I never knew if my birthday fell in summer or in fall.  Every year it was different, sometimes tinged with the hot glare of summer, despite being stuck in school (which was always exciting, anyway); sometimes the leaves had already turned and I could immediately wear the new sweater I received as a present.  This year it was definitely summertime, in the 90s and with a night that didn’t cool.  The celebration lasted more than the usual week, with a belated road trip to Los Angeles and a stop at the Madonna Inn.  Their pink champagne cake is my two-year old self’s only desire.

This time of year, when the weather is mysterious and wavering, is my favorite time.  Indian summer, that liminal season before the cold stays for good, after the sun has shut one eye.  When the stickiness in the air gives way to smoke and dying leaves. Liminal like twilight, when the sun extinguishes itself in the big puddle out west, lights flicker on in houses built into mountains, neither dark nor light outside.

“I find myself stressing the fire because fires were important to us.  I grew up in California, John and I lived there together for twenty-four years, in California we heated our houses by building fires.  We built fires even on summer evenings, because the fog came in.  Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night.” —  Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

somewhere between summer and fall, 2011

Lassen National Forest shows up on Google maps as a swath of green protected land, surrounded by tiny archipelagos of green pixelated dots, some as small as a few acres.  Sierra Pacific Lumber Co. owns most of the land surrounding the cabin and the locals hate them for their clear-cut methods, which leave huge bald patches on the mountains that were once dense forest.  In the time since I went up last month, another stand of giants has been taken out and there are markers for more to come.  Someday the national forest will be a tiny outcropping of beautiful old growth trees surrounded on all sides by empty land.  It’s hard even to imagine how wild it all once was.

The rodeo made me cry.  It was like a tick, coming on so suddenly and completely, unintentional and embarrassing, upon sight of the first calf roping.  (In case you’re unfamiliar, calf roping is when a cowboy rides in on his horse, lassoes a calf, jumps from his horse and wrestles the calf until he has three legs tied together.  All done in the span of about seven seconds.  Pretty impressive, actually).  The instantaneous tears took me back to Mexico, when the same thing happened the moment I saw blood at a bullfight.  What was I expecting?

Luckily, other parts of the rodeo, especially the barrel racing, with its athleticism and grace, were more entertaining and less cruel.  All in all, though, I prefer the monster trucks and especially the demo derby.

Northern California

Summer 2011

Bright orange poppies dotted the way down south along Highway 1 and cropped up among the railroad ties that ran alongside us.  Swaths of mustard flower electrified the fields, despite heavy fog in Pacifica and Half Moon Bay.  Santa Cruz flashed by like so many VW vans.  We stopped for a drink at Nepenthe and sat outside looking out across the Pacific, impossibly big, impossibly blue.  Big Sur seems so far away once you’re there.

One of the many bridges on that twisted stretch of Hwy 1, which hugs the mountains above the ocean in a precarious way, was totally taken out by landslides in March.  The rebuilding is scheduled to be finished in 2013.  A lot of work goes into building a bridge, spanning nothing with something.  The exposed infrastructure under the surface hangs above sheer cliff and water, so delicate.  When the day is done, the construction workers hang the large metal toolboxes above the unfinished bridge from their cranes, keeping the valuables out of reach, like a treasure chest.

Big Sur, CA   6-8 May 2011

Pt. Richmond, CA

Petaluma River, 15 January 2011

At the fortune cookie factory:

All those decorations made me want to watch Raise the Red Lantern,

Happy Chinese New Year!

with love, from San Francisco’s (first) Chinatown (the largest outside of Asia!)

The Lady Washington was docked in Sausalito this past week.  Chloe and I went aboard.

When the ship was built in 1989, they didn’t know what Lady Washington actually looked like, so they took a bust of George Washington and gave him a sex change.

Gracias pirates, and fare thee well!

Sausalito, 4 November 2010

Happy Halloween!

The Fourth of July has always been my favorite holiday, since I was a little kid in a small town with a parade and relay races and fireworks over the beach at night.  The fireworks exploded so loud I called them thundercrackers.  One year the folks out on the barge bungled the order and shot off the grand finale first.  It might have been disappointing, but in a way that only fireworks can be, which is to say not at all.

There was a man with his young daughter and son behind us, watching the fireworks.  The girl asked, “Dad, what makes that noise?” and he responded, naturally, “Rice Krispies.”

The swimming hole is an interesting spot, where the confluence of people from different walks of life reflects the spirit of summer and its relaxing of convention.  It might be psychologically impossible to feel bad at a swimming hole.

Driving up to Petaluma, I passed an 18-wheeler hauling the broken-down rides from the county fair, which ended a few days prior.  I half expect to see little Pete and Artie tussle with some waves, but it’s still only July.  Phew!