Category Archives: Sense of place

Weather

I’ve been reading Weather of the San Francisco Bay Region by Harold Gilliam, who says that in this area, if you don’t like the weather, you can walk or drive a short distance to find weather more to your liking. “Fishermen along the fog-shrouded coast of Marin County on a summer day may be shivering in the low fifties while people in San Rafael, ten miles east, bask in comfortable 70-degree weather,” writes Gilliam, “and residents of ranches at the edge of the Sacramento Valley, another 40 miles east, mop their brows as the thermometer hits 100 — a temperature difference of 50 degrees in 50 miles.”

I have noticed that it is generally cooler at home in San Mateo than it is at church in Palo Alto. At our apartment in San Mateo this morning, it was perhaps 60 degrees, with low stratus clouds overhead, and a chilly breeze blowing. I put on my fuzzy fleece jacket and walked over to the train station. After a 30-minute ride, I got off the train at the San Antonio station in Palo Alto, 17 miles to the southeast, and it was sunny and in the 70s.

Weather

At a meeting the other day, some of the other people in the room were complaining about the weather here. “It’s so hot,” said one (it has been in the mid-80s, but windy and dry so it’s very comfortable). “Miserable weather,” said another.

At some point, one of them looked at me, and suddenly realized that I have just moved to the Bay Area from a place that is currently beastly hot, in the 90s and humid, a place which just had destructive rainstorms and flooding — that I have just moved here from a place that has blizzards and ice storms and hail and hurricanes and thunderstorms. “Well,” she said, “the weather here is not so bad compared to New England, is it.”

“No, the weather here is pretty good,” I said.

“The weather here is actually perfect for human beings,” someone said.

“But human beings just like to complain about the weather,” said someone else.

Seasons

I remember from the last time we lived in the San Francisco Bay area that there are two seasons here: winter, when most of the rain falls, and summer when very little or no rain falls. I feel that the terms “winter” and “summer” are misleading, though: “winter” comes from Old English, and the season it describes has little or no resemblance to winters in old England. I tend to think of the two seasons here as the green season — because when the rain falls, the plants start to grow, and the hills turn green — and the brown season — because after the rains stop, eventually the plants dry out, and the hills turn golden brown.

We are in the middle of the brown season now: the hills are brown, the soil is dry, the air feels dry. I was walking through a residential neighborhood a couple of days ago, and some of the home owners let their front yards turn brown: either they let their lawns dry up and turn brown, or they had something other than grass growing, or they just had bare ground or pea stone for their yards. But the majority of home owners feel the need to have bright green lawns year round. As I walked through this residential neighborhood, I couldn’t help thinking how odd it looked to have lush green lawns during the brown season. It would be as if New England home owners had snow-making machines, and tried to cover their front lawns with snow during the hottest days of August.

Evening walk

You can walk from our house to San Francisco Bay in less than half an hour, by following our street up three blocks to Monte Diablo Street, and then following Monte Diablo east to the bay. I walked to the bay this afternoon to look at whimbrels, willets, egrets, sandpipers, gulls, terns, grebes, and blackbirds. Then I walked back home.

The stretch of Monte Diablo closest to the bay goes through a suburban tract that was probably built on filled-in land. I walked past single story houses a few decades old with small lawns. A black girl came skipping up the sidewalk followed by a white woman; they turned in at a house where they were greeted by someone inside. “I’ll bet you wondered where she was,” said the white woman.

I stopped at M&H Market, just before the foot bridge over the freeway, to get something to drink. An older white man with a pencil-thin mustache waited on a hispanic man and a little girl. “Put it up on the counter,” said the man to the little girl, and she did. The man behind the counter was wearing a dime-store sombrero.

On the other side of the footbridge, Monte Diablo Street becomes shady and more attractive, with a mix of older houses and other buildings. I passed Pilgrim Baptist Church, currently advertising their vacation Bible school, and St. James A.M.E. Zion Church, and then the Hari Mandir Hindu Temple, and an anonymous gray building with a sign that said, “Church of Christ Meets Here.” I passed the M. L. King Community Center, and the King Swim Center.

When I got to our street, I turned right towards our house. An ice cream man pushed his cart down the sidewalk ahead of me, the bells on the cart jingling. A boy stopped him, and when I passed them they were deep in conversation; the man was saying, “Like how long ago? Lotsa years ago?” A group of people sat on a couple of cars parked on the street, listening to some quiet salsa while they talked idly. A white man wearing a broad-brimmed white hat and shorts went in the driveway of a big old house almost hidden by a fence and trees; I looked up the driveway and saw that it must be a party, for there were about thirty people, all of whom were white, milling around on the driveway and yard of the old house.

A small box truck was parked across the street from our house. The back was open, and a man was in the truck selling produce and bread. A short middle-aged hispanic woman stood looking up at and talking to the man in the truck. A young white man came around the corner and walked up to the truck to wait his turn. On the other side of the street, I turned in our front gate and walked upstairs to our apartment.

San Mateo City Hall throws us a curve ball

San Mateo City Hall just threw us a curve ball.

We shipped our belongings to California via a “PODS” temporary storage container. Last week, Carol went to San Mateo City Hall to get a permit to place the Pod on the street near our building (there’s no other place to put the Pod because the yard is completely fenced in).

The people at City Hall told Carol there was a brand new requirement that we get an insurance certificate absolving the city of all liability. We were not surprised by this, since New Bedford had recently instituted a similar requirement. But they also said they were going to charge us $800 for the permit.

I called Brian, the manager of the local PODS franchise, and told him the story. “Eight hundred dollars?! I can’t believe that,” he said. “I’ll drive down to San Mateo tomorrow and talk with them about this.”

Brian called me this morning. It turns out that it’s worse than we all thought. They city of San Mateo has banned all placement of temporary storage containers on the street, and they told Brian that if they find a temporary storage container on the street they will fine the company that owns it $1,000 a day. The fire chief has said that temporary storage containers interfere with firefighting, and cannot be allowed any longer, as of a week ago. Apparently, then, City Hall gave incorrect information to Carol — this is not about insurance, this is about firefighting.

Brian has gone out of his way to accommodate us. He is going to dispatch a truck with our belongings first thing Monday morning. The truck driver will wait while we unload the contents of the Pod into the garage and driveway. Now we are gathering a crew together to help us unload as quickly as possible. (If you’re in the area and want to help, send me email — I’ll buy you lunch!)

I’d feel better about this if the city’s new requirement made sense to me. But our building is on a street corner with about 150 feet of street access, and one 16-foot storage container is not going to create a significant problem for firefighters. This is the sort of thing that makes people cynical about City Hall.

Sigh. Just what we need. More stress in our lives.

Across the mountain states

We left Salt Lake City at about 9 a.m. Mountain time, and arrived here in San Mateo at about 10:30 p.m. Pacific time. The landscapes we drove through were amazing, awe-inspiring, beautiful, stunning, sublime….

Carol on the Bonneville salt flats, Utah

When we arrived, we found that our new landlord had found an air mattress for us to sleep on, and he even helped us unload our car (thanks, Ed!).

And now it’s time for bed, so I can get up in time to spend my first day at the new church.

Wind power from Iowa to Utah

Over the past two days, we have seen a great number of wind turbines. In Iowa, the wind turbines were often in fields of corn or soybeans:

Near Walnut, Iowa

These wind turbines were far from the highway, and barely visible across the Great Plains:

Somewhere along I-80, Nebraska

In Wyoming, we saw several extensive fields of wind turbines, like this one:

Between Laramie and Rawlins, Wyoming

Elsewhere in Wyoming, we saw a wind turbine being erected: a slim white tower, and a crane nearby waiting to place the blades and hub on top of the tower. In another place, we saw wind turbines gracefully turning in the distance, while close to the road an oil derrick clumsily bumped up and down, up and down: two different sources of energy side by side.

And finally, these wind turbines were somewhere near the Wyoming – Utah border:

We arrived in Salt Lake City at about 7:30 this evening, and as we were pulling in to the motel parking lot, Carol said that it looked there are more wind turbines in the Great Plains now than in California.

So that’s where we are

We rolled across the rolling hills of Iowa and on into Nebraska. We drove alongside the Platte River, catching glimpses of the high and oddly-shaped bluffs that define the edges of the broad river plain. We passed into the Mountain Time Zone. Let’s stop in Sidney, Nebraska, I said to Carol. She said, Why not go a little farther, it’s only 7:30. I said, Because there isn’t much between Sidney and Cheyenne.

We pulled off the highway. The tall huge signs read: Comfort Inn; AmericaInn; WalMart Supercenter; Sapp Bros. Shell; Steakhouse and Bar; Mexican Food. We walked to WalMart to buy fresh fruit and cheese for tomorrow. Wanna go for a longer walk? I said to Carol. She wanted to walk to a building on the other side of the road that looked like a casino, or something. We walked over in the gathering dusk. We both realized what the building was at the same time. Cabela’s, said Carol; I said, I was just thinking that.

There were big statues of horned animals in contorted poses. The store was closed. It was right next to the interstate, and trucks whined by. There are very few trees in this part of the country, and the soil looks dry and sandy. We walked back to our motel and went to sleep.

States that begin with vowels

Most New Englanders have a poor sense of geography. We have always had difficulty distinguishing between the states west of the Connecticut River (technically, Vermont is a New England state, but it is inhabited chiefly by New Yorkers and people who pronounce the letter “r” oddly). We New Englanders know vaguely that there are Appalachian mountains, then a big flat place where they grow corn and soybeans and all the states have names that begin with vowels, and then west of that there are mountains and deserts and big square states. We pity those New Englanders who have to go live in California, because they will be so very far from the ocean.

Corn and soybeans along I-80 in Illinois

Corn and soybeans along Interstate 80 in Illinois

Today, Carol and I drove through flat states whose names begin with vowels. We started driving this morning in Ohio, drove through northern Indiana, across midstate Illinois, and then across the Mississippi River into Iowa.

Crossing the Mississippi River along Interstate 80

The landscape was fairly flat in Ohio, sloping gently down towards Lake Erie; it was heavily developed south of Chicago, covered with industrial buildings, big box stores, and housing developments; it was fairly flat through midstate Illinois but even here it rolled gently; and here in Iowa, the landscape consists of low, rolling hills with winding creeks in the valleys between the hills. In short, the landscape is far more diverse than New Englanders think it is.

We are spending the night just south of the Amana Colonies in Iowa. We had some Schild Brau Amber lager beer at dinner, brewed locally by the Millstream Brewing Company. Carol comes from Iowa, and as we walked around, she said it felt somehow familiar: the cicadas, the fireflies, the silos half hidden behind the low hills, the fields of corn. And tomorrow we will continue driving across the flat states, getting farther and farther from the ocean.