Category Archives: Around home

The Earth is alive

March 26, 2016Around home, EvolutionSteve Stern

San Andreas — Road cut on Highway 25 closed by the winter rain.

I feel like I have been cooped up all winter, watching it rain, watching the Warriors on a record-setting roll, and giving in to the allure of idleness. To put a purpose to getting out, I took the first of – hopefully – several drives along the San Andreas Fault between home and the Carrizo Plain. It is a part of California that I don’t know.

But it wasn’t until I started driving down Highway 25 that I realized how cooped up I had been. I rolled – buttoned? – the windows down, slowed the truck, and soaked in the spring day. The grass was bright green, just starting to go to seed in some areas, and the oaks were flaunting their new growth, a green that is so green, so bright, that it seems artificial.

Running along the fault, it was pretty hard to not think about earthquakes and how they affect the people who live here. Maybe a confession is due, I like earthquakes. I know that earthquakes kill people – lots of people all over the world, although not so many in Northern California and other parts of the developed world – and cause damage, but nobody I know has ever been hurt and the damage around here has been minimal. I like earthquakes because they remind me that the Earth is Alive.

By Alive, I mean Alive, as in living, not just the opposite of inert. When I drove back home, I detoured to the western gate of Pinnacles National Park just to marvel at what seems to be an incongruity but is really an artifact of the Aliveness.

Pinnacles is a strange little National Park. First, it is small and pretty inconsequential with only about 200,000 visitors a year – for comparison, the Grand Canyon has almost 5,000,000 visitor a year – and yet it was made a National Monument about eight years earlier than the Grand Canyon. Even this week, in what the Ranger said was a busy week because of Spring Break, the entry gate was close and we were told to pay, on the honor system, by dropping our money into a collection kiosk.

The Park is here because the rocks are very strange and, I am guessing, when it was first made a National Monument, nobody knew why. Now we know that the rocks were formed by a volcano on the San Andreas fault about 23 million years ago – that is about 20 million years before Lucy – a little north of Los Angeles. Because the volcano was directly over the fault, the western part of the volcano was on the Pacific Plate and the eastern part was on the North American Plate, and because the fault was and still is moving, the western part of the volcano was dragged about 200 miles northwest over the ensuing 23 million years. Now one large chunk of that volcano is in Northern California and the remainder is still in Southern California. Although I don’t think anybody knew it at the time, Pinnacles is a perfect San Andreas Fault demonstration.

Heading north, back to civilization and home in the fading light, the Wildness turned into a manufactured landscape. The Earth is our home and we are trying to bend it to our will, but here, along the San Andreas fault, it is obvious that is impossible. The earth is Alive and still bats last. This spring afternoon, it is starting to bat flowers.

Watching Grandson Auggie and thinking about the Warriors

March 2, 2016Around home, Local eventsSteve Stern

Basketball 1 (1 of 1) — A bounce pass to Grandson Auggie who is in the open with an open lane to the basket.

“Thanks for making basketball fun again.”a grim immigration agent at the Canada-US Border when Steph Curry went through after playing in Toronto, as reported in a slightly fawning, but stellar, article in this week’s Sports Illustrated.

A couple of weeks ago, we went to Grandson Aggie’s basketball game (well, one of his games). I’ve read that several people have complained that the Warriors are teaching young players bad habits, I don’t think so. To me it seems like Auggie and his friends are running up and down the court, passing back and forth, shooting when they are close to the basket – and the basket is much further away when you are under four feet tall – and having fun. Being kids, they probably didn’t have to learn to have fun by watching basketball on TV, but they might have, because if the Warriors exude anything, it is Having Fun.

I know exactly how that immigration fella, in the quote at the top, felt. The Warriors are on a terrific roll and almost everybody around here is watching; Michele and I sure are. Watching the Warriors is engrossing, nail-biting at times, almost always wildly satisfying, and great fun. Basketball is probably the most athletic mainstream sport anyway, and it can be as graceful as ballet, but it is also a sport that rewards sharing. It turns out that it is fun to watch people having fun sharing.

Basketball 2 (1 of 1) — Grandson Auggie getting ready to shoot.

The Warriors are taking the fun and the sharing to a new place. As the article in Sports Illustrated points out, they are playing with Joy, just the Joy of playing (and winning). There was a time when I looked down on jocks but I am pretty much over that now. I probably started getting over it watching a pitcher in a tight game, in front of a huge crowd, let go of everything but the task at hand. That ability to concentrate, to stay present, astounds me. Over and over again. With the Warriors, and Steph Curry in particular, it is the ability to be present in Chaos.

Basketball 3 (1 of 1) — and Grandson Auggie shoots for two.

To be present in Chaos and pass the ball to somebody with a better chance at a basket even if that person is behind you, is a lesson that the Warriors teach every game. That not bogarting the ball, that not shooting yourself if somebody has a better shot, is a great lesson to be teaching young players. Having fun is an even better lesson, even if it is not needed.

(The YouTube below is only three minutes, check it out to see what fun, exuberant fun!, look like. BTW, Curry is number 30.)

Middle California, mostly empty

November 7, 2015Around home, CaliforniaSteve Stern

Last weekend – well, weekendish – we drove south through the Salinas Valley to Paso Robles (hereinafter called Paso to sound like a local). Paso’s recorded history goes back to 1795 when it was considered California’s oldest watering place, because of its mudbaths and hot springs, according to Wikipedia. Two years later, in 1797, the first vineyards were started in the area and, by the late 1800s, the area was already known for its Zinfandels. Now there are about 200 wineries in the area and the historic city core is booming.

It was our 22nd anniversary and for our anniversary dinner, we ate at Artisan in the old downtown area. The price was great and the dinner was good and we would have considered it much better if we were from anywhere other than the Bay Area and hadn’t just had a stellar dinner the Friday before. As an aside, there are not many downsides to living in the Bay Area – not counting cost, especially housing – but one of them is being spoiled rotten by the local dining. I remember going to New York, on a food and architecture pilgrimage, about the end of the 70s and being very disappointed. After eating at Chez Panisse, Poulet, and getting food to go from the Cheese Board Collective, old timey restaurants – like New York’s famous Lutece or the Kennedy favorite, La Grenouille – just seemed so old fashioned. End aside. This time, the disappointment – and disappointment is way too strong a word, the dinner was good, excellent really – was the result of just having had a pick up dinner at Mau in Oakland and Mau just seemed so much newer as in more au courant.

The next day, after a super breakfast at Kitchenette, we toured several wineries. In the rain! To me, the Paso wine country feels a little like Napa forty years ago. The 200, or so, wineries are not enough to turn the landscape into a wall to wall monoculture like Napa and most of the area is still open so driving around was more fun for me.As the day went on, I increasingly realized that I don’t particularly like wine tasting. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against drinking wine, it’s just spending the whole day tasting with the expectation that we wouldn’t be there unless we were going to buy some of their wine that I don’t like. What I do enjoy is looking at the buildings and driving around the countryside , however. We ended the day with dinner at The Hatch where Michele had Chicken and Waffles and I had Ramen – with okra, collard greens, maitake, bacon, rotisserie chicken, and a pickled egg according to the menu – made with great local ingredients. As another aside, I had ordered the ramen for the ingredients, but the noodles were gummy and I realized, once again!, that folk food – for lack of a better descriptor, food like coq-au-vin or beef bourguignon or ramen – is not based on great ingredients but great technique to cover up problem ingredients. End aside.

We spent our last day, wandering around town and shopping like any red-blooded ‘merican – I got a new, Sterling Silver, loop earing, for only $2.68 – and then driving home the long way. We drove east on The 46 – when in Rome, blah, blah, when in Southernish California, I am agreeing to use the descriptor The in front of highway numbers – and then north on county roads, roughly following the San Andreas Fault. Whenever I drive around the Bay Area at anytime near Rush Hour I can easily slip into a California’s-too-crowded annoyance but out here, it’s almost empty. It could easily be everybody’s idea of Nebraska. When we turned north, towards Parkfield – famous for having a 6.0 earthquake about every twenty years – we started running with the grain. The valleys are wide and almost flat, bookended by low rounded hills, with nothing but the occasional ranch. As we cross the bridge into Parkfield, we are greeted with a welcome back to the North American Plate. Parkfield itself is a tiny road stop with a population of 18, most of them interested in earthquakes, I would guess.

To be continued.

The Carrizo Plain on the way to Fresno to pick up the V dub

October 8, 2015Around home, California, PhotographySteve Stern

When we left Fresno last Thursday, the Volkswagen still wasn’t repaired. Or, more accurately, they repaired the water pump only to find out that the radiator had started to leak and they would need until Monday to fix it. Since we had an Enterprise rental car – with unlimited mileage – for a week and Los Angeles was only about 425 miles out of the way, I decided to run down to Los Angeles to see the Frank Gehry show at the L A County Museum. To keep costs down, I was going to camp at the Carrizo Plain north of Los Angeles and go into town in the morning. Courtney Gonzalez volunteered to come along for company if we could take the time to visit her niece.

Driving south on 101 and the 58, California looked dry and the Golden Hills were a parched dun. As we got close to where we were going to camp – camp is way too grandiose, all we really planned on doing was throwing our bags down on a flat spot with a view – we saw a tarantula crossing the road, then another one, then several more, then lots more. It was a tarantula migration! and we were in the middle of it. Courtney said, We don’t have a tent and I don’t want to sleep out with tarantulas crawling over me in the dark. I didn’t either but I was still in denial, thinking we would soon enter a tarantula free zone in which we could sleep without worries. We didn’t. As an aside, I haven’t seen a tarantula, in the wild, since the fall of 1981 when I was moving into my Portola Valley home. That fall, I saw three; two near my home and one on a back road to Mt. Hamilton. In the thirty four tarantula-free years since, I would sometimes wonder at the oddness of that year of seeing tarantulas crossing the road and how it must have been a once in a lifetime event. Now Courtney and I were seeing hundreds and it turns out that this is an annual event. It is not a migration but late September to early October – in dry grassland areas – the males go hunting for girlfriends. Tarantulas live from six to twelve years, mate once near the end of their life and – presumably – die happy (sometimes, but not usually, the girlfriend will kill the male after mating). End aside.

Discretion being the better part of valor, we opted out of spending the night on the Carrizo Plain. Instead we wandered around for a while and then drove back to Civilization in the fading light. Fortunately, the late afternoon light was golden and I did get lots of pictures.

Finding the elusive Pagani in a world of excess at the Monterey Car Week

August 27, 2015Around home, CarsSteve Stern

Standing on a platform, overlooking Carmel beach and the Pacific Ocean, at about 6 o’clock a week ago last Wednesday, I felt like the proud father of a kid that had just sung a solo at her third grade graduation. The temperature was in the low eighties and there was not a breath of air with the Pacific as placid as a millpond. Standing there, listening to the babble of voices and laughter from all over the world – mostly Chinese and French, it seemed – I felt, totally irrationally, that California was putting on a great show just for the out-of-town visitors and I was, somehow, partially responsible.

Later, driving away from the beach on Ocean Avenue, with the top down on Michele’s car, all the better to feel the soft air and see the supercars parked around town, like Toyotas at Costco, we both yelled, There’s a Pagani. It was our first sighting in the wild. We circled the block, found a place to park and walked back. Looking at it parked in a standard parking place, the Pagani looks small. It is only a little longer than the Miata in front of it and not any taller. Somehow however, it has a presence that is way out of proportion to its actual size; it is about as unobtrusive as Sofia Vergara at that third grader’s pool party.

I do read that the Huayra is easy and pleasant to drive which is not always a feature of a hypercar. Of course, I will never find out, and therein lies the paradox – to misquote the Bard – cars are meant to be driven and while the overwhelming majority of us are only able to ogle, how they drive – how fast they are – is part of their allure. The Pagani has plenty of allure with a six liter, twin-Turbo, AMG V-12 Mercedes engine that puts out 730 horsepower giving it a 0 to 60 time of about 3.2 seconds and a top speed of about 230 mph.

As an aside, Horacio Pagani made his fortune making carbon fiber and the Pagani Huayra is a legacy of that. Carbon fiber is cloth woven from threads – thinner than a human hair – made from carbon atoms bonded together to form a long chain. These are then woven into a very thin cloth. According to howstufworks.com, it’s five times as strong as steel, two times as stiff, yet weighs about two-thirds less. What they don’t say is that it is way, way, more expensive. The Pagani Huayra’s basic body is made from four layers of carbon fiber, each about one millimeter thick. Because the carbon fiber has a weave and it takes more to match the seams – like making the pocket weave match on a nice shirt – in the least expensive versions of the car, the carbon fiber covered by paint. End aside.

I want to say that, in the Pagani’s case, the exquisite details are what give it the most kick, but that really isn’t the case. Everything just adds to its show stopping presence and I think that is because Pagani is the creation of one person. Most cars, most for-sale designed things, are compromises with what people supposedly want. When a designed object gets too far from the mainstream, it risks being ostracized. No matter how good it is (think Raymond Loewy’s Studebakers which, looking back, are much better looking than anyone gave them credit for). The result is that most car designs are watered down, but not the Pagani. Often, I will rave over a car and Michele will be lukewarm saying Yeah, it’s OK but it is too masculine for me. That is not the case with the Pagani, it is soft and luscious and very feminine. Even the mirrors are supposed to evoke a woman’s eyes (although who besides Sophia Loren, I have no idea). Still, for me, the best part is the heavily chromed steampunk interior which contrasts with the chromeless exterior. Of course Ferrari wants to remain the premier Italian car so, to take on Pagani, they have come out with the 1.5 million dollar Ferrari LaFerrari. It is drop dead gorgeous, in a very studied way, and the contrast to Pagani is striking. Michele described it as The Pagani is a young rich man’s car and the LaFerrai is an old rich man’s car. Of course, the Huayra and the LaFerrari were not the only treats. Everywhere we turned, there were memorable cars. This year, there were lots of Cunninghams – an American supercar from the 50’s – a wonderful 1931 Alfa Grand Sport with a body by Touring, and one of my favorites, a Cadillac built for Rita Hayworth with a body by Ghia. I can hardly wait for next year.