I am having a very small show at Sweetie’s starting this Friday. If you are around, please drop by and say Hello. Sweetie’ is a great old-time San Francisco bar at 475 Francisco Street, North Beach, San Francisco. It is well worth the stop.
Category Archives: Photography
Drought
Cathedral in the Desert 2005, exposed by low water level in Lake Powell (really a reservoir). © srstern
On January 17th, Governor Jerry Brown finally declared a drought emergency in the state. He also asked all citizens to cut back at least 20% of their water use. In typical Jerry Brown fashion, he had lots of charts and photographs showing us how bad it is and it is very serious. Last year was the driest year that California has had since we started keeping records in 1895. The Department of Water Resources said that Gasquet Ranger Station in Del Norte County has only 43% of normal and Sacramento is even worse with 5.74 inches of rain instead of the typical 18 inches.
This is probably not news to anybody who lives here and has gone outside this year. I have never seen it this dry and I have lived here since 1940 and paid attention since about 1956, when I started backpacking. The scary thing is that we don’t really have enough water for our lifestyle even if there were no drought. The good news is that the drought, which is aggravating the problem, may actually make us think about the underlying problem.
Felt Lake, irrigation water for the Stanford University Campus. © srstern
That is not something we – we meaning, probably, all Homo sapiens, maybe all mammals – are good at doing; looking at subtle, underlying, problems and correcting them before they become big emergencies. Jerry Brown was the first politician that I remember who talked about national limits, saying The country is rich, but not so rich as we have been led to believe. The choice to do one thing may preclude another. In short, we are entering an era of limits. He got laughed off the stage as Governor Moonbeam. Jimmy Carter was the first president to really face an energy crisis, complete with gas lines. He asked everybody to turn their heat down to save energy, and he was belittled for it, losing to Reagan’s It’s morning again in America campaign.
As an aside, Carter had several firsts as a president; he was the first president born in a hospital, he was the first president to wear jeans in the White House, he was the only president – so far – to have lived in subsidized public housing, and he was the only President to have been interviewed by Playboy. End aside. My friend Ed Cooney is in love with Jimmy Carter, Ed is an amateur presidential historian and smart enough to know that, in many ways, Jimmy Carter was not an especially effective president but enough in love to want to overlook these Presidential flaws. However, I think that he is actually in love with Carter because of Carter’s political flaws.
What hurt Carter as a president, is partially what made him admirable. Carter graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Annapolis and later did graduate work in atomic reactor technology and nuclear physics; he was a rational man more than a political man. He knew we weren’t going to solve our energy and resource problems by ignoring them, and we haven’t.
I am not sure if I have become more or less cynical over the years. I used to think that we would know when we really have a water problem when they stop watering the golf courses, now I am not so sure. Now I think that water flows towards money more than downhill and we can be in a very serious drought with very green golf courses.
Silverado Golf Course, evening mist. © srstern
Spare the Air in the San Francisco Bay Area
For the last nine days, I heard on the radio, it has been a Spare the Air Day somewhere in the Bay Area. The longest run on record. When I went up to Russian Ridge to watch the sun go down over the Pacific, it was not as spectacular as I hoped. I guess that is the good news
The Grand Canyon on November 29, 2013
Michele told me that the Grand Canyon was her favorite place, over a Scotch at the old Stars, the night we first met. I guess we had technically met weeks before, but this was the first social conversation we had. I don’t remember if it was before or after I told her I was would be going down the Colorado in a couple of months. It was my second trip into the Canyon and, it turned out, it was her third trip. For both of us, it was our first time down the bottom half.
I thought I had seen the Canyon in all her moods,
but I have never seen it like it was on November 29th (click through for more pictures). It must have been spectacular, but only if you had been there before and knew the clouds were 7,000 above the river. When I showed it to Michele, all she said was Wow!
Down East and back east
Our plan – my plan, really – for our last day, was to get up early, wander around the Schoodic Peninsula down to Acadia National Park, have a late breakfast, and drive south to Boston. But, at dawn, the light was flat, the air outside was cold, and our bed was warm. We got a late start.
However, the late start did allow us to have a nice breakfast at the Bluff House Inn – included in the price – and we got a couple of pointers from Libby the Inn Keeper. Driving down to Winter Harbor; the sky was heavy and grey, the trees on the narrow road silent in the gloom.
When we we first got to the water at Winter Harbor, the air was cold, with no wind, and the sea calm. The no wind, calm sea, was somewhat of a surprise; at home, the sea is never calm and my idea of the North Atlantic is based on the books The Cruel Sea and The Good Shepherd in which the weather is nasty and the waves high and relentless. Then I remember that the Viking longboats were – mostly – oar driven which would indicate that the wind was often calm.
What ever the reason, the sea was glassy, reflecting a sky that was still grey, but becoming more lively, and I kept thinking what spectacular sunrise pictures I could have gotten if there had been a sunrise. I didn’t Google it, but there must be a million of them on the internet. 
Near the boat ramp, was a granite sculpture, typical of the kind we have seen in various places over the last couple of days. I have no idea what the deal is – whether there is a state program or just a series of unrelated pieces of art using granite – but they are always a nice addition.
The light was flat, but the coastline was still stunning – dramatic, magnificent, sensational, choose your own superlative – and reminded me more of a Sierra lakeshore than the North Atlantic coastline of my imagination. 
The popular misconception is that National Parks are put where the landscape is at its most spectacular. But, in most cases, that is not true; National parks are put in the left over areas and the spectacularness is a byproduct. And the spectacularness is a byproduct may be wrong, also; spectacularness is probably the product of any wild landscape. I suspect that Manhattan Island would be pretty spectacular if it were completely wild today.This is not to diminish Acadia and this coastline, it is jaw droppingly beautiful – rugged and, on a day like today, strangely soft – but it is only here because it was left over. Driving here, there were hundreds of places, coves, rivers, estuaries that would have been just as stunning if they were still natural. All that said, this coastline is here and we were very happy for it.
At one point, we were on a desolated spit of rock, listening to wavelets lapping the shore, hearing the offshore voices of lobsterman pulling up their traps, when a busload of kids arrived. It was amazing how the energy changed; from quiet at the end of the continent to the cacophony of the classroom. The tinkle of young voices filled the silence and the bright colors of their clothes enlivened the landscape. 
We moved on to the next stop and, once again, we were alone in this rocky landscape. 
To a Californian, what is surprising about the Acadia tip of the Schoodic Peninsula is how densely it is populated, how every habitable cove is inhabited (and has been for – probably – almost 200 years). We were completely alone – looking with lust at the round, shore rocks, protected by the sign that said Don’t take rocks – then we drove around a corner and were at at Wonsqueak Harbor where the Bennett Twine House, on +/- 1 acres and 460′ of shoreline, is for sale for only $450,000. 
Every cove, every inlet, in this part of Maine seems to have a working harbor. On the short drive from the Bennett Twine House to Corea, we drove through Birch Harbor and Prospect Harbor. They are not as quaint as our destination, Corea, so we passed them by (thinking that, in California, they would have been the most picturesque place within a hundred miles). I think that it is another misconception of Coastal Maine that there are working harbors and tourist – summer home – harbors, South Bristol and Corea, both reputed to be fishing villages where people really fish – lobster? -have lots of summer houses and every harbor village we drove through, supposedly non-working villages, had working lobster boats moored in their harbors. However, just like South Bristol, Corea is movie-set quaint.
We wandered into a big storage shed full of lobster bait from Canada. Looking at all that bait for this little harbor convinced me that these guys are feeding the lobsters, they are farming them. Maybe not officially, maybe not technically, but just as much as cowboys in the west are farming cattle on rangeland. I bet there are more lobsters in the nearby Gouldsboro Bay today than there were 200 years ago (Michele says that the lobstermen told her that there used to be more lobsters, but that still seems like a huge amount of bait for this small place). 
We were four or five hours – maybe five or six by the way we would probably go – north of Boston and hadn’t had lunch, so it was time to start back. First north – North?? – to Highway 1 and then southwest to Boston. I drove and Michele started looking for a place to have lunch. We stopped just past the bridge over Sullivan Straights for Michele to use the viewpoint restroom – which was locked so she resorted to the behind a tree method – and I took what I thought might be my last inlet-with-trees-in-color shot of the trip. 
We passed by Chester Pike’s Galley and I pulled in. Michele said No, keep going there is a restaurant that looks good on the Hancock Peninsula, I figured it would be nearby last night’s disappearing Hancock. As we got close, Google showed it to be in the middle of a forest which did not look promising, but we noodled around and found it right next to the No Frills Oil Co., Inc.
The Salt Box – a name that must carry some irony as it was in one of the few non-saltbox buildings in Maine – turned out to be the best restaurant we found on our trip. I had The Local which was huge hunks of lobster stuffed into a housemade roll, it was the best lobster roll of my life (so far, I plan to keep looking). Michele had a housemade elk sausage with a glass of red wine and was thrilled.
We spent a few minutes of valuable travel time talking to the chef co-owner about how he got to the Hancock Peninsula, food, Himalayan Crystal Salt, and Juju.
I was getting anxious and we got back on the trial deciding to go cross country – so to speak – rather than through Bangor and down the freeway. 
When we finally did get to the freeway, it was getting dark and Maine started to feel like any other part of America.
Michele pitched Let’s stop at Eventide, the oyster restaurant that Warren suggested in Portland. We can get oysters and a glass of champagne to celebrate our twentieth. The little bit of Portland that we drove through was utterly different than everyplace else we saw in Maine. It was urban and gritty, busy. It seems that artists and foodies are moving in bringing change and excitement. Eventide was typical of the New Portland and was the perfect place to take a break. The centerpiece of the restaurant is a concrete counter embedded with a big hunk of granite, on the granite is a pile of ice with various oysters. Michele was giddy. We – I should say Michele, here, as I was just a bystander – settled on four each of three different kinds of oysters from the Damariscotta River Estuary. They were firm shell, large, light in texture, and high salinity and, yet, each one was different, the champagne was dry, we had a side order of tasty housemade kimchi and we were very happy.
Michele and I finally did make it to Boston, in the dark, and went straight to East Ocean City, for our official Chinese meal that we have to have on every trip. Part of our reasoning – justification? – in going to a Chinese restaurant on a trip is that it takes us out of the culture. In a Muslim country, like Morocco, we can have pork, in India, beef. During the all pervasive Ramadan in Indonesia, we could eat lunch – in broad daylight – guilt free. In Boston, the local Ramadan was the World Series and we expected the restaurant wouldn’t be too full because of game six.
It was empty, except for four or five waiters who were watching the game on one of the place’s three TVs (one of the other TVs seemed to be hardwired to a How-great-is-the-Chinese-Military channel with lots of movies of Chinese war exercises). Later a Chinese couple came in and he watched the game while she watched her iPhone. Over our appetizer of Barbecued Spareribs, we watched Boston score three runs in the third inning. We had Lobster with Vermicelli Hotpot and Buddha’s Delight Vegetables while Boston scored three more runs in the fourth inning.
Another reason that it is so much fun to go to a Chinese restaurant on a trip is that, in different places, the Chinese food is different in ways that is a caricature of that place’s regular food. In Vicksburg, Mississippi – my choice for worst ever Chinese – it was deep fat fried, in Guatemala – Michele’s choice for worst – everything was cut into teeny-tiny little tasteless pieces.
By the seventh inning stretch, an older American couple came in, sitting so as to not see the TV, the Chinese couple left and so did we. The next morning, we flew back to California, hungry for more of Maine.
Thoughts on coming back to California