15 August 04
Honeymoon Flat to Lee Vining
I drive, Numenius reads maps and chooses campsites. Our plan for Tuesday—our actual anniversary—was to go to Bodie, the best-preserved ghost town in the United States, and then on to Mono Lake. Bodie is famous for one other reason: it’s the best place in California to see greater sage grouse.
Sage grouse are large but are very good at hiding in the arid country—dominated by sage brush—in which they live. They are drawn to Bodie because it’s just above the water table and they’re able to graze early in the morning before the cars start arriving. The gate opens at eight; our plan is to be there for when the gate opens.
The road up the hill is thirteen miles, the last three miles of which are a dusty washboard. We get to the gate just before eight and behind two other cars. The car in front of us has Oregon plates; the driver gets out, wearing binoculars. Good. I get out and go and talk to him, hoping to coordinate the grouse search. The minivan in front contains speakers of French who know nothing about grouse, but are very interested when I tell them about it.
Just then one, then four, then seven sage grouse amble across the path just in front of us. They are mostly young, but the males already have the black belly-patch that is so characteristic. I call to Mr. Oregon and Numenius, and run back to see if any of the cars behind us have any birders inside (they don’t).
At 8:05 we go through the gates, having seen these incredible birds. From here, we can sightsee. It doesn’t get much better than this. We sketch, we see sage thrashers and mountain bluebirds all over the place. These are real treats for us lowlanders and this is already shaping up to be a splendid day.
At around ten it’s getting hot, so we go back to the car and make our way to the gate. Coming up the hill in the dust is a Rolls Royce open-top. Not just any Rolls Royce; a 1922 Silver Ghost. It’s so funny—a Silver Ghost in a ghost town—I wave. They wave back, grinning. A short way down the hill is another one! It must be a thing, we think, like a weekend get-together.
It’s only when we come to check in to our cottage in the town of Lee Vining after a hot and dusty day wandering around Mono Lake that we see thirteen of these things—pre-1927 Rolls Royces—parked outside. It’s not just a weekend thing at all: they’ve driven all the way from Maryland and are headed to Monterey. That’s over 4,000 miles. A bit later we find out how: they all get out there and take the cars apart, clean them, oil them, and put them back together again. Every single day.
We didn’t get in a Rolls Royce on our wedding day, nor would that have been our style. But being surrounded by them on our anniversary was sort of fun. We sat out on our little stoop and drank tea and watched them wrestle with spoked wheels.
We decided to go to dinner at the best restaurant in town, which is the Mobil Station on the road to Tioga Pass. Getting our minds around this was interesting till we found it was run by high-end hippies of the rock-climbing variety and featured a full trapeze set with participants in shorts and t-shirts. The food was, as advertised, excellent. And, yes, the Rolls crowd showed up, making a grand entrance complete with anemic horn and smiling faces.
A gallery of photos from our trip can be found here.
14 August 04
Eastern Sierra Sketches
We’ve returned from our camping jaunt to the Eastern Sierras relaxed and happy. Pica had never been south of Lake Tahoe in the Sierras so I was able to show her some places I had been to before, though not for a long time. Every night we stayed in a different location and habitat, so we had quite the natural history tour, travelling from the Carson Pass area south to the White Mountains. Here are several sketches and paintings I did during our journey.
At right above is Woods Lake, near Carson Pass, where we stayed the first evening of our trip. This is a small glacial lake at 8250’ elevation in lodgepole pine and red fir forest. Happily they don’t allow motorboats on it, and only a few paddlers were sauntering forth on the lake.
After reaching Highway 395, the highway running along the east side of the Sierras, we turned south, reaching Mono Lake on Tuesday. The area from the Mono Basin south to the town of Bishop has very interesting volcanic geology, there being a series of recent cinder cones, rhyolitic lava flows, and active hot springs. Mono Lake is also known for its tufa towers, which are towers up to ten or fifteen feet tall formed when calcium carbonate precipitates out of spring water flowing from underneath the lake into the alkaline and highly saline lake water. At left is a sketch of some of these tufa towers.
The literal high point of our journey was our trip up into the White Mountains to see the bristlecone pines, the oldest living organisms on Earth, in a grove above 10,000 feet in elevation. Some of these pines have been dated by tree ring analysis to be older than 4,600 years. We stayed at a campground about 1500 feet in elevation below the bristlecone pine forest in pinyon-juniper woodland, which I think is gorgeous landscape. At right is a detail of leaves and berries of Utah juniper (Juniperus osteosperma), the species of juniper up there.
The other reason for our stay in the White Mountains was to see the Perseid meteor shower. There were a number of other amateur astronomers already staying at our campsite, giving the night a bit of a flavor of a star party. It was a calm and warm night, and we quite enjoyed sleeping out under the stars and meteors.
7 August 04
Off to the Sierra—A Year Later
On August 10th last year, Numenius and I got married in the hills above Winters. Our planned honeymoon to the Eastern Sierra Nevada never happened because I had a slight mishap, a snapped achilles tendon, and spent weeks on crutches.
So we’re leaving tomorrow to celebrate our first anniversary for a week of camping, meteor shower watching, pondering on old bristlecone pines, sketching, birding, hiking, and generally taking stock of where we are a year later. We will not, however, be blogging, so we’ll see you when we get back.
6 August 04
Iraq In Ink And Wash
Artist Steve Mumford from New York has made several trips to Iraq since the fall of Baghdad, capturing views of life there ranging from open-air markets to the battlefield in a wonderful series of drawings and paintings. In a world where the digital camera is commonplace, it’s remarkable to see someone out there in the field with sketchbook and brush. (Thanks to Danny Gregory.)
5 August 04
Crow Catching
My colleagues at the Wildlife Health Center are gearing up for a big corvid study. They plan to catch 60 crows and perhaps 30 yellow-billed magpies, equip them with radio-backpacks, and monitor them as West Nile Virus sweeps through this part of the country. It’s here now; there was a dead crow in Dixon, the next town down, which tested positive for West Nile over the weekend.
I was quietly finishing up my work day this afternoon (read: I was vaguely comatose following an unbelievably tedious series of web edits) when a huge bang woke me up. Picture two vets, one vet tech, and two hangers-on contemplating the effects of a net gun. They will fire this remotely over a baited meadow in an attempt to capture as many corvids as possible. You only get one shot, though: crows are smart and won’t allow themselves to be duped twice.
Perhaps not so smart as all THAT: one method of removing a huge colony of roosting crows in Davis was to play a tape of a crow being throttled. The colony left that spot and didn’t return for a couple of years.
4 August 04
Four Kitten Update
Diego is helping me with this blog as I write though some of his text needs a little editing. He is also very interested in pens, so I think we have the makings of a literate kitty here. Anyway, it’s official: we’re keeping both Diego and Charlie. Our landlord is letting us keep a pair and we signed the adoption certificate for them this past Sunday. Our cats are now bona fide.
We’re having a great deal of fun having them around the house. I’ve never had a cat before. Since I’ve been a cat lover since at least age 6, this is quite a joy for me. I’ve always lived in a situation where people were allergic, cats weren’t wanted, or cats weren’t allowed.
We saw Diego and Charlie’s sister this evening. She’s grown quite a bit, though is much smaller than her big brothers, and is feisty as ever. The interesting thing is that she’s developing a grey undercoat to her black fur, coming in across her back especially. She’s also getting a grey coon tail pattern contrasting with the black.
Up in Woodland, Louie, the orange kitten we adopted out a month ago, is doing very well in his new home. His family loves him dearly and think he’s going to grow up to be a huge cat.
3 August 04
A Different Kind of Thought
I just finished reading a book so remarkable I’m not sure what to say. The book is Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism. I had heard a lot about this book—my sister works with autistic children, for one thing—and when the chance came to evaluate it for next year’s Campus Community Book Project, I leapt at it.
I have always thought I had a visual mind… When people talk, I immediately render what they’re saying into pictures. When the topic is very abstract, this is hard, which is why it’s hard for me to get my head around REALLY abstract concepts. I couldn’t have been a philosophy major, for instance.
But I have NOTHING on Temple, a woman so courageous it leaves me humbled. She thinks only in pictures. Every thought she’s ever had is an image, and they get stored in her head, sequentially, so she retrieves them as though from a hard drive. This method of thinking has allowed her to be an amazing designer of facilities for livestock, with whom she identifies and is able to “see as”: thinking like a cow, she calls it. So she’s been able to design chutes, insecticide vats, vaccination restraints, and even restraints for slaughter that are humane and dignified, cutting down on the amount of unnecessary stress on the animals. When the book was written, a third of all livestock facilities in the United States were designed according to her principles. All of which are done in her head, visually, from every conceivable angle, like pieces of neurological Meccano.
Yet it is Grandin’s account of growing up autistic, of the tantrums, the isolation, the terror of being an adolescent and not fitting in, unable to communicate, yet miraculously tumbling on two or three mentors who didn’t mind that she was different (understatement of the year) and finding her calling as a designer-the journey is quite spiritual. And that she is able to articulate all this, an experience that is usually perplexing and completely opaque to non-autistics-no wonder this woman’s such a heroine in those circles.
My hope is that she’ll be a heroine in other, much bigger, ones. She has so much to teach us all about difference, tolerance, other ways of seeing.
2 August 04
The Sundowner
An entry for the Ecotone wiki topic on weather and place.
Art, Lynn, and their two kids passed through Davis today. We had a picnic lunch at the Village Homes green—Art wanted to tour and photograph the development—before they continued their trip north. Art is an ecological designer and on this trip was headed to a workshop on cob building techniques. It was fun seeing them today; it’s been several years.
During 1997-1998, while I was still in grad school at UC Santa Barbara, we rented their house out while they spent a year living in Mexico. Their house is a funky cabin located in a canyon at an elevation about 1200 feet above the city of Santa Barbara in a small community called the Trout Club. Their house has about 40 different types of fruit trees in their yard, solar hot water heating, and grey water irrigation. It was a magical place to live for a while.
We took advantage of the commute. It is 9 miles each way to the UCSB campus, and the way back involves a climb of about 1400 feet. Considering this a challenge, we rode our bikes to and from campus about three days each week. The ride up the hill (Old San Marcos Road) is long and steep in parts but it became a type of meditation.
Some days it would be a lot harder than others because of the strong sundowner winds that set up late in the afternoon occasionally in the region. These are fierce, hot, downslope winds that blow down the canyons of the Santa Ynez range, in part associated with a high-pressure cell over the Great Basin. The steepest bit of the ride, near the top, involves a set of hairpin turns. If there was a sundowner, we’d be in the lee of the hill until we left the final hairpin, at which point we’d almost be blown off our bikes!
1 August 04
Over There
The year after I finished my degree in England I went to work in Paris for a year. I had done a short secretarial course in Cambridge, England, which in those days invariably involved learning shorthand, which I got good at quite fast and then taught myself shorthand in French. (I can still remember the contraction for “Dans l’expression de mes sentiments distingus,” the equivalent of which is “Sincerely yours” in American business English.) I got a job in a French insurance agency. This was my first, and only, corporate job, apart from a translation gig in college for a Spanish agricultural engineering firm.
The unit I worked in at Faugre et Jutheau was reinsurance: a big game where the insurance companies themselves are insured by others. Lots of money; it’s like corporate Vegas. Anyway, many of the “jobs” the company reinsured were in the United States. And many of the US “jobs” that needed reinsuring were because of the weather. Why? L bas, c’est pas une blague, le temps. (The weather over there is no joke.)
Hurricanes and tornadoes. Hailstones the size of canteloupes. Freezing temperatures that would glue your hand to your car door if you were stupid enough to leave your gloves inside. Heat that rivals anything, most anywhere, including the Sahara.
For all this unjoking weather, I’ve fetched up in the California Central Valley, close enough to the Sacramento River Delta that we get a cooling breeze each night in summer, so that even if it’s been well over 105 degrees Fahrenheit—over 40 centigrade—during the day, it almost always cools down at night. (We’ve lived here five years or so and have never turned on the air conditioner.) In winter occasionally it freezes but mostly we have to contend with the local version of purgatory, the Tule Fog, where you can barely see your hand if you stretch it out in front of you.
Subtle, this version of weather, once you weather it a bit. (We don’t even really get earthquakes here, which are what other Americans claim keeps them from moving to California—though they seem perfectly happy to live in tornado country and the like).
I imagine the first inhabitants of the Sacramento Valley used all of this weather to help them survive. The fog is a powerful blind to a hunter; compelling thirst would drive prey to water. Lots of food grows in this climate. It was probably close to someone’s version of paradise, long ago.
This post is for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic, Weather and Place.
31 July 04
On Treating A Computer As A Wastebasket
This afternoon we went into Pica’s office to download something from her computer, and as I had a scrap of paper to throw out, I looked underneath her desk and saw a rectangular object with light sides and a dark interior, so I started to throw the paper there. In fact this wasn’t a wastebasket but Pica’s Mac G4 computer.
These perceptual errors always make me think of the theory of affordances, a term coming from the renowned perceptual psychologist J.J. Gibson. To quote Donald Norman, “the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. A chair affords (“is for”) support, and, therefore, affords sitting.”
Gibson explains:
The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment…
There is a language which objects communicate to us in. If you see a door with a flat panel rather than a handle on it, you know to push on it to open it. Boxes suggest opening them and looking inside, and if you’re a cat, laptop computers suggest walking over them!