Category Archives: Sense of place

Watching for winter-wet season

I’ve been reading Gary Snyder’s most recent book of essays, Back on Fire (2007). In a couple of the essays, Snyder talks about the two seasons in the Mediterranean-type climate of much of California: there’s the summer-dry season, and the winter-wet season.

It has been odd for me, having recently moved from the south coast of Massachusetts, to hear people in California talk about seasons. We had a cool day a couple of days ago, and I overheard someone in the supermarket say to the cashier, “Fall is finally here.” It doesn’t feel like autumn to me. Autumn means a killing frost, and a changing weather pattern that includes more rain storms, and wide variations between warm and cold. We have not had a killing frost here, nor an increased incidence of rain storms; the earth, where it hasn’t been watered by in-ground irrigation systems, is still hard and parched and cracked dry, and the grasses are still dry and crisp, and the fire danger (as it is every summer in California) is still very high. We are not experiencing autumn here yet; we are still in the summer-dry season.

Somewhere in one of the essays in Back on Fire, Snyder says people living in California should abandon the kind of lawns and landscapes that require heavy water usage in the summer — practices that have been imported from the “Atlantic coast,” says Snyder; although these practices are really indigenous to the English climate, because even on the Atlantic coast lawns need heavy irrigation in the summer in order to stay green. But as a poet, Snyder also gives us new language, so that we can start thinking and acting in new ways. The English language has names for four seasons: winter, spring, summer, autumn or fall; these words come from the land where the English language began. In New England, most years have five seasons: winter, spring, summer, fall, Indian summer; we had to invent a new term for that season between fall and winter when the leaves have all fallen and weather gets warm again and there is still plenty of fresh food for humans and other animals to eat. In this bioregion of California, west of the crest of the Sierras, there are just two seasons, which Snyder calls summer-dry and winter-wet; to try to impose the old English terms for the four English seasons is a kind of self-delusion.

So it does not feel like autumn yet, because there is no autumn here, not really. Winter-wet has not yet begun; the hills are still brown, the trees are dull and faded green; we are still waiting for the first big rain storm of the new season. Yet here near the Pacific coast, we can feel that the weather pattern is changing; the fog is not reliable as it is in the middle of the summer-dry season. (And maybe here we need to add a third season to Snyder’s two, because Snyder lives up in the foothills of the Sierras where there is no summer fog. Maybe we need to talk about a summer-fog season which precedes the real summer-dry season; but I haven’t lived here long enough to be able to say.) We’re still in summer-dry season, but winter-wet season is just around the corner.

Monday evening en route to Millbrae

I’m trying very hard to cut down on my driving, so when I needed to go to Berkeley last night, I decided to take CalTrain commuter rail to the Millbrae station, and transfer there to BART for the rest of the trip.

After we left the San Mateo station, we were scheduled to go express to Millbrae, so I got up to stand near the doors. Not far from the San Mateo station, the train came to a dead stop. I looked out the window, and we weren’t near any station.

Then one of the train crew made an announcement over the public address system: “Ahh, we are stopped here because the train has just hit a white male,” he said. His voice sounded a little unsteady. “We’ll have to stay here until the police come….” The man was under the fifth car of the train.

I sat back down again. Years ago, I was on the train heading into Boston when the train hit someone, and we had to wait for over an hour before we got going again. I remembered hearing then that the police treated the train as a crime scene, which they had to document before the train could move again.

I sat and read a book. Every once in a while, a member of the train crew would walk up or down the aisle with expressions that ranged from blank to unhappy and sick at heart. After a while, I saw police and EMTs walk by. They did not hurry, so I assumed the man was dead. A member of the train crew announced that we would have to wait for the coroner to come and make his investigation. We waited. A couple of southbound trains passed on the other track; there had been no trains moving at first, but now the dispatcher was letting the southbound trains go. I saw more police walk by, and a couple of people with the word “Sheriff” on the back of their shirts. We waited. I saw Amtrak personnel (I guess Amtrak had the contract to run CalTrain’s service) walked by, wearing hard hats and carrying clipboards.

Around me, people were talking. You could tell that we were all thinking about the recent spate of CalTrain suicides, and we were all thinking that this must have been another suicide. Some northbound trains passed us on the other track. Finally, more than an hour after we had stopped, the announcement came that we had a new train crew on board — presumably the other train crew had to stay to answer police questions — and we got underway.

I felt crummy the rest of the evening. It was like passing a really bad accident on the highway, only worse because I was pretty sure that whoever had died had committed suicide. In a way, committing suicide by throwing yourself under a train is an incredibly selfish thing to do — from the expressions of the CalTrain crew, you could tell that they were sickened by what had happened. And what a horrible way to go. I couldn’t get rid of the bad feeling all evening.

Cell phone conversations

Standing waiting for the train this morning, I became aware of a young man walking towards me, talking on his cell phone. I glanced at him: in his twenties, long black t-shirt with a fanciful design over his belly, long black shorts down to his knees, a set weatherbeaten face with a little bit of facial hair, intense dark eyes with bags under them.

He was speaking quite loudly and forcefully into his cell phone: “…and she’s on probation too, and she’s like, oh my God I’m going to jail I’m going to jail, and so I…”

Fortunately he walked by me so I could stop listening to his story.

A word about practicing

The people next door to us host a drumming group. The drummers are practicing tonight. They are not very good. They are trying to do polyrhythms, but when you’re doing polyrhythms you have to be really precise or your drumming drifts in and out of chaos, which is what they’re doing. I understand that this is what one has to do when practicing, and I understand that drums are loud, but the least they could do is close the windows so the rest of the neighborhood doesn’t have to listen to their mistakes. But too many amateur musicians are so enamored of themselves that they forget how excruciating their practice is to others.

I experienced this phenomenon this past summer at a summer conference. A young man was trying to learn a guitar part from a recording. He sat in one of the common rooms of the conference center. He played little bits from the recording, and then tried to work out the guitar solo. I’m sure that inside his head it all sounded so wonderful, but to me it was just painful to listen to the same little recorded bits over and over, and then hear him make the same mistakes over and over. Most amateur musicians are considerate and practice in private; but the ones who aren’t, and don’t, are really annoying.

Bookstore

It’s about a twenty or thirty minutes walk from our house to downtown Burlingame. Instead of going into the city tonight, I decided to walk over to Burlingame. I walked past the stores with expensive women’s clothing, past the Apple store, past Pottery Barn and Banana Republic, finding with unerring instinct the local independent bookstore.

I wandered down to the current events section, which was right next to the children’s section. Near me, a man was standing next to a boy who was about 8 years old.

“Dad, look at this book,” said the boy.

The man mumbled a reply. He was looking at something else.

“But Dad,” said the boy with more urgency in his voice, “look at this book.”

“What?” said the man.

“This book,” said the boy, showing it to his father. “It has Legos with the book.” His voice sounded slightly awestruck: a book with Legos!

“Cool,” said the father, with some enthusiasm, which he spoiled by immediately turning to call to his wife across the store, “Did you see the children’s section? They have a good children’s section here.”

I wandered over to the mystery books. There were two other children behind me looking at books. A man, presumably their father, walked over, and said, “OK, it’s time for the —— family to go now.” There was just the slightest hint of uncertainty in his voice.

The children ignored him.

“C’mon, guys, let’s please put the books back now,” said the tentative father.

The children ignored him.

“Don’t you guys want to get ice cream?” he said.

“Ice cream?” they cried.

“Yeah!” he said, putting their books back on the shelf for them.

I suddenly noticed that there was one other solo adult in the bookstore; everyone else appeared to be part of a family of adults and children. I went over to the science fiction books, which again was near the big children’s section. Yet another parent was standing in the children’s section talking to a child.

“Put the book back,” said the parent.

“WAAH!” screamed the child.

“OK, we’ll buy the book,” said the parent to stop the child from crying. This reminded me of when I visited a toy shop in a well-to-do white suburb for ten years, where someone I know was the manager. Behind the cash register, the staff had posted a sign that read, “Unattended children will be sold into slavery.”

Unusually for me, I didn’t buy anything at this bookstore.

Phoebe

Fifteen minutes ago, Amy, the lead minister here, walked into my office. “Do you know anything about birds?” she said to me.

Without really looking up, I pointed to the pair of binoculars and the two field guides on my desk. “Yeah, I’m into birds,” I said.

She held out her hand, on which was perched a small songbird. “I found this little guy outside my office,” she said, “and wondered if he’s all right.”

“Black Phoebe,” I said, still not quite registering that the bird was quite calmly perching on her hand. “He looks OK. Maybe he needs water?” The phoebe continued to perch on Amy’s hand while I went off and got a tray. The bird moved its head and looked around. I said to Amy, “You’re like St. Francis or something.” I put some water in the tray. When Amy bent down to put the phoebe next to the tray of water, the phoebe suddenly flew away and perched inside Amy’s office.

After we got over being startled, we both laughed. “Well,” I said, “looks like there’s nothing wrong with that bird.”

“But why was it sitting there on the sidewalk?” said Amy.

“Maybe a hawk went by,” I said, spinning out a plausible hypothesis; I had seen an immature Cooper’s Hawk just outside my office a couple of weeks ago. “The phoebe was sitting there avoiding the hawk. In fact, now that I think of it, all the birds stopped singing a few minutes ago, which is what they do when a hawk goes by. Then this big mammal came along and picks up the phoebe.”

The phoebe stayed inside Amy’s office for about five minutes, watching her eat her lunch. She didn’t see it go. When I poked my head in her office to see if the phoebe had gone, it flew back in and immediately back out again.

“Jeez,” I said, “you really are like St. Francis.”

“One of my favorite saints,” said Amy.

Autumn watch

A gentle rain is falling outside the door.

This is September, when you expect the Bay Area to be sunny and hot; but sometimes a little bit of fall rain arrives early. But yesterday we had thunder storms move through, big dark clouds moving across the bay, and just enough rain to disturb the summer’s accumulation of dust on my car. When I got up this morning, the sky was still cloudy — not just low stratus clouds, some fog bank that had been pushed up a few hundred feet above the ground, but real clouds. The sun tried to peek through the clouds in the middle of the day, but towards sunset the clouds had grown thicker.

And now it’s raining — not much, not enough to need a rain coat or even an umbrella, but just enough slow gentle rain to settle the dust and stir up smells from the earth and the plants. The air feels damp and warm. Surely it will get hot and dry again before the winter rains come in earnest, but in the meantime I’m enjoying the gentle rain.

On Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley

This evening, I was browsing in a used bookstore. The man standing at the cash register was talking with two women. He had a ponytail and a beatific smile. I noticed one of the women wore a bright orange t-shirt. They were having a long conversation, and I didn’t pay much attention to what they were saying.

But then I happened to be browsing through the used sheet music, idly hoping to find Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” when I heard the woman with the orange t-shirt say, “Do you have any Bibles?”

“Right over here,” said the man, and walked over to show her the Bibles, which happened to be right behind me.

“Have you ever read the Bible?” she said.

“Oh, yes,” said the man. “Several times, in fact. But I don’t believe in it. I guess I’m more of a Hindu.”

“How come you don’t believe in the Bible?” said the woman innocently.

The man proceeded to rehash some of the old arguments of the Higher Criticism, getting one or two of them wrong. I made it a point to wander away to different part of the store. I felt tempted to involve myself in the discussion and make corrections, but I also felt that perhaps they were flirting a little bit and I didn’t want to interrupt them.

The man had to go back to the cash register to take care of a customer. When the customer had gone, the woman in the orange t-shirt went over and continued the discussion: “How come you don’t believe in the Bible? Don’t you worry about what will happen after you die? Because life is short, but what happens afterwards lasts much longer.”

“Well,” said the man, still smiling, “I can’t be a Christian because I can’t believe in a God that would damn people to hell. Either everyone goes to heaven after they die, or I can’t believe in God.”

He continued at great length, and I restrained myself from bursting into their conversation and saying, Ah ha, you are stating the case for classic Universalism as set forth by Hosea Ballou…. — as I say, I restrained myself, because by now I could sense that the woman was not as innocent as she appeared at first. She was determined to save this poor man’s soul, to bring him to Christ, or whatever phraseology might be used by her particular sect or denomination. I couldn’t see her face, but I could see from her body language how intent she was. I could also see from her body language that she was still flirting with him.

At last I couldn’t wait any longer; I wanted to buy a few books and move on. “Excuse me,” I said, walking up to the cash register. “I hate to interrupt your conversation, but…”

The man, still smiling beatifically, cheerfully took my money. The woman stood there, intent, silent. Her t-shirt was very orange.

I picked up my books, saying, “And now I’ll let you get back to your theological discussion.” By the time I had turned away, they were at it again.

I walked back out onto Telegraph Avenue, dodged the drunks, the addicts, and the homeless, wove my way through the well-dressed college students, the hippies, and a few middle-aged suburbanites, until I got to the next used bookstore.