calm of the Pacific, necessarily, and finally.

It's a quiet ocean today, barely a sound from the small, regularly rolling waves. A western grebe greets me at water's edge, his long slender neck held erect as he glides over the placid waters.

An elderly man in chest-high waders leans into the small surf. His handmade tripod fish net dips into the waves, searching, as the Yurok have done here for centuries. Our fisherman today is accompanied by his wife, three or four harbor seals, a couple of cormorants, and a gaggle of gulls. Apparently he's found a good spot. That, or the critters are as hopeful as he is.

He's retired, I come to learn, and lives in Blue Lake. He and the Missus wander up here a few times every year around this time. They're not fishing for anyone but themselves, just enough to stock the freezer. As he steps from the waves up to the dry sand, he holds up the bottom of the net which contains maybe a dozen silvery smelt and says to her, "Got my dinner. What're you havin'?"

The seals roll in the shallow surf briefly stranding themselves on the wet sand before wobbling themselves back into the waves. Seems they're having more success in hunting up some lunch than our fisherman.

Cormorants are common today, and pelicans are plentiful. It's quiet. There's activity, but not much of it. A perfectly lazy afternoon. Finally, time to think.

This kind of time has been rare this past month or more. At work, seven new summer rangers have joined us, all of 'em new, and in need of training, guidance, help, research and resources, and as you might expect from the government, tons of bureaucratic papers and hoops to overcome.

The girls' softball seasons are in full swing. I don't help my own downtime by coaching both of their teams, VP'ing the league, writing and managing the league schedules and tournaments, and creating and maintaining the league website.

But our seasons have been wonderful. Our 10 & Under girls are 6-4-2 going into the end of season tournament (a loss in the tourney last night has us needing to win the next one to keep playing). They're goofy and frenetic and learning so much so quickly. Our 16 & Under team is 11-0 thanks to stellar pitching, strong hitting (including a legit over-the-heads-of-everybody home run by my very own kid last week!), and experienced defense. We're the odds-on favorite to win it all, finally, this year.

We'll have an 8th grade graduate - a valedictorian, no less - this weekend, bringing family to town, a host of school trips, 8th grade dinners, awards ceremonies, and all the attendant events and emotions. Can it really be that my tow-headed baby girl who just yesterday paddled off to her first day of kindergarten in a blue and white catholic plaid jumper is off to high school?

Redwood Creek is in the final stages of becoming Redwood Lagoon for another summer. The sand bar thickens at the creek's mouth, a wall that the dwindling force of tumbling valley streams can longer overwhelm.

Parallel to the surf lies a 200-foot long, 15-foot wide pond where the creek just a month ago took a sharp right-angle turn to the south. That pond is now closed but for a small opening, just barely leapable by a bulging mid-lifer with just enough spring left in his step.

30 Caspian terns stand at the edge of a larger flock of western and mew gulls at the mouth of the creek. They're not happy with my approach and embark en masse. These orange-billed terns are much more graceful in flight than the frantic flapping of the gulls. Their bright white wings, tipped in black and thinly curved cut the air, soaring and curling above me, barking at me to keep moving.

The creek is now a slow meander to the sea, maybe 20 feet across at its mouth but still eight to ten feet deep. The ocean continues to push in while the creek presses out, but without the violence of the winter clash. As summer approaches, the creek slows. Another week or maybe two, and the summer lagoon will become still 'til the rains return.

I've never been a fisherman. It's not a requisite element in the cultural heritage of a suburban east coast kid. It doesn't look like a bad way to spend a quiet afternoon on the beach. For now though, even the efforts of this old fisherman, quietly, purposefully, easily dipping his net up and down in the surf looks like too much work. I'm enjoying the moment just sitting here, watching him and the rafting pelicans wait for the fish to come in.

Almost helps you understand the libertarians

2008-04-26T15:10:00.000-07:00

The letter arrived in the mail this morning:

April 23, 2008

Dear Arcata Dog Owner,

We have received no response to our letter dated February 25, 2008, requesting that you license your dog. If we do not receive a response by May 23, 2008, we will turn our records over to the police department. Per the Arcata Municipal Code, Title V, Chapter 2, Section 5221 - License Required. "It shall be unlawful for any person to own, keep or harbor any dog over six (6) months of age within the City for a period of time unless they first procure a license therefore."

(The threatening bolded italics are in the original letter.)

It's the kind of thing that makes one twitch and go, "Huh?"

I mean, wasn't it just six days ago that the city and county turned their collective law enforcement backs as nearly 3000 of our fellow Humboldtians, real and imagined, converged in a city park to light up the afternoon with who knows how many pounds of dope, which, unless someone can tell me different, is still an illegal substance (except for those who've paid off a mercenary physician for a constitutionally questionable note to smoke the stuff)?

I mean, we have drugs being sold in the open on the Arcata Plaza. We've got employable vagrants wanderin' the streets, peein' on walls, and beggin' working folks for cash. We've got contractors hiding environmental hazards on property they hope to turn into tenement housing. We have poachers cutting apart old growth forests to flip stolen shake bolts into cash to feed their meth addictions.

And instead, our fair city chooses to spend its time, money and resources threatening us and an 11 pound dachshund with a violation of the municipal code.

How many others received this letter? I'm gonna take a wild ass guess that the only ones who got it are those who have recently taken their dog to a local vet to have it vaccinated and cared for, and not the casual owners of free range, bastard pit bull mixes, uncollared and uncontrolled, that have never, and will never, see the inside of vet's office much less a vaccination of any kind.

Now, I'm not some right wing, gun'n'religion leaning, anti-pot zealot. But c'mon, can you ID the greater threat to the local peace and community prosperity in the line-up below?

...or...

(bottom photo shamelessly heisted from the HSU Lumberjack.)

A fool on a hill

2008-04-25T15:40:00.000-07:00

Today I have an aerial view of the mouth of Redwood Creek that didn’t exist on my last walk here two weeks ago. I’m sitting on an sliding escarpment of sand, first built up, then sharply carved by the past two months of winter rain and shifting ocean currents. On this same point of beach, where I once walked at the same level as the waves, I’m perched on the edge of an eroding precipice 25 feet above the westward bending creek.

The creek has two mouths today: the main channel rippling its way to the right and flushing into the open ocean, and a smaller, shallower channel trickling off the corner of the main channel, a tiny backwater passage that won’t exist in a few hours when its fresh banks are overrun by the incoming tide.

I can feel imminent change foreshadowed in this morning’s cool northerly breeze. By this time next month, the rains will have all but ceased. The gray sands will have closed the creek’s access to the sea as the creek is drained of winter rains and melting snow, lacking the energy to break through the sandy barrier.

Gray whales crease the placid ocean just beyond the cresting waves, shepherding their newborns through the dangerous maze of coastal rocks and orcas to the Arctic.

Geese move south, resting in the calm and shallow water of the estuary, feeding on the grasses planted for California’s happy cows.

Four Caspian terns mingle with a smaller-than-usual crowd of gulls on the thin isthmus of sand that holds back the blunt force of the Pacific from the estuary. Yesterday, a coworker spied six pelicans hovering over the surf, a sure sign that summer is not too far beyond this horizon.

There are fewer seals here now than the 40-strong horde hauled out on the beach most of last month. One surfs by in the rapids of Redwood Creek, turning a slippery shoulder back in my direction as he passes, gawking at the comparably blubber-free fool on the hill.

“We’re having more fun down here in the waves,” I imagine him calling up to me. His dark eyes laugh at the lonely figure who sits on a broken log safe from chill and power of the ocean, separated in so many ways from the seal’s world, a world of which he enviously and distantly wishes to be a part.

The Definition of Bitter (or, Why ABC News really really sucks)

2008-04-16T21:14:00.000-07:00

What an embarrassing night for ABC, and more importantly for a nation theoretically founded on the principal of intelligent discourse, in their conduct of tonight's phony made-for-idiot-TV campaign "debate". Nearly an hour devoted to rehashing trivial comments on sidebar People Magazine issues, issues that no one outside the joke that is the American coporate media cares a damn about. Jeremiah Wright. Lapel pins. The meaning of the word "bitter". Well, I'm bitter now dammit.

It's probably a good thing my girls shuffled me and my culturally elitist organic Petit Syrah out of the TV room. After an hour of unrestrained cursing and ball cap throwing at political flacks and coprolitic media pitchmen Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous, the three of 'em wisely and carefully escorted me out the door, favoring the half hour of mindless American Idol commercials presaging the narrowing of the faceless karaoke pop star wannabes down to six to the sight of la casa's lone male sputtering and fuming at the silvery-screened orb inside a faux antique cabinet.

Damn. I really wonder sometimes about the future of this country. I'm pissed and frustrated. I'm grieving and, yes, bitter, but without guns or religion to soothe me. And I'm wonderin' where a middle career guy with a mortgage and a 70 mile daily commute on 4 buck a gallon gas goes to make sense of it all.

People are dying in a needless war.

Millions wander the streets homeless.

We can't, we won't, pay our teachers a decent salary for the most important jobs in the whole damn world.

We're selling semi-legal dope on the plaza to professional panhandlers on phony medical pretenses.

Our planet is rapidly melting itself into oblivion.

And ABC thinks we should give a shit about whether Obama wears a half inch composite metal American flag facsimile made in Taiwan on his friggin' suit?!? Go to hell ABC. If I actually watched any of their programming I'd boycott it, but I suppose they're not really gonna miss me since there's nothing there to watch anyway.

I'm not gonna sleep well tonight, am I? Someone pass that wine cork puller thingie over here. This bottle's empty.

When I Grow Up....

2008-03-31T16:16:00.000-07:00

It's taken purt near two score and half a decade, but I finally know what I want to be when I grow up. Nevermind that I already come close to resembling a grown-up: a middling and muddling bureaucrat with 20-plus years of dedicated guv'mint service, a dad with two hungry (and gettin' hungrier) mouths to feed, rapidly graying chest hair and lengthening eyebrows, and the simple fact that I have no skills upon which to survive beyond the ability to yak in a friendly manner about things I know just barely enough about. I finally figgered it out.

I want to be a lighthouse keeper.

A drive up the Oregon Coast late last week confirmed it. I dragged the girls off the 101 wherever I thought I could get away with it and for as long as I thought they wouldn't whine too loudly. First stop was the Cape Blanco light (the upper photo) where I chatted with the elderly whale watching volunteers long enough to spy a couple of spouts a mile offshore in a brisk cold breeze.

A while later, we saved the 36 bucks it would've cost us to elevator down to the World Famous Sea Lion Caves for the more frugal $3 parking fee at the Heceta Head Lighthouse (photo numero dos). From there, I was able to put my limited cetacean knowledge to use with an impromptu whale talk of my own to a couple of Wisconsin tourists who probably wondered why I was excitedly yakkin' at 'em after spying several spouts slipping through the water from this tremendous viewpoint. My girls walked back down the hill without me, impatient to get to the hotel and on to Portland for 8th grade graduation dress shopping, the real purpose of this trip, not the lighthouses and whales that I'd come along for.

(Heceta Head is named, by the by, after Spanish sailor Bruno de Hezeta who piloted the first Spanish ship to dock in Trinidad Bay in the summer of 1775, stepping ashore on 10 June 1775. Hezeta, along with the captain of another small boat, Don Juan Francisco de Bodega y Quadra (of Bodega Bay fame) claimed the Humboldt coast for Spain on June 11th, the Holy Day of the Trinity, thus the name Trinidad.)

OK, I know being a real lighthouse keeper probably demands more work than I care to romanticize. The fog and the wind and the rain probably begin to eat on you after a while. As would the isolation, at least now and then, I suppose.

But I'm willing to give it a go. From the sunny perch of my spacious lighthouse tender's cabin (once I move the quaint and undoubtedly not inexpensive B&B operation off the Heceta Head cliffs), I will write all those great things I've been meaning to write. I will welcome just a few select visitors to the headlands and explore with them the birds and whales and tides and storms and history of the Pacific coast.

Now, if I can just figure out how the vintage bookstore fits into the keeper's house, I'll be ready for my version of adulthood to settle in.

Mind the Gap...again

2008-03-19T21:51:00.001-07:00

....once again. I shall return once things settle down, assuming they do.

On and on, on and on, on and on.

2008-03-05T06:18:00.001-08:00

She wins Rhode Island. He wins Vermont. She wins Ohio big, then edges him in the Texas primaries. But wait! He wins the Texas caucuses and earns a bigger piece of the delegate pie. And so it goes. On and on.

A couple of weeks ago, the kids and I watched Field of Dreams, the one movie that consistently makes grown men choke up and sniffle like women watching a Renee Zellweger flick. Then baseball's Spring Training kicked off on Valentine's Day, a day when two loves are satisfied in one sitting. Toss in the past couple weeks of Humboldt sunshine which brings our own gloves and balls out of the bottom of the sports basket in the garage. The scent of aged glove leather and the pop of balls in reformed pockets announce the beginning of spring.

Then on one of my thrice weekly browsings of Northtown Books, a copy of W.P Kinsella's magical novel, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy pops up on the sales table. It's the story of a 1908 exhibition game between the Chicago Cubs (Tinkers to Evers to Chance & the last Cubs' World Series) and the semi-pro Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-Stars, a game lasting 2000 innings, replete with albinos, feisty dwarves, Hall of Fame names from baseball's glory days, floods, Indian spirits, and windows in time.

200 pages in with another 100 to go, the epic game's in its sixth day and somewhere around 300 innings. Day after day, the players slog on. When the visiting North Side nine score in the top of an inning, the hometown Iowa farm boys inevitably pull out a run to knot it in the bottom frame. They break for hot, full-course meals served by local Christian cultists, and for sleep, only to return to the field at dawn. And the game goes on.

Page 199 introduces Hall of Fame umpire Bill Klem who's summoned from the Majors to umpire the game when the local man in blue misses a call that would've decided the game in the Cubs' favor.

"How long will you let the game go on?" calls a dapper, white-haired reporter.

"The game shall continue until it is resolved," says Klem.

"But why?" asks the reporter.

"Sir," says Klem, drawing himself up until he is as tall as the reporter, who is not very tall. "I need not justify my decisions, any more than I need to justify a call of ball or strike, safe or out. The game will continue because I believe that it should."

America's Democrats are not quite ready to see their epic game end either. While some grow weary of the back and forth, up and down, nasty and nice, We the People have spoken, and need not justify our actions. The game goes on as it has, as it will, until it is resolved. Perhaps it will take a 40-day flood, or the magical rub of an albino's mane, or the chanting of a long-dead Iowa Indian, but there will be resolution. As there should. We're on page 199. But there are 111 pages, and 10 states, left to our story.

As Stephen Bishop once crooned....

On and on
I just keep on trying
And I smile when I feel like crying
On and on, on and on, on and on

On and on, on and on, on and on
On and on, on and on, on and on

Driftwood Vernacular

2008-02-22T15:16:00.000-08:00

Borrowing from Wikipedia, that eminent source of all things believed by someone else to be true, “vernacular architecture” is the term used to identify structures built from “immediately available resources to address immediate needs.” The definition goes on to describe such structures as usually “crude and unrefined”. No where does the term more rightly find its fruit than on north coast beaches where countless driftwood structures organically materialize from the sand, crafted by unseen hands in a moment’s inspiration, for very temporary occupancy or simple personal fancy.

I’d like to introduce what I hope becomes an occasional series highlighting a distinct architectural style found on this one stretch of beach and others where a steady supply of movable driftwood is available, a style I’ve coined Driftwood Vernacular.[1]

On our little beach, we often discover outstanding examples of driftwood vernacular architecture. The beach here is liberally strewn with driftwood rafted down untold miles of north coast creeks and rivers, smoothed and polished by the sands and salts of the roiling Pacific, and tossed willy-nilly across the silvery Humboldt sands. These smoothed sections of redwood, fir, madrone, oak, alder, and hemlock are the life-sized Lincoln Logs for countless structures that rise and fall with the seasons and the tides.

Driftwood structures, it is presumed, are most often thrown up quickly by regular folks like you and me, but by those with more limited attention spans. While others in their beachcombing party are content to watch the waves, scan for shorebirds, gawk at the seals, or hunt for the perfect stone, these creative constructionists, untrained in the architectural arts, see utility in the storm-tossed beach litter. Fitting peg to hole and beam to post, or crafting tipi tripods without the benefit of rawhide lashes from fresh bison sinew, their creations rise from the sand in mere moments. Then the builders, like the Anasazi of yore, vanish.[2]

Their structures remain behind…for a while at least. Occasionally, they’re reinforced, added to, or altered by the next set of beach walkers. School kids who begin their seasonal migrations to the parks in early March are regular contributors to the driftwood vernacular portfolio. College spring breakers who migrate for shorter periods but at similar times to local school kids, are also suspected participants in the local driftwood arts.

Tides and time take their toll. The harshness of winter’s storms bear no mercy upon these structures. Older buildings are cannibalized by more recent builders who believe they can improve upon the last craftsman’s efforts. And it’s sad but true that now and then, some mindless bureaucrat hoping only for the faint praise of a governmental safety commendation, or perhaps believing that wild beaches must remain free of man’s handiworks, will dismantle and tear asunder the creative genius of those who came before them.[3]

I hope to create among both of the readers of this blog, an appreciation and understanding of Humboldt County’s unique driftwood vernacular landscape. Through documenting their appearance and disappearance here, we can raise the public’s awareness of this important element of coastal heritage of the ultra-near past and present (though if we find something interesting, we may delve into the deeper past as well.)
___
The photos above are of the most current structure on the beach. A small abode, designed for one occupant or a very familiar pair, it is only a few feet across, with a small entry portal. It lacks a roof, as do many of our driftwood vernacular pieces. It does, however, contain the rare example of driftwood furniture: a small seat in the southwest corner of the one-room dwelling. This structure also contains a clue to the builder’s intentions in the charcoal-etched “House” sign, vertically planted at the entryway.

Built on the eastern slope of the high-arching beach, away from the blunt force of the ocean winds, one can imagine the rolling sounds of the surf lulling the occupant into a brief afternoon doze, or perhaps a zen-like meditative state from which the occupant could consider their place in the universe in relative comfort and safety. With the open roof and open door design and a good pair of binoculars, birdwatching opportunities abound in the nearby estuary. Privacy is also assured as most casual beach denizens would steer to the ocean’s side of the beach, leaving this modest structure generally undisturbed.
___
Outside contributors to this article are welcomed. Email or post a link in the comments if you care to share your driftwood vernacular experiences with the masses.

[1] I just invented that term, so any future use of the phrase driftwood vernacular must henceforth be attributed to me. I know, because I Googled it and nothing came up. Like Wikipedia, I’m free to make stuff up as long as it sounds sort of intelligent and no one tries to discredit me.
[2] Yes, I know the Anasazi did not vanish into thin air but dispersed across the southwest and are the forebears of today’s Pueblo peoples, but the phrase above makes for a more interesting literary statement. Literal truth must step aside occasionally for self-described clever turns of phrase.
[3] This is not me.

The Perfect Stone: A Valentine's Tale

2008-02-14T15:06:00.000-08:00

I saw it lying there in the wet sand on a day not unlike today. The last gentle wave had slipped back to the sea leaving behind streaks of puffy white foam and popping bubbles as hidden air pockets sucked the ocean water into the sand. A mosaic of colored pebbles decorated the gray sands beneath my feet.

One small rock, set off by itself, away from the clustered masses, caught my attention. It is small, an inch or so across, and flat, less than a quarter inch thick. It fits perfectly in the small depression in the center of your palm. Hold your hands together as if you’re praying, or if you’re the non-catholic waiting in the communion line for the priest’s blessing. That tiny gap between your two palms is the exact size of this stone.

It is smooth and flawless: there are no cracks, no crystalline inclusions, no chips, dents, or dings. It is very near a geometric circle, if not quite perfectly round, trending almost heart-shaped. And it is a pure, even, flawless jet black.

I waited a few minutes, contemplating and examining this seemingly common stone. Often a rock that appears unique and stunning in the temporary polish of sea water, loses its luster as it dries. Bright reds, greens, browns and blacks tend to turn an indistinct gray as the warmth of the sun or your hands draw the moisture away. But while I waited there patiently on this lazy afternoon, the rock kept its shine as it dried.

I knew then and announced it to myself: I just found the perfect stone.

That evening, with great flourish, I presented the perfect stone to my family. At first they were skeptical. How can a stone be perfect, they asked. What makes this rock more special than all the other rocks from the sea? Who are you to claim this stone stands above all other stones?

Then I let them hold the perfect stone. They felt its smooth, black coolness in their hands. Turned it over in their fingers. Clasped it between their palms. Rubbed its smooth surface against their equally smooth cheeks. Though they searched, they too could find no flaws on this rock. And soon, they understood that I had indeed found the perfect stone.

“Can I keep it, Daddy?” said one child.

“No,” I said. “This is the perfect stone. I need to care for it myself.”

“I’ll take good care of it,” said the other child.

“No,” I said. “I found it, thus it is my responsibility.

My lovely wife looked up at me and asked, “Can I have it? If you love me, you’ll give it to me.”

“I"m sorry my love,” I said. "What’s mine is yours, now and forever. But this is my rock. I will keep it next to our bed and you can see it every day. You can even pick it up and hold it if you wish. But the perfect stone belongs to me.”

And so it was. Every time the family would walk together on the beach, one of us would find another seemingly perfect stone. We’d examine it closely, turn it over and over and consider its qualities. There were many contenders. And when we came home and held the challenger up to the perfect stone, its flaws were instantly revealed. Today, an abandoned flower pot sits by the back door, overflowing with almost-perfect stones. All fell short of the perfect stone.

Now and then, my wife would ask, “Can I have the perfect stone?” And every time I would tell her that she should consider it ours, as long as she knew it was really mine. I would hand it to her and let her hold it for a while, to be charmed once again by its simple perfection. But after a few minutes, fearing that any longer may imply some sort of dual ownership, I would ask for it back. She would pout in that girlish, you-don’t-really-love-me-do-you flirting way that women have perfected, and hand the perfect stone back to me.

For months, the perfect stone sat quietly (as stones are wont to do) next to my bed. I shared it with my family when they asked. We even brought it down to impress a few friends on occasion. All agreed that no finer stone had ever been seen.

On Saint Valentine’s Day I struggle, as all men struggle each and every year, with how to honor the love created when two souls join together forever. Flowers are standard and expected, of course. Lingerie works when you’re young, before you get the lecture about it being a gift for the man, not the woman. Chocolates either sit in the cabinet uneaten because holiday chocolates rarely taste as good as they look, or they’re eaten too quickly, making your loved one nauseous and hyperactive, certainly not conditions conducive to romance.

On one such Valentine’s evening not so very long ago, I sat on the edge of the bed. In one hand I held an empty Hallmark card. In the other hand rested the perfect stone. I looked it over carefully. I considered its origins and its discovery. I remembered the wonder it had brought to our family and our friends. After all these many months resting comfortably on my bedside table, the perfect stone retained all of its glorious perfection. Confident and comfortable in the difficult decision I had made moments earlier, I slipped the perfect stone into the card, licked the gummy glue, and sealed the envelope.

The perfect stone fell out of the card and into her hand. She looked at it, held it in the small pocket in the palm of her hand. She rolled it over once or twice. Then she started to cry. Not tears of annoyance. Not the sneering I’d anticipated. But the happy tears you see when the wealthy yet aloof guy finally consents to marry the plain but boring older sister with tightly pressed breasts in Masterpiece Theater versions of Jane Austen novels. (Or so I’ve gathered as I walk through the TV room wondering how they watch that stuff.)

Mind you, she’s only cried with one other gift I’ve presented, and that was our engagement ring 23 years ago. The perfect stone became the perfect gift, bringing a swell of tears to her blue eyes.

“It’s the perfect stone,” she said, biting down gently on her lower lip. “I thought it was yours.”

“Yes, my love. It was mine. Now, it’s yours," I replied with all the Victorian romantic flourish I could muster.

She laughed through her tears. I laughed with her, and at her, for crying over a stupid little rock.

But it wasn’t a stupid little rock, was it? It is the perfect stone.

Tonight the perfect stone sits alone in a blue Wedgewood pottery dish on her bedside table. Every once in a while, she hands it to me and asks if I want to hold the perfect stone, just for a moment. I usually accept, remembering the time when it belonged to me. Then I hand it back to her. It’s in good hands now.

Beavers & Bureaucrats

2008-02-12T20:24:00.001-08:00

It’s a cool February late afternoon, a steady breeze blows in from the north, and a not-quite-foggy haze in the pastel sky just before sunset. I’ve spent much of the day sequestered in a box we call a visitors center with little ambition to get much done and alarmingly few visitors to chat with. All afternoon I’ve stared out the front windows at a glorious day, wanting to join the gulls in their swirling and diving over the surf that sweeps in on the beach in regular and oddly horizontal waves.

Foregoing the opportunity to spend the final hour of my day in yet another box I call my office, I venture out to the mouth of the creek as the sun slips down towards a horizon hidden in distant clouds.

A large gathering of mew gulls and western gulls huddles around the mouth of the creek. I find a seat on the low bench of sand carved out by recent swift running waters from upstream. The estuary has returned to its pre-storm bulb shape as the channel narrows and calm water once again sits in its southern bend.

Every couple of minutes a surge of sea water riding on two or three larger waves pushes through the channel. The main surge pushes straight up the deeper main channel, small, rolling waves surging upstream through the boulder-lined levee walls towards town. A smaller pulse of water bends around the small sandy peninsula on the south bank of the creek, easing its way around the curved shoreline and gently swelling the estuary’s south slough.

25 harbor seals laze at the end of that tiny peninsula, the high curving bank of sand protecting them from the ocean surf. They watch me warily as they always do wondering if or when they’ll need to rock their sausage-like bodies off the dry sand into the water if I approach any closer. A couple of faint-hearted fellows bail into the water when I reach in my pocket for the camera, only to return to the beach a few minutes later when they realize I’m not going anywhere. These same two or three chickenshit seals repeat their panicked escapes twice more, once when I pull out a pen to take these notes, then again when I reach in my back pocket for a hankie to wipe away the post-flu nasal drip.

I walk back by way of the south slough of the estuary needing to head home, more to help with science fair projects than a desire to leave this spot on the beach. Just as I step onto the observation platform overlooking the estuary, I hear quiet munching. Just below me, not ten feet away sits a plump brown beaver noshing on some willow stalks. I don’t think he even noticed me for the first ten seconds or so. It was reaching (again) for that damn camera that catches his attention. He looks up at me, a bit pissed I think for interrupting his happy hour, and slides quietly into the calm, dark waters and disappears.

It was, folks, my first beaver. At least my first Humboldt beaver. I know what you’re thinking: “Bob, you’re a ranger. You must see this shit all the time!” It doesn’t happen that way. I’m more typically, by position more than desire, the office jockey doing paperish tasks and organizing other folks to get out and experience this stuff than actually getting out to play in the out of doors myself. But lately it’s the making-up of excuses to get out here so I have something to occasionally write about that’s opened up the bureaucratic blinders to everything that shares this little corner of the planet with me.

Not a bad job, eh, when you can write off an hour on the beach as a pay-worthy experience. Hasta la proxima.

The Romney Rules: A campaign strategy for 2012

2008-02-06T10:50:00.000-08:00

“…there was a special feeling in my heart when I realized that the three places Ann and I lived have all voted for us — Michigan, Massachusetts, and Utah.”

Mitt said it most clearly last night in claiming favorite son victories in all three of his home states. All the other candidates did just as well among their own hometown folk. Huck and Hillary won Arkansas, with Hillary adding the ol' Chappaqua family homestead in New York. McCain took Arizona. Obama won Illinois, Hawaii, and the ex-pats in Indonesia. Hillary did manage to lose her childhood home to the sitting Senator from Illinois, however, in the only contested hometown race.

Based on those results, I hereby officially announce my candidacy for the 2012 Republican nomination for president.

Why Republican? Simple political expediency. The winner-take-all primary format guarantees I win all the delegates from anywhere I once called home, and provides the clearest path to victory. (This proportional thing the Democrats are doing is much too confusing for me and the national media, and anything too complicated for the blown-dry hairpieces of mainstream journalism just isn’t shared with the public at large since we’re more easily entertained by Brittany Spears' underpants and cute photos of the world’s ugliest dog, which should not be confused as one in the same thing.)

Plus, Republican positions are much less complicated, more black ‘n’ white (literally) than are the nuanced and convoluted Democratic positions that no one ever quite understands. (See the prior parenthetical comments about complexibilityness in the national dialogue.) Simple is good in today's America.

So if you’re lookin’ to invest your future campaign contributions in a winning crusade, I’m the perfect national candidate. For the record, I’m only claiming hometown status in places I (or my parents) actually resided and had US Postal delivery.

Here’s the math:

Rhode Island	Humble birthplace	19 delegates
Maryland	Pre-school	37 delegates
Illinois	K-3 (and an early Cubs fan)	70 delegates
Massachusetts	Grades 3-7 (Go Sox!) and 2 years workin’	43 delegates
New Jersey	Garden State Pkwy, Exit 142. Discovered the female vote.	52 delegates
Pennsylvania	High School amid the birth of the supermall	74 Delegates
Texas	3 years of college, a fundamentalist Christian college to boot	138 delegates
Washington DC	More college	19 delegates
Colorado	Yet another college	46 delegates
New Mexico	A college degree (finally) + 12 years careering + wife + kids	32 delegates
South Dakota	A summer of workin’	26 delegates
Idaho	2 summers of workin’	31 delegates
Virginia	A winter of workin’	63 delegates
California	6 years now and growin’	172 delegates

By simply claiming favorite son status, I have 822 of the 1191 delegates necessary for victory before the race even begins. If I can pull in my wife’s home state of Florida (113 delegates), Maine where I’ve spent many a summer (20), and both Ohio (88) and Arizona (52) where I have deep family roots, I’m at 1063 committed delegates. Another 128 delegates shouldn’t be difficult considering my Obama-like charm, Hillarious intellect, Romneyesque good looks, and liberal use (though that may not be the proper Republican phraseology) of Huckabee’s holy bookcase in my campaign commercials.

So, attaining the Republican nomination won’t be an issue, especially now that being pro-choice, anti-Bush, anti-gun, anti-war,and of squishy religious beliefs are no longer screen-out factors. The same math guarantees an Electoral College victory in Nov 2012.

The bigger questions come as we slip into the lame duck years of my administration (which I hope come quickly since I’m not really interested in workin’ that hard) as to where to locate the Bob Flame presidential library and which of my former homes is designated Bob Flame Boyhood Home National Historic Site. Both of those questions, though, should provide ample opportunities for corporate fundraising graft as my tenure as your 45^th president draws to a close.

A flawless plan, don’t you think?

My Endorsements: Super Sunday & Super Tuesday

2008-02-03T10:45:00.001-08:00

Not that anyone of sound and independent mind should really care, but here are the crucial picks for the crucial issues of the day from one middle-aged, middle-class, middle-mortgage, mid-level bureaucrat, husband, and dad.

Super Sunday: I grew up just outside of Boston in the ‘70s, back when they were the Boston Patriots led by QB Jim Plunkett, RB Sam Bam Cunningham, and WR Randy Vataha. The Philadelphia Eagles supplanted the Pats as my favorite team in high school, but I continue to follow ‘em, and, quite honestly, the Patriots have provided a few more opportunities to cheer in recent years than have the Birds.

After an impossible and impressive run to 18-0, it’d be a shame to see ‘em lose this last and championship game. While I usually run with the underdogs in the Super Bowl just to see top dogs get knocked off the roof of their dog house, Fate demands a Patriots victory today. A season-long streak like this comes along once a generation. And it’s time to witness a little perfection in our world, don’t ya think? I’ll be grinding up some salsa and guacamole, frozen mozzarella sticks, and boilin’ up the chili dogs by 3pm today. It’s the Patriots’, all the way.

Super Tuesday: I will stand in line on Tuesday morning and color in my voter's bubble for Barack Obama…because it’s time to change. I have no doubt that Hillary would be a solid, formidable, effective president. If she emerges victorious at the end of this process, I will support her with all I have available to give. The positions taken by Clinton and Obama are not all that radically different. In all fairness, I’m having a hard time figuring out what they would do differently than the other when elected.

But……

I’m so tired of the language of politics today. So beleaguered by the pettiness, the crassness, the obnoxiousness, the shiftiness of the dialogue. I’m exhausted by right v left, blue v red, east v west, Hannity v Colmes, Carville v Matalin. For 16 years, this country has done nothing but holler at each other across increasingly rigid lines. You can blame talk radio, the insipid corporate media, and the internet, but we are no longer one country, indivisible. We are not united to stand; we are divided to fail. Another four or eight years with the Clintons in the White House just prolongs the angry, short-sighted, politically expedient rhetoric, not only in Washington, but in our own communities across the continent.

It’s time for America to speak with a new voice. It’s time for someone who can lead us with a vision for the future, a vision that includes justice and opportunity for everyone. The only one in this race capable of changing the nature of our national dialogue is Barack Obama.

I admire the way Senator Obama has kept his campaign focused on the future, on changing the framework of the debate, and generally steering clear of the name-calling and blame-placing brought upon the race by the Clintons. I was among the hundreds of star-struck fans at Bill’s Eureka performance a few weeks ago, but the Clinton campaign proved itself that night, and continues to prove itself today not only capable, but eager to sink into the political muck to reach a political victory, and not of reaching up to take us to a new place.

Perhaps my vote is a vote against something as much as it is a vote for something. And it’s likely that my vote for Obama will be cancelled out within my own household. But, and it’s become cliché, it’s time for a change. For the country’s sake, we have to end the politics of polarization, stop this rhetorical inanity, and move forward, to a new future, a future we where can are proud to be United States and united Americans again. Barack Obama is the only one standing in the campaign capable of leading us there.

What about all the ballot initiatives, Bob? I oppose the entire ballot initiative process in principal, so I probably won’t vote on any of ‘em, out of pure spite. This is idiot special interest democracy run amok. I’m tired of being hustled at the Farmer’s Market and the Safeway parking lot by students and ne’er do wells who don’t understand the nature of what they’re asking us to sign on the dotted line for, and who are almost always paid by the signature by some corporation, special interest group, or billionaire. How about doing away with this ridiculous ballot initiative process altogether and making the legislature do the job we send ‘em to Sacramento to do for a change?

And while we’re on the topic, we already have a term-limit law in place, folks. It’s been there since the founding of the state and the US Constitution. It’s called an election. If you don’t’ like your congressman, vote him/her the hell out of office. There’s absolutely nothing stopping you.

Enough ranting. I’ve got guacamole to create.

Happy Birthday Ernie Banks

2008-01-31T14:58:00.001-08:00

(Now if this ain’t serendipity... I’ve been spinning this essay ‘round my brain for a couple of weeks or more, but while floating the web lookin’ for good images as illustrations for the piece, I discover that today, January 31st, is Ernie Bank’s 77th birthday. Now I’m a fan as you’ll soon see, but not so idiotically fanatical as to have actually known this date before the fact. But knowing it now, this collection of memories begs to be written today.)

Way back in 1969, we lived in downtown Chicago. I was a mere 6 and a half that summer. Dad was attending the Unitarian Theological Seminary. Mom was a mom to four of us. We lived in a brick townhouse on South Kimbark Avenue in a racially diverse neighborhood not far from the University of Chicago. My best friends were a Jewish kid named Charles who lived in the townhouse next to ours; Tony, the son of our black babysitter Lula, and was a year older than us; and Charlotte, my first love, the blonde daughter of first generation Swedish immigrants who lived in another townhouse around the corner next to the park with the playground jungle gym, who's mother once served us pancakes for lunch.

I discovered baseball the summer before ‘69. 1968 was a tumultuous year, especially in Chicago. Much of the maelstrom passed well over the head of this first grader at the U of Chicago Lab School. (I’m assuming the Lab School is where they trained new teachers and/or experimented with new methods of schoolin’ youngsters.) I do remember our family riding our bikes down to the shores of Lake Michigan to see the gathering of National Guard tanks and troops, though I don’t recall whether that was after the Bobby Kennedy assassination, the Martin Luther King assassination, or the riots at the Democratic Convention. Whatever the occasion, seeing green army men and tanks in my neighborhood was pretty cool.

But at six and a half, only baseball and my friends really mattered. The Chicago Cubs were my first team, a team who’s starting line-up I can still recite today. I spent hours cross-legged in front of a black and white television (you know, the kind where you actually had to get up to change the channel or adjust the volume) watching my team win every game.

Charles and I both started our baseball card collections during the summer of ’68. On Saturday mornings, after we’d each received our weekly allowance, we’d walk down to the local drug store in the tiny strip mall just past the playground. (Gotta wonder whether I’d allow my 6 year old to walk down an inner city Chicago street without adult chaperones today. We haven’t let ‘em walk alone to the Arcata Plaza yet!) We’d carefully finger our way through the stack of waxed packs inside a thin cardboard box at the checkout counter trying to identify the best cards by touch, before selecting the fore-ordained pack of Topps baseball cards that would be ours. Ten cards and a stick of pink bubblegum for a dime. (10 cards for a dime! There ain’t no value like the baseball collectibles world anymore.)

As soon as we exited the front door, the wax paper was ripped away and tossed into the trash can at the corner of the storefront, and we rustled through the small stack of cardboard pictures searching for our favorite Cubs or other players we recognized. Charles, Tony and I held elaborate card trading sessions on the cement front steps of the townhouse.

Some of the older kids in the neighborhood showed us how to flip cards against the step. We quickly abandoned this game when we learned you lost your card when your flip landed short of the other guy’s flip. And it’s no fun to lose the cards you just paid a whole ten cents for. (I still have that stack of cards from 1968 and 1969, held apart in a special box, separate from the several thousand other baseball cards in a chest in the back of the closet.)

On May 13, 1969, I went to my first game at Wrigley Field. Mom had somehow gotten her hands on a couple of tickets. She arranged to pick me up early from school (since this was two decades before there were lights at Wrigley). I remember handing the early dismissal note to my teacher that morning, then watching the clock on the wall, counting the eternal minutes until 12:15 when I could abandon my classmates with a grin and leave penmanship and spelling lessons to go see a Cubs game!

12:15 finally arrived. The young blonde teacher motioned to me quietly while the rest of the class worked on their papers. I walked down the empty hall, unescorted, pushed open the large wooden school doors, and stepped out on to the granite stairway. True to form, my mother wasn’t there. She was then, and still is, at least 15 minutes slower than everyone else in getting anywhere. But soon enough, I saw her coming down the street in our white, wood-paneled Ford station wagon and away we went.

As if for the sole benefit of this six year old at his first-ever baseball game, the Cubs provided a certifiable rout: 19 to nothing over the hapless expansion San Diego Padres. I have the still fresh memory of sitting on the third base line, probably 20 or 30 rows up, underneath the overhanging roof. The light green grass and dark green ivy walls were brilliant, lit by the spring sun and viewed from the cool, dark shade of the grandstand. All day long there were Cubs on base, balls from our white pin-striped good guys spinning past the gray and brown suited opponents into the outfield grass, blue-capped runners rounding third – right in front of me! – on their way home again and again.

And leading the way, the man who became my baseball hero (to this day), Ernie Banks. Mr Cub, closing in the end of his Hall of Fame career though I didn’t know or care about his past at that point, hit three home runs and knocked in seven RBIs just for me that sunny afternoon. I was on the edge of my seat for every one of his at bats, waiting for the Cubs star to shine, and shine he did, for me, at my first ball game. A few years ago, I read a book on those 1969 Cubs, and damned if Ernie, who never made it to the World Series, didn’t recall that very game as one of his favorites too.

History, of course, shows that Ernie Banks and the Cubs’ 1969 magic lasted only ‘til early September. A near total and unexplainable collapse combined with the Amazin’ Mets run up from the cellar of the National League’s Eastern division, led to one of baseball’s most storied season endings. I don’t recall my feelings during that crashing, crushing end of the season. Perhaps the trauma wiped the tears from my memory. Or maybe it was 2nd grade, or the vision of Charlotte on a jungle gym, that took its place in those neural corners of my brain. I can tell you though, that that season embedded a deep hatred of those damned Mets that’s going on 40 years now. That those same Mets pinned a stunning 1986 World Series loss on my now favorite Boston Red Sox – where we moved in ‘72 – doesn’t help their cause.

Happy Birthday, Ernie Banks. In a single afternoon, you created a lifelong love of the world’s greatest game, a passion handed down to my little girls, who’ve never been to Wrigley, but who know to respect an experience at Fenway Park as if they’re in the Notre Dame Cathedral (with hollering, flat Cokes, and red licorice ropes permissible). I wore your number 14 on every little league jersey I had as a kid, and it’s on my fat guys, beer league softball jersey even now.

And I recite Ernie Banks’ catch phrase at near every girls softball game I coach: “It’s a great day for a ballgame. Let’s Play Two!” Even on a day such as this, maybe especially on a drenched day like this, give me a ball, a bat, a glove and a couple of old friends, I’d be out there lookin’ to play two.

A day to match the mood

2008-01-30T16:06:00.000-08:00

There are days to match our moods, aren’t there? A rainy, mid-winter Tuesday slowly wasted at my desk doing little tasks while bigger, more significant, immediately pending things wait for me.

Too little sleep over the past few nights doesn’t help. There’ve been at least four nights now laying awake with images of conferences to plan, articles to write, league schedules to draft, science fair projects to shepherd, unpaid bills, the neighbor’s possible pot grow, Barack v. the Clintons, all of it bouncing around my head at 3am for several nights in a row like agitated electrons under the glare of a microscope with no pattern at all played to a musical score that consists solely of the repeating chorus to the Bee Gees “My World”. (My world is our world and this world is your world and your world is my world and my world is your world is mine.)

Noon passes. The remains of last night’s leftovers sit on my desk. Outside the rain is finally letting up though the clouds refuse to open and allow in the blue and gold of sky and sun. It’s time for a walk. All of the rest of this shit can wait.

Ten minutes finds me in the snow-strewn parking lot of Lady Bird Johnson Grove. A solitary snowman adorned with the tight-needled branches from the highest points of the redwoods greets me. He’s been here a couple of days. His once smoothed, rounded paunch is dimpled by the just-a-bit-too-warm-for-him temperature. The white skirt around his ankles oozes slowly into the blacktop. His eyes are sunken and his bushy green moustache droops, the gaunt look of a tired old man who knows he’s already seen his best days.

A sense of heaviness pervades as I slosh up the path. Wet mounds of melting snow gather on the edges of the trail. The surrounding cold gray fog blankets the forest, veiling the tops of the trees.

Large branches have fallen here in the week’s heavy storms, more from the crushing weight of wet snow than the wind I’d guess. Several new widowmakers have impaled themselves solidly beside the trail. A hemlock, nearly a foot in diameter, is snapped about ten feet above the forest floor and fallen to the ground, it’s pale heartwood splintered and pointing jaggedly upwards shaking its fist at the sky for denying it the opportunity to reach the canopy with its brethren.

It’s not raining right now, but a secondary rain falls. Rain drops collected in the highest branches cascade down, falling only short distances at first, from branch to branch, needle tip to needle tip until there are no more branches to slow their fall and they pour from a million needles in a thousand trees to be absorbed in the ferns and saturated duff far below.

The ferns and huckleberries and rhododendrons bend under the weight of a week’s snow. They’re held low to the ground opening broad vistas through the lower forest that don’t exist in drier times.

The trail is half covered in half gray, half white snow, snow that is pockmarked with round water drops and depressed by muddy bootprints. The remaining snow is littered with fallen debris: thin redwood branches, some dead and brown, others recently alive and bright green, are strewn casually alongside dark green rhododendron and tanoak leaves.

In a tanoak cluster near the end of the trail, there’s a quick flash of pale yellow. A small warbler or vireo flits around in front of me. I stand still, watching her for a moment and she comes closer, curious, as if she wonders what I’m doing out in the cold, wet forest on a day like this. I wonder the same of her.

I try hard to not see this colorful, carefree little bird as a sappy, sugar-coated omen that spring is just around the corner and better days are just ahead. But I fail. The walk has done me some good after all. The pressures of life have been lifted, if only momentarily. And perhaps, as soon as I’ve finished this little piece of non-fiction, I’ll actually get back to something my boss considers worthwhile. Perhaps.

The ocean above me

2008-01-25T15:41:00.000-08:00

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve been able to get to the mouth of the creek. Work. Holidays. Meetings. Bill Clinton. Jury duty. All have conspired to keep me off my favorite stretch of sand of late. But with rain on the horizon yet standing off shore for the time being, and knowing I won’t have the opportunity again ‘til sometime next week, I seized the moment, albeit a quick one, for a short saunter in the sand.

It’s warmer on the beach today than it is in the woods. I spent a little time on the Lady Bird Johnson Trail where the wind whistled above while the trees surrounding me remained near motionless. The cold and damp of the higher forest was not doin’ the soul proper though, so I decamped for what I hoped would be warmer climes.

And it was indeed warmer on the beach, with a gentle breeze blowing along the shoreline.

The slope from dry sand to the surf is steeper than it was a few weeks ago. The stronger storms of recent weeks have carved out a high-angle bench along much of the beach. The waves are a respectable eight to ten feet or so, and the tide is moving in. Two or three glistening pebble fields decorate the beach to the north, providing a tinkling treble melody to the booming rhythmic bass of the crashing surf.

The surf is higher and the sky is grayer than when I drove past the beach on the way in this morning. The sea is a dusty jade green, just a shade or two paler than my jeans. Off to the north, beyond the Gold Bluffs as the coast winds up to the mouth of the Klamath, silvery virga streak a distant blue sky just below the steel gray line of the incoming storm system.

The mouth of Redwood Creek remains wide and turbulent as it has been all winter. High waves roll in through the creek’s mouth, cresting past the hundred gulls standing on the south shore. (I wonder why the gulls are always massed on the south side of the creek, and rarely on the north?)

I almost trip over a dead harbor seal. He (she?) has been dead for a while. The soft fur is unmarked and there’s no sign of injury or assault. The critter’s eyes and insides of its head have been eaten or decayed away. (The incoming tide apparently returned this seal to the sea shortly after my wandering. My coworker couldn’t find it on her walk a couple hours later this day.)

I make my way to the very edge of the mouth of the creek, down the tiny peninsula of sand between the Pacific and the estuary. I feel like I’m standing below sea level, which I probably am. From this vantage point, the waves appear to rise and crash above me, spilling downhill and past me into the estuary. It’s a dizzying, discombobulating sensation if you think about it too much, which I tend to do.

I don’t have the chance to linger there as a series of three or four large and closely spaced waves rush into the channel. A few inches of foam-led water pour over the top of the sand berm from the west, while perpendicular running waves ease up the channel’s bank from the north. And from the east, the estuary swells as the incoming saltwater fills its banks. My broad and dry peninsula becomes very narrow, and very wet very quickly forcing me back and up to safe ground.

Two seals appear to stand up in the channel, the upper third of their bodies out of the water, their dark eyes watching my retreat. I’m momentarily jealous of these two characters, and their ability to float effortlessly up and down the swells.

A few more waves send me higher up the beach while sending me the message that real world responsibilities await. I’ve promised a lunch break and an couple hours wandering time out of “the store” to a coworker ‘fore it rains.

Hasta la proxima.

Oh, what a night! Bill Clinton comes to town

2008-01-17T05:57:00.000-08:00

About 6:45 last night, as we waited inside the cozy fairground hall in humble Humboldt County for the former leader of the free world, I saw him. Briefly. Through a gap in the temporary white privacy curtains at the north end of the hall. The dark blazer, the shock of white hair. "He's here! I saw him" For a few brief moments, I was standing less than 20 feet from frikkin' Bill Clinton.

Yes, it was a long afternoon of waiting in a brisk north coast winter breeze. I planted my chair on the concrete around 130 in the afternoon when there were only about 70 people in front of me and precisely in the center of the shade shadow created by the Redwood Acres grandstand. By the time the scrap paper and highlighter tickets were passed out, my wife and 9-year old daughter were tickets 119, 120, 121.

Rumors and gossip rolled up and down the line like ocean waves, and were fun to follow all afternoon. Only 377 people were gonnna get in. Then only 240 would have seats. There was a sign-in list and if you weren't on it you weren't getting in. No, wait, there wasn't a sign-in list. Hold on, yes there was. A required Secret Service questionnaire...passed out by a 10 year old boy which looked suspiciously like a Hillary campaign flyer to gin up emails and addresses of potential donors. The tickets mean nothing. Oh, yes they do.

In the end, even though many of us had stood in line for several hours, kept our places, organized ourselves in numerical order as the event volunteers had asked us to, there were many people who pushed their way to the front, forgetting the Democratic ideals of fairness to others and concern for their fellow citizens, and cut the line into the hall since those numbered tickets that had been handed out to the first few hundred of us never mattered anyways. (My great thanks anways to all of you hardworking Dem volunteers who pulled off this massive event on just a couple days notice....despite the whining, you done great!)

But that's all prologue. Once in, the excitement of anticipation permeated the place. Smiles. Laughs. A rolicking gospel choir.

Then Bill showed up. I kept thinkin', "This is Bill Clinton...in Eureka. What the hell is he doin' here?" I remembered having the same thoughts 10 years ago when Willie Nelson came to Carlsbad, New Mexico, a town of 20,000 in the backwaters of the southwest. Why? It didn't matter though, cuz the big dog was here.

Bill's hour-long speech was fun as spectacle, though probably typical of campaign stump speeches. He pumped Hillary as the only logical choice in this race. He promoted her as someone who not only promotes change but as the only surviving candidate that has actually changed people's lives.

His not-so-subtle digs at Hillary's most prominent competitor came in the question, asked several times, (and I'm paraphrasing) "Does it make sense to promote change by tossing away all the candidates who've spent their lives making real change and starting over?" He tossed in his admirations of Sen's Biden and Dodd, and Governor Richardson to bolster his case.

And he made a good case. My wife, a Richardson then Obama follower before 7pm last night, is almost convinced. Me? It was an effective argument, though I'm gonna withhold judgment 'til the stars in my eyes have a chance to clear. As effective as Bill was last night in garnering new Hillary supporters, I wonder what happens if Obama or Edwards shows up to turn on a Humboldt County crowd. Will we follow them and their star power just as eagerly into the fray? That bouncing from inspiration to inspiration in such close proximity to our real political superstars must be what it's like living in Iowa or New Hampshire, eh?

The moment of the night came after the speech. While Bill walked the cordoned line at the front of the stage, shaking hands, hugging crying women, passing autographables over his shoulder to his handlers, my 9-year old daughter managed to squeeze her way underneath and through the throng of giddy adults who were pushing and jostling for position to shake the president's hand.

She got not just a handshake, but a brief conversation with the president. OK, so it was just him asking her name three times since it was loud and she's on the quiet and shy side. But Bill Clinton, the former leader of the whole frikkin' free world, Democratic party saviour, most famous guy on the planet, leaned down, put his hand on my kids' shoulder, asked her name, and signed her now-not-so-worthless piece of scrap paper with the orange highlighted number 119, as Mom and Dad giggled like schoolkids behind her.

Oh what a night!

Three Presidents Visit Humboldt County

2008-01-15T15:08:00.000-08:00

News of Bill Clinton's visit tomorrow has me wonderin' how often we get visits from this pols of this stature in the hinterlands of northern California. A few quickie Google searches begs the following question: Has it really been 38 years since a US President found his way to Humboldt County?

As near as I can tell, not since August 27, 1969 when President Nixon (before The Fall), former President Johnson (Lyndon, not Andrew), and then-Governator (and future president) Reagan gathered in a 300 acre redwood grove a few miles off the highway in the newly minted Redwood National Park, have we witnessed American royalty this high up the north coast. (And those of you who've been here much longer than me, please, don't hesitate to correct my attempt at county history.)

For 'twas on that cloudless August afternoon that three presidents - past, present and future - deplaned at the Arcata Airport, took the short drive up Highway 101, breezed through the little town of Orick to dedicate the Lady Bird Johnson Grove. Lady Bird herself had already visited the area in November of '68 to formally dedicate the National Park. This day's visit named this one grove of ancient redwoods in honor of the former first lady and her "Beautify America" efforts.

August 27th just happened to be LBJ's 61st birthday, and for the occasion the Nixons had flown Lyndon, Lady Bird, and the girls all out to San Clemente for a roast beast feast, a lemon birthday cake decorated with yellow roses and bluebonnets, and a 19"bonsai tree with its requisite "Bonsai for Beginners" handbook. Tossed in were a couple hours of meetings between the two presidents and dastardly notable Nixonites Kissinger, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman.

After lunch, the party retired to Air Force One, trusting the military's finest designated drivers to find their way northward the redwood coast. It was not a direct flight however. The revellers pit-stopped at Orange County's El Toro Marine Corps Air Station to pick up Governor Reagan, the good Reverend Billy Graham and soon-to-be House Majority Leader (D) Hale Boggs , better known today as the father of NPR's Cokie Roberts.

A signing ceremony, a few quick, mostly forgettable remarks (check 'em out here if you like), and some great pictures of three American presidents, side by side, literally, in our neck of the woods. I know we can all go on about the three President's debatable "greatness" as we will about Bill and Hillary when their run is done, but a great day for the county nonetheless (or at least for our local historians and chambers of commerce).

***

For the record, Herbert Hoover visited the county on a few occasions after his presidency ended in '32, including a night camping under the redwoods on Bull Creek as well as occasional fly fishing forays on Redwood Creek and nights at the Orick Inn on his way to his private fishin' cabin on the Klamath.

Were there others?

Mr Hillary Clinton on his way to Eureka later this week. (Wednesday)

2008-01-14T13:17:00.000-08:00

Carol and Greg are reporting that Bill Clinton, husband of presidential candidate & former 1st lady Hillary Clinton is coming to Eureka....maybe. Word has it that Wednesday is the day, noonish the time. KHUM was interviewing Milt Boyd, Humboldt County's Democratic Party Chair a little while ago, who said the rumor's true, and they've been talking to Bill's people, though there are lots of details and likely lots of schedule changing possibilities between now and then. Even if I'm not firmly in the Hillary camp (leaning Obama now that Bill Richardson's returned to Governoring) but if the big guy's coming to our neighborhood, we'll be there to holler out our loud and proud Democratic cheers from somewhere in the teeming crowd.

Updating around 820pm: Looks like it's pretty much gonna happen, though sometime between 4-5pm according to the NCJ Blog and other sources. See y'all there.

Updating again, Tuesday 2ish: The afternoon guy on KHUM was phone talking to someone, I believe from the local Dems office, saying the hoopla happens between 400 and 630 tomorrow at Redwood Acres. (I'm hoping someone else can confirm this before too long so me and the 2 readers of this tripe aren't the only ones showing up there.)

Tuesday, just after 5pm: Over at the NCJ Blogthing, they're sayin' the gates open at 4:30 for a 6:30 event. Perhaps my girls will get to watch the boys play basketball and see Bill after all. It was gonna be a tough call for them, though boys in shorts were winning the debate last I checked.

Humboldt Democrats finally have an "official notice" up about the visit. They're sayin' gates open a 5:30, but I'm thinkin' there'll be a couple others in town wanting to witness the spectacle so we'll be there early I suppose.

That was the kind of house it was.

2008-01-14T08:23:00.000-08:00

Every so often, you run across a passage in a book that sticks with ya. I found one of those last night, marveling at the ability of a great writer to paint a picture. Suppose that's why they're considered great writers, and I'm not.

Here, from All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (p32 in my copy):

It looked like those farmhouses you ride by in the country in the middle of the afternoon, with the chickens under the trees and the dog asleep, and you know the only person in the house is the woman who has finished washing up the dishes and has swept the kitchen and has gone upstairs to lie down for half an hour and has pulled off her dress and kicked off her shoes and is lying there on her back on the bed in the shadowy room with her eyes closed and a strand of her hair still matted down on her forehead with the perspiration. She listens to the flies cruising around the room, then she listens to your motor getting big out on the road, then it shrinks off into the distance and she listens to the flies. That was the kind of house it was.

More hirsute political analysis from the frozen steppes of Iowa

2008-01-04T10:07:00.000-08:00

Yes, you heard it here first. Or at least you would have if anyone read this insignificant slice of tripe. Obama wins Iowa with Edwards nosing out Clinton, while Huck musses up Mitt’s hair of inevitability with a 34% noogie courtesy of Iowa’s churchgoers.

Not that all this means much of anything. It’s just a first chapter, and an oddly constructed one at that, in an intense and condensed process. I don’t expect Hillary to fold quickly, and Edwards should play well in New Hampshire and beyond too.

My man Richardson is playin’ up his 1.7% finish as “making the final four”. He’ll need to improve that a tad bit to survive beyond next week. I’d humbly suggest that if he doesn’t reach at least the 15% mark and make this a 4-Dem race, he’s off the table and workin’ the VP angle for real.

(By the by, farewell Messers Biden and Dodd. Both of y’all would’ve been great guys in the White House if only you’d’ve been a tad bit more interesting.)

A couple interesting results not being played up amid all the noise of voter turnout, young 1st-time voters, and evangelical yayhoos:

Heisted from the Daily Kos, an interesting look at the results en toto (I believe just invented that latinish sounding phrase so don’t go lookin’ for it in Wikipedia.): If you look at all the voters combined (all 356,000 of ‘em, R & D & I & L), the results read:

Obama 24.5%
Edwards 20.5%
Clinton 19.8%
Huckabee 11.4%

I know it’s not a square-up comparison ‘cuz caucusing rules vary by party and you’re only choosing a candidate in one party. But it’s interesting, no, that the top dog Republican gathers only 11% of everyone who slogged their way through the fallow cornfields. It’s kinda like the Colorado Rockies emerging victorious from a pathetic National League field just so they can lose to any of the top 3 or 4 AL teams.

Another interesting result (though not really pointed out quite yet in the press…again you hear it here first) is that of Dems, 68% of ‘em chose candidates who idealize change and progressive new directions in Obama and Edwards over the political establishment’s cautious status quo and Hillary’s barely 29%. I’m guessing here that if/when Obama or Edwards have to fold, their voters will slide more easily towards each other rather than to the stolid, cautious, DC establishment-propped Hillary.

Predictions for next week? Hillary gets ugly with both Obama and Edwards ‘cuz she has to win. I’m guessing, here and now, she doesn’t win New Hampshire either, not with Obama’s message, momentum, and money. She should do well enough to edge Mr Edwards, narrowly, enabling the Dems to maintain the 3some for a while longer. Governor Bill slips upwards to perhaps 6 yet not more than 10%, just not enough to matter, but retaining his floppy gravitas to serve us entertainingly somehow, somewhere in the near future.

The R’s? A 3-way nastiness ensues between Mitt, Huck, and McCain. Ron Paul could be interesting in NH with its “Live Free or Die” sympathies, but not interesting enough to make a difference. Giuliani? Fred? They’ll continue on past NH but nobody knows quite why.

Enjoy the primary season goofiness. This’ll all be over in less than a month. We’ll have a short breathing period to concern ourselves with Britney’s next rehab and terrifying tiger tales before the real-life intensity of the national campaign commences in earnest come spring.

Let the games begin: Punctual political punditry from the flannel drop-seat of my tartan plaid Christmas pajamas

2008-01-03T10:44:00.000-08:00

The Presidential Primary season officially kicks off tonight in the frozen, fallow cornfields of America’s heartland. The pandering in Iowa ends around 430ish (left coast time) when Iowans can finally watch Jeopardy without attack ads, and dine at the local eatery without TV camera’s following well-coifed temporary coffee attendants who’d rather shake your hand than refill your mug. Later of course, we’ll have to listen to blithering TV analysts for a few hours to figure out who won the damn thing, and let them tell us what this means for next week’s primary in similarly tiny, similarly frozen, and similarly Caucasian New Hampshire.

Ya want my opinion? I thought you might.

If I was Republican: I’d throw up my hands, pour myself a strong drink or three, and consider leaving the country and traveling for a spell ‘cuz ‘taint nothin’ there. Take your pick from the following: A mis-speaking fundamentalist preacher. A newly-minted fundamentalist Mormon flip-flopping Bush-suck-up. A Gotham mob henchman whose hometown’s greatest tragedy occurred while he was in charge…and he’s proud of it. Two geriatrics, one who’s having trouble staying awake during this process. And a goofy libertarian, government-hating, former government rep who wants to be the guy that runs the hated government.

It appears this one’s coming down to whether conservative white religious pastoralists can swallow the good-looking Yankee from a century-old cult who’s changed all his positions to run as a right-wing fundamentalist. Or, will they choose the lifelong right-wing fundamentalist preacher of a two-millenia old cult, owner of a blessed bookcase and who’s skinnier than he once was, but really doesn’t really understand much of the world outside of Dogpatch.

My money’s on Arkansas’ Huck tonight, figgerin’ that Iowa’s bachelor farmers will choose to hang their John Deere ball caps with the historically safe preacher/governor/formerly fat guy rather than a slippery-principled slick-haired New English Mormon.

And, should I be a Democrat (which in the name of full disclosure I have been since my Mama drug me out leafleting for George McGovern in ’72), here’s how I’d spend a pleasant yet frigid January evening:

From what I understand of the Iowa voting process, you gather together with 14% of your neighbors of similar political persuasion in someone’s parlor. The kids have taped hand-crayoned faux campaign signs for each candidate in different corners of the room. The three candidates officially sanctioned by the national news media – the girl, the black guy, and the guy with good hair – each get a corner of their own. The last corner of the room is available for “The Others”: the paunchy, flop-haired Mexican, a couple of eastern white guys, and the short guy with the hot wife.

After coffee is served and everyone’s had a fair chance at the cream cheese finger sandwiches and powder-sugared almond cookies, the caucus host invites everyone to sit in the corner correspondent with their pre-selected fave. When the attendees have all gathered in their chosen corners, the calculators are pulled out while the caucus-goers try to remember how to figure out percentages. Once the remedial mathematics arguments are resolved, those misbegotten fools who sat momentarily for a candidate that couldn’t garner 15% of the 14 people in the room, have to move to the already crowded corners pre-selected for the girl, the black guy, or the guy with good hair.

Me, I’d start in “The Others” corner, throwing my support to Bill Richardson – diplomat, congressman, governor, backslapper and global do-gooder. He wants us out of Iraq now. He’s taken New Mexico forward in green energy leadership. He’s got the personality and experience to talk to foreign leaders. And he’s wasted an entire career working with Republicans and other despots getting things done whether they’ve wanted to cooperate or not. Following 16 years of ugly partisanship, couldn’t we use a domestic diplomat who can tell a good joke for a change?

Unfortunately, the national media says Bill’s just running for VP and refuses to include him in any discussion of leading Democrats. So I’d reluctantly abandon my butt depression in the couch, along with the lonely heart supporters of Dodd, Biden, and Kucinich and try to fall in love with someone, if only for the night.

Likely, I’d snuggle up with the Obama crowd. I like his message of hope and change. If anyone’s capable of moving the national discussion in a new direction, with a new voice, I believe he can and will. I also like John Edwards' message of middle-class resurrection, particularly the class warfare angle he’s taken of late. Hillary, I’m sorry. You may be a brilliant policy wonk and a hard working and effective senator, but you’re much too centrist and all too politically cautious for me. We don’t need your triangulating and parsed and pallid support for action or inaction (which is it?) in the Middle East. And I just can’t stomach the thought of another 4 to 8 years of counterproductive political mud wrestling that you and Bill and Rush and Sean would bring us.

My predictions? Obama slips in as the winner tonight, with Edwards nosing Hillary for #2. Hillary, a disappointing third remains unbowed with gobs of cash and her all-star status media-assured. Bill maintains his steady fourth place, not quite prime time position to hang in for another couple of primaries, assuring himself of the serious VP consideration the media has allowed for him. Biden, Dodd, Kuch…likely gone and forgotten by mid-January.

We have to do this all again next week with New Hampshire, of course. By then, we’ll have a new set of rules, another round of pundit prognostications, hopefully a smaller cast of characters (unless Mr Bloomberg determines we need another NY mayor in the hunt), and a more comprehensible process beginning in Dixon’s Notch, albeit sans the delicious finger sandwiches.

....and I get paid for this?

2008-01-02T19:53:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, 02Jan08, around 1pm, just before low tide:

It’s a hazy gray day. We’re waiting on a storm that should arrive later this afternoon or tonight. There’s a high, dark line of clouds that’s been hanging out at sea for most of the day, yet still hasn’t made its move toward the shoreline. The haze settled after lunch after a morning that was simply overcast. The sun tries to shine through but just can’t penetrate the silvery haze.

The ocean is loud today as the bottom of low tide approaches. It’s difficult to make out the sound of individual waves. Simply a continuous grumbling rumble. The waves are constant, moving, jumbled, anticipating their upslope return trip with the rising tide. Beyond the breaking waves, the ocean matches the silver of the sky, and Redding Rock slowly disappears behind a thin gray veil.

In the distance there’s a huge gathering of gulls at the mouth of Redwood Creek, bigger than I’ve seen in months. To say several hundred gulls is not an exaggeration. They mass on the wet, oval sandbar sitting at the mouth of the creek and on both its north and south shores. They float in the rushing channel of the creek and fly over the churning foam around Little Girl Rock and the two sisters.

On the south shore, 40 to 50 harbor seals have beached themselves. They rest on their bellies, some on their backs, and one reddish fellow leans on his left flipper like he’s waiting at the bar for his girlfriend to come back from the restroom.

They are of all sizes, male and female (and young’uns) though I don’t know how to tell apart from this distance other than relative size. Their colors range from very near white with dark spots, to cream and chocolate brown, as well as the aforementioned ruddy haired gent. They all have the same black-eyed face though, and each pair of dark eyes follow me as I saunter past, making sure I give them adequate personal space. I’m enjoying watching them and don’t want my presence to force them into the chilly rushing waters on this calm afternoon.

The estuary is all but gone. Where two weeks ago there was a placid, near circular pool of fresh water, today there is only Redwood Creek, wider than it was a fortnight ago, rushing straight to the Pacific. The path to the ocean is a broad avenue with no narrowing or tapering at its terminus. No ocean waves push their way into the channel this afternoon. The force of the creek stops the Pacific at the sand bar.

I’ve had this beach to myself on most of my walks in recent months. Today, a solitary birder has joined me here. He kneels on the sand, motionless, keenly focused, his eye pressed into a large spotting scope that almost certainly costs what would take me a couple weeks to earn. What is he looking at? I scan the horizon yet see only gulls. Perhaps he’s peering through the haze to one of the rocks, to something beyond the range of my 20 year old binoculars. Though I’d be well within the expectations of my paid duties to stroll over and chat with him, perhaps inquire as to what he’s found, I’m not willing to interrupt his afternoon simply to satisfy my curiosity.

In the south estuary, some new birds appear for me this afternoon. A black-headed bird with a dark back and striking white patch at the base of the chest, with reddish eyes and a hint of white on the bill - male ring-necked ducks - dot the calm waters. Lesser scaups, so similar to the ring-necked ducks but with a silvery-white back, plod along nearby. Buffleheads and a few coots, both of which have been here before join the throng. And, perhaps a few ruddy ducks, small diving birds with a dark head cap, buff body and grayish-buff back. (I’ll need to check on that last one.)

Hard to believe sometimes that your government pays me to wander around on the beach doing not much of nothin’. On days like this, it’s harder still to wonder why I have the gall to whine about it on occasion. As we enter a new year, I’ll try to remember this task is better than quality counting the elastic threads on a pair of BVD’s in Russell County, Kentucky, cuz it’s really not all that bad, huh?

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

2007-12-27T06:43:00.001-08:00

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.

2007-12-22T12:19:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-22T09:58:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-12T11:59:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-12T10:33:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-11T13:19:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-10T09:21:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-06T17:21:00.001-08:00

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

The first fish

2007-11-11T11:15:00.000-08:00

Late Thursday afternoon, 08November2007…

It’s late on Thursday afternoon, one of my all-too-rare days to get down the mouth twice in a day. We closed up the building shortly after 4pm. For a change, I have nothing to run home to do – no soccer, no basketball - and lacking any desire to spend my final working hour in an square white office in the darkening village of Orick, I ask my fellow ranger to lock me in behind the gate…I’m a-gonna take a walk on the beach.

I knew as soon as my feet hit sand that the evening was to be memorable. Pockets of pink and blue have appeared in the formerly solid gray sky. The beach is wet well above the normal high tide line, with several long, bowed damp incursions almost up to the dune grass. Somewhere during the afternoon, the tide had risen incredibly high and at least a couple long running waves had invaded beyond the high point of the beach and running back down towards the vegetation. Sneaker waves possibly? ‘Tis the season.

But now, approaching 4:30pm and very nearly the day's second low tide, the beach lay exposed far below what I’ve seen in a long time. From where I’d walked earlier in the day, the beach stretched westward another 20 or 30 yards. Long expanses of glistening pebbles of gray, green, black, white, and brick red litter this lowest of low tide lines. Gazing north to the creek, the smaller twin sea stacks (occasionally known as “the Sisters”) were exposed to the shoreline, a rocky walkway connects them on the north side of the creek to dry land. If I could cross the creek, I could’ve walked out to ‘em. I content myself with tempting the edges of the now-calm waves at surf, excited to think I can walk today where tomorrow I’d be under several feet of water and crushing 6- to 8-foot waves. A Moses in the Red Sea moment in this mild-mannered bureaucrat’s life.

15 brown pelicans surf the air currents above the surf, single file, playing follow-the-leader over the bending waves. Large clusters of double-crested cormorants sit atop the ocean, ducking beneath the occasional breaker. The waves are a translucent green with the last light of a gray afternoon shining through them. Shortly, a second single-file flying march of pelicans cruise southward, their plump silhouettes gliding in front of a pastel gray-pink evening sky.

At the mouth of Redwood Creek, the wave patterns are a bit more erratic. The creek cuts a deep channel in the now-long channel between estuary and ocean…a giant S-curve, perhaps 100 yards long through rarely exposed sand, and full of downward rushing freshwater. The freshly cut sides of the channel quietly erode into the channel. The water eddies and gurgles inside the channel’s curves.

From the channel’s banks, you witness the force of the onrushing creek. The entire floor of the channel slides into the sea. Anything smaller than a golf ball rolls along swiftly, spinning its way to the sea. It’s geology in action, and easy to imagine how mighty canyons are carved over eons.

Standing on the bank, looking back from the calm, draining estuary to the turbulent sea, I notice a splashing in an otherwise calm section of the current. A flapping tail appears above the water. My first salmon of the season fights its way against the current over the very shallow sand hump between ocean and creek. I follow this lone creature as she struggles against the creek, her strong tail pushing her forward against gravity and friction. As the fish breaks into the deeper channel and begins moving more freely, it turns suddenly, right at my feet, and coasts back out to sea.

“Wait!” I say. “Shouldn’t you be going the other way?” I wonder, did the fish see me, flip out and run scared back to the Pacific? Or did she simply enter the wrong channel, or at the wrong time? Was she scouting the channel for others, ensuring they took the right exit off the Pacific Ocean highway? The thought stays with me though, that I may have scared off the first salmon to return to upper Redwood Creek in years. Sure, she was probably heading to the Prairie Creek or Lost Man Creek tributaries, but what if, after years of logging and over-sedimentation, this one fish had finally decided to head further upstream into Redwood Creek, and because of my long green & gray, middle-aged shadow on these freshly cut banks, she determined to head elsewhere?

Damn. (Or is it, “Dam”?) Either way, I'm damn (dam) glad I chose to wander out here than wander through the morass of emails in the office.

Gray

2007-11-08T17:17:00.000-08:00

It's a long afternoon, sitting here tending to visitors who don't come. The sky outside, the sky I can't really get out under since I have to "mind the store", is a uniformly pale gray. Only the slightest deepening of the gray differentiates the sky from the near-waveless Pacific. And the ocean blends softly into an even darker gray sand horizon. The mood is only accentuated by reading graying 40-year old pamphlets advocating for a new national park, replete with 1960s black and white photographs...all while wearing a gray shirt and gray-green jeans. Is it any wonder my beard feels grayer on days like this?

Discovering coots

2007-11-08T11:20:00.000-08:00

Thursday, 08 November 2007…

For the past couple of days, I’ve been seeing large bunches of dark water birds – dark gray, chunky bodies, black heads, and obvious white bills. They’ve been all over our lagoons, estuaries, and even out in the ocean just beyond the surf line. Now if the ID is obvious to you already, don’t go minimizing my naturalist skills, cuz I do enough of that myself. I’m still learnin’ my ways around the birding thing. This morning, on the way into work, I stopped on the roadside at Freshwater Lagoon to make sure I had a good idea of the markings before consulting the bird books once again.

Scaup? No…it has the white bill, but the body is all dark vs. the white-backed scaup. Scoter? Again no, cuz the body is entirely dark, and there’s no apparent color to the bill as with the scoters. Too big really to be a duck, and none of the ducks match the description anyways. So I gave up on the books, and asked our wildlife folks. Didn’t take them long to figger out my obvious ignorance.

An American coot. How’d I overlook that one in all the books? Too painfully obvious with Mr Sibley’s nicely illustrated picture of an all dark bird with a bright white bill and a squat, round body. Now I know. And now I’m revealed to the rest of the staff as an idiot. But really, I’m ok with that.

So I learn.

After checking in at the Visitor Center (and before heading to the office to do some real work), I spent a few minutes out at the end of the boardwalk overlooking the south end of the estuary. A list of what I saw that I could identify, again, painfully obvious to those of you with proper bird credentials, and becoming more obvious to this untrained eye with 20-year old, minor league binocs:

A sizable number of Canada geese, who dashed away as soon as I appeared on their horizon,

A lone great egret, brilliant white, wading in the middle of the shallow water,

A cluster of mallards, both green-headed guys and brown mottled girls, and perhaps a couple other types of ducks that I was too far away from to make sense of, or maybe they were all mallards,

Lots of the aforementioned American coots,

A couple of great blue herons – tall, dark gray birds, white headed with a dark black streak above their eyes and bright yellow bill. One strolled the grasses along the shoreline while the other waded along the muddy shoreline before lifting off and disappearing in the haze.

Two river otters appeared near the southern edge of the estuary, slipping in and out of the water’s surface. They disappeared for a couple minutes into the grass, then re-appeared, one of them dragging a duck carcass behind him. They swam together with the carcass out to a log in the middle of the estuary. Perched atop the wet log, one munched down, pulling out long, bloody strings of duck parts for breakfast. The other cleaned himself next to his dining partner and occasionally dipped into the water for a brief swim. Very cool…wild lives in action.

Oh, to be a pelican.

2007-11-07T14:46:00.000-08:00

05 November 2007, Monday (though not etched in electrons here 'til a slow Wednesday afternoon):

I walk out the back door of the office to a red-tailed hawk coasting slowly over the dune grasses, only looking at the moment -window shopping - and apparently not finding anything of real interest.

The food's in on the ocean however. Several brown pelicans float on the waves just off shore, perhaps two dozen in all between here and the mouth of the creek. Several males with brightly shining white heads glide in and out...a sign of impending mating season? A few of the pelicans are finding food whilst sitting atop the waves, nary an ounce of effort extended in dipping their pouched jaws into the water and coming out with a mouthful of slender surf fish.

Others hover hawk-like above the brilliant blue ocean and pure white wave crests. Groups of two or three soaring cruise together 'til one, with a keener eye than his comrades, suddenly turns and crash dives into the turquoise blue. The others quickly follow his lead, each of them coming to rest with a fish bouncing around inside their yellow bills.

Oh, to be a pelican. Such an ungainly and awkward looking beast. Certainly not designed not for our People Magazine vision of beauty. Round in the gut, long skinny necks, huge feet, a large sagging jowel. They search for food, twisting and turning on the breeze, scanning the blue surface below. Their dives are clumsy, spinning, twisting, collapsing falls ending in a shallow and noisy splash. Even in eating they appear off-kilter, nodding their heads back and forth, up and down, turning a slippery, squirming fish into position inside their beak before jerking their head backwards and tossing it down like a worm in the bottom of a tequila bottle.

Everything about the pelican looks awkward...except for its magnificent, low-altitude coasting inches above the the Pacific. Gliding effortlessly, head craned back over its shoulders, legs tucked in behind, wings outstretched and curved to expertly shape the air currents above and below. There is no more magical animal show on the coast (in my silly opinion) than the flight of the lone pelican, or the tight formation of three or four of these magnificent creatures on a quiet, hazy afternoon.

Further down the beach, a large gathering of western and California gulls spans the sandy horizon. Occasionally, the entire flock lifts and takes flight, circling a few times before returning to their original plots of sand. Is it the odd, faster wave that makes panics them into these sudden aerial escapes? An unseen visitor? Jumpy juveniles?

A handful of dark, slippery seal heads pop up sporadically between the running waves. As soon as they notice me notice them, they disappear beneath the foam making me guess where they'll apppear next. This game of hide'n'seek continues for my entire saunter this morning...as, I guess, it does every time I'm out here.

There's the beginning of small sandbar at the creek's mouth this morning. A raised platform of sand just beyond yesterday's waterline, an elevated wedge that creates a second small outlet for the creek's freshwater and ocean's waves to mingle. Two gulls perch bravely atop this small mound ignoring the shallow waves washing over top, seemingly holding their claim to this private beach from the masses on the safer footing of the beach.

A handful of double-crested cormorants float just a few yards beyond the breaking surf.

Why do I have to go do "real work" when I really just want to sit here on the beach all day!?

The morning fog lifts

2007-11-02T09:02:00.000-07:00

Thursday, 01November2007...1:30pm, about an hour after low tide:

Thursday morning, the first day of November, started off cool and foggy. Overcast, steely gray skies and low fog hinted at a long, dark Humboldt wintery kind of day. Though the forecast called for clearer skies by lunchtime, there was nothing in the air at the beach to raise the hope of anything approaching of blue and clear.

Then, at precisely 10am, as if on schedule, the flat silver curtain lifts and the world opens up around us. Gray turns white that slides into pale blue. A wispy mist hangs high above us reflecting the new-found sun creating a bright glare and squints my unprotected eyes.

The surf is high today. The waves running farther in and out than has been usual. In fact, I can count 7 or maybe 8 sets of cresting and running waves in the first quarter mile or so offshore. The roar of whitewater surrounds me as I walk the wet sand at the surf line.

There is no even wave line this morning. Several times, waves chase me and my government-issue cordovan boots back up the slope. It's a classic, sneaker wave kind of day , each wave deciding where it's own journey ends.

Every surge of ocean leaves behind a curving line of thick white foam, carbonated sea water churned and agitated by their long runs. The low angled winter sun creates mini-rainbows in the foamy bubbles.

A collage of multicolored pebbles flushed from the creek into sea, are pushed back to dry ground, their weight finally halting their return voyage below the tide line.

There is so much motion at water's edge this morning it's almost disorienting, as if I can feel the movement of the water, the movement of the earth.

A large flock of gulls - almost exclusively western gulls today - gather at the crest and ocean-side slopes of the beach near the mouth of the creek. Higher moving waves scatter the gulls in squawking gaggles that circle and return to the very same vulnerable spots moments later.

The combination of low tide and a few days without rain have narrowed Redwood Creek's channel into the Pacific. The force of downhill-moving freshwater into the onrushing saltwater waves creates a cup, a "C"-shaped bend in the powerful surf. Though the force behind the ocean's waves travel thousands before meeting higher ground, the relatively short, 67-mile gravitational force wins the day in this spot. Even though occasional strong wave will override the open channel and send its saline waters deeper into the estuary, dislodging the small group of bathing gulls, the salt water eventually ebbs and the ever-driving river channel is revealed again.

In the middle, where ocean and creek collide, swirling eddies and erratic white splashes send lines of water in all directions. The push and pull of the Pacific and the creek's rainwater continues as it has for eons. Two seals bob in and out within the tumultuous transition zone, watching me, happily fishing (or maybe just playing) in the swirling waters.

As the tide rises, large waves enter the channel more frequently, overrunning the creek's force. The mouth slowly widens. I hear the honking of Canada geese from the southern backwaters of the estuary, enjoying a rest from their long southerly journey. A few pelicans cruise past, surfing the air currents just above the breaking waves. A lone cormorant joins the seals at the mouth, ducking beneath the running white foam of each incoming wave.

Told ya it wouldn't take another 86 years!

2007-10-30T06:27:00.000-07:00

Essentially wire to wire, this moment was inevitable as far back as mid-May.

It's not the angst-filled Sox of yesteryear. We're not waiting for the inevitable catastrophe to add another chapter to the lore of losing gloriously. It's page 2 of a new chapter of dominance. Some may worry that the Sox will become the Yankees, the new team to hate, but I'll enjoy this ride while it lasts. And with the young guys - Papelbon, Pedroia, Ellsbury, Beckett - they'll be back.

Hot diggity dog...what a great run!

Indian Summer

2007-10-28T07:45:00.001-07:00

23 October 2007, Tuesday, around 930am (though not transcribed here 'til Sunday 28Oct):

After a week of October rain - at least 7 or 8 inches worth - an Indian summer rambled on to the north coast. The rain (and a bit of work) had kept me off the beach most of the week, but following a day when the sun glared down and temps reached a near unheard of 80 degrees...on the beach!...I had to get out for a while.

Unlike yesterday though, the morning was cool. A steady, soft breeze came in from then north, over the tops of the waves. The sky cloudless and glowing bright blue.

I wandered to the creek's mouth from the south end of the estuary. A flock of maybe 40 Canada geese honked a noisy escape when I approached, leaving behind only a smattering of dark duck-like water birds that I couldn't identify cuz of sun glaring off the placid backwater.

Even from this distance, I can see the mouth of the creek has widened since last week. Pacific waves roll through the gape deep into the estuary. The narrow 50-foot channel that opened just a week ago is now closer to 50 yards across. The sand bar has been obliterated, the shoreline now a steep 4-foot cliff, eroding gradually between each push and pull of ocean and river. A half dozen harbor seals and a couple of gulls coast in the roiling waters between ocean and river.

The water at this junction of Pacific and Redwood Creek runs in every direction. There is constant noise standing here at the edge. The crashing surf is almost drowned out by the whooshing sounds of river pushing its way forward. The flush of the main creek channel is clearly visible, a steady boulevard of blue water parting the undulating white run-up of the sea.

There is an amazing amount of water here. That has to sound fairly inane as I stand on the edge of the world's biggest ocean, but you feel the power of the water, indeed of the earth standing in a spot such as this. Not a quiet spot where nothing happens - except in an egocentric human life perspective - but an ever-living, moving, and changing, transmogrifying eternal place. I'm reminded of a sappy line in a Disney Pocahontas song, something about how a foot never enters the same river twice.

A sudden shift in the breeze raises the temperature noticeably. Now from the west, from over the hills, it warms quickly. (We'll eventually get back to the mid-70s later in the day.)

I turn my attention away from the creek to the silver beach and surf. Seagulls sit atop the waves, lifting briefly as the waves crest and break, or floating up and over the curving tops before the crash. There is a lot of organic material - brown leaves, twigs, small branches - in the surf today, coloring the green-blue of the waves.

We still have pelicans, though most only visible through the binoculars, feeding maybe a half-mile off-shore. Now and then, small clusters of pelicans soar by, surfing the tops of the waves. Western and California gulls plod in the sand nearby, but none of the gray Heerman's gulls.

Hasta la proxima.

Was there ever any doubt?

2007-10-26T06:28:00.000-07:00

Certainly wasn't in our house. Well, except for Mrs Glass-is-half-empty moanin' through a mostly tense game, "They're gonna blow it. Here it comes. I can't watch this anymore."

For me, when everyone else was moanin' 'bout being down 3 games to 1, and how the Sox were one game away from going home, I was yakkin' to any who would listen (and there aren't that many out here who give a rat's ass) that the Injuns were just 3 games from their inevitable elimination.

Bring on the Rocks and the snow. Been my contention for a while that anyone the NL puts through this season is gonna lose to anyone in the AL. The Injuns provided the Sox with a worthy Championship series. The Rockies are simply the post-game mop-up work that must be done before the flag is hung on the Fenway flagpole.

This pose was my pose (and I sup-pose a host of others in the extended Red Sox nation) about 9:12 pm last night:

Chasing Chewbacca with Chickens (free-range of course)

2007-10-26T06:27:00.000-07:00

Seems the hunt for Bigfoot (or Sasquatch or Yeti or Omeh) is heating up on California's north coast. Led, or at least chronicled, by a former Humboldt County politics and society blogger known as "Captain Buhne", the search leads into directly into our neighborhood's "Haunted Forest", otherwise known as Redwood National Park.

Curious? Check out the tabloid-ish cover story from this week's North Coast Journal, "Bigfoot Trapped by Norcal Fanatic".

Now perhaps I'm too much a skeptic. I have spent a summer reading about science, reason and faith courtesy of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Unitarian preachers after all. Hundreds, possibly thousands of secretive, breeding primates wandering the backhills of America's most road-strewn national park? You'd be better stashin' your faith in a world-savin' Jew borne of a teen virgin and an elderly carpenter. Oh yeah, guess that one's still floatin' out there too.

So our good Captain Buhne sets off to prove Bigfoot's existence by concocting several thousand words documenting the complete lack of evidence for any such beast. Short of any convincing documentation via the scientific record, the Captain baits the redwood forest with Bigfoot's favorite cuisine: whole free-range chickens bungied to tree trunks. Why the mysterious creature would turn his nose at a chicken from one of our national industrial chicken factories isn't explained. (Perhaps Sasquatch read The Omnivore's Dilemma, previously reviewed on these very pages.) Finally, we're treated to the Captain's determination to wait the requisite 10 days for a legal firearm to embark on an illegal hunt with a national park to "bag" a Bigfoot of his own, the fame and fortune of great scientific discovery revealed finally to an appreciative world.

Let's take a look at the Captain's thought processes, shall we?

A long time ago, a couple of Humboldt cowboys curiously carrying a movie camera while riding in the remote forests captured a few seconds of iconic footage of a hairy and large-tittied Sasquatchette, who now goes by the classic 60s name of Patty. (Why doesn't anyone name their kid Patty anymore?) Though no one else has ever produced any footage of similar Patty Bigfoots, or Patrick Bigfoots for that matter, it doesn't seem to bother Captain Buhne or the true believers. It's enough that the photographer died without admitting to the lie, and that his trusty sidekick hasn't coughed up a better explanation in all these intervening years. Captain, the lack of a deathbed confession isn't proof that it happened.

The Captain relates his own close encounter in Redwood National Park's "haunted forest" three years prior. While wandering back to his vehicle in the shadowy mists, he heard three knocks on the trees followed by another set of three knocks. Suddenly. a shower of "golf-ball sized stones" rained down upon our valiant seeker. Knock three times roughly translates as "Ready. Aim. Fire" in Yeti it seems. (Or was Tony Orlando fuckin' with the Captain's mind?) The Captain claims to know that it wasn't woodpeckers tossin' stones at his head since there's no proof that woodpeckers can actually throw things. Apparently he's never seen the Woody Woodpecker Show. Giant blue woodpeckers with white gloved hands haven't been positively documented in the redwooods either, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, does it?

Captain Buhne tries to breathe a little science into the discussion. "Academics...posit that Bigfoot is likely Gigantopithecus blacki", an ancient precursor to modern orangutans. While the Captain would like us to believe that G.blackis wandered over the Bering land bridge 12,000 years ago alongside our own first Americans, scientists have already shown that the G.blackis disappeared from the evolutionary record more than 100,000 years ago and no sign of 'em has ever been found in North America.

Those damn inconvenient facts. No problem for the believers though, because there are several mysterious plane crashes in the northwestern forests that prove that you'll never find remains of Bigfoot either. (Huh?) Yes, according to the captain, the lack of evidence confounded by irrelevant analogies= proof.

Want more? To prove that the redwood forests support enough food for a population of thousands of wandering Bigfeet, Captain Buhne notes the enormous populations of Roosevelt Elk. That elk can find food enough proves there's plenty for the Sasquatch family. If there's enough grass for the elk, then there must be enough chicken for the Wookie goes the logic.

Let's end this with the Captain's attempt to photograph Redwood National Park's Bigfeet through hidden cameras and not-so-hidden chickens.

"I strapped several cheesecloth pouches of raw chicken to nearby trees, fastening the juicy bundles to trunks in view of the game camera such that, arms outstretched, the baits are positioned well above my own 6-foot, 3-inch head. (The oozing pockets of free-range, organic poultry would sit out-of-reach of every known forest inhabitant, I calculated.)"

Raw chicken, oh so carefully placed out of reach of every known forest inhabitant? Apparently our Captain's never heard of black bears, known to climb high into the redwood trees in search of the sugars and bugs hidden under redwood bark or the carelessly hung food sacks of unwary campers. Nor does he know the qualities of ravens who scour the forests for anything edible. Racoons? Must not have 'em here.

But yet, the Captain's camera did snap photos of black bears and foxes drawn to the smell of the hanging free-range snacks. But suddenly, or somewhere in the span of three hours when the camera apparently didn't take any photos at all, the chicken vanished. Something had taken it while the camera rested. Not the bears in the photos most certainly, but a critter with opposable thumbs! Captain Buhne's camera did spy a black-hair covered shoulder. Bigfoot? Bear? Skinnydippin' Greek camper? There's your proof of the existence of Bigfoot in the redwoods.

Thanks for all your efforts Captain Buhne. And good luck on the hunt. We eagerly await your follow-up report.
--- --- ---
Ya know. I generally trust the North Coast Journal more than I don't. The tabloid cover and the impossible story so close to Halloween imply to me a good Halloween ghost story. A Sidd Finch tale for Humboldt County.

Ya almost had me there, Captain Buhne. I'll give you a call you if Tony Orlando starts banging on trees next time I'm hikin' the Lady Bird Johnson trail.

Winter comes to the north coast

2007-10-26T06:25:00.000-07:00

Monday 17October2007, around 930am...

It's been more than three weeks since I've taken the short walk down the beach to the mouth of Redwood Creek. (And precisely one month since I've chronicled it here.) Three weeks of bullshit government bureaucracy, cranky weather, short days caused by my post-work p.m. schedule, and general early fall sloth. But today I took the time seein' as how the visitors were few and we had a little extra help at the Visitor Center with the surprise arrival of one of our volunteers.

9:30 marks the morning's low tide. The slope to the surf is steep, the edges of the last high tide etched in a fresh line of waterlogged driftwood. The first real storm of the season came last Wednesday in a 2.5" soaker. Scattered showers over the weekend added more wet to the coast along with a good downpour early this morning. But now there's a nice break in the showers, a slight cool breeze from the south, and even a few patches of blue highlighting the varying shades of gray blanketing the sky.

A flock of maybe 60 Canada geese in an enormous V fly high overhead. Two smaller Vs of six and seven geese each fly inside the larger formation. There are just a few honkers in the group making me wonder if there are designated talkers in a flock of flying geese, those shouting out directions or encouraging the stragglers, or if they are simply the chatty Cathys of the bunch.

Walking north in the wet sands near water's edge, the sound of fall's stormy surf captures my attention. Visually, the waves are higher than they've been in the past couple of weeks, maybe eight to ten foot swells cresting and running to the shore in 10 second increments. But what I've not really noticed before is that it's the retreating waves dominating the soundscape. Close your eyes, as I do now, and you hear the upward trilling of the wave as it slides up and back down the coarse sands. The low drumming of the cresting waves further out are the background bass to the more lyrical run-up and back-down of each wave.

As the retreating waves slide back to the sea, they provide a smooth floor for the next wave to roll up the slope. There's a visual tension between advancing and retreating forces that slows and controls both their progress. Where the sandy slope angles to one side or the other, the diagonally backing waters force a spouting line of white foam in the full length of the incoming wave.

Approaching the mouth, the familiar flock of gulls and pelicans rest at the apex of the waveslope. They're not doing much of anything. A few sit. A few stand. And a few wander between the crowds. The pelicans bail out as I approach, the dozen or so of them bouncing three times in the sand as they build up wing speed enough to lift their bulbous bodies up and over the waves to nearby sea stacks.

There are more immature gulls out here than a few weeks ago. Dark brown and mottled, one with a nearly black head, another with dark rings around his eyes (a teen who stayed out too late perhaps?). They are western gulls, just young ones without the distinctive, clean white and gray markings of their elders.

The mouth of the creek is indeed open now. I'd been told it opened after last Wednesday's two-an-a-half inches of rain, but now I can tell y'all that I've been there and seen it for myself. I've always loved this point of clashing contact between river and ocean. The steady push of creek water is easily traced all the way into the crashing waves. The pulse of each ocean wave forces sea water over the rushing fresh water into the estuary behind the sand. In between, swirling eddies and ragged waves decorate this meeting of two worlds.

A western gull perches on a dark rock in the middle of the two watery worlds. Throughout the hour I spend in and around here, he (she?) doesn't leave, standing as a sentry on his small-scale Rock of Gibraltar.

Three seals slide in and out of this middle ground, surfing outward with the river's surge into the Pacific, and swimming back to the estuary in the calm eight foot- deep channel underneath the roiling swells.

This is my favorite corner of the beach, and love to be down as close to this joining of fresh and salt water as common sense and dry sand allow. The hazards of this spot are brought back to me suddenly when I hear water rushing in around the corner of the elevated sandspit to where I stand, my back momentarily to the ocean, eyes staring at the estuary. The water swells in the narrow channel as I scamper quickly to a higher spot of sand. My footprints are quickly erased from the wet sand, before the wave is spent and the water returns to its narrow channel. While never in any real danger of embarking on my own watery journey this time, I'm reminded that this transition zone is best left to loftable gulls and slippery seals, not slow-footed, Gore-tex booted rangers in heavy green jeans.

The estuary behind the sand spit is quiet and calm save for the occasional pulse of water from the overriding sea. The opening of its path to the Pacific has drained the estuary and its shores are perhaps 15 feet lower than they were last month. The south estuary that wrapped in behind the levee'd walls of the creek's mainstem is dry now. A flock of gulls bathe in the freshwater, furiously flapping their wings splashing water high above their heads, rocking side to side, and dipping their heads in and out of the water's surface.

A solitary egret, white and tall, stands in the rocks along the levee's edge, still, unmoving, waiting.

One pelican floats quietly, a few yards north of the splashing gulls. Just watching.

I wander up the backside of the sandspit through the piles of driftwood and back to the surf. It's just over an hour since I started this morning's saunter, but the wave heights have increased dramatically. Another storm is anticipated tonight or tomorrow that will swell the waves upwards to 15 to 20 feet high. My footprints from an hour ago are gone as the rising tide eliminates all evidence of this morning's walk.

Gray skies still dominate though small patches of blue appear between the grays allowing quick flashes of sun to hit the beach. The breeze has definitely picked up a tad.

A most glorious morning.

"The Omnivore's Dilemma", by Michael Pollan

2007-10-26T06:24:00.000-07:00

It's not often a book comes along to change the way you think and act. I'm guessing most of us read books that support perspectives we've developed already. I've read a ton of great books lately, and many of them offer new insights and different twists. But books that truly open the eyes, at least for me, are rare. Tom Hodgkinson's book, How to be Idle, was the last book to provide me an entirely new way of seeing the world. Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great, which I read earlier this year, comes close as well, but it probably served more as reinforcement than a real awakening.

The Omnivore's Dilemma is one of those big picture, eye-opening books. Journalist Michael Pollan expertly weaves his way through the morass of industrial agriculture, box-store organics which appear on the surface to offer a better way to eat, and into the world of local organics, before detailing his own journey into a personally hunted and gathered meal. I found the entire book fascinating.

Did you know that more than 60% of all the industrially-created and processed food we eat comes from corn? From the corn-fed beeves and chickens to purt near all our processed food, (including nearly the entire McDonald's menu), our glut of cheap, government-subsidized corn has become the hidden foundation of every American's diet. And thanks to these corn-based diets, we have a surplus of obesity (consider those beautifully marbled ribeyes and the chicken's artificially large American breasts), diabetes, and heart attacks, not to mention polluted rivers and farmlands, farmers on welfare, and wars for oil.

Do you realize the environmental costs of the burgeoning organic foods now so readily available in our "whole food" supermarket chains and in the neighborhood Safeway? When measured in transportation and packaging costs (read petrochemical costs), the impacts are very nearly the same as foods grown in the industrial food chain. Sure, they'll be slightly better for you healthwise, but the costs to the planet are just as high.

I had hoped for this kind of measured expose when I read Fast Food Nation a few years ago (though it didn't effectively get me to kick the fast food habit). Pollan has convinced me of the value - both to my own health and that of the planet - of eating foods made, grown, and created locally. Since beginning this book, I've made more trips to the local farmer's market and scanned the cards at the local co-op more diligently to see where my food is coming from. I'm convinced now that it matters. I'm trying to limit the Safeway & Costco visits to toilet paper, toothpaste, and Cheezits. Now I'm considering how to put together my Thanksgiving meal with all local foodstuffs. Go ahead...add a challenge to a full day's cooking!

Now I'll not step out and say I'm a full-blown convert and become entirely local and organic. I know I'll still drive-thru for the occasional double cheeseburger value meal. And I'm not gonna quiz the waiter at the local eatery on what the chicken ate before I ate the chicken. It's all in perspective. But Pollan has convinced me that our food's provenance matters. If we are what we eat, we should try to know a little something about where what we eat came from. That shouldn't be so hard.

Anyone up for some Brio sourdough with Humboldt Creamery butter alongside the Willow Creek Farms cherry tomatoes and Cypress Grove Chevre?

So little time

2007-10-26T06:23:00.002-07:00

Seems I have two wildly busy seasons anymore, with a whole lot of generic, though generally manageable, busy-ness the rest of the time. May is one of those periods: coaching two girls softball teams with games every night of the week, while coordinating the scheduling for the whole league, and at work I'm hiring and training our new summer rangers and shepherding in another busy summer season.

That other crazed season is right now. Though visitation is down at the park - October 15th usually marks the day that our numbers fall off the table - and winter's rain started in earnest late last week, our staffing is also down with the departure of the last summer ranger. Our winter ranger's hiring has been stalled due to bureaucratic foot shooting which, as of October the first, requires all new hires to clear a background check before they step behind the desk, a process that could take up to a month After all, we wouldn't want al quaeda operatives staffing our quiet visitor centers in the dead of winter. (Actually that wouldn't bother me as long as they don't call in sick on weekends and can properly count out the cash register at the end of the day.) For me, it's means more time hanging out at the VC than in my office (not always a bad thing) and trying to sensitively juggle the lonely desk time of the other permanent rangers here.

October is a two sport season for me as well. I'm in the last month of the soccer season with my under-10 traveling team, and just beginning practices for the middle school basketball team. Now, instead of sneaking out of work twice a week for soccer, I'm stealing away at 2:30 or 3:00 every day for one or the other team, whilst trying to keep up a respectable presence at work so I don't piss off the bosses or my coworkin' friends.

Speaking of soccer, our girls beat the league powerhouse yesterday 4-3. Yes, the team that went 0-9 last year with a goal differential around 7, the very same team that had gone 1-6-2 so far this season, knocked off a team that hasn't lost a game in two years. We found ourselves down 1-0 barely a minute into the game as our cross-bay rivals stormed our goal before our kids even realized they'd kicked off. It was 2-0 maybe 3 minutes later when our fullback tipped the ball into her own goal in an shotblocking attempt. And then suddenly it was 3-0 off a penalty kick forced by our other fullback raising a hand to block a shot in the goal box.

But the valiant Thunder eight charged back scoring on a penalty shot of their own just before the half. Beautiful passing and timely runs knotted the score at 3 a few minutes into the second half. Then, with 10 minutes remaining, a mid-field kick, intended as a pass but which became a shot, rolled painfully slowly under and past their falling keeper, its forward momentum sapped mere inches across the goal line for the game winner. The last 10 minutes were a flurry of runs and charges and shots as our opponents pulled out everything to avert their loss. Several great saves by our own keeper and a few direct kicks off the chests and faces of our own girls closed out the game...a most satisfying victory for these beautiful little 9 year old girls (not to mention their long-suffering coaches and parents). I should mention they were almost as thrilled by the homemade caramel apples post-game as they were by the win.

Ah, but back to the time crunch. On top of girls' sports and work, the baseball playoffs keep my ass firmly settled in the family room chair when I'm not on a field or in the VC. The Rockies have forgotten how to lose. And the Red Sox figured out a clever way to lose game 2 of their series. There are more games coming with at least another 3 games in AL, and perhaps only 1 in the NL. Then there's the World Series. And me and the Mrs still have to watch the last two episodes of the first season of 24!

I haven't been to the mouth of my creek in maybe three weeks. The rain, the trip to Arizona, work, meetings, annual stats, performance reviews, basketball, soccer, life, kids, dentists, have all conspired against me. Winter is here. We had two-and-a-half inches of rain last Wednesday so by Friday the mouth of the creek had burst open to the sea. More rain last night with a forecast of continuous wet through the end of this week. Perhaps this afternoon I can sneak out between showers to check things out. Perhaps, instead of writing this pointless screed I could've been walking out there by now.

Findin' a candidate

2007-10-26T06:23:00.001-07:00

I'm three weeks shy of four and half decades now and been politically aware and occasionally active (at least in presidential election years) since my mom took a 9 year old me out leafletting for George McGovern in '72. Yet since my first presidential vote - Jimmy Carter in '80 on the day before my 18th birthday no less, I've never contributed actual money to a candidate. Sure, I've donated plenty of time to candidates...at the DC headquarters and New Hampshire for Gary Hart in '84, and in local phone booths, envelope stuffing, and voter turnout stuff for all the Dems from '88 through '04. But I've never handed over any pocket change until now.

That streak ended tonight when I sent along a small sum to the guy from New Mexico, Governor-Ambassador-Secretary-Congressma

n Bill Richardson. Unless the Nobel Peace Prize coaxes Al Gore into the race, Bill's my guy through the primaries.

(Note: What follows is a slightly revised screed posted in an earlier blog incarnation on another site.)

They say all politics is local. No where did I find this more true than when living more than a dozen years in New Mexico. In a state of not quite two million people - a third of them in Albuquerque - opportunities for meeting and even having a meaningful conversation with significant political folks were plentiful.

At the one politically connected hotel in our little town or at rallies by the red, white and blue rocket slide astride the Pecos River, I met both of our US senators (Bingaman and the dottering Domenici), two governors, and buffet tables full of state incumbents and candidates. And I actually had a brief conversation with then-congressman (though not from our district) Bill Richardson. In his standard rumpled sport coat, sans tie, he said talked briefly with me and my daughter...a cool moment for me, but absolutely lost on a three year old. Those were years when I felt that the common folk - like me - might actually have the opportunity to influence the political life of the nation.

Then I moved to California and I lost that personal touch with our national politics. Tucked away in a distant corner of a monstrously huge state, far from the seats of power and money, we are neglected here by anyone of national interest or importance. No one wants or needs to come by this corner of California, including our own US senators and our cartoon-character governor. It's easy to become cynical about the state of national politics when you're so far away from the conversation. And the local politics of fast food regulation, flouride paranoia and agricultural zoning, though essential for maintaining the loopy and free-form character of our neighborhood, seem petty when people are dying by the thousands in wars of choice led by liars and thieves.

So, I'm supporting Bill Richardson this time 'round. He's the only viable candidate with a brave stance on ending the war in Iraq. He has experience in bringing disparate people together, be they dictators and democrats (small d) or Republicans and Democrats (big D). He's got the resume in congress, the state house, the UN, and the cabinet to see the picture from so many sides.

And, because I once shook his hand. Because he came to my little town and took a few moments to talk to me one afternoon and ask me what I did for a living, and what I thought was the most important issue he should be thinking about. Because he asked my daughter's name and flashed a smile and a hello to her.

Yes, he's a politician, and we could rightly question the sincerity of it all. He didn't invite me to join his party of local fat cat fund raisers. He was then the big fish in the small pond that is a small state. He would not remember our conversation, nor would I harbor any fantasies that he would.

In many ways I'm supporting an ideal by supporting Richardson. For me, for now, he represents the ability of real live Americans to touch those who want to lead us. His wrinkled sports coat, casual demeanor, simple and plain conversation reveal the possibility that our leaders might want to come to our little towns and meet inconsequential people like you and me (and I mean that in the kindest way), and they'll ask how we're doing and what matters to us....and that they'll genuinely care about our answers.

Of course, campaign teams work hard to make us believe their cleverly crafted photo ops are really the candidates reaching out to the little guys. They want you to think that Hillary Clinton really is on a listening tour. they think we'll fall for the joke that Bush is pondering a new way forward in Iraq, that Giuliani has courage, that Thompson is awake, or John Edwards would just as soon work in the mill as be our next president.

I know it's all a bunch of ad company driven hooey colorized by nameless news anchors from empty suited media corporations who have bankrupted their news departments, pantsed their journalists, and are driven by money, not a journalistic fervor for truth, justice and the American way.

But for a brief moment nine or ten years ago, someone who mattered in the higher echelon of national politics, seemed to think my daughter and I mattered to him. That's the ethos of politics we must have again. We need the casually dressed, rumple suited real guy who knows how to work with normal people, not just how to work a room of corporate donors. That's the sort of representative democracy I think this country was founded upon. And I'm bettin' a few bucks that Bill Richardson is the guy who can bring us closest to that silly little dream of mine.

Saying goodbye

2007-10-26T06:21:00.000-07:00

Here are my grandfather's rules for living to 100:
1) Take a nap every day.
2) Bourbon at 5:00.
3) Don't eat your vegetables. (Unless they're covered in sauce.)

My fathers' father turned 100 years old last December. We celebrated the centennial that none of us ever doubted alongside his three children and their spouses (and including my divorced mom and her second husband), his then grandchildren (plus nine spouses), and his 22 great-grandchildren. A party complete with a catered outdoor meal and fireworks that lit up mid-winter suburban Phoenix skies where he's spent his last 25 years. A wonderful tribute for a proud and honorable man who despite a remarkable career in business, a life of aviation, world travel, and philanthropy, views his family, from top to bottom, as his lone success.

This past summer, my 100 year old grandfather fell getting out of his car at his summer cottage near Cape Cod. He fractured his pelvis, not badly, but enough to put the family scion into a full-time day care facility for a few weeks and limiting his movement upon returning home to Arizona. It seems that this last injury finally made my grandfather feel his age.

And thus began, at least outwardly, his slow, graceful walk into the proverbial sunset. Unable to get around as he wished, relying on the supporting arms of his oldest daughter and oldest granddaughter, my grandfather's body is at last winding down.

I suppose 100 years is a lot to ask of any body. We all know this, but then again we also knew that nothing would stand in my grandfather's way of reaching his centennial. But now, the next milestone - 200 years - is too much to ask of himself.

I spent three and half days last week visiting my grandfather for what I fully know is the last time. He still retains all his mental acuity - his sense of humor, of politics, of books, of family. He knew me through the haze of his tiring eyes. He asked after my wife and his two great-granddaughters by name. He asked about our jobs, remembering my wife had recently been promoted. He wanted to know if he should send John McCain the money McCain's asking for. (I advised against it, though he pshawed my suggestion of writing the check to Obama instead.) He still carries on a good conversation, though after three or four exchanges, he tires and appears to drift off to sleep.

My father and I talked through my grandfather's apparent mid-conversation naps. My dad leaned in once and asked him, "Dad, when your eyes are closed, are you sleeping, or are you still listening?" To which my grandfather grinned, raised his head, opened his eyes and said, "I've heard every word you've said. It's just not very interesting."

My grandfather's body is simply giving out. It's his heart mostly. The blood isn't pumping well. He's always tired. Any amount of exertion, simply walking to the bathroom or cutting the meat at dinner, tires him. He's not in pain. There is no cancerous rock in his belly slowly and painfully overtaking his organs. He's just tired. And this, I see as a fitting way for him to let go.

You feel his quiet pride when you're with him. And you feel the frustrations of this proud and honorable man, so used to doing things for himself, as he gradually allows others to take control of his life. He doesn't like being cared for, or fussed over, or managed. (He wouldn't let me adjust the bourbon and soda I made him that he said was a bit too strong.) He didn't give in to the notion of 24 hour caregivers until last month. No longer able to control his own bowels and requiring help in cleaning himself up, he simply announced to my aunt and cousin that he didn't want his "nearest and dearest" wiping his ass. The caregivers arrived the next morning.

Now my aunt, my cousin, and the caregivers are in charge of his heart, his breathing, his medications, his bowels, and his food. At some point, when the quality of life is not there for him, he and his doctor will make a decision to discontinue that kind of management. But for now, he delights in family visits and happy hour guests, even when nothing is said. And my visit last week was but one in a parade of family and friends.

He's never spoken much of his faith or what will happen after. One of the night nurses told us that my grandfather woke up in the middle of the night and sat on the edge of the bed talking to himself. He spoke to Martha, his mother, and Edie, his wife (my grandmother). In his apparent sleep, he was asking them if they're going to be there when he arrives, and telling them that he can't wait to see them again.

But when asked by the hospice nurse if he wanted the chaplain to come by just as someone else to talk to, my grandfather emphatically said, "No. I don't want him here." He's even refused the visits of his local pastor, the one who buried my grandmother six years ago. He doesn't need their counsel to feel comfortable in what comes next.

Mostly we sat together. We shared lunches and dinners, the vegetables slathered in homemade hollandaise. We talked. I watched him sleep. I helped him keep the oxygen cannula hooked over his ears. We were simply there with him.

As the moment closed in when I had to leave, I stalled going into his bedroom. It was just past noon and he was still sleeping. I found myself moving so slowly, holding back that moment when I would see him for the last time, when that final goodbye was imminent.

A deep breath and I walked in to the bedroom I almost never entered as a child. I sat next to him and he opened his eyes. "Is it time for you to go already?" he asked. (I remember thinking that statement would've been more appropriate coming from my mouth.) I took his hand and told him I loved him. I told him that my daughters loved him too. I couldn't hold back the tears when I uttered the words, "I love you". Hearing the tears and the muffled snorting in my throat, he said, "I love you, too." He closed his eyes again, and I left, quickly, without looking back wanting to spare him the notion that this was a last goodbye, though I know he's experienced a entire month of final goodbyes from so many of us.

He is such a huge part of my life. Such a tremendous presence. I'm glad I made the trip. It would've been easy to use work or coaching or family as an excuse to put off the visit. I would've regretted it. Not much was said between my Dad and I on the way to the airport. Small talk. I just wanted quiet and was happy that air travel today is such crowded anonymity. I felt pensive, not really wanting to speak with anyone or about anything. Just quiet, remembering the moments over the past near 45 years with him, squaring the image of the tiring man in the bed with the enormous presence he's held throughout my life.

My next visit to Arizona will be different. The place will be empty without him. But I'm hoping, as are all my cousins, and aunts and uncles, and brothers and sister, and all our kids, that the moment will be seeded with the thrill and honor of being able to be part of his life, and the pride of knowing that his legacy continues through our stories and memories of him.

My Daughter's Morning

2007-10-26T06:20:00.001-07:00

Courtesy of Garrison Keillor's radio broadcast, The Writer's Almanac, here's a poem by David Swanger that spoke to me on my way to work this morning. As the father of two daughters, it's nice to be reminded what we mean to our little girls. I'm many years removed from the diapering days outwardly portrayed here, yet I still witness almost daily the anticipation of escapades in the eyes of our nine year old. The eyes of a 13 year old more often reflect the amazing idiocy of her paternal parent than "the first version of later princes", but the smile and love and admiration are still not too deeply hidden...at least not yet.

For all of you with kids, enjoy....

My Daughter's Morning
by David Swanger

My daughter's morning streams
over me like a gang of butterflies
as I, sour-mouthed and not ready
for the accidents I expect

of my day, greet her early:
her sparkle is as the edge of new
ice on leafed pools, while I
am soggy, tepid; old toast.

Yet I am the first version
of later princes; for all my blear
and bluish jowl I am welcomed
as though the plastic bottle

I hold were a torch and
my robe not balding terry.
For her I bring the day; warm
milk, new diaper, escapades;

she lowers all bridges and
sings to me most beautifully
in her own language while
I fumble with safety pins.

I am not made young
by my daughter's mornings;
I age relentlessly.

Yet I am made to marvel
at the durability of newness
and the beauty of my new one.