Beeboxes In Twilight

It is still quite hot here: in the late afternoon the critters were taking shelter and there was no sign of the ground squirrels that live under and amongst these beeboxes. Only the western kingbirds were up and about, proclaiming the end of the day—they’re the first birds up in the pre-dawn hours as well.

Four Fat Drops

It’s been hot over the weekend, hot enough almost to persuade us to just give it up with the self-righteousness and turn on the airconditioning… But the blue mud dauber wasps are living in the outdoor fan unit, hopefully polishing off the black widows, and we don’t want to interrupt them. We sneak into movie theatres to see films that are far too young for us in an attempt to keep cool. (Yesterday we finally saw Finding Nemo.)

The predicted thunderstorm never really happened-we got a few huge drops (cuatro gotas gordas, in Spanish) which never amount to anything, don’t cool the place down, and certainly don’t get rid of the dust that blows off the new-plouged fields. One crop’s done, another needs to go in. We saw our first tomato truck yesterday-barrelling down the road with an articulated load of romas. The ones on the bottom inevitably get flattened, despite being bred not to, and cover the roads in a red film which is lethal come the first rain.

Above are a jackrabbit (Lepus californicus) and Western scrub-jay (Aphelocoma californica) through our kitchen window doing their best to stay out of the heat.

Wednesday Evening Ramble

A friend’s visiting from New York—no, he’s not a truck driver with a hamburger, he’s a Paulist priest with a peanut-butter-cookie-ice-cream-sandwich. We had dinner at the Picnic in the Park, watched the Stop UCD Biolab Now silent protest, saw the amphibious multi-geared tandem bicycle, and rode our bikes back home through campus (Ed had brought his mountain bike along with him in his Toyota Matrix through the Black Hills, the Cascades, Portland, Seattle, Boise…)

The Arcadian Dreamscape

This is a response for the collective set of posts on suburbs at the Ecotone Wiki.

I grew up in Kensington, California, just north of Berkeley, a little one-square mile municipality perched on hills with about 800 feet of relief from top to bottom of the town. I don’t think I considered it a suburb when growing—that was something you’d call Walnut Creek, or Fremont, or Hayward—after all it had plenty of secret places to explore—several creeks, a hidden garden at its heart, even a monastery. And it is a place that very much has its own identity: in a different county from Berkeley, up the hill from Albany, and much smaller than the city of El Cerrito to the north and west. But by most technical definitions it is a suburb, mostly of Berkeley but more generally of Oakland and San Francisco, significantly one whose early development was in the pre-war years.

For this post I just read American Dreamscape: The Pursuit of Happiness in Postwar Suburbia, by Tom Martinson. He writes in opposition to what he terms the New Urbanists, an intellectual tradition that is quite critical of suburbia, inveighing against their dependence on the automobile and promoting high-density housing, public transit, and centralization. The numbers are on his side: most people aspire towards suburban living, wanting to have their own little bit of space along with a house. He argues that the New Urbanist criticisms just don’t make sense to most people, who find the majority of their needs being met in the suburbs.

But Martinson, an architect, is critical of his profession, tracing a history of the Modernist architectural movement that led to a complete disinterest in residential design. Even contemporary estates for the elite in this society show little sense of design, “a hodgepodge of unrelated architectural features thrown together in a vain attempt to create visual interest”, as he puts it. Landscape architecture, vital once in the days of Frederick Law Olmsted in shaping our surroundings, has undergone even more of a decline in its importance, being relegated to specifying the choice of plantings in a development.

Martinson’s hope is that American society is overdue for a shift from rationalism to romanticism, and that there is a yearning now for what he calls an Arcadian suburb, with a concomitant attraction to smaller-scale dwellings and more natural environments. Sarah Susanka’s book The Not So Big House is an example of this, and at a landscape scale so is the work of the extremely influential planner Ian McHarg, author of the book Design with Nature.

Perhaps this is the reason why I get much more of a sense of place from my home town than the image I hold of the contemporary suburban development. Kensington dates from a late Romantic period in American landscape design. The layout of it as a development respects topography and the land. In the town I live in, Davis, growth, though inevitable, is fiercely contested. Maybe the contestants are missing the point. What if the tension over urban growth is not about traffic, or noise, or overburdened schools, but instead, at an archetypal level, is really about beauty?

Growing Up in the Suburbs

This post is in response to the third Ecotone Wiki joint blogging topic, Suburbs. Other posts on this topic can be found here.

When I started to think about suburbs for this piece, the stereotypical “kids and cul-de-sacs” image surfaced. I pictured green lawns, children being ferried to soccer and ballet and camp and swimming and all the other activities that people-mostly mothers-at work recite incessantly, half with pride, half with resignation. I pictured single-family homes with two vehicles, neither of which fit inside a garage filled to bursting with the detritus of contemporary consumerism. I pictured something alien: not somewhere I’d fit in, feel comfortable.

I hang my laundry on a line outside our front door (front, not back)—this would probably be enough to get me arrested if I lived in Mace Ranch, not four miles from here. I have no interest in mowing lawns, in washing my ancient car on a regular basis (the summer dust in Davis ensures that this is an essential activity for anyone caring to have a shiny car, to look “respectable”), or in worrying about whether or not I’m conforming to the expectations of the neighborhood. It feels oppressive and confining to me.

Yet I grew up in suburbs. We moved to Spain when I was four from Tiburon, a suburb of San Francisco. Rereading my grandmother’s diary of that trip-across the ocean on the Nieu Amsterdam from New York to Southampton, the drive south through France where I apparently got appendicitis, the arrival in downtown Madrid on a hot, sweltering day in early August-I see the anxiety that must have plagued my parents (and grandparents, who were on childcare detail) to find somewhere suitable to live. Suitable: meaning suitable for children, American children, not the immaculately dressed Spanish children in the playground outside our downtown hotel where the ground was dirt, not grass. Not one of those four adults thought we could possibly adapt to living in an apartment, which is how most Spanish people lived. We weren’t immaculately dressed. We had different needs, it seems.

There was one place they found that conformed to their expectations of suitability: Mirasierra, a small area to the north of the city (in 1964 Madrid still had sheep regularly crossing the Paseo de la Castellana, sheep having the right of way over cars, to go and graze in the field in front of the Real Madrid soccer stadium). They scoured Mirasierra for a house to rent. We moved into a red-shuttered, granite-and-stucco three-bedroom with a “maid’s room” downstairs (where my brother, the youngest, slept, to the absolute horror of Francisca, who wore widow’s black and cleaned up after us).

There were shops at the top of the hill on Calle Nuria, which we were allowed to walk to by ourselves from about when I was seven, as long as we stayed on this side of the street. We walked barefoot (no Spanish child would EVER be allowed to do this) to buy our polos de naranja (orange popsicles) and black-market American comics on the diamond-patterned cement sidewalk and splashed in paddling pools and walked across the street to see if Annie or Robbie could play (the neighborhood was filled with foreigners, most of them executives from English, French, German, Dutch, Swiss, or Italian companies—and their children, many of whom by the time they were six could speak three or more languages). We had puppies and a rabbit and a chicken (neither of which survived very long and ended up in Francisca’s pot: we couldn’t eat them, of course, being unadaptable foreign children). We caught mumps and chicken pox and minnows in the mucky stream further west beyond the grapevines.

Our third Mirasierra house had a pool and we bought it. Franco’s Spain was unairconditioned apart from movie theatres, and stiflingly hot nights were mitigated by frequent dips in the pool which my poor father labored to keep free of leaves, lizards, wasps, ants, coins, bobby pins, and hair, hair, hair. We became the envy of friends-many of whom lived in apartments closer to their father’s office or to Runnymede, the English/International school we all went to-on account of the pool, and summers were filled with friends of various ages who came over, towels and bathing suits in hand. My mother ferried us to ballet and riding and orchestra practice, just like the Mace Ranch mothers do today.

I loved growing up in that place. The memories serve to soften my reaction to the aspirations of families with young children to live in a safe, green-filled environment, however Stepfordian I might find it. But I don’t have children and I don’t ever want to mow a lawn, and I like the smell of air-dried sheets too much to give that up. So we live nestled in among the landlord’s son’s beekeeping equipment in the back, with the walnut tree and the peach tree and the nectarines and plums, with a good view of the fields and the railroad track and the hills off to the west. The cropdusters are at it again. The field workers will be out early in the morning because it’s going to be in the 100’s again tomorrow, so I need to be somewhat appropriately dressed as I dump the compost onto the field before seven. This is not Mace Ranch.

The Point Reyes Place Blogger Meetup

After our visit to Bodega Bay, we went south this morning to Point Reyes to have a picnic with Lisa of Field Notes. We met up at her house which is a beautiful A-frame cabin on the edge of Inverness. For our picnic we decided to stay on the Inverness Ridge side of the peninsula, so we took a little walk down to one of the beaches at Tomales Bay State Park. Usually when we head to Point Reyes, we go birding on the coastal side, heading towards the lighthouse, so it was nice for a change to walk in the mixed hardwood-conifer forest characteristic of the eastern side of the ridge.

We passed through the burned area from the fire a little over three weeks ago. There’s already regrowth: both sword and bracken ferns are sprouting in, the sword ferns growing back from the base of the burnt clump of stems of the old plants. We stopped for a little bit on the trail in a section with a lot of bird activity, and saw pacific-slope flycatchers, Wilson’s warblers, chestnut-backed chickadees, and winter wrens, the latter probably building a nest nearby. There was also a tree at this spot with a portion of its bark recently scraped away from about six feet up down to its base; we wondered if this was a sign of the bear that’s been about in recent weeks. The forest was oddly reminiscent of being in the native ohi’a forest on Maui last January; the physiognomy of the vegetation was similar, with a fern understory and a relatively low, dense tree canopy, not to mention that both places get lots of mist.

After our lunch near the beach we sampled some thimbleberries for our dessert, the fruits readily coming off their base and living up to their name by forming a little red fairy-sized berry cup. We then went back to the cabin for some tea. Dinah, Lisa’s chocolate Lab, had evidently figured out The Doorknob Principle to escape from the house and greeted us in the driveway. Over tea we talked about politics, Barry Bonds and the Giants, took some group photos, and saw a digicam movie of Dinah splashing in a river yesterday.

It was a wonderful visit. In homage to Coup de Vent, above is a picture of place bloggers on the trail.

A Break From the Heat

We’ve come west to Bodega Bay to visit my mother and immerse ourselves in the summer permafog of the coast, where multiple layers are essential and where we are gleefully freezing. There are also hills, too, so Numenius got a nice bike ride in. I went for a walk instead along the cliffs of the headland with my mother, checking up on the Western Gull chicks, the Pigeon Guillemots, and the Ravens who seem to have done away with the Oystercatcher offspring… Ravens are beautiful and majestic in flight but they are doing too well in this state, boosted by their adaptability to humans and our garbage. Marbled Murrelets in particular are suffering from the increased raven population.

The Turkey Vultures are doing well here. We saw three-a parent and two young-perched precariously on a telephone wire. Turkey vultures are almost always silent except in the breeding season, when they are said to coo and nuzzle. I would give a great deal to witness this!

On the way back we saw an Eared Grebe in breeding plumage sitting on the water with a Pied-Billed Grebe for company. I guess there was no spring migration for these two birds.

Picnic in the Park

The Davis Farmers Market is open two days a week, Saturday morning and the Wednesday evening Picnic in the Park, with live music and various food vendors to supply dinner. For dinner this evening we both picked up vegetarian combos from the Kathmandu Kitchen booth and found some shade from the 90-degree heat. Afterwards, a seller passing out samples of an exquisite peach lured us to buy several from the stand shown at right.

San Diego Jaunt

I flew to San Diego and back today for a business meeting in the afternoon. Southwest has lots of Sacramento-San Diego flights, which makes turning it into a day trip quite easy. They’re my favorite airline, in part because of their enlightened GPS policy (they explictly allow passengers to use them inflight), so my usual trajectory is to head straight for a window seat and once we reach altitude I turn on the GPS and try to get a location fix. Somebody once wrote that not preferring the window seat means wasting the airfare and I heartily agree—there’s too much to look at outside, and I always end up staring rather obsessively through the window.

The meeting ended early and I had time to visit the Maritime Museum of San Diego, the three-masted Star of India having caught my eye on the bus ride downtown. It’s a beautiful iron-hulled bark, first launched in 1863 under the name Euterpe, and had many careers, hauling emigrants to New Zealand, timber from Puget Sound, and salmon from Alaska, among other voyages. I also stepped aboard the Berkeley, shown up at right. This is a passenger ferry, launched in 1898, that spent most of a 60-year career operating on San Francisco Bay being run by Southern Pacific Railroad. It has beautiful woodwork inside on the main deck, with elegantly finished benches for the passengers.

I think this is my fourth visit to San Diego, none of which have allowed me a great deal of time to explore. But San Diego is a place where many people pass through on their way to elsewhere, and the energies are that of a port town. The trolley heads to south to Baja, the naval presence has long looked towards the Pacific (two aircraft carriers in port today), and the aviation history dates back a long time as well. Interesting town.

It Must Be July

The blue-black wasps are all emerging from their larval forms along our roof. They are beautiful and seem quite harmless—but perhaps we’re less concerned about them because we live peacefully alongside bees that get trucked all over California and Nevada in the spring… When they’re here, they’re quite well behaved.

I don’t know the species of this wasp—I’ll add it later if I find it. We are well stocked in this house for looking up names of birds, plants, mammals, dragonflies, butterflies, herps, and marine invertebrates, but not, alas, wasps.