Let’s do some experimentation to bridge these weeks where I am not at full strength – brain and body alike – with something focussed on a single photograph.
My choice of image was based on how well the picture captures what’s going on in my current state. Here is today’s visual representation of the status quo.
The central characters are stuck at a cliff edge. Looking ahead, fog envelopes the landscape, with no clear view of what the future holds. The blossoms are curled into themselves, with tear-like rain or dew drops attached. The path towards the edge is filled with broken pieces of granite, pebbles, sticks and stones that make for precarious footing.
I’m stuck as well. Not necessarily at the cliff edge, but with little predictive power as to how the future unfolds, with the fate of lung capacity uncertain. I have so little stamina after two consecutive surgeries, and so little breath available that I can slowly walk for only 30 minutes. Forget hiking. Water drops cling to me as well, be they tears or be they frequent night sweats that try to push all the medication out of my body.The path has been anything but smooth, and now we have to wait until early April to determine if I need yet more surgical repairs.
But, oh, look at the defiance of these Penstemons!!! They make due in the harshest of conditions, are luminous in their rebellious purple, smartly planting themselves in the vicinity of a natural wall that protects against the harsh mountain winds. They don’t have to go anywhere, the world comes to them, pollinators grateful for a destination, hikers silent in appreciation of the unexpected beauty.
Count me their cousin. I might be purple in the face from huffing and puffing, but it is a purple of determination to get this body back to working. Conditions are somewhat harsh, the Covid isolation making everything more complicated, the pain requiring a delicate balance between weaning off the meds while not have pain interfere with healing. I, too, however, am graced with the shelter of my surround, practical and emotional support arriving from all directions, some intermezzos of calm before the winds arise again. Things could be worse!
Kissed by privilege. Not only do I live in a place surrounded by old-growth trees, but from my bed I look directly onto a balcony that has become a cafeteria for all kinds of creatures during the cold months. The crows visit, as do the thrush and the nuthatches, the juncos and the towhees, some sparrows and the occasional shy chickadee. And then there are the squirrels, scrambling up the side of the house.
We had put seeds and nuts out onto the railing before the snow hit. The squirrels lost no time to dig them all up and either eat them right there or abscond with them to refill empty caches. It brought nature as close to me as possible, a source of considerable joy and distraction. Photographing with my small digital camera – I am not allowed to lift or hold the large one until the incisions are healed – through the window yielded some fun images.
It also made me think about the double-edged sword of the fragmentation of boundaries between human and animal territory with our human incursions into nature’s spaces. On the one hand, you gain so much knowledge if you can observe and research animal behavior of populations close to you. On the other hand, we all know how pandemics are generated if territorial lines are crossed. I feel like Cassandra just mentioning the fact that 7 Russians were the first humans found to be infected with the H5N8 bird flu last week.
Let’s start the week on a more optimistic footing, though. Here are two amazing things about squirrels.
They have not only the capability to listen for and identify predators’ calls, like owls and hawks, predators that could become dangerous to them. They also eavesdrop on the general bird population around them. If other birds continue to chatter unperturbed, the squirrels relax.
“Eavesdropping on alarm calls or eavesdropping on chatter is a cheap and easy way to supplement the information they have access to. Because it’s free. It’s produced by other individuals in the environment. It’s publicly available to any organism that has the cognitive ability to recognize and interpret that information.”
Nifty, but nothing in comparison to what other squirrels’ brains have to offer in the fight against human disease, Alzheimers in particular. Recent research of the brain of arctic ground squirrels revealed some facts that no one ever anticipated.
These critters, at home in Siberia, Alaska and Canada, burrow about a meter under the tundra surface to hibernate for 7 months. During that process, their body temperature plummets, below the freezing point of water!, and their brains stop producing a lot of neural activity. Structurally their neurons shrink and the connections between neurons shrivel away. Think of it as if a tree crown sheds all of its twigs and branches, just leaving a few big limbs intact.
But here comes the amazing part. When the squirrels wake up, they grow back, within only two hours, not just all the synapses lost during hibernation— their brain cells now boast many more links than those of an active squirrel in the spring or summertime. A day later, their brains prune many of these ties, probably recognizing them as superfluous, and so end up in exactly the state before they started hibernation. The details of this process can be found here. The implications for brain plasticity and potential application to brains that have lost a lot of their dendritic connections (dementias) are now explored by scientists around the world.
Maybe my own synapses start firing again, one of these days, emerging from this semi-hibernating interlude. And I will walk in nature again. Which reminds me of one of my favorite poems about walking while stewarding nature’s cycles or mythology, your pick. It was written by former Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen. The story of Demeter and Persephone really focusses on the eternal cycle of sowing, growth, harvest, withering and dying back, questions as to the nature of human life and death, including the possibility of resurrection from Hades. A mother, Goddess of the harvest, Demeter, carries her tears with her grains, missing her abducted daughter. The pomegranate seeds, mentioned late in the poem, hold life but also the banishment to the underworld, if you remember Persephone’s fate. A temporary excursion into the realm of the dead, just like squirrels in hibernation….
Music by Stravinsky, I’m indulging in the incomparable German version with Fritz Wunderlich.
Nothing you haven’t seen before, if you have followed this blog for a while. The same vistas, the same trees, the same kind of birds. A recurrent destination for my walks, Sauvies Island. And yet….
Yesterday, the light was moody. It felt like dawn had lingered into mid-morning, reluctant to leave to wherever dawn goes, a darker place perhaps.
The birds were moody. Resting one minute, then driven into the air by the hunters’ shots or a hungry raptor chasing their weakest links, no safety here.
Canada Geese, now staying year-round
Snow geese, on their migratory routes, in dire need of refueling and rest, where constantly erupting into their airy circling, feeling threatened.
The ducks were just trying to hide, making themselves small in the water.
The clouds were moody as well. Forming bulwark banks in some places, wispy sheets in others, breaking on occasion to remind us the sun still exists. Flecked and blue skies in alternation, until the rain came and washed the light into uniform grey.
The corn was moody. Late, dry stalks whispering when not drowned out by the cries of a thousand geese. Bordering on water that came too late in the year to be of use. Or maybe it was the hunters whispering in their corn-clad hide-outs.
I was moody. But as always, nature soothed with magic. The sandhill cranes danced.
Each return to this ever changing place reminds me of possibility. I might not gather paradise, but at minimum a distraction. If lucky, a kind of peace that descends temporarily from that everlasting roof of a sky.
The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine-and-fifty swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me Since I first made my count; I saw, before I had well finished, All suddenly mount And scatter wheeling in great broken rings Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, And now my heart is sore. All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight, The first time on this shore, The bell-beat of their wings above my head, Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold Companionable streams or climb the air; Their hearts have not grown old; Passion or conquest, wander where they will, Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water, Mysterious, beautiful; Among what rushes will they build, By what lake’s edge or pool Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day To find they have flown away?
Don’t sweat the details. Trees displayed late, not early autumn beauty. The paths were muddy, not dry. It was December daylight, not October twilight, and there were surely fewer than 59 swans. A number, I am told that signified something other than reality in any case in the poem, since swans do not congregate in such large flocks and if they did you couldn’t count them…
Other than that, I thought Yeats perfectly captured the experience during my current jaunts. There is the splendor of late autumn, caught in all the rusts and russets, garnet, oranges and gingers I’ve been walking amongst.✅ There is that sense that the lighter steps are a thing of the past, and treading is a bit harder with approaching age.✅ The heart sore? ✅ Nature’s beauty immutable? Ok, Yeats could not have possibly heard about the climate crisis, so we give him a pass on that. Future can only be guessed at? ✅, again.
I know I sound like a broken record, but for me something that transcends the particulars of a given time and/or historical setting, is necessary if not sufficient to make it art. I don’t know the particulars of the Irish turmoil and rebellion in 1916 that literary critics link to the poem, as they do to Yeat’s personal misery as a refused lover, who feared to be cut off from happiness in his approaching twilight years. And I don’t need to know them.
The description of someone seeing time pass by and fearing changes that are not kind, stand on their own, an experience known to all of humanity. The fact of nature’s beauty existing independently from us is timeless – and could be read as a reminder not to take ourselves too serious after all, but be grateful for the lovely cyclic permanence around us. Then again, the juxtaposition of nature, beautiful in each of its stages, but also guaranteed a renewal after each season, and our own linear progression towards a winter without spring, is rather depressing, don’t you think? The words resonate.
Quick, the reliable sharpness of Margaret Atwood to the rescue:
Hm, pull back a bit from exhortation and despair, and come to your own conclusions about a poem written over a century ago, which provided an experiential understanding if not of human impact, then of human frailty.
Not a great help, either….. but maybe I am indeed coming to the wrong conclusions.
I have been working on a project that, once again, tries to express the feelings associated with our current predicament: longing for freedom of movement and togetherness with others while being forced into spatial isolation. (I wrote about my last one along those lines here.)
The most recent exploration was initiated by watching a clip about those eerie kinetic artists, starlings, swooping through air in energetic and coordinated murmurations. The freedom of movement combined with a sense of communal action seemed like the perfect symbol for all that we deprived of right now during (in)voluntary quarantine due to Covid-19.
Artists have, of course, taken an interest in starlings for centuries. A contemporary one is photographer Søren Solkær who has observed the flights for many years now and published the images in a series called Black Sun. It’s worth clicking on the link below (Colossal) to see a spread of what he captured, some etherial beauty of stark landscapes in addition to the murmurations.
This project has taken me back to the landscape of my childhood and youth in the marshlands of Southern Denmark. A place where as many as one million starlings gather in the spring and fall, prior to onwards migration, and set the stage for one of nature’s most spectacular phenomena. As the countless birds congregate in large murmurations before collectively settling in the reeds at dusk they put on an incredible show of collaboration and performance skills. And now and then, by the added drama of attacking birds of prey, the flock will unfold a breathtaking and veritable ballet of life or death. The starlings move as one unified organism that vigorously opposes any outside threat. A strong visual expression is created – like that of an ink drawing or a calligraphic brush stroke – asserting itself against the sky. Shapes and black lines of condensation form within the swarm, resembling waves of interference or mathematical abstractions written across the horizon. At times the flock seems to possess the cohesive power of super fluids, changing shape in an endless flux: From geometric to organic, from solid to fluid, from matter to ethereal, from reality to dream – an exchange in which real time ceases to exist and mythical time pervades. This is the moment I have attempted to capture – a fragment of eternity.
One of my favorite paintings of a young starling is by Dutch painter Jan Mankes (1889 – 1920) who, come to think of it, deserves his own YDP one of these days.
Starlings are often snared – they are perceived as a nuisance when they descend in great numbers onto cities, Rome being a case in point, where 5 million of them spend the entire winter before flying to Scandinavia to nest in spring. The city, no longer allowing nets, now has taken to releasing falcons to hunt them and places loudspeaker with starling distress calls and calls by other predatory birds near their roosting sites. Why such efforts, you wonder? In one word: Poopocalypse….. More than a nuisance are starlings at airports, endangering safety when they get caught in the jets of planes – Seattle’s airport SEA TAC catches over a thousand each year.
In any case, I had to combine, for my own Covid response purposes in my montages, a sense of being snared with a sense of symbolic murmuration. You tell me if the sentiment is adequately captured.
Music today is in honor of Mozart’s starling – a bird he held as a pet. Details on that in an interesting interview here. Apparently Mozart’s pieceMusical Joke was part of their collaboration….
“Mozart’s Musical Joke was completed very shortly after his starling died in 1787. And I’m not the first to make the connection between this starling and this piece of music. That was Meredith West in a 1990 piece for American Scientist magazine [co-written with Andrew King]. She noticed that musicians hated this piece because it made them sound really bad — a lot of disharmony, fractured phrases, very odd key changes. Finally, she noticed that if you overlaid some of the most disconcerting parts over the song of a starling, there are a lot of similarities. You find the same kind of fractured phrases and general playfulness.”
There I was mid- afternoon, back to my old haunts, this time Oaks Bottom. Looking one way, a fall landscape of etherial beauty, separated by a mirror-like body of water, still as can be. Looking the other way, I was surrounded by throngs of people trying to catch the last sun rays before the upcoming storm, getting their runs in, having outdoor school, setting camp for the night, ever deeper in the woods that shelter the unhoused. Busy, noisy, alive, but not exactly a retreat into undisturbed nature.
Made me think of something Spanish-born artist Remedios Varo once said: “The dream world and the real world are the same,” although she, of course referred to the content of her paintings, her art in general, that “alchemically combined traditional techniques, Surrealist methods, and mystical philosophic inquiry into visionary dreamscapes.” (Ref.) It was also the mantra of the surrealist movement – André Breton declared in his essay The Manifesto of Surrealism,”surrealism is a movement that seeks to display the thoughts of the unconscious mind in a conscious manner, linking the dream-world and reality.”
My dream world and my real word yesterday depended on where I pointed my gaze, while hers’ originated with her inner eye. Varo had joined the surrealists when moving from Spain to France in the late 1930s before she fled fascism and emigrated to Mexico in 1941. Her art was a reaction to both the misogyny she experienced in Paris among her fellow painters and the political repression, also squarely directed at women, that made her stay in Mexico during Franco’s rule of Spain after the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939.
Having grown up in the 1920s to the achievements of a women’s movement that was espoused in the liberal Second Republic, she saw those rights trampled, including the right to divorce, use contraception, have an abortion or simply have a passport or a job (your husband had to sign.)
In 1934, a very conservative fascist group founded a new branch of government named the Sección Femenina. Franco later redesigned the mission of the Sección Femenina to encourage women and teach them how to be the ideal woman, as described by Franco and the Catholic Church. Women had to take classes at a young age to be “cheerful, supportive, self-sacrificing wives, waiting for the return of their husbands to a spotless home and happy family.” Maybe Lindsey Graham read the instructions. This is what he said at a campaign event beginning of November almost 100 years later: “I want every young woman to know there’s a place for you in America if you are pro-life, if you embrace your religion, and you follow a traditional family structure — that you can go anywhere, young lady.”
Varo became a highly successful painter in Mexico before her death of a heart attack in her mid 50s, although much less known than her male surrealist counterparts. Just think Salvador Dali, her contemporary, attending the same art schools in Spain as she did, and part of the movement that she joined in Paris during late 1930s.
Art critics have often described the two as surrealism’s extremes, representing shock and wonder, respectively.
And yes, there is much wonder to be found in her work, much admiration for nature (birds are ubiquitous, reason alone for me to be enchanted,) and mysticism and magic, but there is much more to it than that. There are clear feminist expressions found in the way women are depicted, strong, self-determined, explorative and intelligent. Equally important, she understands the Orwellian implications of mass movements centered around a snake oil salesman, having sacrificed their personal identity for being members of a cult, yearning for mystical fusion with the conjurer.
Here is The Juggler. (The Magician) (1956)
I think this painting could not be more apt for our times. (A lager version can be seen in the MOMA link attached at the bottom.)
The juggler, on the one hand, seems to represent enlightenment, his face painted on mother-of-pearl, in nature a protective layer, here a mask protecting who from whom? He is painted in the style of Hironymous Bosch (one of Varo’s role models) with red, shimmering robe, and metaphysical objects rather than rings thrown in the air, a light show to distract and/or blind the acolytes in front of him, although sold as enlightenment.
His cart, like a little ship that could sail away any moment when his manipulative task is done (or he lost the election,) contains a woman with closed eyes (no enlightenment here!) and all matter of domesticated critters, tame lion included. That’s what autocratic figures pull off.
The most interesting part is of course, as Varo herself declared, the uniformed mass of beings. “… a kind of unenlightened individuals who were awaiting a transference of enlightenment from the magician so that they can wake up…”
If you look closely, they seem to be wrapped all in the same cloth, a cape that reminded me of those fairy tale invisibility cloaks, about to be triggered. The people are rather androgynous, although upon close inspection you can see still hints of individual expression, some hope or differentiation. Not all is lost. The dystopian future of psychic fusion with the magician might just be averted.
Let them wake up to the real world, not the dream world, and tackle its healing without the help of witch-hat spouting quacks. And have eagle eyes to be on the look-out for the next one….
(Note that the MOMA interpretation of the painting is rather different.)
I figured we’d celebrate the wave of relief felt by more than half of this country with a color that stands for enthusiasm, positivity and enlightenment. Or so the color gurus tell me…. conveniently ignoring that yellow has often had different connotations.
Just think of its association with sickness – yellow-fever, hepatitis, yellow-jack (a flag on a ship that is under quarantine) – or associations with excess – yellow journalism. Then there are yellow-dog contracts which deny workers the right to join unions. And my own yellow-bellied (cowardly) manner towards a personal nemesis: yellow jackets.
Oops, I announced a celebration, so let’s look at the positive side: yellow daffodils are one of the few bulbs that are absolutely resistant to being devoured by critters, and who bring brightness to spring. And yellow is certainly the color in late fall, early winter, that captures, mirrors and reflects the last of the light, reminding us of escape from the darkness.
Yellow mums bring cheer, modeling patience for long winter days given the eternity they last even in a vase or through first frost. The vivid contrast between yellow and the dark surroundings in the fall woods feels energizing, no hiding here, no shyness, a sturdy presence, at least when it comes to mushrooms.
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Yellow was van Gogh’s favorite color. Speculations abounded what could account for his “yellow vision.”
It was his abuse of absinthe, the alcoholic drink he favored! No, he suffered from xanthopsia, a state where everything in your sight looks yellowish, the result from exposure to toxins, including poisonous foxglove tinctures prescribed by his doctor in the asylum at St. Remis! It was subacute angle closure glaucoma that accounted for the yellow ‘halos’ in his paintings!
Basically all of these arguments are put to rest here. The use of digitalis from the foxglove plant was well understood in the 19th century, and by the time van Gogh would have reached sufficiently toxic levels (from absinthe as well) to exhibit xanthopsia he would have been unable to paint. Furthermore, he did not display any of the other symptoms associated with the kind of assumed glaucoma (brow ache, blurred vision,) never once mentioned in his otherwise detailed thousands of letters home.
His vision was also tested by his Doctor in 1889, using the kinds of color vision tests available for railroad personnel in safety tests, and found to be normal, as was his short- and long-distance vision. The guy was in his early 30s at the time, remember?
In contrast, we have his own thoughts in letters about his use of color, of his experimentation with color (yellows were almost always off-set with blue and white, a white he could not have distinguished from yellow with xanthopsia) and the fact that the use of yellow was already dominant in his very young years in Holland, before any of the potentially poisonous agents appeared on the scene. (Here is an invaluable source for his letters, searchable by key concepts.)
Last but not least we also have the assessment of his colleague Paul Gaugain:
‘Oh yes, he loved yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from Holland — those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul, that abhorred the fog, that needed the warmth.’
Now why do I bring up so much of this debate, in my view solved by looking at scientific facts with an eye on the whole package of historical data?
I have been thinking of how arguments are flying around in the Democratic party post-mortem of the election, claiming this or that or those being at fault for losses, for gains, on all sides. Often the loudest arguments win, or the ones that jive most with our own closely held beliefs (confirmation bias,) or the ones that are repeated most often. Now more than ever it seems paramount to wade through them all and really test the veracity of claims, not just their plausibility.
This is important because we will not prevail if we do not learn from mistakes. I am all in favor of celebrating today – but the work of tomorrow has to begin with honest assessments of future moves. And a good start is to look at the differing voices. We can contemplate what AOC had to say in an interview with the NYT yesterday, pointing to the fact that we urgently need and utilize the help of marginalized communities, but then tend to drop them and their demands once we’ve won, giving plum political jobs to anyone but progressives. Or we can turn to a thoughtful, intelligent essay in the Atlantic about what it would mean for democracy to simply go back to the status quo ante 2016. (Highly recommended reading.)
We can look at the argument of many that a centrist Biden, or down-stream candidates like him, overall outperformed the more progressives, even if those won in their own districts. We need to ask, if those claimed differences (we don’t even have yet all the numbers!) are based on message content differences (Medicare for All/Defund the Police) or were inherently driven by misogyny or racism (the more progressive candidates also tended to be POC, many of them women.)
There has to be an assessment of the way messages were conveyed – did we match the skillful bite-size narratives of the republicans with our more complicated stories, did we match their community engagement (democrats did not do door to door canvassing because of Covid)? Did top-down regulations and media approaches hamper individual democratic candidates because they were not appropriate for their communities?
Was there a failure to nationalize attacks on Trump for fear of scaring potential republican voters ready to jump ship – a population that did NOT materialize? After all, campaigns that accepted top-down funding were obliged to run under basic strategic maps brought to them by the DCCC/DSCCC/DLCC and this was their strategy.
Was lack of skill or funding or awareness for the need for social media dispersion a factor? There are so many variable to be taken into account beyond the core issues of progressive demands versus centrist calls for reconciliation and moderateness, that it will take time to isolate them and analyze them all. Most of all it will take the will to do that, otherwise we will not stand in 2022.
Reward yourself for due diligence in exploring these issues with a walk in the woods showering you with exuberant yellow. It will lift your soul.
Music today is by Michael Torke who has composed a lot around colors, including bright blue and its opposing color on the wheel: YELLOW. (Yellow Pages are not the only industry to flag that color. Think Nikon, National Geographic, McDonalds, and CAT and Caterpillar…..) Someone knows what they are doing.
“Finding immortality, one pumpkin at a time,” was reportedly uttered by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk in response to the work of the Maniac Pumpkin Carvers, Marc Evan and Chris Soria. (I am skipping his newest book published this September, The Invention of Sound, all about mortality in its most sadistic forms….)
The Brooklyn, NY-based duo has been carving pumpkins for many years. One of their approaches, carving famous works of art into their pumpkins, has been recognized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. MoMa has ordered an annual pumpkin devoted to a piece from their collection for the last 7 years, so has the Whitney and the Queens Museum of Art. And now Chuck Palahniuk.
Here is a sampling of their work, done these days in cooperation with 12 other carvers, using tools from different trades, including kitchen knives, hardware tools, such as small saws, serrated knives, linoleum cutters (typically used for printmaking), and clay loops (used for trimming in pottery). (Photographs from the website.)
Keith HaringVan Gogh
The pumpkins, internally wired with little lamps, can cost up to $800. That is a lot for a fleeting pleasure, and not much if you consider the skill that goes into it and the fact that this is probably a one-shot-per-year business.
To put the word immortality and pumpkin into one sentence requires some chutzpah. I cannot think of another organism widely available to observe, perhaps with the exception of sunflowers when they go dry and black, that reminds me so visibly of death and decay. Who hasn’t thought about the fleeting of existence when watching the crisp pumpkins melting into pulp and slime, on one’s doorstep as much as in the fields come winter?
On my visit to Sauvie Island yesterday, the fields were ready to be picked, the greenery already gone, the pumpkins bare for the take. It poured, I could not even leave the car, photographing out of the window. My favorite willow tree had finally collapsed under its own weight, pieces stacked along Reeder Road.
The ponds were dry, not good for November when so much traveling water fowl needs a place to settle.
(The red dirt is where usually the pond resides)
As a result a universe of hunters concentrated around one of the few remaining wet spots, killing scores of ducks by the unrelenting sound of the shooting.
Mortality was on my mind, not immortality. Beauty, of course, as always is the case in nature, visible even in the stark reminders of transience.
Then again, the quest for immortality, or ruminations about it, have also created some – literary – beauty. The ancient Greek texts come to mind, or Wordsworth, but also something decidedly contemporary. Here is Brian Culhane.
THE IMMORTALITY ODE
Bill Evans is quiet, fingers still above the keys, But ready to begin again and again and again The first twelve bars before the drums come in, Just as I am ready for inspiration this evening, Fingers rehearsing an entrance above the keyboard Of the Olivetti Lettera 32 I pounded years ago On Charles Street, nights I wore my father’s Black cashmere overcoat whenever the steam Failed to make it up five flights, and back then Evans waited, too, for his entrance, rain on glass Waiting to accompany him, and on the B side? Everlastingness is still there, and all Camus Said it was, the boulder, the hill, the boulder again That we come to over and over, pushing— Quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua As Lucky said and which my annotated Beckett Traces to the Latin (qua) for in the capacity of. As in I qua Sisyphus, I quaquaquaqua greybeard Old father shuffling along in black cashmere: The Child is father of the Man, a looped immortality, While happiness, per Camus, if patently absurd, Nonetheless may rise with the struggle to old heights And just might be enough to fill a man’s heart, Even as Evans once more lifts his fingers for “You and the Night and the Music,” his solo fresh As when he first sat down, and the night is young.
And here the referenced music by Bill Evans. Stay alive for now, folks. We need to be around for the official calling of the election…..
If you drive north along palmtree-lined Bay Road, passing the Bay Bridge,
the Piers,
and somewhat confusing public art,
you’ll eventually end up at Crissy Field, a large expanse of park, with a bit of marsh enclosed, and sandy beaches to walk on.
The views of the Golden Gate Bridge are postcard material, and as such sold in every tourist trap in town. That said, the views are gorgeous.
Walking in those green meadows and along the pristine beach you wouldn’t know that the area was for the longest time one of the major military air fields on the West Coast if not the country. Parking lots and concrete- plastered runways covered the area since 1921, with barracks on the infill of what was once a marsh housing enlisted men, and other buildings serving as administrative offices and officers’ quarters.
Fog made for difficult flying conditions, as did the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937. After World War II the field was primarily used to received MedEvac flights bringing wounded Vietnam soldiers from Travis Air Force Base to Letterman Hospital. It closed eventually in 1974.
The bridge is in that cloud!
In 1994, Crissy Field and the rest of the Presidio became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, under the care of the National Park Service. Three years later they started enormous restoration efforts, the results of which are now enjoyed by throngs of people, tourists and neighbors alike.
About 230,000 cubic yards of soil had to be removed from Crissy Marsh alone to transform it from a parking lot back into a habitat for plants and animals like herons, egrets, crab and fish. The rest of the area had to be cleaned from decades of accumulation of hazardous materials, an undertaking that was supported by millions of dollars in donations from citizens and organization alike.
Here is a detailed history provided by the National Parks Conservancy, with remarkable before and after photographic footage of the transformation. A true restoration.
Have we learned anything? Cargill Inc., the nation’s largest privately held company, recently wanted to develop nearly 1,400 acres of the shoreline along the San Francisco Bay in Redwood City, destroying existing marsh land. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency tried to give the green light, ignoring both it’s own agency regulations and the Supreme Court’s decision on the Clean Water Act.
Save the Bay, an energetic environmental protection organization, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, and three other environmental organizations sued the EPA and EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler over the agency’s March 2019 decision not to protect the salt ponds under the Clean Water Act. A federal judge has now ruled in favor of the environmentalists, but one wonders, of course, what will happen if and when the issue winds its way up to the newly configured Supreme Court.
Why is it that every bit of nature has to be ripped out of the maw of forces trying to destroy it in these urban environments? Why do always either the state or private business reap the economic benefits of their strongholds, while the damage removal has to rely the generosity of citizens’ purses or the tax payer stepping up? And are people even aware of the work and time and money and sweat and tears provided by conservancy organizations who try to rescue what they still can? Rhetorical question, I admit.
Before there was the bridge there was the strait. Its name was chosen in 1846 by Captain John C. Frémont in analogy to the Golden Horn of the Bosporus (Turkey) when he hoped for rich cargoes from the Orient arriving through the strait.
The treacherous water channel connects the Pacific ocean with San Francisco Bay, and the Sacramento-San Joaquin river system. From 1 to 3 miles wide, it is frequently shrouded in fog. Humid air from the Pacific Ocean floats over the cool California wind current flowing parallel to the coast. The fog stays low to the ground and then the warm, moist air condenses as it moves across the San Francisco Bay or nearby land.
The fog was probably the reason for a relatively late European discovery of the strait – it was first seen by a land party of Spanish colonialists in 1769, and first sailed by a Spanish ship in 1775, giving the native Ohlone tribes a bit more time before death and destruction descended upon them.
The fog has not been kind to sailors. Estimates claim that between 100 and 300 shipwrecks are buried in and around San Francisco, some truly deadly. A fascinating map of the buried ships (some under the city itself) can be inspected here. These days there are fog horns, situated mid-span and on the Southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge – the most photographed bridge in the world, they say – that guide maritime traffic to safety.
On the other hand, the fog is kind to the coastal red woods who get half of their moisture from the fog during the summer.
The history of the the bridge itself can be found here. No longer the longest suspension bridge in the world, it is still a thing of beauty and technological magic, considering it was opened in 1937.
Photographs of the strait and the bridge today were taken along the Lands End Coastal Trail, which was close to my apartment, sometimes foggy, and sometimes in full sun.
It is a beautiful, well maintained path, but too crowded for my spoiled taste groomed by Oregon’s empty spaces. Homesick, that’s what I am.
Music in honor of 75 years of the bridge (2012-competition.) Something different from our usual fare.
