5 May 04
Cinco de Mayo
I just finished one of my many concurrent Clairefontaine grid-journals, which I started in April 2002, when we were taking our Mexican poetry class here at the UC Davis Arboretum. Looking through it, there’s a lot of poetry in there; Maria Melendez made us write a SONNET A DAY for a week. Sonnets are tough. It was a tough week.
She also introduced us in this class to the chant, believed to have been the earliest form of poetry. Francisco Alarcn, a poet who teaches here at Davis and who was shortlisted for California poet laureate that year, came and read some of his chants to us. I loved them. I wrote lots, including, I now see, the chant of the ground-squirrel sentry. (No mention there of genitalia, I assure you.)
Here are a couple of poems. One’s a chant, in Spanglish, a tribute to the people we see in the fields near us, working all the time, all the time, all the time. The second is in Spanish, written as I was reading lots of sonnets in Spanish (notably Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz). The poem talks about the blind lottery ticket sellers I walked past as a child in Madrid; they sang out in a resounding tenor that they had tickets to sell. (The Spanish lottery has, since its inception, devoted a large percentage of its profits to the blind; the “gordo” is the mind-boggling sum won only at the Christmas lottery.)
Growing What Sells
The wheat. The cows. The almonds. The plums.
The earth. La tierra. Trabajo. Our hands.
Los aos. The sweat. Sudando, we plough.
We water. We grow. Cultivamos. We pick.
The food. The earth. La tierra. The bounty.
The silos. The cows. La leche. The rain.
The sun. El sol. Sudando, we work.
The mortgage. The debt. Sudando, we worry.
The houses, the creeping. The vanishing farms.
Regulations. The debts. The cows, the poor wheat.
Las casas, the lawns. These have few regulations.
The turf that we grow, that we spray, it pays well.
If there’s no more food, don’t blame us: it’s demand.
We grow grass for your lawns, it’s no sweat: it’s our land.
Lotera
“El premio para hoy,” canta el ciego:
Un chillo que se extiende por la plaza
Por encima del ron del autobs
Circulndose. “El premio para hoy.”
Tono casi rabe llamando a la
Oracin, o an canto hebreo
Que se oan por aqu hace mil aos:
La splica del ciego nos promete
Ms que la maana soleada. Un
Boleto del azar, la vida,
Premio gordo: basta comprrnoslo.
O suerte desgraciada y ciega, que vas
premiando y castigando igualmente!
Por m, elijo la maana y el sol.
4 May 04
La Presentacin
This evening I gave my presentation to my Spanish class on our trip to Spain. For my visual aid I printed out several photos from our collection and passed these around the class. I was going to make overhead transparencies of these, but it turns out one can’t readily buy inkjet transparencies in small quantities. We weren’t supposed to read our presentation; I didn’t, and did fine nonetheless. Instead, we were allowed to use a 17-word cheatsheet. Here’s mine.
- Un viaje
- El bautismo
- Un foto
- vila
- Nuestro almuerzo
- Toledo
- Andaluca
- Pajaros y caballos
- El tren
- Vacaciones
3 May 04
Gone, Gone, Gone Beyond
Unlike American college students, it was considered unusual for British university students to get summer jobs, and almost unheard of for us to get jobs while we were in session. Nevertheless, I landed, in the summer of my second year at the University of Birmingham, a killer lucrative summer job.
I was interpreting for a company that had contracted with the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture on a project of hail suppression in Albacete, about 250 kilometers southeast of Madrid. The Spanish company retained the services of an American outfit. These guys were supposed to fly planes into towering, unstable cumulonimbus clouds and seed them with silver iodide, which supposedly turned the threatening hail into harmless rain.
The “guys” were a motley crew of mostly ex-military, pleasant enough, though their marriages seemed to be in none good shape, those of them who had marriages. They were led by Larry, a jovial Colorado businessman with a drinking problem. And in the middle of them all was “Ron.”
Ron wasn’t American, he was Rhodesian. (He certainly wasn’t married.) Not, you understand, Zimbabwean. Rhodesian. He knew his way around combat helicopters, around sub-machine guns. He had, according to him, killed HUNDREDS of “blecks.” With him, “killing blecks” was a refrain; he trotted it out at EVERY available opportunity. Only, the Rhodesians had lost, and here he was fetched up in the least desirable part of the least desirable country in Europe (the Spanish say “Albacete, caga y vete”—hardly a strong selling point to tourists). There were no “blecks” to kill, just black clouds. Hardly a compensation.
I was nineteen. I had grown up in Franco’s Spain, mostly shielded from its excesses as a foreigner and as a child; I had never heard muffled screams in provincial “cuarteles” where police interrogated dissidents. Ron terrified me. He was utterly deranged; it was clear he should be in an institution, but everyone just smiled benignly-oh that’s just Ron-and got on with the tedious business of waiting for the next thunderstorm to roll in.
The American military had an air base near Madrid, the source of American candy, Thanksgiving dinners, and lots of kids my age who never, ever interacted with anyone Spanish. The Cold War happened within the confines of that base. We were oblivious.
I grew up believing the American military to be the strongest in the world; to have the worst haircuts; to contain recruits who didn’t really know any better, for whom two years of service meant a paid-for college degree, which I managed to get because my father could afford it. I didn’t really know much about what was happening in Vietnam-we heard a lot more about the rioting in the U.S. than about the specifics of the war, through the BBCbut on the whole the American military seemed overstrong, a bit clueless, and generally a bit misguided-yet not really EVIL. There was certainly no place for the likes of Ron the Deranged in the American military.
Well, it turns out there is. We’ve seen it. It’s here. I suspect it’s been there all along. And I wince at my failure to have seen it earlier. You see, I’ve been secretly hoping-against hope, against reasonthat someone would prove beyond all doubt that this war with Iraq was somehownot good, war’s never good-but at least somehow not utterly bonkers.
Wake up and smell the coffee, Pica. It smells of burned flesh and cinders. It sizzles with electrodes. Welcome to the World At War.
2 May 04
The Sound of Home
A note for the Ecotone Wiki topic on sound of place.
This morning there was a black-headed grosbeak singing in the yard from the treetops, and a Swainson’s thrush singing from lower down. Both species are migrating through the Central Valley, and won’t be here in the summertime. The song of the grosbeak is bright, cheery, and resonant. The Swainson’s thrush has a beautiful flute-like song that cascades up through the octaves.
They remind me of home. There is a little canyon below the house where I grew up, just north of Berkeley. Both species nest in the canyon, and their songs would resonate through the canyon splendidly. I’d occasionally see the grosbeaks in nearby treetops, but the thrushes would always be singing from the bottom of the canyon, far out of sight.
1 May 04
The Sound of Here
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint post on Sound of Place
As Numenius pointed out, yesterday at 4:00 am I got up trying to locate a calling barred owl.
I am not normally walking about at that time of day. Scorpius was rising in the south and the air was still. No barred owl. Lowing cattle—polled herefords, mostly. I don’t know why they do this some of the time and not others; it seems unrelated to when they get fed or the time of day. There it was, though: the drone of I-80. At four in the morning.
I write this at dusk and we just walked out and took more or less the same route. There were quite a few cars about, disturbing the frantic chattering of the Western kingbirds. But most of the other birds had stopped apart from a lone mockingbird—and a lone great-horned owl who was just waking up.
I yearn to hear all this sometime without human sound competing with it all, obliterating it. These days you have to go a long, long way to find that. Farther, I think, than the range of the Western kingbird.
30 April 04
Barred Mystery
We were restless this morning at 4 AM and so were the livestock in the ranch across the street. One of the animals trailed off into what sounded like an impersonation of a barred owl — low hooting usually transcribed “Who cooks for you?” — but I thought how could it be that? and stayed snuggled under the covers. We heard it again, and Pica startled. It was definitely the call of a barred owl. We heard it one more time, and Pica got up and threw some clothes on to go look for it.
The Central Valley of California is not the place one would expect to find a barred owl. I recalled that they occur in the Pacific Northwest forests, but we’re hardly surrounded by forests here. Pica came up with another possibility before she went outside: maybe it was the barred owl in captivity at the California Raptor Center, located about 650 meters from us across Putah Creek and over two levees. On the other hand, she said, the eagles there call all the time during the day, and we never hear them from our house. But that’s during daytime, and it was now a quiet, still cool night. Who knows how well the atmospherics would carry the sound?
Pica heard the bird a total of five times, but not outside. She walked to the bridge over the creek and from there could barely hear the mockingbird calling in our yard, so she didn’t think she’d be able to hear an owl at the Raptor Center.
Consulting the nearest reference source in the morning — Arnold Small’s book California Birds: Their Status and Distribution — it turns out that barred owls are quite recent arrivals in California, their first sighting being in 1981. Their range has been expanding rapidly throughout the Pacific Northwest, and moreover there is concern that the barred owl will compete with and/or hybridize with the endangered spotted owl.
One of my coworkers volunteers at the Raptor Center. She told me today that she has never heard their barred owl vocalize. But four in the morning isn’t the time she would be over there.
A mystery then, with two remote possibilities coming to mind. Through some fluke of atmospheric conditions and perhaps change in bird behavior, did we hear the barred owl at the Raptor Center, even though we’ve been in our house five years and have never heard anything resembling it before? Or was it a wild barred owl, perhaps a subadult leading its species’ dispersal into new points south in California?
29 April 04
Adventures In Spanish
Tuesdays and Thursdays are long days on campus for me. My Spanish class starts at 6:30 in the evening and runs till 8:20. I grab dinner at the campus eatery before heading on over to class. Next Tuesday I have both a test and an oral presentation, and will accordingly be busy studying this weekend. My presentation will be on our trip to Spain: fortunately we’ve gotten as far as the preterite of ser and ir so I will be able to use the correct tense when describing the trip. I don’t know that they’ll be able to figure out the word bautismo though, so that one is going up on the chalkboard for them.
28 April 04
Wyrded Out
I have just had a rollicking introduction to Terry Pratchett. Numenius got the Wryd Systers, a hilarious rewrite of Macbeth, out of the library on Sunday and I started-and finished it-this evening.
There’s many more where this one came from. I feel a May and June full of silliness coming on.
27 April 04
April Heat
We’re having a heat wave this week, with the temperature in the mid-90s, and record temperatures being reported from all over California. But when I returned this evening from my Spanish class, it was a lot cooler outside than inside, so for the first time this year it was back to our summertime pattern of opening the screened doors to cool the house down. (We pride ourselves on never running the air conditioner.)
Despite the summertime weather, spring migrants are still passing through. Yesterday I heard a black-headed grosbeak outside our house, and Pica today had a grosbeak singing outside her office all morning long.
26 April 04
From the Window at Work
I’ve been in my new job for two months now. The warblers are coming through; today I heard a Wilson’s for the first time. The jackrabbits, cottontails, and ground squirrels have an uneasy sharing of the green grass which, if this heat continues, won’t be green much longer. The horses have been drooping their heads in the heat, looking for the shade, waiting for the man in the truck at 2:40 to bring their hay.
One thing about working with a posse of wildlife vets is that offhand comments are no longer offhand. I mentioned that the ground squirrels seemed to have finished their elaborate tail-thrashing courtships, assuming the females all to be pregnant.
“Did you know that the California ground squirrel has the largest testicles-per-pound of any mammal?” was the reply.
I didn’t know this. Now I do. Such are my window musings.