A Scorecard and a Number Two Pencil

Long ago, I scored the cricket matches for my boarding school, a function of having a boyfriend on the “first eleven” (team). I sat in the scorebox with the scorekeeper from the opposing side and the resident spiders; we joined the players in the clubhouse for tea. We drew little dots in pencil for balls bowled, six per box (an “over”), drawing a large M through all six dots for a maiden (scoreless) over, or a W when it was a scoreless over with a man out, or “wicket.” Matches stretching back into the past were kept in burgundy leather-bound scorebooks, connecting me with boys who had scored when the school was still single-sex and World War Two had not yet blown up their world. I liked the precision of scoring, the order, and the way to make sense of an intricate sport.

Eight years in Boston turned me into a baseball fan (and an inevitable hater of the New York Yankees). I enjoyed nights at Fenway Park, watching the common nighthawks catch moths drawn to the floodlights, listening to the colorful language flung at the umpire (and anyone within earshot). But I didn’t learn to score baseball till I arrived in Davis, when Numenius’ brother joined us at a Sacramento River Cats game, our local AAA affiliate for the Oakland A’s. I watched him fill in the small boxes in different but somehow recognizable ways. I knew I could do this.

Encouraged by Paul Dickson’s Joy of Keeping Score, I started to keep score myself, first at games and then from the radio. The radio proved to be much easier, since the announcers explain every pitch, every decision, every vagary of errors-versus-hits. It makes it more interesting to follow the game when you know that this player struck out last at bat, flew out to left the previous one, and blooped a single first time up. It’s also a way of focusing entirely on the game, which seems to be the last reason many people go to see baseball, when there’s all the entertainment (high-tech or goofy, depending) and food and drinks. I’m often the only person I can see scoring. I’m also the only person I know who sits at home, listening to the radio, scoring games.

Midway Through The Tour

We’re well into our July morning routine here: turn on the computer, get online, go to the official site for the Tour de France, and read the text update live from the race. Two minutes later, hit reload, and see if there’s anything new. Even if we had a television, the race is being shown on a relatively obscure cable channel, OLN, which isn’t in most standard cable packages.

The next few days will prove decisive. Tomorrow is the first individual time trial, followed by four days in the Pyrenees. The time trial is being seen as a possible showdown between Lance Armstrong, and Jan Ullrich, the 1997 Tour winner and a formidable time trialist, who’s eager to make up a 2’10” time deficit. Armstrong thinks this is the most important time trial he’s faced in the past five years because the race is so close.

For a lighter look at the world of bicycle racing, see this, from bsag.

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.

The Town-Gown Shoving Match

Big front page headlines today in the Davis Enterprise reading “LRDP workshop turns ugly—UCD officials pack up and leave after fracas”. The UC Davis Long Range Development Plan has proved controversial, especially a plan to build 1,600 housing units for faculty, staff and students on UCD-owned agricultural research land just south of West Davis neighborhoods. At last night’s meeting UCD planners and their consultants intended to break the crowd up into small discussion groups to look at how to connect the proposed development with Russell Boulevard, the main artery fronting West Davis. The crowd, several hundred strong, many with protest signs, most believing that on account of the added traffic volume there should be no connection at all between the development and Russell, had other ideas, the meeting ending when the UCD planners walked out after one of the West Davis residents shoved a consultant.

Davis politics is entertainingly contentious. The other major town-gown dispute these days is over the proposed UCD biolab, but I’ll leave that one for later. The answer to the proposed UCD neighborhood seems clear to me though: let the university build the development, but disallow cars from it!

Unseeing and Unseeable?

Last night was the Davis Code Pink gathering, where we (mostly women) wear pink, sing songs, recite poetry, and whackily try and interest passersby in alternatives to war. We were lucky to have Annie last night who is an undergraduate at UC Davis, but also a poet and songwriter with a hauntingly beautiful voice.

We were packing up to leave when a woman with a stroller approached. She was wearing a hijab. Not just a hijab, either: the full-on Saudi head and face veil. She seemed disappointed we were leaving, so a few of us stayed behind to chat. She was so pleased there were still people protesting the madness of the illegal war on Iraq. Her accent was far more American than mine—and when I told her Annie had read some poetry, she produced at least five poems of her own. I read one. I was stunned by the beauty of her words.

I introduced her to Natalie, our local Code Pink organizer. I should explain that Natalie is blind as well as confined to a wheelchair, so she couldn’t see Maria’s hijab. What happened next was extraordinary.

I mentioned once again the Campus Community Book Project for the fall: Mark Juergensmeyer’s Gandhi’s Way. Natalie scowled and said the book wasn’t available on tape so she couldn’t read it. Maria said well, I’ll record it for you, I’ve just finished working at the Student Disability Center. Great, said Natalie, though I think someone’s already doing it. Thank you. Maria’s hijab came up. Is your hijab pink? No, it’s black and mint green… But Adam’s sippy cup is pink, I said. Don’t tell me you aren’t good with kids, said Natalie to me, I know you just picked it up. And how you were with that child.

Riding home with tears in my eyes, I saw the gibbous moon perfectly in line with Scorpius, as though it were the giant head of a dragon. I don’t think I’d have noticed it if it hadn’t been for these two women and their conversation. They were teaching me to see.

What if this lesson could be taught across the world? It’s quite simple: open your heart. You might be surprised by what you see there. It certainly involves more than just your eyes.

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.