Category Archives: Around home

Happy 50th, Portola Valley

September 24, 2014Americana, Around homeSteve Stern

Portola Valley celebrated its 50th Anniversary last weekend. That’s 50 years as an incorporated Town – in California, there is no legal difference between a Town and a City but Towns do seem to be smaller and often use the County Sheriff for their Police – not 50 years of being inhabited. The area had been inhabited by the Ohlones for only – probably and approximately – 600 years although there have been signs of human habitation around the Bay for about 4,000 years. What ever that exact timeline, by the time California became a State on September 9, 1850 – although we Californians didn’t find out about that for 38 days because news had to come by ship, around Cape Horn – people were already cutting down the Redwoods for San Francisco housing. By the turn of the Century, most of the Redwoods were gone and Portola Valley became a farming area mixed with a few big estates.

As an aside, one of the major estates was owned by the inventor of San Francisco’s cable cars, Andrew Hallidie. He built an aerial tramway, now gone, that went from Portola Road up about a thousand feet to Skyline. He also built the best swimming pool I have ever seen, it is probably about five or six acres and has a small steam train that goes around it. About twenty years ago, or so, Michele and I were walking through some second-growth Redwoods, on an abandoned logging road, when we chanced upon the pool in an open area. It was full of water and clean but looked abandoned. The next Fourth Of July, on a similar walk, we decided to go by the pool only to find it all decked out for the Fourth, complete with small sailboats and lots of bunting. We felt like trespassers and started to back out when we were spotted, told to stay on the roads, and then ignored. End aside.

By the 60s, the residents voted to incorporate in order to have local control over development. The goals were to preserve the beauty of the land through low-density housing and to limit services to those necessary for local residents. They thought they would keep the government small and cheap by having lots of volunteers and Portola Valley still has that tradition and, apparently, enough money has been saved to host a free dinner for the residents of the Town.

Michele wanted to go and I tagged along. When I first moved into Portola Valley, it was a different place. That was 1981 and the whole world was a different place. It would be two more years before the Macintosh would be introduced, AOL was still called Control Video Corporation, and Silicon Valley was an inside joke rather than one of the richest places in the world. Portola Valley was already a low density suburb but the houses – trending towards Sunset Magazine Ranch-house – were modest by today’s standards. I was far from being the only forty something in town but we were among the youngest citizens. Most of our neighbors were older and, as they got even older and moved out, they have been replaced by young families from Silicon Valley with kids.

I knew that intellectually, still it was a surprise to go to a public gathering and see so many young kids.

The Birthday Party was also full of very nice adults, but Portola Valley has always had nice adults. .

Referring to the San Andreas Fault – which is about a hundred feet from the hay bales above – Michele said something along the lines of These are the people who want to live on the edge. It’s true that they are more on the edge than the people who are living in Menlo Park or Palo Alto, but it is a deceptive edge, nobody is growing their own veggies and we are 3.5 miles from the freeway. What is different is that the center of the world has change from where ever it was to Silicon Valley and this edge is now the edge of one of the most vital places on earth and one of the richest.

The new, very nice, adults are very smart, very rich, and very good looking – even their dogs are good looking – with above average children. They also are people who want their own way. The Town has a Yahoo! Group – PVForum – and an amazingly big part of it is about airplane noise from the planes landing at SFO 30 miles away, or somebody driving too fast in their BMW.

Still, this is one of the world’s sweet spots. Happy Fiftieth, Portola Valley.

Lake Tahoe and The Galen Rowell Scale

August 24, 2014Around home, SierrasSteve Stern

Michele and I went to her Squaw Valley Cabin over a long weekend. It was great to get into the mountains and it brought back all sorts of childhood memories for her. Playing in the creek behind the cabin, hiking up to Shirley Lake, swimming in Lake Tahoe. Listening to her talk about her adventures reminded me about an article in – I believe – Outdoor Photographer in the February 1991 issue. It was January 1991 and, if all had gone as planned, I wouldn’t have been reading that issue.

Michael McDonald and I had booked a trip to go to the Hoggar Mountains in Southern Algeria on the same date Bush the Elder scheduled the start of the First Gulf War. I was starting to get cold feet about going into a Muslim country just when we were starting to bomb another Muslim country, but Michael kept saying that the war was all a bluff and there wouldn’t be a problem. Then, the night before our trip started, Pan Am cancelled our flight to Algiers. We now had almost three weeks off from work with no place to go. However, in a couple of days, we would have free tickets to almost anywhere else. As an aside, I had to get a Visa in my passport to go to Algeria and I had been to Morocco so I had an entry stamp and an exit stamp but they looked the same if you couldn’t read Arabic. After 9-11, this became a constant problem especially trying to get through Heathrow. End aside.

The day after our trip didn’t start, I saw the article by Galen Rowell. It proposed a scale to measure how much is still left of what you are going to see, at the place you are going to see; in other words, how uncontaminated is the place. As I remember, Rowell used Waikiki and The Galapagos as the one to ten extreme examples. Galen Rowell was – sadly, he was killed in an airplane accident while flying into Bishop in August of 2002 – a nature and landscape photographer and he was traveling to mostly natural places to see nature and indigenous people. He rated Kathmandu a six on the scale because, among other things, it had become so popular that it even had a Howard Johnson. Guatemala rated an eight.

For me Tahoe City rated about a two, but up a dirt road out of Tahoe City is a trail that leads to a lake that rates about an eight.

Driving through the empty backcountry above Tahoe and waiting in a car line, trying to get through Tahoe City, I realized that there was a huge flaw in the Galen Rowell system. Unlike, Rowell, most people come to Tahoe to see what is there now, shopping and dining with the natural beauty as a backdrop. That, I think is the draw of Tahoe, and the end of the day, even with all the people and all the traffic, it is an incredibly beautiful place.

Fun in the fog

August 16, 2014Americana, Around home, Cars, Local eventsSteve Stern

Thursday, Malcolm Pearson and I went down to Laguna Seca to watch some old cars drive around in a fog heavy enough to be called drizzle. I can’t imagine doing anything more fun!

It was all part of the Cargasm that, according to Sports Car Digest, is now known as Monterey Classic Car Week, Pebble Beach Automotive Week, Concours Week, Holy Car Week or just Car Heaven. Car Heaven started out innocently enough, in 1950, when owners of what were then called Sports Cars, wanted a place to race those cars just like in Europe. The Sports Car Club of America put on several races, including the Del Monte Trophy which was run on part of the private Seventeen Mile Drive. The Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance was put on to compliment the nearby race. In 1956, Ernie McAfee was killed while racing a Ferrari in the feature race, making it obvious that racing through a forest on narrow roads was too dangerous, and the race was cancelled after 1956, but the Concours lived on, thriving.

In 1974, Steve Earle organized the Monterey Historic Automobile Races to show off his and his friend’s old sports and racing cars. In a sort of turnaround is fair play and, I suspect, hoping for synergy, they chose the same weekend as the Concours. They got synergy in spades, first an auto related Art Show and then a get together of Italian Cars; over the years, some car auctions were added, a get together for German Cars, another car show called Carmel-by-the-Sea Concours on the Avenue. Sometime in the last thirty or so years, The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering, a very high-end car show started and became so exclusive that the $450 tickets are controlled by lottery. Now there is something happening every day of the week. Usually something very expensive.

This is the kind of Automotive Event that every car company wants to be part of: it is where you can sign up for the Aston Martin experience – a week of luxury for you with your Aston Martin – for only $18,000 per person, where – on the same Thursday that Malcolm and I were at the racetrack – a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO sold for $38,115,000 at the Bonhams’ Monterey Auction, a place so important that Toyota repainted and reupholstered their FT1 concept car in order to tone it up for display.

Still, there are ways to mitigate the expense, the Concours on Sunday costs $300 a ticket but most of the cars take part in the Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance, which is on public streets, visible to anyone, and the Monterey Historic Automobile Races – now called the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion – has a sparsely attended practice day on Thursday that is cheaper than the usual Friday Practice. Malcolm and I chose Thursday and we got two bonuses.

The first was not a surprise, the Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance now takes a lap around the racetrack before heading out on the city streets, the second is that almost nobody goes to the Thursday Practice. Standing in the grandstands because the seats were too wet to sit on – and why don’t they call them grandseats? if you aren’t supposed to stand? – The Tour passed by in no discernible order.

It was like going back to the beginning of the Historics, when we could park close to the track, the stands were almost empty, and we could leisurely walk through the paddock talking to car owners and their mechanics. OK, the mechanic part is new, in the olden days, most cars were owned by people who did their own work, now it is a much bigger deal, even on Thursday. Unexpectedly – although, I guess it shouldn’t have been – the everyday street cars of some of the owners were absurdly spectacular. Absurd as a Ferrari, but not the kind of everyday Ferrari that anybody with a two or three million dollars yearly income could buy, no – this one had a special body by Zagato – or a McLaren P1 which is not to be confused with the standard, pedestrian, McLaren you or I might own, or two – count them, two! – 1955 Bentley S1 Continental, Mulliner Fastback Saloons.

As we wandered around, I mentioned to Malcolm that I was having a hard time coming up with a theme on which to blog about this. Malcolm said I don’t know, but don’t make it about the money. He is right, in this case, it really isn’t about the money. Michele and I are going to Squaw Valley for the weekend, but after that, a bit – maybe a bigger bit than some people might want – on several of the special race cars at the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion.

Michele’s Opening at Sweeties

August 3, 2014Around home, Art, Family, Local eventsSteve Stern

Michele is showing her pictures at Sweeties. They are beautiful but I am not sure what to call them, let me explain.

About a year ago – maybe a year and a half, maybe eight months ago – Michele got a Sunprint kit for Granddaughter Charlotte. If you know Michele well, you will know how hard it would be for her to not get a Sunprint Kit for herself. It just hit all her hot buttons. Anyway she did and she started playing with it right way (when I say playing, I mean playing in the deeper sense, as in playing the piano).

The process is simple: place something on a piece of bluish, sensitized, paper and put it in the sun, then develop it in water. What happens is the bluish paper fades in the sun leaving only the shadows blue. In the water, the shadows turn white and the exposed paper turns blue, reversing the exposed image.

It didn’t take long for Michele to get interested in the mid-reversal.

She first took the paper out of the water and tried scanning the dripping wet paper, trying to control the paper with paper towels and rags. The she tried photographing it with her iPad, and – finally – using a camera on a tripod. After about a year, the mid-process scans and photographs were hidden away in the computer and the finished – but not as interesting – Sunprints graced every available horizontal surface.

Then Michele started printing the mid-process images – eventually on Epson Hot Press Bright, 100% cotton fiber, acid-free, lignin-free, paper – and they were beautiful. Framed, with hand torn edges, they make a striking show.

Michele’s artist statement says, I am not big on change, even though as the iChing claims, change is the only thing we can be certain of, so it is in my nature to try to hold on to memories and bits of beauty. One of the things I love most is my garden, if you can call it that, since it is really just a tamed bit of woods in Portola Valley. I’ve noticed that every day the garden changes, just a little; something new has bloomed, something else has withered away.

Thinking we might soon be moving from our home, I started using sunprint paper as a way to record the flowers in my garden. As I did this I became fascinated with transitory images that emerged as the water hit the paper. It is a brief moment when dark and light comingle as they exchange places. These giclée prints freeze that moment during the processing of impermanent images of impermanent blossoms that grace our impermanent residence on this ever-changing planet.

Reading that statement and looking at my pictures of Michele’s opening at Sweeties, below, reminds me that we are both trying to do the same thing, freeze that moment.