Natal Aesthetic

This is another post for today’s collective blogging endeavor at the Ecotone Wiki.

I travel with the image of the place I grew up in. The house—built on a slope, with five half-levels descending from the front entrance, stairs opening to a church-like living room resplendent in wood, beams peaking to ceiling nearly twenty feet tall, the deck at back overlooking a little canyon where I could scramble and slide to the creek below through toyon and fallen oak leaves with spines that always got you. The streets winding along the contours of the hills, interconnected by many dozens of paths cutting straight down, their steps often now warped and broken by the processes of soil creep and tectonic movement. And a canyon but twenty minutes away on foot where I could walk in solitude and wildness for hours and miles. It is a walker’s landscape, a landscape where the winter greening of the ridge across the canyon from my grammar school spoke of possibilities—not to mention hikes where boots would get all sticky with clay.

The Berkeley Hills landscape I describe, I now know came about through an early twentieth-century aesthetic and image of place, the Arts and Crafts movement finding its way into California architecture and urban design. The house I grew up in was designed by Bernard Maybeck, whose work stressed organic form. Maybeck was an important figure in Bay Area architecture and a founding member of the Berkeley Hillside Club which had a large role in the layout of the streets and houses of North Berkeley. The paths of Berkeley, which I would follow on innumerable meanders, were an integral part of an urban landscape designed before the popularity of the automobile, their role being to provide rapid pedestrian access to the electric trolleys of the Key Route System running up the several main streets into the hills. And though many battles would be fought along the way, something about the culture of this aesthetic movement together with the nascent environmentalism of John Muir and kindred souls would eventually ferment in the remarkable preservation of so much open space in the Bay Area.

I carry this image with me; indeed it defines the sort of place I aspire to live in. A house, not a large one, built with character and craft. Places to roam—a walker’s landscape, not one solely for the automobile. Nature, both in the backyard and nearby. Hills to climb, cycle up, and cycle down. And when I fancy myself an inheritor of the Arts and Crafts tradition, I needn’t look far from home to realize why.

How We Are Defined and Shaped By the Place We Live

The Ecotone Wiki is running its second collective biweekly post on place; the link to other entries can be found here.

Thinking about this question on the plane from Philadelphia to Sacramento over the weekend threw me into a panic. Why?

Because: I’m not, I don’t think.

I’m sure, at least, I’m not defined by the places I’ve lived: not by Davis, nor by Santa Barbara, nor by Cambridge, Massachusetts, nor Cambridge England, nor Paris, nor Birmingham (UK, university), nor Montpellier (junior year abroad), nor Derbyshire (boarding school), nor Madrid, nor least of all by Tiburon, Tiburon in Marin County, California, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, where I spent the first five years of my life.

I have two passports. One corresponds to the country of my birth; the other to the nationality of my father (British). It’s handy, this land/blood dichotomy: it opens up the world to you as a place to live and work. It also left me at an early age with an identity crisis: I was always defined by somewhere OTHER than where I was actually living, especially in Spain where no matter what we did or wore or ate or said we were always, ALWAYS foreigners. Even today, my hybrid accent sets me apart (I’m well aware it also confers on me a certain status in this country of rampant, albeit often undeserved, Anglophilia).

Being a “Permanent Expatriate” (sometimes I think I should have this stamped on my forehead) is quite different from the experience of being a refugee. Refugees have few choices. They are at the mercy of the authorities of the places they end up in, where the culture is often completely alien, the language is different, the food, climate, customs, expectations, manners, plants, landscapes, buildings, graphic design, EVERYTHING-everything that combines to make a place what it is to inhabit-is unfamiliar. It is very hard for mainstream American culture to understand the unwillingness of certain ethnic groups (the Hmong, for example, who fled Laos in the aftermath of the Vietnam war having fought and died for the CIA with the promise of a new life in the U.S. and who have settled in large numbers in the Central Valley of California) to assimilate. Why, this is the melting pot! We welcome all comers! Bring us your weary, your destitute…

Only, of course, it’s not really true, is it. Bring us your white, well-educated, well-spoken, polite, PRODUCTIVE, portfolio-endowed, expatriates in ones-and-twos and we’ll be welcoming and admire your nice British accents. Otherwise, we’ll growl. We’ll inflict our cumbersome bureaucracy on you. You’ll have to wait in long lines in emergency rooms and we’ll make you walk through nightmarish hoops to get your food stamps. We’ll give you work, maybe, and then at minimum wage. And when we wave our American flags in your face by the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands, or by the millions, you’d better cheer and holler (even when we bomb your country of origin) or we’ll place you under surveillance.

There is little doubt, though, that the places I’ve lived have somehow contributed to who I am today, the kind of person who might produce the above rant, for example. The kind of person who might subsequently feel it important to apologize for it (being half English means you often have to preface a question with the word “sorry,” as in “sorry, would you mind if I opened the window?”). And the kind of person who could segue, neatly, into a parallel track, one which is far less likely to cause offense.

Such as:

The connecting thread in my life for all the places I’ve lived and even visited has been birds. The birds of Europe are very different from the birds of North America, but they’re all birds, and they don’t know or care what passports I carry. I look at birds while I’m walking, bicycling, driving, or riding a train. The sight of a flock of white-faced ibis that flew southwest over Sacramento Airport on Saturday evening as I waited for the shuttle brought the first smile to my lips after landing—saying, I suppose, I’m home. Home. Not the home of flag-waving bigots, the home of the white-faced ibis. The home they share with me. The home I will fight to protect—the landscape that is falling piece by piece to developers of tract houses.

Census Geographies

After my outing last Sunday circumnavigating east Davis, I spent some time looking to see what information was available about Davis from the 2000 U.S. Census. I was quite pleased with the resources they have online, especially the interactive thematic maps linked from the American FactFinder site. This mapping tool allows you to make a map showing census information for any geographical level in the census system. The smallest unit in system is the census block, which is roughly equivalent to a city block. The next higher level is the block group, followed by the census tract. Those of you who filled the 2000 census may remember that there was a “short form” which most people filled out, requesting basic information about age, household size, housing status, and ethnicity, and also a “long form”, which about 1 in 6 people filled out, requesting additional information about employment, income, and so on. These maps allow you to depict information from the short form at the block level, and information from the long form to the block group level.

It’s a quite well-designed mapping interface, and has some nice cartographic touches such as allowing you to select the type and number of classification breaks to use in the theme legend. My one gripe was that the steps in the different zoom levels are too widely spaced: I kept trying to get all of the city of Davis to fit comfortably in the window at the block mapping level, but it didn’t allow me to do that.

Two Pennsylvania Houses

I’ve been visiting family in Philadelphia, some of whom I had never met before. I arrived on Monday to a town house with three floors and lots of interesting people coming in and out… and spent yesterday and the day before in the hills west of the city, in an old farmhouse with bowed walls and wooden floors. It’s hot, now, hot and sticky, and my cousin Maggie and I have been exploring nineteenth-century family haunts. It’s odd to find a park named for an ancestor on the site where the mill he founded used to be. It makes exploring a place a different experience.

The Unexpected Guest

I got home late this afternoon after doing grocery shopping, got out the bag of mixed greens for a salad out of my backpack, then looked up on the kitchen windowsill and was quite surprised to see to see a western fence lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis) happily at rest on the inside of the windowsill. I have no idea how he got there — the house seems fairly well-sealed (at least compared to the drafty cabin in Santa Barbara where we lived previously) and there are no obvious holes by the window. Perhaps it’s a bit patrician of me, but I think lizards belong outside the house, so I showed him an open window. After about five minutes of maneuvers on the countertop, I got him to go out the window, where he leapt to land on the African violets below, losing a bit of dignity in the process. He did seem very content where he was on the windowsill. Sigh.

We like western fence lizards though. Apart from being our most commonly-encountered reptile friend around here, they are believed to be important in reducing the incidence of Lyme disease in the state. When nymphal ticks feed on the lizard, some factor in their blood destroys the spirochetes that cause the disease.

Soundscapes

Fred of Fragments from Floyd today shares a journal entry from the summer solstice that is particularly evocative of the soundscape of his little valley — he hears the creek rumbling with the recent plentiful rains as the low note, the incessant stridulations of cicadas in the middle register, and the wind blowing a million soft leaves on the ridge as the treble voice.

The term soundscape comes from the Canadian composer and communications researcher R. Murray Schafer who in the late 1960s started the World Soundscape Project, aiming to document the relationship, both good and bad, between people and their acoustic environment. He wrote in his 1977 book The Tuning of the World:

Noise pollution results when man does not listen carefully…We must seek a way to make environmental acoustics a positive study program. Which sounds do we want to preserve, encourage, multiply? When we know this, the boring or destructive sounds will be conspicuous enough, and we will know why we must eliminate them. Only a total appreciation of the acoustic environment can give us the resources for improving the orchestration of the world soundscape.

Schafer’s interests led to the development of a new field called acoustic ecology. There is now a society called the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology whose members are interested in the social, cultural, and ecological aspects of the sonic environment. A favorite activity of acoustic ecologists, recurringly described in their writings, is to go on soundwalks, an excursion where the point is to listen to the environment.

These people are on to something: awareness of our acoustic environment is very much neglected, and gaining this awareness makes for a much richer life. So step outside sometime, close your eyes, and listen…

Blood and Water

Coming back East is a major exercise in juggling for me… I have family in Maine, now, and all my friends in Boston where I used to live. I’m also taking advantage of this trip to do some genealogical research, which means travelling to New Hampshire and Philadelphia—and spreading myself thinner over a two-week period than I usually do.

Yesterday, however, felt a bit like I was back in my former life. I took a trip to Plum Island in northern Massachusetts with two birding friends, and we sloshed our way through the muck into Plumbush marsh looking for seaside sparrows (no luck, though plenty of sharp-tails), edged quietly down a boat-ramp trying to find the clapper rail that was clacking incessantly (saw it several times as it collapsed itself vertically through reeds and grasses), pottered about the New Pines to the overlook where we saw a tricolored heron, and generally ate salty and sweet snacks in between forays. The weather wasn’t good (showers all day, which to me were heavenly) so few other birders were around, but I still ran into old friends all along the way.

It’s a dislocating experience to catch glimpses of a time that is past. I have left people behind me each time I’ve moved somewhere, which has been often, and these friends get connected in my mind with the place I left. Sometimes they move too, and the past gets fragmented, almost ruptured. We are a culture that is just manic to move. When I read Fred’s posts on Fragments From Floyd about how he’s stayed pretty much in the same region all his life, I’m astonished and a little envious. Maybe that’s part of the reason why I’m pursuing the naming of dead ancestors: if I can’t be rooted in a place, there’s no way of escaping the fact that their blood flows in my veins…

Last Bastion

This afternoon I went on a cycling ramble around Davis, a bit of a cultural field survey in preparation perhaps for a later Ecotone joint blogging exercise on suburbs and place. I was riding north on Mace Blvd. at the eastern limits of Davis, north of I-80, when I saw the above bird perched on top of a sign reading “Rick Price – Custom Homes”.

This is a burrowing owl, a species which is in the process of being extirpated from the Davis area, owing to its proclivity for living in sparsely vegetated plots inhabited by ground squirrels, the same sort of land that’s ideal for building things like housing developments and college football stadiums. This bird was part of a pair inhabiting a thin plot of ground, which looked like it was recently scraped, between the road and a tomato field. This is just east of the upper-middle class McMansion tract houses comprising Mace Ranch, which was the scene in the year 2000 of the developer deep-disking burrowing owl habitat without any notification. The city is suing the developer, but such actions are most likely far too late for the population of the birds.

Kindred

On Thursday I met up with Beth from Cassandra Pages on my way to a family visit. We both looked at each other as though we couldn’t quite believe it. I was in her place-the place she writes about, thinks about, grows, breathes, inhabits. It was an honor. New England this year is lush and outrageous-the pine trees explode in yellow clouds of pollen and the next rainshower coagulates it on the windshields of cars in a sulphur-like glop. I saw a common loon on a nest on the way over.

Above is a photo of the two of us looking at the Ecotone Wiki and posting a joint thing, which I never even do with Numenius—felt like stirring up the dynamic of a 60s commune, in a way.

Red Planet in the Morning

In two months time, on August 27, Mars will be closer to Earth than in any time in the past 59,619 years. Every two years, Mars is favorably placed for observing, being on the same side of the Sun as we are, and this time around we are approaching a record-setting opposition of Mars. Now is the time to start watching in a telescope the lead-up to this event, as the planet, rising in the early morning, is already 60% of its maximum apparent size in the sky.

Getting up at 4 in the morning is not something I am wont to do, but for some reason I woke up at that time, so I got up, poked my nose outside to check the sky and wind conditions, and thought why not? I hauled the 7” reflector outside to get it cooling to ambient temperature, went back for a little bit of a doze, threw some clothes on, and started observing.

Telescopic observing is good exercise in the discipline of learning to see. Anybody expecting magazine-quality images in the eyepiece will be disappointed; visual details are instead subtle and take much patience to tease out. In the case of viewing planets, one is constantly battling atmospheric flickering (known as “poor seeing”), and one’s impression of surface detail gets built up over many tens of minutes of observing.

The conditions were good this morning—it was cool and the air was pretty still. I think such conditions are typical in the summer here, which bodes well for Mars-watching in the next couple of months. It’s getting up at that hour that’s the challenge. Above is a rendering based on a sketch I did at the eyepiece. The South Polar Cap was quite evident, as was a darkish area in the Southern Hemisphere.

Some critters were up too and kept me company. A coyote howled once at the passage of a freight train, and a western kingbird sung for a bit while it was still quite dark.