16 May 03
Moon Emerging From Shadow
We watched the total lunar eclipse last night from our house. Sunset here yesterday was at 8:10 PM PDT, and the moon entered totality at 8:14 PM, so the moon was already dark when it was first rising and took a long time to become visible through the dust and murk of Sacramento Valley air. The image at left was taken about 10 minutes after the end of totality.
15 May 03
Other Calligraphies
I’ve always enjoyed watching snails: they are unhurried, they carry their house with them, and their retracting eyes are surely the envy of any alien. They are also among the best of nature’s calligraphers. The dotted-line trail they leave, pictured at right, sends gardeners into a murderous rage, but in its own way it’s lovely, an intermittent aftertrace of the movement of a creature not in haste (unlike the beautiful lateral fury of a sidewinder’s forward/sideways tracks).
Last week I paid a visit to a physical therapist (I had a horse-related injury from January that’s still bothering me). I was given a set of exercises to do: the obvious flexing and circular motions… The third got me smiling: draw the entire alphabet, daily, with my foot! (By the time you reach Z, you’ve gone through every range of motion available to the ankle joint.) Roman, Italic, Uncial, Carolingian, or Humanist? I’m loving it. It makes going to meetings a whole lot more fun.
14 May 03
On Designing Bike Lanes
Peter Merholz has a post (warning, big images) about the phenomenon, common on university campuses, of people turning lawns into dirt paths where they actually want to walk, and how they will blithely ignore barriers in this process. In a similar vein, I am looking with dismay at the bike lane construction project just outside our house. As far as I can tell, they are building the bike path so that it veers to the right off of the road where it descends from the levee on the south side of Putah Creek. Why any cyclist going over 10 MPH will opt to take the bike path rather than picking up a little speed continuing straight down the road is beyond me. Time for some civil engineers to read A Pattern Language, perhaps?
13 May 03
Pondering on Place
Discussion has been growing between Fred of Fragments From Floyd, Lisa from Field Notes, and ourselves about what blogging about place might mean in a larger context than simply one’s own interaction with a geographical location in which one finds oneself (by choice or need). I say “ourselves” but I have been quite silent so far in the discussion. This is an attempt to explore what place means for myself, Pica, as opposed to Numenius.
Both Lisa and Fred live in places that are ordinarily described as “picturesque” by the majority of us. We don’t. We live in Davis, which is a college town (more like a city, now) of about 65,000 people in the Central Valley of California. I used to joke to friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Santa Barbara-the previous two places I had lived-that Davis was like a cross between Berkeley and North Dakota.
Agricultural land surrounds the house we rent, the guest house of a ranch house. Our landlord owns 40 acres of prime agricultural land which he leases to Campbell’s Soup. The wind blows all March and April; once the fields get plowed, that translates into a lot of dirt blowing around. The field immediately to our south is owned, somehow, by the Shriners, who have no compunction about getting it sprayed. Spraying, in this context, means application of pesticides by small plane, usually very early in the morning.
Yet Davis also has its progressive side, with one of the best food Co-ops in the country, a City Council that passed a dark-sky ordinance in addition to building a tunnel for migrating toads, and a well-educated, vocal, politically active (if predominantly white) population.
I do love living here, though, despite the dust and the pesticides. I love being able to ride my bicycle to work; my two-mile route takes me over Putah Creek, along some horse pens, through the Arboretum (always good for birds) and fetching up at the core of UC Davis, with its huge aged oaks. I love being able to live car-free (we do own a car for heavy shopping and short trips, but it’s still my first, and I’m 43 years old). Over 100 miles of bikeways in a town this size make it a haven for bike nuts—we qualify, owning six bikes between the two of us; the tandem cost three times as much as the car.
The Putah-Cache Creek Bioregion Project is exploring in greater depth the appeal of this “less picturesque” landscape. Spring migration in the Central Valley is muted compared to the outrageous excesses of Cambridge or even Santa Barbara, yet we have come to feel much more bonded to the birds around us here—our resident barn owls, the Swainson’s hawks, the meadowlarks and Zonotrichia sparrows in winter, the blue grosbeaks and loggerhead shrikes in summer, the ever-present, ever-raucous yellow-billed mapgies. These birds ground me, organize my understanding of the seasons. They reinforce my sense of place.
12 May 03
The Passage of Tanagers
Yesterday I was cycling through the countryside southeast of Davis, riding south on Mace, just across from Yolo Grasslands Regional Park, when I saw a brilliantly colored male western tanager in the lowest branches of one of the walnut trees lining the road. He flew ahead of me from tree to tree as I cycled on, and then flew across the road to land on the fence adjoining the grasslands.
Spring migration in the Davis area is an inconspicuous event, but still noticeable to the open eye and ear. I heard the soft warbling of a Swainson’s thrush in the yard this morning, as well as the chip of a Wilson’s warbler. And a grosbeak has in recent days been singing in the yard. The tanager, the thrush, the warbler, as well as most of the grosbeaks, will be moving on to the forests of the Sierras. I love the sounds of the Swainson’s thrushes and the black-headed grosbeaks—in the little canyon below the house just north of Berkeley where I grew up, their songs would resonate splendidly.
11 May 03
Whole Earth Festival
A good deal of today was spent wandering around and just sitting sketching—here’s a composite of some of my sketches with wash. The festival seems far more politically engaged this year—as a friend said yesterday, “nothing like a war to get people to come out of hiding.” There was lots of music and also a good deal of talking by veterans of the peace and environmental movements. Davis gets transformed each year by this festival. The University has apparently been trying to get rid of it for years…
In no particular order, favorites include the bicycle-driven yellow submarine, the geodesic tent, the indian flute stall, the drummers (I don’t think they stopped for over 48 hours), the jewelry-from-spoons stall, Lydia’s Luscious Foods, and the massage therapist suspended from overhead bars. Three sound stages made scheduling difficult but sketching is best done in one spot anyway—there’s no shortage of material! Sketching people in movement is tough and forces economies of line and gesture. It’s a great exercise.
10 May 03
Our Daily Visitors
What got me out of bed this morning was the declamation of geese. There’s a pair of Canada geese that have been visiting the field outside our house for many weeks now. Usually they come by in the morning, but sometimes they will stop by in the afternoon as well: on Monday afternoon they stayed in one spot nearby in the field for several hours! Obviously they’re still finding something to eat, even though the field, which is rented out by Campbell Soup for crop experiments, was recently plowed and is pretty dry now.
In March at a meeting of the Yolo Audubon Society, we went to hear a performance of the local children’s songwriter Linda Book. Her songs are all about environmental themes, and she has quite a following among the younger set in Davis. The experience of being chased by geese at the Arboretum led her to write a tongue-in-cheek song about geese, one lyric being “There nothing nice about a goose, my friends”! There’s no shortage of Canada geese in Davis.
9 May 03
Goat and Loquats
It’s Whole Earth Festival time here on the UC Davis Quad again—three days of alternative living, music, food, energy, and people. I passed one of these people on my bikeride to work this morning. She was parked just over Putah Creek by the side of the road. On top of her van was a goat eating its breakfast: loquats out of a box.
I saw the goat again at lunchtime and at dinnertime on the Quad, eating whatever came its way—it was last seen eating one of the straw bales that is supposed to function as a chair.
8 May 03
The Pleasures of a Good Bookstore
Lance Knobel of the excellent Davos Newbies (which I just discovered because I followed the little red light on Geoblog) tells of an exciting new bookstore opening near the British Museum in London by none other than the London Review of Books. I’m envious.
Here in Davis, though, we are lucky enough to have three independent bookstores alongside the UC Davis Bookstore: Avid Reader, Bogey’s Books, and Sweetbriar, the latter two dealing mostly in used books. Just up the road in Woodland there’s the Next Chapter. All this despite the inevitable appearance of Borders, for which I politely decline to provide a link. While Borders, which started out as a nice little independent in Ann Arbor, does understand the importance of making browsers feel comfortable and provides them with chairs and a coffee shop, it is now just too big for its boots.
I overcame my usual knee-jerk Borcott and went in last weekend, looking for a book on Photoshop and a DVD. On my previous three or four visits, I had gone in because no other bookstore in Davis had what I was looking for. On each occasion, I looked on the shelf, failed to find the book, waited at the information desk, and was told by a pleasant young salesperson (different each time) that according to the computer the book was in stock, but wasn’t it on the shelf where it was supposed to be. Each time there followed a sort of tortuous and progressively more frantic attempt by the saleseperson to locate the book—always to no avail.
This time, it was even worse. The DVD in question (Bull Durham, Extended Edition,) was indeed in stock, but it was in the back, and nobody currently in the store was authorized to open the box it was in. The pleasant young salesperson was unable to predict when such a box might be opened: it might be tomorrow, it might be in three weeks.
That’s it. No more Borders for me. Not for anything. I like to support Powells in Portland and browse in the Avid Reader, despite the suspect politics of its owner. I can probably wait till next Tuesday for the book I want. And on trips to Berkeley we immerse ourselves in Cody’s, Black Oak, and occasionally Diesel and Pegasus.
7 May 03
The Ghost of Emmett Reid Dunn
The following is inspired by the recent discussion at
Field
Notes and Fragments from Floyd about a troubling tourism poster from the North Carolina Department of Commerce.
In the summer of 1986, in the interregnum of my life between college and graduate school, I went off to the mountains of North Carolina to take a field biology course on plethodontid salamanders. This is the largest family of salamanders in the world, and a major center of diversity for the group lies in the Southern Appalachians, with about 29 species currently described from the North Carolina mountains. My interest in the group came from taking
In our first field trip for the course we went to Great Smokies National Park, and there on the road to Clingmans Dome, we were asked to imagine what it would have been like for the young herpetologist Emmett Reid Dunn (1894-1956) to explore the fauna of these mountains for his first time in the early 1900s. When he was eighteen the naturalist Leonhard Stejneger of the Smithsonian encouraged him to take up the study of salamanders, and that study was to occupy much of his career. A note in this brief biography of him says that in 1917 he “failed for a commission in the army, because his week-end pursuit of snakes and salamanders was unbecoming to an officer candidate.” It was around this time he began his explorations of the Southern Appalachians, which would result in his discovering or describing four or five new species of salamanders. He writes of his 1916 discovery of Plethodon yonahlossee in his eloquent foreward to his 1926 monograph on the Plethodontidae: “And I remember…how, on the slopes of the Grandfather, some chance-turned log disclosed the red band on the back of yonahlossee, and I knew that an unknown species was before me.” Later in our class we went to Grandfather Mountain where we too saw this strikingly-colored species.
We step forward in time to the poster from the North Carolina tourism office,
where a marquee reading “Now Showing: Sunset and Clouds” has been dropped into the view from a mountaintop bald, which according to Fred of Fragments is likely Bald Mountain on the North Carolina-Tennessee border. The disconnect between the world view of Emmett Reid Dunn, and that of the tourist office and their target audience, is total. It is not surprising that 7 of 11 posters in the series are devoted to golf. The vast majority of tourists pass through the mountains unaware of the diversity Dunn, or for that matter we 1980s field biology students, came to study. At best they will see the display in the park visitors’ center describing the numbers of amphibians, and move on to the postcards.
Yet I am not entirely convinced that the gap between Dunn and his peers who went off to war is narrower than the disconnect between today’s naturalists and our tourists. As Fred points out, natural history curricula are disappearing from
universities in favor of the gene-splicers and the computational biologists. But
to some extent this is ameliorated by the naturalists in academia shifting over
to more applied departments, or realizing they have to tie their studies to the
latest fads in ecology, evolution, or conservation biology. More significantly, I think the locus of natural history knowledge in this society has shifted away from academia. The good naturalists these days don’t find careers in academia, but instead often become biological consultants, many working on environmental impact reports. And as birders will tell you, amateur natural history is quite vibrant today. It’s significant that UC Press is continuing to
publish new natural history guides in these desperate times for university presses. There’s a market for this stuff.
That said, the chasm between the naturalists and mass culture remains, and is deeply troubling.