Category Archives: California

I am afraid it has come to this

Americana, Bay Area Walks, California, Evolution, Psychological Musings

I had lunch today with a friend and we finished much more quickly than usual. I had brought my camera because the last time we had lunch there – there being the Fish Market in San Mateo – a mother duck was showing her teenagers how to forage and I was hoping for a repeat. It was gloriously hot  and all the outside tables were full so we ate inside which may be why we were finished so quickly. What ever the reason, we had some time to kill and we sat – sort of sunning ourselves – on a bench overlooking San Mateo’s Seal Slough. On a corner of the Fish Market’s dock, were a cormorant and seagull also sunning themselves.

They seemed to not being paying much attention to each other which makes sense as they operate in totally different eco-niches. After a while, two more cormorants showed up to fish just off the dock. Then they came over to sun themselves – opening their wings – and the seagull got sort of agitated and moved away. But not very far.

About that time a heron came over to the shore near us to hunt.

At one point one of the late to arrive cormorants got two close to the self identified dock owning cormorant and he/she/or it turned and bit his – who knows if she is a he, but I’m going with his – wing. The intruder backed up about six inches and then moved closer by about four inches just to show he wasn’t intimidated.  Watching the five birds was watching five individual animals. It was fascinating and lovely, sitting in the sun, watching the birds live their little to me – big to them – lives.

And then I thought This is just too close to two old men sitting on a park bench. I remarked on that and we both decided we had places to go and people to see.

 

A trip to the Exploratorium

Americana, Bay Area Walks, California, Steve Stern's Field Notes From A Random Walk Through Life, Travel

Located at the Palace of Fine Arts on the site of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, the Exploratorium is one of San Francisco’s best entertainments. It has the added benifit of being in a building designed by architect Bernard Maybeck.  The Exploratorium  bills itself as a museum of science, art, and human perception but it is much more. It is a giant, interactive, toy for anybody who is even a little curious about the world we live in.

A couple of weeks ago, I went there with my grandkids.

When I was in the Army, in Korea, I read Herb Caen, a gossip columnists in the San Francisco Chrony that everybody read. Every time I got a letter, it would have several Caen columns. During that year, one of the things that he was promoting was the restoration of the Palace of Fine Arts which, by then, was the only building left from the world’s fair built to show San Francisco’s Phoenix-like comeback from the 1906 earthquake. Then, like now, I was interested in architecture, and then, like now, I loved Bernard Maybeck. I loved his take on classical architecture at the Palace of Fine Art and sent a couple of bucks to my mom to contribute to the cause. She thought that my contribution was mis-placed and sent the money somewhere else. I have blocked out where.

So I was very happy to see that the restoration took place without my money and, eventually, became the home of the Exploratorium. The Exploratorium, itself, was the brain child of Frank Oppenheimer. Frank was the brother of Robert Oppenheimer, considered the father of the Atomic bomb. In my book, Frank has left the better legacy.

I fell in love with the Exploratorium when I went there as a childless adult, then later, with my daughter Samantha, then my “little brother”, Edwin Peña, and, now, with my grandchildren. Charlotte and August.

 

Any kid, every kid, can find hundreds of fascinating experiments. So can any adult.

 

 

A trip to the mountains west of death Valley cont.

Americana, Cactus & Succulents, California, Camping, Death Valley, Photography, Steve Stern's Field Notes From A Random Walk Through Life, Travel

After driving all day Thursday, we all slept in on Friday.

But it did not take very long before the sun got bright enough and hot enough to wake us. After a quickie breakfast, we packed up


and hurried over to the Eureka Sand Dunes.

The Eureka Dunes are not very large or famous but they are among the highest dunes in the United States at over 650 feet above the valley floor. They look smaller because they are framed by the striped limestone cliffs of the Last Chance Range that rise up 3000 to 4000 feet higher. Sand dunes are caused by wind blowing across the valley floor and picking up fine dust and sand; as the wind hits the higher mountains, it slows down, loses energy, and drops its heavy load. One thing that I find interesting is that the the individual grains of sand are constantly changing but the size and shape of the dunes do not.

As an aside, after getting home I realized that, with four people on our trip, I took alot less pictures than I usually do when I am only with Michele. Among things I didn’t take pictures of were the beauty of the sand dunes. Fortunately, Kirk Moore has some wonderful sand dune pictures over at his website. I highly recommend that you take a look. End aside.

By the time we got to the dunes, it was starting to warm up and the dunes were getting very bright. We hiked up about half way, maybe 350 to 400 feet, on sand that got looser and looser.

About the time that the day starting getting really hot,  heading towards triple digits. We got back in the truck and looked for shade. First it was back to the main road and then over the Last Chance Range into Death Valley itself. As we started over the last pass before Death Valley, we started seeing more plants in bloom. First the Beavertail Cactus, also known as the Pricklypear Cactus and probably known as some other names which is why people who like plants and go looking for them in the wild end up using the botanical name. In this case, Opuntia basilarus.  Just as we got to the pass overlooking upper Death Valley, we came across lots of clumps of Desert Aster, AKA Mojave Aster, or Aster mohavensis.

Then it was down into Death Valley, past Crankshaft Crossing, and on to Scotty’s Castle where we had lunch in the shade.

 

 

A trip to the mountains west of Death Valley

Americana, California, Camping, Death Valley, Travel

Last Thursday I, along with my wife Michele and our friends Howard Dunair and Basha Cohen, spent the day driving down Highway 395.  Highway 395 runs from Canada to somewhere in the Mojave Desert.  Between Reno, where we got on to Big Pine, where we got off, 395 runs just to the east of the Sierras. Reno is at about 4500 feet and Big Pine is at about 4100,m but, from Reno, the road climbs to a pass of over 8100 feet so Big pine seems much lower.

The Mojave desert is the the UFO desert, the wacko desert, and it seems to have seeped up the 395 corridor.  About an hour south of Reno, we ran into a guy who was pulling a cross from San Francisco to, I think, St. Louis. He had been saved by Jesus and wanted to save others. Like other people I have met who have been saved, he was sincere, open, passionate, and living so far from my reality as to be incomprehensible. I do admire his conviction, however.

 

Miles later, web got to an overlook and view spot with a guard rail. The guard rail has become a poster board for – for lack of a better word – travel stickers. I think that I first saw a bunch of travel stickers stuck on the windows of a a store – for foreigners – at the edge of the Sahara desert. Now I notice them anywhere tourists pass by, such as a guard rail at a view spot. Here – as Michele poinbted out – was an interesting group that showed one evolution of the Keep Tahoe Blue sticker.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As we moved south, after crossing the high point of Highway 395, we dropped from one basin to another, each one lower and warmer with the Sierras on our right getting higher and higher. Mile after mile.

 

Finally, at Big Pine, we turned left off of the highway and drove towards the deep desert.

And once we reached Eureka Valley, we stopped to drink a toast to the road.

To be continued….

The Escape Trail

Americana, Art, California

In reading Peter Kuhlman and Ophelia Ramirez’s blog – I think 99% Peter now – post about Peter’s reclaiming of his creativity and his posting of Chupacabra From La Habra, I am inspired to post a Haiku and a short  non-fiction piece I wrote in a Meditation and Creativity class I was in over the Weekend. I brought a bookmark – to class- I made from a photo I took while on a trip into Death Valley last year.

Manly died quietly
on his farm near Lodi CA
fruit trees blooming

Remembering The Escape Trail

The first thing to remember is that we went backwards- from Trona to the Panamint. From busy, dirty, mining town to Peace. Up an easy downhill, over the gentle summit, down the road that was such a struggle for Manly to lead the Bennett and Arcane families in the climb out of their hell. The oxen eaten long ago, the wagons left behind.

The Bennetts and Arccanes didn’t want to die, didn’t want to embrace Eternal Peace in the Panamint. Eternal Peace that sounded so good , sitting in the cool shade, inside Pastor Bennett’s church with its hard pews.

Under the glaring sky of the Panamint, Eternal Peace felt too much like Death. Death accompanied by the Angels of Fear, the hounding fear of thirst. Their thirst for a new life in the goldfields of California, turned into a thirst for water. Any little water.

Water we so easily carried; sloshing in the five gallon containers in the back of the truck. Sitting in front, we smiled and chatted; looking for wildflowers, going up and over the Escape Road.

We had red wine with dinner that night, not sacramental, but still welcome. We talked about Manly and how he had saved Bennett and Bennett’s wife and Bennett’s children and how, years later, when they came back to look for silver, Bennett had betrayed Manly. Leaving him for dead. Just up the road from our bright campfire.