Last Saturday, Michele and I went to the Inaugural Industrial Arts Horsepower Car Show and Street Fair in the old – for lack of a better word – industrial part of San Carlos. The alleged car show wasn’t much, a large number of Camaros and Mustangs, a heavy spattering of crome covered 50s and 60s cars that reflect Detroit at its most flamboyant, and several hotrods, one similar to the five-window deuce I had when I was 16 or 17.  The biggest surprise, however, was the change in this part of town. It seemed so Silicon Valley and au courant, I remembered it as a flyover area – so to speak – that was a combination of light manufacturing – actually, it was more like light fabrication – commercial sales places that sold stuff like piping or forklifts, and construction companies like plumbers. Under that memory is a deeper memory, of the legendary Lenkurk Electric Company and Lennart Erickson. The details, and probably the truth, has been sort of lost in my mythic past but Lenkurk was the biggest, flashest, company around, they made electrical stuff for the government, some of it secret and Lennart Erickson was an eccentric genius who even had a round bed with a fur blanket. I read now that Lenkurt Electric Company was a microwave and telecommunications company, it was started by both Lennart Erickson and Kurt Appert and it had about 4,000 employees.

We had a beer from a brewery, Devil’s Canyon Brewing Company, that is now in a building that once housed Varian Associates and, later Tesla Motors, it is now set up for parties. After wandering around for a couple of hours, we ended the day wine tasting at The Russian Ridge Winery, one of the eight local wineries.

Yesterday’s twilight brought weather that was very strange; maybe not for lots of places, but for our little corner of the world. It was dry and hot most of the day, then – in the early evening – it clouded up and started to rain with big fat rain drops like it sometimes does in the Sierras after a hot day. With the rain, came thunder without lightning, although, intellectually, we knew there must be lightning somewhere and the sunlight was hiding what was going on just over the ridge. That evening, when we went out for dinner, the rain had stopped, the temperature dropped 30 degrees, and there was lightning everywhere. On the way home, we could see lightning sweeping across the bay and over the Fremont Hills. It was also warmer again which lead us to hypothecate that the temperature drop was from evaporation as everything was dry again.   

This morning we got several ALERTS on our phone – cell phones, not on the vestigial land line, we noticed – that there was a fire in nearby Bear Gulch and several roads were closed. Cal Fire started bringing in equipment but it was sitting in a meadow close to our house but far from the fire. Driving to Marin, the radio said that ten acres were burning, on the way back, they said fifty acres and a couple of helicopters had joined the Cal Fire trucks. Now, in the evening, the skies are clear, the temperature has dropped from a high of 90 to 75 and the helicopters are still flying.