Tomorrow morning, I’m heading off to New Orleans with our church youth group to participate in rebuilding work. Yes, New Orleans is still being rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina. Now, we will not be cleaning up the BP oil spill — apparently volunteers aren’t allowed to work on cleaning up the oil yet (’cause, ya know, BP is doing such a good job on its own).
Will post more from new Orleans beginning tomorrow evening….
It rained three days this week. As Debra in the church office said, it always rains in late May and usually on Memorial Day weekend; maybe this year we got the rain out of the way before the long weekend. After three days of rain, you’d expect a nice crop of mosquitoes to hatch out. But not in the Bay area. The few mosquitoes that do come around whine listlessly around your ear, and when you swat at them, and miss, they apologize for bothering you and fly away. If you go hiking up into some of the undeveloped canyons and ridge tops around the Bay area, it’s a different story. As you dodge the poison oak branches that actively try to swat you in the face, fast little iron-gray mosquitoes fly at you while you’re distracted, and drill their red-hot proboscises into your arteries.
When those vicious iron-gray mosquitoes attack you, you believe the stories of the early residents of Palo Alto, who complained that the town was a vile place to live: every time it rained, the streets turned into a muddy mess, and the fleas and mosquitoes made life miserable. There are credible stories of children getting sucked down into the mud and lost forever. As for the mosquitoes, they were much bigger back then: two working together could pick up a small dog and carry it off, and four could drain enough blood out of a big man to leave him ghostly pale and unconscious. In San Mateo County, mosquitoes were among the first registered voters back in 1856 when the county split from San Francisco. The county had only 2,000 human residents; women and children weren’t allowed to vote, yet 1,600 votes were cast in the first election, many by mosquitoes. It is said that the only reason San Mateo County politics eventually got cleaned up was that the swamps got drained, and the mosquitoes mostly died off.
The old Palo Alto Unitarian Church was designed by Unitarian architect Bernard Maybeck in 1906; he his firm also designed the old Unitarian church building in Berkeley (now owned, and treated somewhat disrespectfully, by the University of California), and he most famously designed the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Berkeley. The first set of drawings for the Palo Alto church building was destroyed in a fire that followed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Maybeck made another set of drawings, and the main church building was completed 1907; due to the rise in construction costs following the earthquake, the social hall was not completed until 1913.
“A prominent architect, Mr. B[ernard] R[alph] Maybeck… was hired. The new building was dedicated on March 24, 1907…. The design of the building was unusual. It used rough, less expensive forms of material, redwood board and battens, common redwood shakes, rough, heavy timbers which more than caqrried the weight of the roof and cement plaster like that use for outside work, forming a deep chancel arch as high as the roof. Continue reading
While researching something completely different, I came upon an obituary in the 1919 volume of The Pacific Unitarian for Helen Kreps. She had been encouraged to enter the Unitarian ministry by Rev. Florence Buck, interim minister in 1910 at the old Palo Alto Unitarian church. By 191, she was a highly promising student at Pacific Unitarian School for the Ministry (now Starr King School for the Ministry) when she died in the great influenza epidemic. I make no claims for the historical importance of this story, but its poignancy makes it worth reprinting here.
From The Pacific Unitarian, vol. 28, no. 3, March, 1919, p. 65:
Helen Katharine Kreps
(Editorial Note. — The above article by President [Earl Morse] Wilbur came just too late for our last issue. Since it was written the deeply lamented death of Miss Kreps ended her heroic struggle. Dr. Wilbur now adds a tribute to her memory.)
About three years ago I received from a young woman in Palo Alto, of whom I had never heard, a request for information about courses of study in our divinity school. Shortly afterwards a member of the staff at Stanford university told me that one of their finest graduates was coming to us to study for the ministry, and mentioned her name with high praise. Later in the spring a slight, girlish-looking person appeared at the school, accompanied by her mother, to make final arrangements for the proposed course of study. Thus I first came to know Helen Kreps. She entered as one of our students in the autumn of 1916, and was thus in her last year when death snatched her from us. Continue reading
It rained again today. So I said to a long-time California resident, “It’s raining! When I moved out here, I was promised that it only rained in the winter. I thought our high rents out here paid for no rain. Doesn’t this void my warranty? Can’t I get my money back?”
Smiling, he said, “It rains eleven months of the year here. And we have land slides, wild fires, the occasional tornado, and the Bay Bridge collapses in earthquakes.”
“So this doesn’t void the warranty?” I said.
Still smiling, he just shook his head. “Land slides, wild fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, this is a terrible place to live. I keep telling this to people, they should stay in the eastern half of the country, they really don’t want to live out here.”
It rained today, and now everything smells fresh, and the trees look a little greener, and the white cumulus clouds drifting by overhead are beautiful.
We completed two garden beds today, both made out of recycled wood, and filled in large part with compost (made by the city) from yard waste. Because we live in a hundred-year-old house, it’s probable that there’s lead in the ground from lead paint, which is why we decided to use raised beds with soil brought in from somewhere else. In the photo below, the nearest garden bed is made from a pallet that we got for free from a store across the street; the further garden bed is made from recycled wood that Carol got at Urban Ore when she was over in Berkeley last month.
The rains continued right up to the last week of April, which everyone keeps saying is unusual. Everything is still green: the hills in the distance, the unmowed verges along the roads. But now it seems that the rains have ended at last, and the summer-dry season is setting in. As I drove across the Dumbarton Bridge to the East Bay, I noticed that the green hills on the other side of the Bay are already fading to gold in places. And the long grass along part of the road near the church is fading from a brilliant green to a light golden-green, its heavy seedheads nodding in the sun. Soon the hills will fade a golden-brown, and the ground will be parched dry; in the mean time, though, flowers bloom everywhere, the air is thick with pollen, and trees are beginning to set fruit. Another writer living in a Mediterranean climate said this about this time of the year:
My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
Song of Solomon, 2.10-13, KJV
Rev. Scotty McLennan was the preacher here in Palo Alto this morning. After the worship services, dancer Robert Neff and and concertina player Paul Kostka led Maypole dancing. There was also an ice cream social sponsored by the senior high youth group, and the middle school class did a Morris dance (they made me play the Fool in the Morris dance, not because I’m the best dancer, but because they wouldn’t trust me with a stick). Ice cream, good preaching, dancing, hitting sticks — what more could you ask on a perfectly sunny northern California morning?
Earth Day photos: