Category Archives: California

Driving Up & Down 395 Looking For Fall Color and Thinking About Elon Musk

Americana, Around home, California, Photography, Sierras

Generally, if draining is worth doing at all, it is worth overdoing...civil engineer George E. Waring Jr., speaking for the drainage design of New York’s Central Park, in 1867.

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. My favorite homily, although Lazarus Long in Robert A. Heinlein’s Enough Time For Love (1973) apparently also said it.

Last week, we drove to Olympic Valley – formerly known as Squaw Valley – to spend some time with Rick Paine and Lynnaea Lombard, who were passing by on their way to a family meeting. In a way, we were passing by, too, on our way to find some fall color in Bishop Creek Canyon, west of Bishop, California. We were in our electric Kona, which, while not exactly a problem, does take some planning to drive around rural California (exactly is the operative word here).

Our first stop was a Tesla charger near Roseville that’s almost next door to a Japanese restaurant. I thought about Elon Musk for the first time. Well, NOT the first time ever, but the first time on this trip. We had a Japanese meal while we topped up on electrons just before we started the uphill grind to Donner Pass at 7,056 feet. It worked perfectly.

We had a delightful but all-too-short 24 hours with Rick and Lynneae, and then they were on their way. We had charged the Kona overnight, so soon after, we drove around Lake Tahoe, on the west side, past Emerald Bay, through the border city strangely named South Lake Tahoe, over Kingsberry Grade, and finally dropped 3,000 feet into a different world on Highway 395 in Nevada.

We drove down the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada –Snowy Mountain Range in Spanish – crossing the border back into California at Topaz Lake as the shadows cast by the Sierras turned into twilight.

I want to make an aside here. The above photo was made by Michele, as was the photo above it and the photo above that. On the driving-to-get-somewhere part of the trip, at least, the great majority of the photos were taken by Michele while I drove. End aside.

While we had a very late lunch at the Whoe Nelli Delli, we topped up the Kona at a Rivian charging station, and I thought about Elon Musk again. Not that I like Elon Musk; he seems very juvenile and insensitive at best. And I want to add, I really don’t know much about Musk except for the chainsaw stunt or whatever it was – political speech? demonstration? childish asshole stunt? or just plain whatever? – in the White House with President Trump. Oh, and that he has a lot of kids, 14, I think – by four different birth mothers. He seems more childish and wacky than interesting, but he is worth a trillion dollars. A TRILLION DOLLARS, so he must be doing something right (assuming he does want to make lots of money).

A trillion dollars is an unfathomable amount of money, though, in the middle of the 19th century, the entire Rothschild family – in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Naples – were probably richer in total. Still, Musk is richer than any single person: ever. Sure, Elon Musk is exceedingly smart – he taught himself computer programming at an early age and sold the code for a basic video game, Blastar, when he was just twelve years old – and has often been at the right place at the right time, but I think his not-so-secret ingredient for financial success is that he is fully committed to whatever he is involved in.

Musk is a “put all your eggs in one basket” kind of guy; I’d even say, an “anything worth doing is worth overdoing” kind of guy. His 14 kids are an excellent example, so is Tesla. Every automaker makes electric cars, but most do it sort of begrudgingly. Tesla not only makes electric cars, but Tesla also makes high-speed chargers to make electric cars more convenient, and now they are starting to build diners nearby so people can eat or grab a cup of coffee while their car charges. They are committed. I’m pretty sure we could not drive across the country without using Tesla chargers.

We had a late lunch at the Whoe Nelli Deli, owned by the same kind of “anything worth doing is worth overdoing” kind of guys. The Whoe Nelli Deli is located in a Mobil gas station on Tioga Pass Road just off Highway 395 and just outside the small town of Lee Vining. To quote the New York Times, our editors were relieved to find the Whoa Nellie Deli, a shockingly gourmet oasis located at the local Tioga Gas Mart, and The Los Angeles Times described chef Matt Toomey as a manic figure in a white chef’s jacket and a baseball cap whose charisma and sense of humor are reflected in his cooking….To have one of the better meals of your life in a gas station is bizarre. It leaves you staring at your plate for a moment or two in disbelief. I know that feeling; I just had it at our lunch. I ordered the steak salad – again, because it’s so good – and just stared at the plate, thinking this is the most perfectly cooked steak I’ve ever had except, maybe, two or three restaurants in Japan and one in Paris.

After lunch, we drove to Bishop in the dark, had a late dinner, went to sleep early, and woke up to a view of a small portion of the Sierra Nevada’s eastern wall.

After an early cup of coffee and egg-thingy at Starbucks, we drove up Bishop Creek Canyon to see the fall color. Bishop Creek Canyon starts west of Bishop at about 4,150 feet and climbs up an additional 5,000 feet. Near the top are three lakes, North, South, and Sabrina, all with lots of Aspens in color. We hope.

The last time I was here was in October of 2018, and I was the only person at North Lake except for a Chinese women’s photography class. This year, eight years later, North Lake we had to follow a honey wagon on its way to servicing the new portable outhouses.

Years ago, probably about 15 years ago, I remember meeting Michele and Karen Amy for lunch in Nashua, New Hampshire. We walked around, stunned by the fall colors, especially in the lovely – can I use that word? – old cemetery where the bright yellow leaves were almost ankle-deep. The Eastern Sierras are not like that. The Eastern Sierras are less color and more mountains. (So, be forewarned, Karen.)

I think North Lake is the most photogenic lake in the entire Sierra Nevada that anybody can drive to in a regular car. In this case, there were too many regular cars already parked along the narrow dirt road for us to find a place to park close to the lake. The lake was packed, but from what we could see, as beautiful as it was in 2018.

I blame the internet for the crowds; I blame YouTube specifically; and I have very mixed emotions about it. Michele and I have pitched the Eastern Sierras for years with very few converts. I think YouTube, with dozens of people, often with kids, pitching the magic of the Eastern Sierras in fall, probably has a low conversion rate as well, but they have an almost infinite audience. More than 15 million people within easy driving range. It is the democratization of information in a way we have never experienced before.

Out of all these people, some, probably not very many, maybe a lot, I have no idea, will have their soul touched like I did in 1956. They will look at North Lake, even in a crowd, and their life will change. That’s great, but last week, they were just blocking the road. I have very mixed emotions.

North Lake in 2018.

After crowded North Lake, Lake Sabrina, South Lake, and the surrounding area seemed pretty empty, the kind of empty where you stop and chat when you meet someone. Most of the people we chatted with were locals, and most of them were interesting and charming, and most of them probably voted for Trump. But we didn’t talk politics; we talked about how stunning the whole area is, and even more so in fall colors.

Carl Linnaeus & The Ubiquitous Asparagi

Americana, California, Joshua Tree Nat. Park

I want to start with a story about buying a plant, a Dracenia, in, probably, February 1977. I remember it was about six months after Sam Berland and I had started bas Homes, and it was shortly after I got my first paycheck after six months of financial fasting. I wanted to buy something, almost anything, to break the fast. We were at a plant show at the Cow Palace, and a guy was selling really nice houseplants, including a large Dracena for something like fifty bucks (a lot of money for a plant in those days).

As an aside, I was in the South Bay Cactus and Succulent Society at the time, and referring to a plant without its proper Latin name was considered déclassé. Looking at a cylindrical cactus with a pattern of spines on the tubercles, one should say, “Nice Mammillaria” or “Nice Mammillaria rhodantha,” or “Is that a Mammillaria rhodantha?” not “Nice pinchusin cactus.” End aside.

The problem was that this plant’s tag had only one name, “Dracaena”, which is the Genus of the plant, and I wanted to know what species of Dracaena I was buying. I asked the guy what species of Dracaena the plant was, and he laughed, saying, “I know, if it doesn’t have a name, it doesn’t really exist…(long pause)…stricta?” He changed the tag to read “Dracaena stricta,” and I happily bought a plant that now had a full name tag, even though I knew stricta might not even be its real name.

If you want to blame or praise somebody for this foolishness, Carl Linnaeus is your guy. He is the founder of the modern system for naming and classifying plants and animals. He was a Swedish botanist, born in 1707, just in time to take part in what is now called The Age of Reason. It was a time of almost constant war, yet Europe’s population grew by almost 50%.

As an aside, the huge population explosion was primarily – not solely, but primarily – because of Solanum tuberosum (potatoes). Before the potato was imported from “The New World”, Northern European farmers relied on grains, such as rye and wheat, which were unreliable food sources and not very nutritious for the amount of cultivated land needed to grow them. The potato changed the “food economy” of the continent in a couple of ways. In addition to being easier to grow than grain, especially in poor, wet soils, potatoes have higher caloric density and better nutritional value – much better when combined with milk (or butter) – particularly in vitamin C, potassium, and vitamin B. End aside.

Linnaeus was a physician, zoologist, and, apparently, an admirer of women’s breasts who standardized and popularized the two-part naming system – genus and species – such as Homo sapiens or Dracaena stricta. Before Linnaeus, plants often had long, descriptive Latin names that were difficult to remember or descriptive names in the local language.

I say “admirer of women’s breasts” because Linnaeus named us Mammalia from the Latin word mamma, meaning “breast,” which implies that the defining feature of mammals is that the females have breasts rather than, say, live birth or hair. By defining the entire class of animals by the act of suckling young, Linnaeus reinforced his premise that breastfeeding was the fundamental difference between other animals, like frogs, and us. He also named a genus of cactus, Mammalarias, because its spines are on the ends of the nipple-like tubercles on the plant, and he promoted breastfeeding as a patriotic duty in an influential pamphlet titled Nutrix Noverca.

The reason is that we – and by we, I mean Cactus and Succulent Society members and, for lack of a better description, the “soft science” press – typically use only two names, like Homo sapiens, Dracaena stricta, or Yucca brevifolia – the “scientific name” for Joshua trees, because it is assumed that we know the larger groups that they are a part of. It would be very unusual to say Primates Simiiformes Homo sapiens.

But for plants, it’s a different story. I’ve been interested in plants for about 50 years, and I thought I had a pretty good handle on what plants were in what group. I knew that a Joshua Tree was a Yucca brevifolia, and was in the Agave group, or, if you are a lumper, which I am, the larger Lily family. But while looking for details on the trees, I found that they were reclassified in 2009 as members of the asparagus family. I am still sort of shocked.

As an aside, while this reclassification is not a particularly big deal, it reminded me that I am old enough to have seen two major shifts in our understanding of our physical world. The first was at the end of a college geology course in – probably – the spring of 1960, after being taught that as the Earth cooled from its molten beginnings, the crust crumpled into mountain ranges, much like the skin of a drying apple, the professor offhandedly mentioned that there were some nuts out there that thought the continents were floating around and banging into each other and that was the cause of mountain ranges. I only found out that the nuts were right years later, when I went on a reading binge about human evolution. By then, Plate Tectonics was so accepted that it was only mentioned obliquely as a given.

I didn’t miss the second shift, however, when the world went from thinking dinosaurs were cold-blooded and stupid to smart, warm-blooded animals – but, no breasts – that are the ancestors of birds. This second shift is almost entirely credited to Robert Bakker, and I read his book, The Dinosaur Heresies, and became an early convert to the theory that dinosaurs were warm-blooded. End Aside.

Meanwhile, back with the aparagi, here are a couple of pictures of asparagus from our garden and more than a couple from the National Park.

Our Agave gentryi getting ready to bloom.
Asparagus densiflorus

A Weekend in LA with More Cars Than A Sane Person Would Want to See

California, Cars, Uncategorized

We went south to Los Angeles last weekend to see Macchinissima, which billed itself as Equal parts Villa d’Este, Punk Rock, and L.A. car culture, and a show at the Peterson Automotive Museum of Low Rider cars that celebrates the end of the discriminatory anti-cruising ban in California. I want to write and show photographs of both shows, but first I want to make a couple of general comments.

I’ve driven to Los Angeles a lot, more than a hundred times, for sure. When I first started driving back and forth, it was on Highway 99 or along 101 near the coast, then on the newly constructed I5 (the I5, if you live in LA). I5 is the fastest way to get to LA, Death Valley, or my sister’s home in Albuquerque, so it has become my default route going South or back North. It is also the default route for trucks traveling between Northern and Southern California. Much of I5 runs along the west side of the Central Valley, which is the largest flat place on Earth at about 18,000 square miles – or about 42,000 square miles, depending on which sentence in the same Google-generated AI paragraph you want to believe – so it is a very boring, but front brain, drive.

On this last trip, on the way home, we started in LA at about 91°F, climbed up the south side of the San Gabriel Mountains at ten miles an hour in 110°F heat, and ran north in an almost constant straight line up the Valley for about 190 miles in 105°F heat. In the car, it was a balmy 75°F, and the coolant temperature gauge was at less than the halfway mark. The whole way, I kept thinking that our SUV being able to do this was amazing. I also kept thinking: Don’t try to tell me that the Earth isn’t getting hotter at an increasing rate, and do acknowledge that, at some point in the near future, it will be too hot to grow anything in the Great Centraal Valley.

Back in LA, on Saturday, we had a great time at the Macchinissima, which was held at the Los Angeles River Center & Gardens. I had never heard of the Los Angeles River Center & Gardens, and when Michele showed me where it was on her iPhone, I thought: this is crazy; there are literally 11 sets of railroad tracks between the Los Angeles River Center & Gardens and the actual river. But, it turns out that the Google map was outdated. The land was an abandoned railroad equipment repair area, LA bought the land and took out the tracks as stage 1 of a future park next to the river. The city has been spending about $800M a year since 2000 on the river, and this is one of the early stages.

The show was great and a kind of throwback to the car gatherings I used to take in when I was really into cars. The Villa d’Este part was covered by a dozen, maybe two dozen, Concours d’elegance grade cars, motorcycles, and even bicycles. The Punk Rock portion was covered by live DJs playing mostly loud Italian Italo-Disco music while we ate pizza and drank Campari spritzers. The L.A. car culture cars were mostly spread around the blocked-off parking lot, and, in many ways, they were the most fun. There were lots of exotic cars in good shape but not perfect, several of which I’d never seen before. Rather than bore us both with details, here are some photos.

Coming up soon, Low Riders at the Peterson.

Pictures from a trip to L A

California

L A trip-00417

Michele and I went to Los Angeles to play tourist over a very long weekend. We had originally planned to go to see my sister in Albuquerque and then go down to Big Bend TX but I was not over my nasty little cold so we canceled out. But I did get better and now we had a couple of weeks with a clear calendar so we decided to drive down the I-5 to Los Angeles for the March for Science and to see Michele’s cousin Maureen who is fighting pancreatic cancer.

L A trip-00420L A trip2-00422L A trip3-00424L A trip4-00425

L A trip5-00427L A trip8-00430

By the time we got to the Grapevine, over the Tehachapi Mountains, the light had started to fade, so we drove into the Los Angeles Basin in the dark.  We did get to the Silverlake area just in time for dinner, however. The next day, the Friday before the March for Science, we went to see the Space Shuttle Endeavour; levitating over an appreciating crowd.

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