12 July 03
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.
11 July 03
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!
10 July 03
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.
9 July 03
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.
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!