9 July 03
The Tour Heats Up
Today was the team time trial in the Tour de France. The US Postal Service team won the stage, putting their leader Lance Armstrong in a commanding position in the overall standings. This year’s Tour hits mountains early: the first stage in the Alps is Saturday. It wouldn’t surprise me if Armstrong took the overall lead then and kept it for the rest of the Tour.
But anything can happen, as Sunday’s massive pileup in the last kilometer of the stage shows. Tyler Hamilton, one of the Tour riders to be keeping an online diary, unfortunately got caught in the pileup and fractured his collarbone in two places. Amazingly, he is continuing with the race, and today writes that there’s no telling how long he’ll be able to continue, but he at least made his goal following the crash of being able to help out with the team time trial.
8 July 03
Baseball on a Sunday Afternoon
I wrote this last year while watching the UC Davis Aggies play Stanislaus State…
The sun
the green
the bat
the boys
the caps
the ball
the ump
the pitch
the strike
the pitch
the fly
the catch
the throw:
safe!
7 July 03
San Diego Jaunt
I flew to San Diego and back today for a business meeting in the afternoon. Southwest has lots of Sacramento-San Diego flights, which makes turning it into a day trip quite easy. They’re my favorite airline, in part because of their enlightened GPS policy (they explictly allow passengers to use them inflight), so my usual trajectory is to head straight for a window seat and once we reach altitude I turn on the GPS and try to get a location fix. Somebody once wrote that not preferring the window seat means wasting the airfare and I heartily agree—there’s too much to look at outside, and I always end up staring rather obsessively through the window.
The meeting ended early and I had time to visit the Maritime Museum of San Diego, the three-masted Star of India having caught my eye on the bus ride downtown. It’s a beautiful iron-hulled bark, first launched in 1863 under the name Euterpe, and had many careers, hauling emigrants to New Zealand, timber from Puget Sound, and salmon from Alaska, among other voyages. I also stepped aboard the Berkeley, shown up at right. This is a passenger ferry, launched in 1898, that spent most of a 60-year career operating on San Francisco Bay being run by Southern Pacific Railroad. It has beautiful woodwork inside on the main deck, with elegantly finished benches for the passengers.
I think this is my fourth visit to San Diego, none of which have allowed me a great deal of time to explore. But San Diego is a place where many people pass through on their way to elsewhere, and the energies are that of a port town. The trolley heads to south to Baja, the naval presence has long looked towards the Pacific (two aircraft carriers in port today), and the aviation history dates back a long time as well. Interesting town.
6 July 03
Al of the 71
Butuki of Laughing~Knees had a post today about a homeless man on the subway in Tokyo and an ugly scene of intolerance. I originally wrote the following piece in response to Fred First’s request for stories about town “characters” while I was visiting the East Coast recently. I’m glad to have the chance to post it today, reminded of it by Butuki’s post and by the oft-repeated statistic that most Americans are three paychecks away from homelessness…
When I lived near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I took the 71 bus to Mount Auburn Cemetery in May for an hour or two or warblers before work. At that time in the morning the bus was often practically empty, but usually Al would be riding the bus.
Al knew all the drivers by name and rocked back and forth in a sing-song about how many cans he’d found in the garbage on his last run and how much he’d won on his last scratch ticket, which is where he invested all of his can redemption nickels. He had ample opportunity to buy tickets: early in the morning the drivers all stopped for coffee on Huron Avenue and Al hopped out with them to try his luck every time. He seemed pretty much to break even.
I never knew where Al lived or whether he even had a home—or whether his home was actually the 71 bus. (He had no bags other than those with his cans inside, so that didn’t seem very likely.) When I visited Cambridge last year, I heard the legend that Al’s parents had left him a fortune when they died, along with their house. It’s possible, but it’s also a kind of Cambridge legend.
I saw Al again on the morning of June 23 this year as I waited for the 71 to take me into Harvard Square from Watertown and on to South Station. His hands and jacket were their usual grimy selves but he seemed to move more slowly than before, a hazard when your strategy for crossing Mount Auburn Street is simply to barge out into the traffic.
Al didn’t recognize me-after all, I left the area seven years ago-but he did manage a half-smile back. It occurred to me that he probably faces far more scowls than smiles most places he goes. As age starts to grind him down, I hope he has some guardian angel other than the 71 bus drivers to look out for him…
5 July 03
Historical Maps Online
I’ve been doing a bit of browsing lately for websites that feature online historical map collections, particularly for the United States. A couple of repositories seem prominent. The first is the Perry-Castaeda Map Collection at the University of Texas Library (their historical maps are here, and they also have a list of other historical map websites.) The second site is the American Memory digital archive for the Library of Congress. The page giving their map collections is here. Their Panoramic Map collection is especially interesting, giving bird’s eye views of cities from 1847-1929.
4 July 03
It Must Be July Part 2
The 28th Davis 4th of July Criterium was held today—it was hot but then, as Fernanda says, it’s always hot on July 4th here! We caught a few of the races and also one spectacular crash where a rider coming out of a curve overcorrected and ended up on about six spectators who were sitting on the grass under a tree. Everybody seemed okay… but it’s unnerving, especially the sound of a bicycle at high speed going out of control.
At a gathering this evening at a friend’s house we met a French winemaker who shares our interest in the Tour de France. He was complaining because he doesn’t have a way to watch it. We told him about the web access and how because of the time difference it’s easy here to catch the last exciting minutes of each stage before going to work… The last few years a couple of riders have done weblog entries while on the Tour; we hope that happens again this year!
3 July 03
Recycling Bicycles
Coup de Vent today has a post illustrating an old bike dragged from the local canal that she thinks might be her ticket to artistic fame and glory. This reminds us of the bicycle, shown at right, we saw in Uppsala on our trip to Sweden a couple years ago that was evidently fished out of the canal that runs along the east edge of the university and quickly put back into use.
Back in Davis, Peter Wagner is well-known for his eclectic bicycle creations built out by recycling parts from old and usually discarded bikes. His trademark Whymcycle, with its mesmerizingly asymmetric wheels, is something of a cross between a pogo stick, a skateboard, and a one-speed bike.
July is a month when for us cycling events come to the fore. All day downtown tomorrow is the Davis 4th of July Criterium, and the Tour de France begins on Saturday.
2 July 03
It Must Be July
The blue-black wasps are all emerging from their larval forms along our roof. They are beautiful and seem quite harmless—but perhaps we’re less concerned about them because we live peacefully alongside bees that get trucked all over California and Nevada in the spring… When they’re here, they’re quite well behaved.
I don’t know the species of this wasp—I’ll add it later if I find it. We are well stocked in this house for looking up names of birds, plants, mammals, dragonflies, butterflies, herps, and marine invertebrates, but not, alas, wasps.
1 July 03
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.
30 June 03
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.