Second Street Sketchcrawl

Today we went to the sketchcrawl that took place in downtown Davis in the morning. We all met at Second Street and G Street but I immediately sauntered east one block to a spot closer to the train station. This sketch here is of a smaller building nearby that serves as the Amtrak bus depot. I did one other sketch today; I looked the opposite direction from where I was sitting for the first sketch and focused on the colorful entrance to the Mexican restaurant there, Tres Hermanas. This sketch was to experiment with a small set of Neocolor II aquarelle wax pastel crayons.

After the sketchcrawl ended, Pica and I had lunch at Tres Hermanas with a friend of ours. We both had vegetarian quesadillas.

Bodega Bay

I made a solitary pilgrimage to Bodega Bay yesterday, where my parents lived for some years before my father died and my mother moved to Maine to be near my sister’s family. Mum and I had spread some of dad’s ashes over the cliffs on Bodega Head; she walked on the Head most days while she lived there, communing with the ravens and oystercatchers. I wanted to add some of her ashes to the mix, 26 years later.

I hadn’t thought about the impact that Veterans’ Day would have on the bustle of this little seaport, but I should have. There were people and cars everywhere. I made my way to the spot where we had spread Dad’s ashes but got overcome with vertigo and crouched down in the iceplant by the cliff edge, unable to move a step closer. In the end I put her ashes in the vegetation; I apologized to her for being scared. It wouldn’t help anyone, though, if I lost my footing and fell stupidly…

There was no way I was going to find somewhere to eat with the gathering throngs so I went out on the balcony at the Tides inn to do a sketch or two… A loon was fishing near the dock. Loons had been calling across the Bay when we set her ashes down in Maine. It closed the circle a bit.

There is still a mum-shaped hole in my being, which I imagine will never really go away. I’m so glad we got closer in the last 20 years, and especially in the last five…

Reaching For The Sky

I am watching a multipart documentary now about the Sagrada Família in Barcelona. This series is being released weekly on the YouTube channel betevé; I am viewing in Catalan with Catalan subtitles for language input practice. The church has been under construction for 143 years now and as the end of October it is the tallest church in the world. The series has many interviews and lots of good imagery ranging from recent drone flights to historical photos from the beginning of the 20th century. A few thoughts:

• I marvel at the continuity of the detailed craftwork over 140 plus years. It is a direct link with the wonderful craft traditions flourishing in Barcelona and Catalunya in the latter half of the 19th century.

• On a completely different tack, I have started a book entitled Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle, by Jodi Dean. As the title suggests, it is a very left-wing analysis of contemporary socioeconomics. One of the points she makes early on is that being a worker is not a source of identity anymore, since people don’t see social production and collective energy emerging from their efforts. This is the exact opposite of what working on the Sagrada Família must be like.

• The Sagrada Família is now the most visited location in Spain, with over 4.8 million visitors in 2024. This sets up a paradox — how does one arrive at a reverential state in a space that is so crowded, despite all the spiritual affordances that are built into the architecture?

Tule Fog

Years ago, when Numenius and I took a haiku class with Maria Melendez, she read us a poem she had written. I can’t remember the first line exactly but it went something like this:

Out-of-towners ask,
What the heck is a tule?
Fog caught on thousands.

In those days tule fog (a tule is a species of rush found in the winter wetlands of the Central Valley, much used by the original human inhabitants of this area, especially for baskets) was a regular occurrence. It would rain, there would be two or three mornings of thick fog, and then it would get sunny again until the next storm. Nowadays tule fog is rare, the result of a changing climate.

We did get a good rainy day yesterday, and we got a good thick tule fog this morning, and I decided to walk over to the Arboretum. By the time I got there the sun had burned off the fog, though it was still pretty drippy. I came across a small flock of turkeys across from the Mondavi Center. I am determined never to leave the house without something to write or draw on (and with), so I made a quick sketch of these guys, posted at right.

Tis The Season

In October I inevitably take lots of photos of Halloween decorations. Here is a photo of a couple of skeletons that I met on a recent walk.

The Call of the Loon

This past week has been very busy with getting things packed up, distributed to various places, visits to lawyers and accountants and funeral homes, all the kinds of things that need to be done and nobody much feels like doing.

We did take a break, though, on Friday morning, to distribute mum’s ashes along with the remaining ones of my father. As we walked silently back to the car, a couple of loons began to call.

Mum kept her sense of humor to the end: writing “sayonara” on her calendar to all future doctor’s appointments, she really left on her terms and on her schedule. I will be making a donation to Maine’s Death With Dignity foundation.

New Water Year

Because most of precipitation in California falls during fall and winter, state hydrologists start the record-keeping for the annual amount of precipitation on October 1st of each year. This past year, the 2025 water year, we got 13.13 inches of rain at our house, which is a pretty dry year. October has started out with a little bit of rain already: yesterday (1 October) we got 0.02 inches of rain and today we got 0.20 inches at our house. I even felt the need to wear my rain jacket and pants for a little walk this morning.

Mantis At Work

Our neighbor Barbara this afternoon showed me this praying mantis in her front yard. It has been hanging out in these lilies for a few days now, and the other day she spotted it devouring a bumblebee attracted to the flowers. It’s a good place to work, I suppose.

One Eagle Hill

I finally finished reading Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s biographical tome about J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus. One of the things that draws me into the Oppenheimer story, both this book and the blockbuster movie of a couple years back, is that my family history intersects quite strongly with the places, the people, and the science in the narrative. Both my parents studied chemistry as undergraduates at Ohio State University, and they moved out to the Berkeley area in 1948 when my father started graduate studies in nuclear chemistry at UC Berkeley. His major professor was Glenn T. Seaborg, who in 1940 discovered plutonium and worked on the element’s chemical extraction at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago during the Manhattan Project. Seaborg knew most everyone in the Oppenheimer story, and because Berkeley became the premier center for nuclear chemistry, my father met some of these scientists as well.

Oppenheimer came to UC Berkeley around 1929 to develop a research program in theoretical physics. An article in the magazine Berkeleyside that came out around the movie illustrates the places that figured in Oppenheimer’s time at Berkeley. Two of these places I know well. Around 1940 the Oppenheimers rented a house at 10 Kenilworth Court in Kensington. I know this place because it was just around the corner from where chemistry professor Joel Hildebrand lived. Hildebrand lived to be 101, and when I would walk to high school in the late 1970s I would sometimes see Professor Hildebrand ambling about near there. (Also, scholarly longevity can be a family thing I guess. Joel Hildebrand’s son Milton became a distinguished zoologist and professor here at UC Davis. Milton died in 2020 at the age of 102).

The Oppenheimers then bought a house at One Eagle Hill Road in 1941. This house is 75 yards away from the home on Edgecroft Road where I grew up and my sister still lives. My parents bought the Edgecroft house in 1953 by which point the Oppenheimers had already moved away, but it’s fun to think about the coincidence in space if not in time. As a kid I played up and on the hill a stone’s throw away from where the Chevalier incident took place (Oppenheimer’s conversation in 1943 with his close friend Haakon Chevalier that would lead to Oppenheimer’s downfall in the 1954 security clearance hearings).

There’s a detail in the Berkeleyside article is of interest to Davis folks. When Oppenheimer moved to Los Alamos in March 1943 to lead the atomic bomb research there, he rented out the Eagle Hill house to a food scientist at UC Berkeley by the name of Emil Mrak. Mrak would go on to start the food science program at UC Davis and then became chancellor in 1959. The administration building at UC Davis is named Mrak Hall after him.

A final astronomical note. I remember looking at Comet Kohoutek through binoculars probably in January 1974 from the top of Eagle Hill. Kohoutek was not the spectacle people hoped for, but it was still fun to see.

September Grapes

The grapes draping our backyard fence are starting to turn color and many of the bunches of grapes becoming raisins. Here is a sketch using De Atramentis Urban Gray ink, Derwent drawing pencils, and Derwent graphitint pan colors.