The Salmon Return

Yesterday morning there was a sighting of chinook salmon in Putah Creek by the Putah Creek Diversion Dam, just east of Lake Solano. This was just three days after a pulse of water from the recent rains opened up the quite circuitous connection between the creek and the waters leading to the ocean.

After Putah Creek was dammed in 1957, salmon weren’t seen in its waters until 1995, and in 1998 observers saw 5 salmon spawning there. And last year there were probably about 70 to 80 spawning salmon.

I’ve never seen any of the salmon in the creek, but clearly now is the time to go look. After all, the creek is about a three minute walk from here.

Mixed Living

When we were in Madrid last December, we stayed with a friend just down the hill from where I grew up. When I was growing up, though, the area was fields of thistles, parched in summer and a good place for madrileos to dump their old mattresses and whatnot. Now there are high rises.

In the manner typical of European planning, this new tiny barrio has plenty of shops at the foot of the apartment blocks: pastry shops, light fixture specialists, and of course the fabulous papelera where I bought my Stypen-Up are all downstairs. There are two buses that run along the street, and two different metro lines are both within walking distance.

This is so normal there that it arouses no comment. Here, when they opened the Davis Lofts, a small mixed-use complex in downtown Davis, it was hailed as a breakthrough in planning and design. Yet if we are to make cities livable in the 21st century, this is going to have to become the norm.

This is for the Ecotone Wiki’s New Urban Place.

A Day With Humboldt

Today was a holiday—Veteran’s Day—and I stayed at home all day, venturing out only to go to my Spanish class in the evening. A storm came through, and we’ve had 1.68 inches of rain in the past 30 hours. My rainy day activities including pondering sparrows with the kitties and finishing the book Humboldt’s Cosmos, by Gerard Helferich. Alexander von Humboldt was one of these amazing figures in natural history, making contributions to botany, geology, anthropology, and of course geography, he founding the field of plant geography. His drive as an explorer was incredible: I can’t believe how he hauled the finest of scientific instruments and tens of thousands of specimens during five years of adventures in South America between 1799 and 1804. How nice to have the luxury to haul out the Times Atlas of the World and trace his route up the Orinoco and through the Andes.

Hope is the Thing with Feathers

This morning as I was getting my bike out along the driveway past all the beekeeping equipment on my way to work—in a hurry, I was late—a rock wren popped out into a small patch of sunlight.

I have a special fondness for wrens, as I mentioned recently in a comment over at Via Negativa. They’re small, they’re not very brightly colored, but they are cheerfully busy. They chatter. They scold. They have personallity.

Then, coming home tonight, way after dark after a dinner in Sacramento commiserating with some friends about Tuesday’s results, I heard some geese calling overhead through the fog. I’m pretty sure they were white fronted geese. Winter is here: our valley is flooded in parts and the waterfowl take over. Switching places with the ducks, they move out in to the fields to feed at night.

It is hard to stay in a place of despair with this around me: a rock wren and night-feeding geese.

Sense of Place Revisited

The Ecotone Wiki was set up to provide a forum for people to explore their sense of place; the first two discussion topics here and here did this in the most general terms. (Many of the discussion topics that followed focused on a more specific element that dealt with place; please feel free to add a post to any of them and please alert me if you do!). The wiki has sadly been the target of much spam and is less active than it used to be, but it remains a wonderful resource for those with an interest in place.

Numenius and I will be heading back to the San Francisco Center for the Book this Sunday to take two workshops: Sense of Place and Letters to Anywhere. Ive just received the materials list for both workshops:

writing paper and pens
drawing paper
colored pencils
marking pens
pastels or crayons
assorted materials for collage
glue
scissors
thread and needles
awls
bone folders
cardboard and heavyweight colored stock for making books
exacto knife with blades

When they say pens, Ill bring about 50; about five different kinds of glue, different kinds of colored pencils, watercolors, gouache, etc. Ill be bringing along the walnut ink I made last year (by the way, there’s still plenty, so if you’d like some let me know and I’ll send it to you), some flowers I pressed from the foothills, various sketchbooks so I can refer back to images in my head. Often for these kinds of workshops I feel regret for things I left behind as ideas get triggered; Im going to stop just short of bringing the kitchen sink this time, since well drive and have no space restrictions.

Thanks to a tip from Chris Clarke, I read an amazing essay by Jarrett Walker on the Central Valley, Im quite stoked about exploring on paper, with ink all over my right forefinger and glue in my hair, what it means to live in this part of the world, where we are currently being pummelled with blustery rain. After a long, hot, dusty summer, Im in ecstasy over it, walked to work today almost getting blown off the Putah Creek bridge.

Rumsey Fire

Coughing didn’t help:
The fires jumped south and west
Pinkball spooked the gloom

Smoky Days

There’s a fire burning in the backcountry on the west side of Yolo County and the east side of Napa County. It’s been going for three days, and has burned almost 38,000 acres, largely in chaparral. There’s been very little damage to structures, and only one injury so far, and fires are an ordinary part of our landscape. The smoke drifts down here from time to time—yesterday someone new to California asked me what it was—and the haze to the west is tinged mauve.

North Wind

In fall and spring we get strong north winds when a high pressure system sets up over the Great Basin. It makes for bad chi, or is it positive ions, all around. Yesterday morning I smelled smoke from a grass fire that turned out to be a three-alarmer several miles to the northwest. And then in the evening we were walking out in the field by our house when we heard and saw a loud bang and a bright white flash. When we got back to our house there was no power—evidently it was a transformer exploding. The house was dark—so much for our evening reading.

Trains In The Southland

I went to Ventura yesterday to give a talk at a meeting. When I was figuring out how to get to Ventura, situated on the Oxnard Plain between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, far away from major airports, I came up with a novel plan: fly to Burbank, and take the train! It couldn’t have been easier, actually. Hop on the 50 minute flight on Southwest from Sacramento to Burbank, walk one block south to the train station at the airport, then take the train west to Ventura ($13 each way), the stop there being several blocks from the conference hotel.

This isn’t supposed to be like this: convenient public transportation in Southern California. Burbank is a good airport to fly into as well, not the out-of-the way zoo that LAX is. On my return trip this morning, there was even a group of sports fans taking the train 75 miles to go to a game. These were USC fans headed to the big game against Cal (alas, Cal lost, but they kept it pretty close): I think they got on the train at Santa Barbara.

One person in my dinner party last night was wondering if somebody would be able to give her a ride to the Burbank Airport today. I told her about the train—she was happy for the tip, since she loves train travel. So do I.

Urban Swine

Part of my dissertation was about mapping the distribution of feral pigs in California. But I had no idea that wild boars could be an urban species. It seems that Berlin has a population of about five to seven thousand wild boars, their numbers increasing two-fold after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And they cause over 400 traffic accidents each year. After all, I don’t see a crosswalk in this picture.