Fieldnotes, with pictures, from a random walk through Life

Friday, August 1st, 2014

Wall Springs oasis and the Fleming Collection

By Steve Stern · Comments (0)

In Northwestern Nevada, is an oasis formed by Wall Spring (and judicious use of a rented skiploader). In the past, I have referred to it as Mike Moore’s place in the Smoke Creek Desert, but it is as much Linda Fleming’s – Mike’s wife’s – as his and it is now becoming a home to some major pieces of her art. Linda is an artist who creates, among other things, Wall Art and Sculptures. Her work hangs – stands? – in such diverse collections as the Stanford University Museum of Art, the Albuquerque Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Oakland Museum, the U. S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, and, I want to add, Michele’s and my home where we have two of her drawings. Now some of her major pieces are at, or are moving to, Wall Springs.

On our way to Portland, Oregon to go to nephew Jason’s wedding, we decided to go via Wall Spring, in Nevada, for dinner with Linda and Mike (it makes more sense if you have the roadtrip gene). It turned out that Mike’s brother Kirk and his sister Kathy would also be there to make it a party. We were bringing much of the dinner because we had stopped at the San Mateo Farmer’s Market and we wanted to tout our fresh produce over what we assumed – wrongly, I think – to be their meager desert fare. We are also on a barbecued goat-leg jag and we brought one with us, it is perfect for a party of six.

We wanted to be there by four to get the goat on the barbie, and catch the 5 o’clock tour of Linda’s work – and we were running late, having diddled away an hour in Truckee – so the last hour and a half of our trip was at 60 miles per hour, or so, over gravel roads. Windows up, cool air blowing through the quiet car from the A/C, the desert, almost motionless in the windshield, with only time rushing by, was a new experience for us. We were in a rented Chevy Captiva, a compact SUV, that is just sold to Car Rental Companies. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the start of the end of our Range Rover adventures.

We got to Wall Springs on time, and while Mike prepared the barbecue, Linda took us on a tour. The one time I had seen more than one piece of Linda’s – often – huge sculptures was at a show in the Esprit Sculpture Garden in about 1988, and I was thrilled to see some more ( it even included a nice wine, like any uptown opening).

Michele, Kathy, and Linda

Mike and myself with “Necklace” [steel; 2000] in the background

Wall Springs is relatively near Gerlach which has become better known as the closest town to Burning Man and the result is that Gerlach now has the infrastructure to place large sculptures. This is slightly ironic because Mike, like most locals, doesn’t like Burning Man. As an aside, the lines on the Buffalo Hills are old beaches where the water level was during the last Ice Age. End aside.

On her website, Linda says My works hint at the co-existence of the mundane and the cosmological where two realities simultaneously exist including the possibility that the past is also present. The structures are diagrams of thought that provide a glimpse of the strangeness beyond the every day world; opening a place where thought becomes tangible, history leaves a trace, and information exhales form. My reaction, seeing the work here, is visceral; they just seem to fit, to be part of the geological province.

“Insinuation” [steel; 1997]

As an aside, the dog is Lefty who is a rescue dog. Lots of people I know have rescue dogs – or cats – but they don’t know they are rescue animals, but Lefty does. Mike found him with his left foot caught in a coyote trap about 50 miles from the nearest paved road (for the longest time, I kept calling Lefty, Lucky, and still want to call him Lucky for what I think are obvious reasons). End aside.

“Pink Glass” [cast glass/steel; 1988]

“Grey Matter” [laser-cut powder coated steel; 2006]

“Hercules” [wood and steel;1988] with the Granite Mountains in sunlight

The tour ended as the shadows stretched out along the Buffalo Hills, we retired to the back porch for drinks and appetizers.

Sitting on the back porch, drinking my wine, eating Linda’s appetizer of heirloom tomatoes, and watching the alpenglow glow on the Fox Range , I am struck by two, almost diametrical, thoughts. Why does this austere, inhospitable, landscape so pull me? How come it doesn’t pull everybody?

We had roast goat leg, corn brought by Cathy and Kirk from Truckee, and salad for dinner as the Terminator – the line marking the earth’s shadow – under the pink Belt of Venus, ended the day.

The air is soft in the Gloaming and the Silence flows in off of the desert floor. On the back porch, we soak up the moment, knowing it is valuable for being transitory. Tomorrow, the heat and the glare will return; the air so dry it buzzes, the light harsh, and the heat an overbearing physical presence.

The next morning is Monday and getting our usual late start, we turned off the gravel Smoke Creek Road onto an actual paved road at about 11:30. In this case, the paved road is Highway 447 which goes north into Cedarville and beyond.

Comments (0)

Categories : Americana, Art, Nevada, Travel

Wednesday, July 30th, 2014

The tragedy of Israel

By Steve Stern · Comments (3)

^{From the The Huffington Post}

^{From 91.3 FM, voice of the Cape}

^{Tyler Hicks/The New York Times}

One Day, Many Years from Now, people will ask how come we were bystanders An anonymous Israeli, Jewish, PhD student whose blog Reality Check Point is revelatory.

Israel was born in hope. Not just the hope of Jewish refugees fleeing the horrors of being second class – or third class or not even – citizens in Europe and, later, much of the Muslim world, but the hope of non-Zionist Jewish people all over the diasporic world. That hope held Israel out as a beacon of Western, Humanistic, Democratic, values. For years, those values have been increasingly subjugated to Israel’s fears and brutality. A brutality that destroys the brutalizer as much as the brutalised.

Sadly, I doubt that it could have any other way, no matter how intense our hopes. For years we have known, on a personal level, that battering the child makes a brutal, battering, adult and the Jews were battered by experts; from the Roman Armies starting the diaspora, to the Spanish inquisition, to the pogroms of Eastern Europe and Western Russia, to the Shoah carried out by the German military under the Nazis. The lessons the survivors learned were not lessons of peace and tolerance, they were lessons of hate and fear. They were not lessons of the futility and ultimate failure of brutality, the lessons the survivors learned were of the effectiveness of raw power.

Why should Hamas, or any Palestinian for that matter, believe the world will shelter and secure them, help them, value them; the world has already said Move off your land, we are giving it to somebody else, you don’t count. People who hide behind their own children after striking out, have no faith in their own future. And a nation that sends their Army in to destroy schools, saying We are justified, the terrorists were hiding behind the children, has lost its moral bearing.

In this atmosphere, anybody who really thinks that a two state solution to Palestine is actually possible, hasn’t looked at the map. It is already one state, a nasty, brutal, apartheid state but one state nonetheless. In October, 2003, Tony Judt, a Jewish intellectual I have come to admire, after being introduced to him by Richard and Tracy, said in The New York Review of Books - in a thoughtful article I think is very much worth reading – The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution—the core of the Oslo process and the present “road map”—is probably already doomed….The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. Sadly, things have only gotten worse since then and, now, even Reuven Rivlin, the Israeli President seems to agree.

I don’t see any ethical choice except a single, integrated Israel/Palestine and it is tragic that the dream didn’t come true, but it didn’t.

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Categories : Current Affairs

Tuesday, July 29th, 2014

An old-timey museum in the Willamette Valley

By Steve Stern · Comments (4)

^{Douglas A4-E Skyhawk and Consolidated PBY Catalina}

As we left Portland , I suggested we make a run for home. Michele suggested wine tasting in the Willamette Valley and then sweetened the deal by mentioning that the town of McMinnville was home to the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum. I had never heard of the Evergreen Museum but I love airplanes and was immediately sold.

To back up a little, I went to Washington in 1976 to see the newly reopened Smithsonian. I had been there a couple of years earlier but most of the Smithsonian had been shut down for a major remodel to celebrate our 200 year anniversary. After my first visit, my two favorite museums were The National Portrait Gallery and the Corcoran Craft Museum and I assumed that, once they were opened, the bigger, more famous Smithsonian galleries would be much better. They weren’t and I was very disappointed. At the time, I didn’t know why.

Maybe three of four years later – maybe ten, but later – I read a column by Stephen J. Gould that explained everything. I don’t remember if I fell in love with Gould’s column, This View of Life and then subscribed to Natural History Magazine to get them or the other way around, but, either way, I subscribed to Natural History and anxiously awaited each month’s Stephen J. Gould column. Gould wrote about evolution and I was deeply involved in trying to understand it.

As an aside, I never did understand Darwinian evolution and still have grave doubts about it. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the fossil record, the facts of change, and the fact of change. I believe the earth is about 4.5 billion years old. What I don’t understand is the how of evolution and Darwinian Evolutionary Theory doesn’t satisfy me. Survival of the fittest seems to be a tautology explaining nothing; how do we know they were the fittest? because they survived! What is left unexplained is how everything, including Homo sapiens, evolves against the Second Law of Thermodynamics which says that everything moves towards equilibrium. The evolution of the universe is away from equilibrium. The Big Bang Theory – I think the Great Unfolding is a better name – says that the Universe went from nothing to a plasma of subatomic particles, to simple atoms, to molecules. Many of those molecules evolved into cells – life – and increasingly more complicated plants and animals. Eventually, those cells evolved into flatworms, and sharks, and frogs, and monkeys, and, eventually, us. That is a constant direction away from equilibrium. End aside.

Back at Gould’s column, he wrote about how museums have gone from being depositories of organized stuff, to teaching about the stuff. The example he gave was of a museum that had a display of beatles. They had several cases of hundreds of beetles carefully laid out and a sign that said something like A sampling of the many beetle species beetles found within fifty miles of this museum. The new display shows several beetles and a large plastic model showing the different parts of the beetle and how the beetles have hard wings that act as covers over their delicate flying wings. Gould liked the first display better and thought it gave more information especially showing the wild variation and number of different kinds of beetles (there are more different beetles than any other kind of insect and more different insects than all other animals, leading the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane to say to a group of theologians, when asked about God, He must have had an inordinate fondness for beetles).

I am with Gould on this one, I like the old museums, that featured collections of stuff, much better than the new museums and the remodeled Smithsonian is a new type of museum. One of the things I was especially interested in on my return visit to Washington was the Smithsonian Railroad Collection that I had heard about. But – when I was there, I hope it has changed – there were only two engines, beautifully restored but, come on, only two engines! The Evergreen Museum is old school with airplanes jammed everywhere.

^{Michele in front of a French Blériot XI with a Curtiss Model D behind, on the right is a Quickie Q2 designed by the great Burt Rutan, all under the The Spruce Goose}

Great planes, famous planes, most of which I haven’t seen before. There are German and British planes of the kind that fought in the Battle of Britain, the Supermarine Spitfire and the Messerschmitt Bf 109,

and there is the ultimate WWII fighter, the mighty Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe which was the world’s first operational jet with a top speed of 530 mph. I was surprised to read that the Germans actually built 1,430 of these planes but there are not many left and this is actually a recreation (accurate enough so that the factory gave it an authorized serial number).

There is a real Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird that can fly at 2100 miles an hour at 85,000 feet and once flew from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., in 64 minutes and 20 seconds.

behind that is a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter in NASA livery.

There are even drones, featuring a Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk, unironically posed above us with a backdrop of an American flag.

In short, this is the kind of old timey museum that the visitor can spend days wandering around. And when you get tired of airplanes, you can go wine tasting at one of the sixty – or so – nearby wineries.

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Categories : Americana, Travel

Sunday, July 27th, 2014

A pitch for walking in the Saddlebag Lake area

By Steve Stern · Comments (2)

(I want to start this by saying that this trip was Richard’s idea and he spent about three-quarters of it waiting for me to catch up. It was the longest I have walked since my foot gave out about six months ago and Richard’s patience approached angelic levels. Thank you, Richard. You are a Mensch, my friend.)

A funny thing happened on our trip to Yosemite to take a walk in Tuolumne Meadows, we ended up at Saddlebag Lake (mostly near Saddlebag Lake, actually). Saddlebag Lake is one of my guilty pleasures. You can drive up, park your car, walk a hundred and fifty feet, take a boat across the Lake, get out, walk another 150 feet, and you are in The High Country. Somehow, it seems a little too easy, a little cheap and it is; there is no suffering involved. Just Pleasure.

Any trip to The Sierras from The Bay Area, involves going through The Great Central Valley and, to me, they are always linked. In the late 60′s, when I was going to the Sierras alot, I had an un-airconditioned 1966 Corvair convertible and The Valley was always Hotter than a son of a bitch. We would drive across it on Friday nights, stopping in small Valley towns, along Highway 99 before it was a freeway, to get a Giant Orange Juice – from a building that was round and orange! – on our way to The High Sierras. When we got there, we already looked like we had been backpacking for two days, now Richard and I ride in comfort looking at Outside Temperature to see how hot it is.

This year, it was hotter and drier than usual, and it is only July!

Don Pedro Reservoir is way down (although as a useless-reservoir-and-the-boating-it-encourages critic, that doesn’t dismay me).

We drove by the cremains of last year’s Rim Fire and it was not as desolate as Smokey the Bear would have us think it would be. Now there is dry grass between the trees, proof of the new grass and new life in the fire-caused clearings.

Like anybody and everybody else, I cringe when I read or hear about wildfires or forest fires and I live in an wild-place/civilization interface so I certainly don’t want this area to go up in flames, all that aside, however, the ecosystem needs these fires. It is our ecosystem too – now – even if we were once interlopers, and it has evolved with these fires. In their wake, there is always new life.

The weather forecast had been for thunderstorms during the day and a 50% chance of heavy showers that night so Richard and I decided to camp out in a motel, in Lee Vining. That complicated our trip because we had to check in before 4:00 PM which meant we would have to drive through Tuolumne Meadows on the way to Lee Vining and, then, drive back into Yosemite. We decided, instead to spend a couple of hours wandering around Lee Vining River Valley, off of the Saddlebag Lake Road.

We were walking at about 9,600 feet and it was late spring with wildflowers blooming (including wild onions).

We ended the day by dropping back down to Mono Lake where we watched the sunset from the Dining Terrace of the Whoa Nellie Deli.

The next morning, as we were driving up Tioga Pass, Richard suggested that we go to the Saddlebag Lake area rather than Tuolumne. He had never been there – I can understand why, it is not a place the cognoscenti go which is why I feel slightly guilty – but, I think, he was a little surprised by the highness of our walk the day before. So we drove up, parked our car, walked a hundred and fifty feet, and got on a boat. It was spring in the High Sierras on the other side of the lake.

About 145 to 66 million years ago, the Farallon Plate dove under the North American Plate, heating and pushing magma up under an eastern California that wasn’t there yet. That magma lifted, twisted, and metamorphosed the rock – a combination of volcanic flows, volcanic ash, and sedimentary rock, called Country Rock because it was there before the magma- that it pushed through. About twenty million years ago, this whole area started lifting again and, as it lifted, it started wearing down by being exposed to weather, a process that is still going on. The core of that lifting mass is the Sierra Nevada, forming what John Muir called the The Range of Light. About 2.5 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago, glaciers carved huge valleys into the bright granite. About a week ago, we got off the boat at Saddlebag, on a Saturday morning. We were standing on Country Rock: the rock that was here before the Sierras.

We are standing next to Saddlebag Lake, in a garden of yellow flowers – Mimulus guttatus, I think – in chips of shales, but just to the east of it is the contact zone where the twisted, distorted, Country Rock hits the Sierra granite and, beyond that, the bright, white Sierra Nevada massif itself.

What I most like about this area is that it seems like a collection of Zen Gardens. We are at 10,000 + feet, one of the harshest environments on earth and everything is so delicate, so refined, elegant.

We are walking up into a cirque below Mt. Conness and, as we get higher, storm clouds are coalescing into thunderheads. High on the mountain, to our left and way above us is the last vestiges of the Conness Glacier, mostly covered in scree. For the first time in all the years that I have been coming here, I realize – with mixed emotions - I will probably outlive it.
It starts to rain and the glacial polish on the wet granite shines in the fading light as we turn around and head back to the boat landing.

An hour or so later, driving through Yosemite on 120, it starts to rain and Richard says the thermometer reads 56°. About and hour and a half after that, going through the valley, it says 90°. We are almost home, in time for me to watch qualifying for the German grand Prix.

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Categories : Sierras

Friday, July 25th, 2014

The Jason Stein and Rachel Sterry wedding

By Steve Stern · Comments (1)

Our species has probably been getting married since we crawled down from the trees and started walking upright into the savanna. Certainly we have evolved into a species in which partnership to have and raise children is a huge benefit and that must have been formalised and codified early in our collective history. Weddings used to be political – political in the smallest sense, at least - and were usually arranged by the families. In many parts of the world, weddings still are arranged and love is a byproduct at best, but not here, not now. Here, now, couples tries to mold those old traditions into new forms that better fit today’s realities, the couples love, and their spirit. Jason and Rachel succeeded in doing that admirably.

To back up, the whole purpose of going to Oregon was to go to the wedding of my nephew, Jason Stein to Rachel Sterry. Jason and his new wife live in Oregon City and the wedding was in Milo McIver State Park, about 45 minutes out of Portland. As we drove out, having no real idea of where we were going, I kept thinking This is crazy, this is really in the boondocks, then Oh yeah? It is no where near as crazy as making everybody go to Death Valley for our wedding!

When we got there, it didn’t seem crazy at all, the park was beautiful and the wedding itself was in an outdoor cathedral.

The wedding was lovely and touching as most weddings are, but what most struck me was how well matched Rachel and Jason feel and how much their wedding reflected that. In their vows, they spoke of being in love with each others bodies, minds, and souls and, watching them beaming at each other, that seemed so true.

Even though weddings no longer cement a political alliance between families, they are still one of the few events that will bring a dispersed family together – in this case as far away as Australia – and it was fun to see people I hadn’t seen since the last wedding. That was a good part of the enjoyment for me (and being with my wife, Michele, and having my daughter, Samantha, son-in-law Gabe, and my grandkids, Charlotte and Auggie, there).

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Categories : Family

Wall Springs oasis and the Fleming Collection

The tragedy of Israel

An old-timey museum in the Willamette Valley

A pitch for walking in the Saddlebag Lake area

The Jason Stein and Rachel Sterry wedding

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