Category Archives: Around home

A walk by the Bay

Don Edwards-2603A couple of days ago, I went for a walk in a reclaimed section of the San Francisco Bay shore. It is a very strange place, and I mean that in the best possible way. It is almost flat – because it is the very bottom of the alluvial fans coming out of the mountains around the Bay – and many of the remains, of what used to be there, are still there and they don’t fit any classical notion of beauty. Don Edwards-2586

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Historically, we have not valued the coastline of our Bay. Most of it has been ignored except for that used for some sort of nasty work. In this case, the nasty work was harvesting salt and using the marshes along the shore as a place to run heavy-duty electrical transmission lines. Five miles north is the port of Redwood City, built to ship the cut redwood needed for the Victorians of San Francisco. The cut redwood that had been hauled down from the hills of neighboring Woodside and my home town of Portola Valley.

As an aside and a comforting sign that Nature Always Bats Last, some of the children of those redwoods have grown high and dense enough to block out view of the Bay. End aside.

Five miles north of the Port of Redwood City are the housing tracks of Redwood Shores and then Foster City, with their thousands of houses facing away from the Bay in one last act of indifference. Now the salt harvesting area – what we used to call The Salt Flats, when I was a kid – are being returned to Nature, a job that is not as easy as it might, at first, sound. This section used to belong to Cargill Inc., and it was turned to The South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project which describes itself as the largest tidal wetland restoration project on the West Coast which when complete…will restore 15,100 acres of industrial salt ponds to a rich mosaic of tidal wetlands and other habitats.

I am proud to say that Senator Dianne Feinstein was a chief motivator and backer and now everybody is getting on board (including the State Coastal Conservancy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Santa Clara Valley Water District, Alameda County Flood Control and Water Conservation District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Resources Legacy Fund, and the East Bay Regional Park District). This area of ex-salt-flats is now called the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay Wildlife Refuge.

Don Edwards was a friend of my father’s and he was instrumental in getting me my first real Job. I had just turned sixteen and, in those days, a teenage boy – as I remember it – was expected to work during the summer. The problem was that most of the available work were pretend jobs that didn’t pay very much. The good paying jobs required joining a Union and that was not very easy for a privileged, white, teenager still in school. My dad knew Don Edwards through the Democratic Party and he – Edwards – was able to pull some strings to get me in the Laborer’s Union and additional strings to get me a job with Charles Harney Construction which was building the section of Bayshore Highway between Marsh Road in Menlo Park to University in Palo Alto (Highway 101 was El Camino then and Bayshore was a bypass).

Like a typical privileged teenager – OK, maybe not typical but typical for me and my type – I was both eager to accept the gains of that privilege and felt slightly guilty, which I probably expressed with disgruntlement, that I hadn’t earned the job and was taking it away from somebody who really needed it, which was why the Union made it difficult in the first place. But the money was great  and the guilt was assuaged by my being given every shit job for the first month. The second month, I moved up to the position of SLOW Sign Holder and would have had a great view of the Bay if I had cared.

Like the rest of California, that came later, and with that public care, the birds are starting to come back. The beauty – and some strangeness – was always there, I suspect, we just didn’t see it.
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Walking Russian Ridge, thinking about religion and violence

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Charlie Hebdo being equally nasty to Islam and Judaism

I woke up yesterday morning to the headlines of the attack on the people behind Charlie Herbo and I have been thinking about it ever since. It seems incomprehensible to me, senseless.

It seems to me that even these deranged killers must know that what they are doing will only hurt the Muslim community in France. Maybe that was the point, as I remember, General Field Marshal Cinque of the Symbionese  Army thought their actions would get the police to over react and, thereby, getting the general community to join their side. Maybe these  deranged killers were part of a recruitment drive as Juan Cole supposes. Maybe it is just senseless violence fueled by helplessness and anger. What ever the reason, I don’t see it improving the plight of Muslims in France.

Selma is coming out this week and, as I walk along Russian Ridge watching the sunset over the pacific Pacific, I think of how powerful non-violence is.

Looking down into the mirk on a No Burn Day
Looking east, down into the mirk over the Bay, on a No Burn Day

 

January sun setting over a pacific Pacific
Looking West at the January sun setting over a pacific Pacific
The end of a warm, calm, day
The end of a warm, calm, day

 

 

 

Some of our favorite things at the year’s first Farmer’s Market

I have a disclaimer here, for me a particular pleasure of where I live is its Asianness, so, in my photography of public areas in Greater-Silicon Valley, I may photograph a higher percentage of Asians than their percentage of the actual population. End disclaimer.
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One of my favorite pleasures in life is the San Mateo Farmer’s Market; it is on my short list of hypothetical places I would bring a hypothetical visitor, to this part of the world, if I were a hypothetical tour guide. Any Farmer’s Market is fun, but especially the San Mateo Farmer’s Market, where I know the Egg Lady and can get pasture raised chicken eggs – the chicken are pasture raised, not the eggs, they aren’t raised at all – and some nice Pu’er tea. Michele can get a hunk of bacon to flavor some beans and a steak for tonight.

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Farmer's Market-2444And we can both wander for an hour buying vegetables.

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Portola Valley Jan 3 '15-1378Or pick-up the makings for miso soup.
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