A Maine Interlude

There’s a Baltimore oriole singing outside… which means I’m not in Davis anymore. The blue jays, the chickadees, the chimney swifts nesting in the abandoned smokestack of the old shoe factory, and the ruby-throated hummingbird that’s hanging around my sister’s rock garden are all constant reminders of how different this place is from the one I live in. The people dress differently, say little. Yup.

The house prices are different, too. The house across the street is for sale. It’s a three-bedroom that in Davis would be termed a “cosy fixer-upper,” but it also has this barn round back that’s been converted to include a granny flat. In Davis something like this would go for over $400,000; here, it’s $79,000. And it’s been on the market for a year.

Some day, I suppose the urge to own property will overtake me, the way they say the urge to have children overcomes women at some point. Since the latter has yet to occur in my case, and I’m fast running out of time for such things, I’m skeptical about the former. But every so often I get a twinge. This little house, with its unpretentious faade and its proximity to my family, whose younger members are growing up faster than I can keep up with in yearly visits, is definitely the occasion of one such twinge. It would be completely impractical to move here: there’s no work for either of us. And midsummer masks the feeling of resignation occasioned by the fifth large snowstorm, let alone the fifteenth…

Summer Arrives

...and the temperatures are well in the 90s. The students timed their departure well to avoid the heat. At least the campus, with nobody around, is placid for a week or so, until summer session starts.

Yesterday I returned to my sketching spot from the other day on Putah Creek and did a little digiscoping. The white-tailed kite didn’t stay at his perch long enough for me to get the scope set up, but I spotted this black-crowned night heron with a nest overhanging the creek. Not a bad location—- it’s definitely afternoon dip weather.

Of Space and Place

Here is another entry for today’s collective set of weblog posts for our Ecotone wiki. Excerpts from these posts can be found here.

A year ago last November, it was late in the afternoon in a meeting in Houston on Internet map services, and drifting off, I wrote the following tanka:

The division, which my little poem hints at, between modern spatial technologies and the almost mystical striving for awareness of a particular locality is what is leading me to write about place. As somebody professionally involved with the former, I find I need the latter for balance.

I have always been interested in natural history, and aware of the long tradition of natural history writing. This led me to study zoology in college and for awhile in graduate school before realizing I wasn’t meant to have a career as an evolutionary biologist. My search for another discipline to enter led me to geography. Why not? I liked the holism of the field, and have loved maps since the beginning (the tale is that I taught myself to read at age three or so from studying maps). I could combine interests in conservation, maps and mapping, and computing, by working on geographic information systems.

But I also began to read more widely in geography, and learned about the humanistic side of geography in addition to the technical side in which I was specializing. Authors such as the landscape historian John Stilgoe and his teacher J.B. Jackson became favorites of mine. My old interests in natural history thus expanded to wondering about the cultural meanings of a landscape.

The danger in our modern world of geodatabases, remote sensing technologies, and GPS mapping tools with sub-meter accuracies, is that what cannot be conveniently georeferenced and placed in computer maps gets forgotten about. These spatial tools are eminently technologies for the managerial mindset, designed to support the archetypal ‘decision-maker’. Lost here is any notion of place as narrative, or place as history.

I was always one for a saunter anyway. As John Stilgoe puts it, cycling along at 11 miles an hour is an ideal way to explore the landscape (at such a speed one can gaze straight through picket fences), and wandering on bicycle or foot is deep in my bones. If every place has tales, trying to write them down is a worthy way to bring them to light.

Water and Old Stones

This entry is part of the first collective blog on place that is being organized through the Ecotone Wiki. We are all writing, today, about what led us to think and write about place. The wiki can be edited by anyone, so please join in if you’d like!

In November 1991, recovering from a marriage that began in Cambridge, England, and ended in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I went to Venice (Italy, not California). I had travelled quite a bit, but I had never taken myself on vacation before-I had never been alone in a new place recreationally-and I equipped myself with a notebook, some rolls of Tri-X, and contingency plans to visit friends near Milan in case I got too lonely.

Foreigners have been making the pilgrimage to Venice since at least medieval times and have written exhaustively, sometimes well, mostly not, about this unique city. Rather than oppressing me, this knowledge was quite liberating: I was absolved of the need to say anything original whatsoever. What I did not expect, though, was how great a teacher Venice would be in the art of opening my eyes.

I anticipated writing, introspectively, finding myself (whatever that means), basically wallowing in this somewhat decaying, watery city of boats and old stone. The act of walking and seeing and looking and walking some more became more joyful and exciting with each step (and there I was, hoping for some good old-fashioned melancholy!). Every street held a surprise, each canaletto reflected a minor balcony above it, every photograph was perfectly pre-framed by the city. Take nothing, nothing at face value, look harder, she whispers. It’s a mask. Look behind the wall, up the stair. In the boatsheds by the water… It’s so trite, it’s so unoriginal, but it’s so true: Venice is a magical city. She’s also by far the most prominent personality in her own history (which could never be said of, say, Florence).

My journal scribblings were hastily reworked one afternoon in my tiny hotel room as I pored over them. They can get organized differently! I need not be tyrannized by dates! There are themes! Burano is not Murano because… Torcello watches them all from afar… Venice is like an abalone shell… I dashed out that evening on the vaporetto to buy some blue hand-marbled paper and I began taking photographs differently: I was going to make my first artist’s book.

I did not neglect the oceans of Tintorettos but found myself getting impatient to head back outside, to see the light at ten, noon, three, six… to see the fishermen coming in from the lagoon. To see the women negotiating the floods on rickety planks during the aqu’alta without ever getting their expensive shoes wet. To watch how this city just HELD itself in its setting, in its history, in the tragicomic knowledge of its future demise. In its place.

I have the Venice Book, still, a large and unwieldy affair with a blue calfskin spine (inexpertly thinned with a skiving knife) and an italic calligraphy whose spikiness makes me wince, just a little. The photographs stand up twelve years later, though. Whenever I see the book I relive that tiny epiphany in that tiny room.

The question as posed—How I Started Thinking About Place, And Why I Started Writing About It—tempts me to start cataloging a list of thank-yous, academy-award style, to places I have known that have taught me, well, place—the pre-Roman ruins at Tiermes in Spain, the Cotswold rookeries, the salt marsh between Cohasset and Scituate, Massachusetts. But for me the writing came first, and Venice taught me the connection between them. By writing I learned to think about place, which in turn made me SEE it. And the cycle continues… looking makes me listen, makes me alive to the infinite transformations around me that make a place THIS place.

A Creek Saunter

I went for a sketching saunter out to Putah Creek this morning. There was a lot going on down there: the magpies were being raucous, and there was a white-tailed kite that stayed perched on the top of the bare branches of a tree for at least twenty minutes before taking off and circling in its display flight. Further away, a couple of Swainson’s hawks were soaring and calling over the field south of the creek. And a blue grosbeak was singing in the eucalyptus behind where I was sketching. Alas, the yellow starthistle is abundant and turning spiny. Not quite as noxious, though still a weed, the chicory is in bloom. At right is a quick sketch of the railroad bridge.

Pica’s Migrating East

I’m flying out of town, leaving Numenius with a huge pile of post-Commencement rubble. My posts over the next two weeks will be sporadic and probably un-Californian, so I’ll direct you to an essay I wrote on California that was published yesterday over at Faultline magazine.

Glorious Fog

I woke up this morning, poked my nose outside, and thought I was back in Berkeley. It was overcast with a proper marine layer overhead! It is unusual to see marine layer fog in the Davis area in summertime; I hope the pattern persists. It’s much more pleasant than the more usual 100-degree temperatures we often experience around this time, as I’m sure many people attending commencement this evening would agree (though some will regret not having brought sweaters). Meanwhile, in Southern California, the June Gloom has been gloomier than usual.

There’s a wind blowing right now from the south at 10-15 MPH, so I think we’ll have a good fog layer tomorrow as well.

A Catbird in California

About fifteen years ago, Jeannie moved to Northern California from Maryland to be near her son and daughter-in-law. She had spent many years around the birds of the Chesapeake and settled in Bodega Bay, where she could familiarize herself with other shorebirds, different sparrows, and rarities.

Bodega Bay is a migrant trap, which means that when passerines (songbirds) are flying north or south to their nesting or wintering grounds, they often run out of land to fly over or time or both and just hunker down where they drop, usually for 24 hours, sometimes for a little longer. Sometimes, blown off course, they’re very rare for California. Bodega Bay is not as famous for rare birds as Point Reyes just to the south, but it’s still an incredible place to live if you’re a birder.

Twelve years ago, Jeannie saw a catbird in Owl Canyon. The hoity-toity birding establishment didn’t believe her (catbirds are found far to the east and north of the Sierra Nevada), even though she grew up around catbirds and knew their sweet songs, calls, whistles, and beady black eyes with the rusty under-tail coverts offsetting the steel gray feathers. She didn’t care. She knew she had seen a catbird.

Jeannie died yesterday at four. My mother had been sitting with her for three hours and when she got home, five minutes later, she got the phone call. She also got a report of a catbird in Owl Canyon.

Sing sweetly, Jeannie, wherever you are; we’ll miss your gentle humor and quiet strength.

The Stink on Campus

This isn’t corruption in the administration building, but rather the blooming of a rare “corpse flower” (Amorphophallus titanum) in the campus botanical conservatory. The rarely cultivated plant from Sumatra gets its name from the strong fly-attracting odor of rotting flesh it emits when it flowers, which only happens every 10 or so years. This is the first corpse flower to bloom in Northern California.

Our plant in question, nicknamed “Ted the Titan”, was raised from seed planted in 1995, and the flower bud first appeared around 15 May of this year. The bloom is a very transient event, and the flower lasts only about 24 to 36 before it collapses. Also, the stench only lasts about eight hours. The bloom was predicted to start around 11 June, but it was two days early, starting yesterday around noon. We all went over to the greenhouse a little after six that evening, where there was a small crowd gawking at the 3 1/2 foot tall flower, pictured at right. The stench, which I thought was something like rotting cabbages at the bottom of a compost pile, wasn’t overwhelming at that point, but would become so later in the evening. Ernesto Sandoval, the conservatory curator, was full of parental pride, giving interviews to the press on his cell phone, and making sure everyone got a good look and smell.

Addendum:There’s a RealOne webcam for the plant here. Also, the Sacramento Bee has an amusing editorial cartoon featuring the plant.

Landscape in K-Band Radar

People key in on vastly divergent elements of the landscape. This is one of these facts that makes studying place so fascinating and challenging. With that in mind, I was bemused to discover that there’s an online exchange forum for information about speed traps. Driving fast through an unfamilar area? Go to the site to learn where you need to be careful. Is there a particularly nasty speed trap on your own commute? Write it up and submit it through their contribution form.

The town of Davis doesn’t cut a very good impression with these contributors. The entry for Davis says: “this whole town is a speed trap. Several tickets issued for 1-2 miles over the limit. Whole town is 25 except for 2-3 roads.” And a follow-up comment reads: “Not only due you have to watch your mile over the speed limit, but the parking tickets are HERENDOUS!! [sic] Even if the security knows your car!! No permit… TICKET!!!”

Sigh. My bicycle commute—over the creek, past the horse stables, and under the freeway where the rough-winged swallows nest—is in a very different world.