Category Archives: Sense of place

Road trip: San Mateo to Salem

We left San Mateo at eleven o’clock, and not long after noon we had left behind the crazy traffic and dense population of the Bay area. We got off the freeway, drove through orchards of walnut and pomegranate trees, and stopped for lunch in the small town of Winters. Carol had a perfect food experience: shrimp salad served on fiesta ware on a cheerful Mexican tablecloth.

I had ever driven through the far northern part of California. The freeway left the flat agricultural lands of the Central Valley, wound up through savannah with live oaks and grasses so dry they were whitish-gold, and into the foothills of the Cascade Range. And there was Mount Shasta, impossibly high, its peak hidden in a cloud. The freeway wound past and over Lake Shasta; but I was driving and decided I had better not look too much or we would be down that steep slope and in those blue lake waters way down below the roadway.

At dinner time we stopped in Grants Pass, Oregon, and ate at Shari’s, a restaurant chain of the Pacific Northwest. I have learned to be skeptical of pie purchased near interstate highways, but Shari’s served astonishingly good pie: Marionberry pie with no sugar added, a crust that was light and flaky.

We arrived in Salem at eleven o’clock, twelve hours after leaving home, with no energy for anything except going to bed.

A rural moment

Camp Meeker, California

The retreat center I’m staying at for a couple of days is in the middle of second growth redwood woodlands. This morning, I walked around a bend in a trail , and there were two mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) standing in the middle of the trail They both froze and looked at me, although they were obviously not particularly afraid to see a human being. I froze and looked back at them. The three of us stood there frozen for four or five minutes until the mule deer decided that I was either not a threat, or stupid, or both. They twitched their big ears, and started browsing again.

They were bending their heads down and eating something that lay on the path. There was no greenery for them to browse on; all I could near them see was old redwood cones; so I couldn’t figure out what it was they were eating. I watched their jaws move sideways as they chewed. Little bits of stuff fell out of the side of their mouths as they ate. They were not very attractive eaters.

At last I got bored, and started walking again. They looked at me as if surprised that I was moving, and then bounded away in a leisurely fashion. When I got to the place where the deer had been, I saw what it was they had been eating: acorns from the tan bark oaks (Lithocarpus densiflorus or, according to some taxonomists, Notholithocarpus densiflorus). The bits of stuff I had seen falling out of the sides of their mouths were bits of the outer husk of the acorns.

An urban moment

We were out walking a couple of nights ago. As we crossed one street, I realized there was a raccoon looking up at me. It was standing inside a storm drain. “There’s a raccoon,” I said in surprise.

Carol didn’t see it at first — you don’t necessarily expect to see a raccoon in a storm drain. It kept bobbing up and down: it would poke its head up above the grating, then duck down back under the grating, then back up, then down.

Carol said something like, “Hello, raccoon,” and gave it a wide berth. So did I. It was not a cute raccoon; it was a little creepy.

The joys of living in the Bay area

A—— showed up for our meeting, and by way of greeting he whispered, “I can only whisper, I’ve got seasonal laryngitis.”

“Seasonal laryngitis?” I said.

“Happens about once a year,” he said. “My allergies get so bad I can’t talk.”

“My allergies have been bad this week, but not that bad,” I said. “My sinuses are constantly draining down the back of my throat. It feels like my brains have liquified and are draining out of my head.”

That made A—— laugh, which started him choking and wheezing, and I started choking and wheezing too, and when we finally managed to breathe normally again we started our meeting.

The Bay area is a great place to live if you don’t need to breathe.

Urban hike: North Beach to Haight Ashbury

We started walking at about eleven, after buying some nectarines at the North Beach Farmer’s Market. It was a perfectly sunny day, and not too chilly. We climbed up Taylor Street to enjoy the views from Nob Hill (elev. 341 ft.) — we could see Alcatraz Island, the waterfront, and sailboats on the bay, but haze kept us from seeing across the bay. We passed Grace Cathedral where a man in a black cassock was showing off the Ghiberti doors to a knot of three or four people, down the hill, and over to Alamo Square. In the Alamo Square park, a young woman held out a camera asked us to take a picture of her and her two friends in front of the famous row of “Painted Ladies.” As we walked away, Carol said, “I didn’t even notice them until I turned to take the picture.” They were behind us as we were walking. “Neither did I,” I admitted.

There were swarms of people at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. We decided not to go in, so we went across the way to the DeYoung Museum. There were swarms of people there, too. Why pay all that money for admission fees (thirty dollars at the Academy of Science!) if you’re not going to be able to see anything because of all the people? We walked over to Haight Ashbury. I wanted to visit Forever After Books, but it was gone. I had never been to Haight Street before.

Except for the half a dozen stores selling drug paraphernalia, Haight Street would be just another upscale shopping district, thronged with upper middle class young people. A scruffy-looking white kid with a beard and a knapsack walked by us; from his knapsack hung a bright metal coffee cup and a red teflon-coated frying pan. He looked kind of dirty and a little bewildered. He had a cane, and he decided to hold it in front of himself, balancing it on his outstretched hand as he walked through the crowds. It tottered, he moved his hand to keep it balanced, and it almost hit the face of a girl with perfect hair and a fashionable tank-top. She gave him a look, part sneer, part scorn, part anger that he would intrude on her physical space. I didn’t blame her one bit. This poor neo-hippie kid was trying to go back to a mythical time when Flower Power ruled Haight Street, when guys could balance canes on their hand and girls would think it was cool. Today, being a hippie is just another consumer lifestyle choice that involves buying stuff at head shops.

On a quiet side street of Haight, a young woman was having a garage sale — really a sidewalk sale since her apartment didn’t have a garage. For months, Carol has been looking for a basic sewing machine that she can use to make some basic skirts — and there was a sewing machine, barely used, and still in its original box. For months, Carol has been looking for a duffle bag with wheels, so when she’s going to promote her books or work on composting toilets she has a big piece of luggage to carry what she needs — and there was the perfect duffle. She bought both for twenty-two dollars, put the sewing machine in the rolling duffle bag, and with the sewing machine rolling behind us we went over to Duboce Avenue to catch the trolley back to North Beach. It was the perfect ending to a ten-mile urban hike.

Three views of Chinatown

For dinner, I had boiled lettuce with oyster sauce. From where I sat, I could watch the cook make it: drop half a head of iceberg lettuce into a big vat of simmering sauce, leave it for a moment, fish it out with a big strainer, put it on a plate, put some oyster sauce on it. I also had a big bowl of fish congee (rice porridge), with toothpick-sized slivers of ginger and a few chopped chives thrown on top. It was perfect food for a New Englander, not too flavorful and even bland, but very comforting. We were the only roundeyes in the place, so they gave us forks, just in case.

After dinner, we heard music, and followed the sound to the Chinatown Night Market. There were two ensembles playing: I’m not sure, but maybe this was Cantonese guangdong music. The singers seemed to know the people who stood around in the chilly night air to listen. One of the singers, a woman of indeterminate middle age, had a voice that wasn’t particularly sweet, but she was musical and expressive. She sang one song that everyone else seemed to know; people were nodding their heads and singing along. In the ensemble behind her, a man playing a lute-like instrument brought his little boy along, and the boy tried to feed him a lollipop while he was playing. Someone wandered in and started talking to a man playing a two-stronged bowed instrument (an erhu?); the musician smiled, and shook him off so he could concentrate on his playing. The woman finished the song, and the man selling old coins at a nearby booth cheered and clapped his hands over his head for her.

We stopped to look at an installation done under the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Art in Storefronts project. Artist Cynthia Toms created an installation in a building that had served as a boarding house, nightclub, and restaurant. We looked at all the objects that were designed to evoke memories of Chinatown, but what really stood out for me was the the slide presentation off in one corner of the store window, housed in something that looked like an old television set: a 1970s photograph of a Chinatown streetscape, a snapshot of a birthday party, a vintage photograph of Chinatown showing some people freeing a woman who had been enslaved in a brothel, a picture of that very building as a restaurant, and so on. We watched for five or ten minutes, then Carol stood out in the middle of the street to take a photograph of the store front.

Summertime, and the livin’ is smoggy

It feels like summer has finally hit the Bay area. There’s apparently a high-pressure system sitting over the desert southwest pumping hot air up into our area. Temperatures got up into the mid-nineties today, with little or no wind.

Summer heat in the Bay area means smog and ground-level ozone. Driving down Route 101 to work today, the mountains on the other side of San Francisco Bay, usually clearly visible, were hard to see through the light blue haze. Smog and ground-level ozone mean that I feel lousy.

The short-term bad news is that tomorrow it’s supposed to hit one hundred degrees in Palo Alto. The short-term good news is that the forecast says cool air from Alaska will move into our area by the weekend. The long-term bad news is that University of California scientists are now predicting that climate change in our area is going to cause more hot days, which means more days of high ground-level ozone levels. The long-term good news is… um, what is the long-term good news?

Green tomatoes

We’ve been having a cold summer here in the Bay area, with night time temperatures frequently in the low fifties. Tomato plants do not like it to be that cool, and while our tomato plants set a lot of fruit, the little green tomatoes just hang on the vine and stay both little and green.

We had one tomato plant covered with little green tomatoes, growing in a big pot that sat in a sunny place in the yard. A few days ago I carried it up to our second-floor deck, huddled up against the house where I thought it might be a little bit warmer. Sure enough, after just a few days the plant looks happier, and most of the tomatoes are turning red; while the tomato plants down in the yard are still covered in green tomatoes.

September tends to be the warmest month in the Bay area. Perhaps this cool weather will finally end, and suddenly we’ll find ourselves inundated with more tomatoes than we can eat.

Pacific fog

This afternoon, while I was waiting to meet someone in Berkeley, I walked up the hills behind the Graduate Theological Union, up past the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, up further to where I got a view of the bay. Fog covered most of San Francisco, except for the tall buildings downtown, and a little bit of the waterfront; fog poured around the south side of San Bruno Mountain; fog filled the Golden Gate, so all you could see of the bridge was the very top of the north tower; fog rolled around the Marin headlands and streamed up inland towards the Delta. South of San Bruno down the Peninsula, the higher mountains held the fog back; I could see that San Mateo had no fog. And there was no fog in Berkeley; the city stretched out below me, and I could see little specks that were cars moving along University Ave., west towards the freeway. It was about three hours from sunset, and the way the sun lit of the fog from behind, and the way it shone on the silvery waters of the bay, was enough to make my heart ache from the beauty of it all.