Sight

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2011

July 4th’s vigilant gaze above leftcoast cliffshores
Probe passions inside from landside an outside
Buddyless lone surfer surveys cold western swell
Where seafoam tidelines mark California edgerock

Green Pacific waters dissolve to grey Pacific mist
Fogs waft north to hide Marin and Point Reyes
Boredom of onshore hours in flat sessions
Send Buddyless and board wheeling homeward

Can the dragon guard of an approaching stormfront
Hear whispers of struggle between angry friends
C'est une question morale ancient exemplars adjure
Green eyes seek new horizons beyond the Farallones

Where I Was In The West

This was originally written in 2005. It was created during what I think of as my insomniac period.

IT HAS AWAYS
SEEMED TO ME
HERE IN THE WEST,
WEST OF THE WEST
WHERE THE WEST
BECAME THE OLD WEST
AND THE OLD WEST
WAS THE FRONTIER
AND THE FRONTIER
WAS EAST OF THE WEST
AND WEST OF THE WEST
WAS WHERE I WAS.
IT HAS ALWAYS
SEEMED TO ME
HERE IN THE WEST
WEST OF THE WEST
WHERE NEW IDEAS
EXPLODE OLD IDEAS
AND OLD IDEAS
LOOSE THEIR MINDS
AND MINDS GO EAST
AND EAST OF THE WEST
OLD TO A WEST
IS NEW TO AN EAST.

Carmen McRae With Summer Memory

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2007

Sitting at my desk, I am listening to Carmen McRae and thinking about a time past.

I heard a therapist repeat a phrase that felt like she had said over and over to many clients. "The future is anxiety, the past is depression." Naturally, in her milieu, she would say such a thing. A therapist deals with anxieties and depressions, and neuroses and psychosis, all day long. But the future and past might just be expressions that are descriptive of when something might or might not have occurred.

Almost anything seems to evoke or provoke memory or thought in me.

Listening to Carmen McRae I was reminded of a scene of summer in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Why do the cool urbane tones of McRae remind me of this rural mind-photo? The possibility exists that when this particular scene etched itself on my memory, I had been listening to her inside my house and wandered outside, and there before my eyes were California liveoak trees and sere summer grass, bleached almost transparent by the heat. There is also, directly in front of me, the gate my father had built into our front pasture. My father was not fond of new technology and never owned a credit card, or an ATM card. He didn't want an "efficient" fence, he seemed to want to reach for a kind of esthetic, so when he built the fence, he did not buy metal posts and a post driver, and then build what was then called sheep fencing. Sheep fencing consisted of wires woven into four or five inch squares and then topped with two or three strands of barbed wire. Our fence was a throwback.

My father dug each post hole with a digger that resembled two individual shovels hinged together like a scissors. He then bought irregularly shaped cedar posts soaked in creosote and positioned them in the holes so that a somewhat flat face could hold and receive four strands of barbed wire running parallel and held with "staples", which were really double ended nails bent into a u-shape and pounded into each post over the strands of wire. We had a neighbor who seemed to like spending more time at our house than at his own, which had picture windows and a swimming pool and evidently a nagging wife; anyway, the neighbor once asked my father why he hadn't done it the "easy" way. My father gave one of his mysterious, laconically styled responses that was calculated to tell an asker that they had just asked a question that was, stupid, irrelevant, pointless, none of their business, and at the same time, gave them a definite sense that my father was a rugged individualist right out of the wild west. It was very effective.

But the real answer was that what he had was what he wanted. But that isn't the point of this. I was speaking about the gate. This gate, unlike our corral gate, three wooden bars which slid to the side to open, consisted of a relatively straight tree branch to which were wound the strands of barbed wire. The bottom of the branch was fitted into a loop of bailing wire and then pulled into a vertical position and a another loop of bailing wire was slid over the top of the branch. This very old-fashioned kind of gate, my father told me, was called a "California gate". I have often wondered if in Nebraska it might be called a Nebraska gate, but the thought that it had originated in California seemed special to me. It made it seem to contain special energy because it was labelled Californian.

But why when I am listening to Carmen McRae, a quintessential New Yorker, was I reminded of summer in California?

I suppose there might be something in the sound of her voice, a horn being blown through sand, that starts a lightening chain of associations leading bio-electrical impulses down some meandering synaptic course until, at last, they arrive at a summer scene in the Sierra Nevada foothills stored in an old brain closet. Maybe it is just my current mood or something I have eaten or seen out of the corner of my eye. There is an image in memory and whatever has caused it to appear is welcome. The image may indeed, be false. But it is there.

With the sound of Carmen McRae's voice moving below a pale blue burning sky, I see the trees, shining spiked green leaves, grass, yellow-gold from heat, fine yellow dust that only a whisper of a breeze will lift into clouds to cloak the grass and the trees.

And I see the California gate.

Pacific Postings

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2007

A couple of days before Memorial Day, an appointment with a dentist for a second opinion and I want a trip to the beach. I need a trip to the beach. So my friend and I pack up our camera stuff and jump in his car and head for Point Reyes National Seashore.

My agitation from the dental appointment is so great I forget to bring sunblock. When we finally arrive at Point Reyes I realize this and my friend pulls out something that looks like a roll-on deodorant which I laugh at and turn down but my friend insists that it is not deodorant, it's a hiking lubricant with sunblock in it.

A hiking lubricant. Something you apply where something might chafe. With sunblock. If clothing is chafing somewhere, that means it's rubbing on your body and irritating it. If clothing is irritating your body wouldn't it be covering the part of the bady that's being chafed? If it's covered why does it need sunblock? Doesn't matter, the sunblock worked even though it smelled kind of funny.

As we drove through the Olema Valley, which sits atop the San Andreas Fault, I couldn't help but notice the beauty of this place. The Point Reyes National Seashore to the west with its conifers, California bay-laurel trees, oaks and wildflowers rather promiscuously showing themselves to the bees and tourists like myself, always gives me a sense of anticipation. That sense is exceptional in the spring when sunlight has a crisp quality which has attracted painters for a couple of centuries.

We took Limantour Beach road over the ridge-top of Point Reyes and parked in one of those lots that have been created a few hundred yards from the ocean. We had to wait for a woman with four children, unloading her van with beach paraphernalia to close her door so we could park. While she was unloading and we were getting our camera stuff together her children took off at high speed for the water in a comic follow-the-leader kind of full-tilt run. It was nice to see them filled with the same sort of anticipation I felt.

I offered to help their mother carry her beach things which she refused but I felt better for the attempt. After this semi-charitable effort we walked out to the beach and began to take photos. I had taken a few when I finally figured out the timing on the digital camera I was using. It is an older Olympus with an amazing zoom but its speed of response needs a different kind of understanding than my film cameras.

It was one of those moments when everything comes together. I was looking through the viewfinder at breaking waves and thinking "if only I could catch one of those at the right moment", and then I pressed the camera trigger half way to focus the zoom lens which worked the way it was supposed to, then watched as the wave started to break and in a moment of emotional overload pressed the trigger all the way and heard the digital shutter beep and voilá I had a picture of a breaking wave. My first successful shot of something moving.

The big success here was not the wave; the big success was the understanding I got for the timing of the camera. I have been trying to capture action shots with no success. I almost had an inner glow; my anticipation completely paid off with an "ah-hah, so that's the way it works!"

Maybe timing is everything.

Water of Life

Throughout my life I have felt a certain affinity for the character of California's seasons. Their unusual nature seems to affect the commentary made by residents and non-residents. I have heard on many occasions individuals protest that it would be hard for them to live in California because it has "no seasons". I have also heard individuals state that they wouldn't live in any other place. Famously, when Julia Child moved back to her native Santa Barbara and someone asked her if she wouldn't miss New England's seasons she replied, "no, I like it just like this every day."

It is a mistake to think that California has no seasons. The entire thousand mile length has seasons aplenty for anyone who cares to notice but sometimes those periods are strangely at odds with the calendar. It is true in California that you could drive from one end of the state to the other and find in any given month the weather of any given season. It is also true that a season in California may last only a month, or a week. You have to enjoy and experience them when they happen. Here the seasons encourage an enjoyment of the moment.

In the eastern part of the United States there is a saying that if you don't like the weather, wait ten minutes. I have often told eastern friends in California that if they didn't like the weather they would have to wait...and wait. There is sometimes a sameness about how the weather plays out but it is also true that my state is a true study in contrasts. I have often walked out my door on a beautifully clear and sunny day in January that looks like it ought to be a day in April or May only to be greeted by frigid air and frozen ground or looked outside at a bleak gray day in the same month thinking it would be cold only to step outside the same door to be wrapped in near tropical heat. These are surprises that I genuinely love.

I frequently wonder how global warming will change California's character. We are certainly a state hungry for water over which residents have fought real battles; and I mean with real guns. California's water law is very complicated. Very, very complicated. The problem has always been getting the water from where it is to where it is needed (or wanted). The obvious corollary to that problem is who wants it. The character of global warming seems to be most of all a change in the behavior of water, as ice, as snow, as rain, as ocean.

Water is necessary for life; this is a truism. Every plant from lichens to giant redwoods and creatures from single cell amoebas to blue whales must have water in one form or another. Life needs water. People are living creatures and they need water also, and while they are not the only creature to work up ways to control water, they certainly produce the most complicated ways of controlling it, and in California we have probably produced the most complicated system on the planet for accessing, storing and transporting and processing water.

What if California experiences a longer drought than experienced historically? What if we experience greatly wetter years? What if we get one of those combinations in contrast that I mentioned earlier: a very, very wet season and a very, very dry hot season? What if we get say (and I am sure it could happen) a reversal of when dry and wet "normally" occur? I don't believe our political system is set up very well to handle such events. I don't believe any political system is set up to handle such events.

Anyone that knows me would say this sounds strange coming from me but I put a lot of faith in the systems as they are, mostly because there isn't anything else. I also know that kind of belief is not well founded. It is just that I hope that the systems in place will work when there is a crisis. The California Office of Emergency Preparedness encourages individuals and families to keep emergency supplies on hand for earthquakes and similar natural disasters. COEP will gladly send anyone a list of what they consider necessary for such emergencies. So far I don't believe they have given any public announcements about possible global warming effects. How could they?

Could a possible effect be a major alteration of seasonal characteristics? The answer seems to be an unequivocal yes. Might those changes in seasons affect some parts of the world and leave other parts untouched, at least climatically? Possibly, but wouldn't changes elsewhere put unbelievable stresses on "untouched" climates? My guess is, very probably.

For instance, California can not help but be affected by changes to sea level. A change in sea level in any direction will alter coastlines. Harbors and bays, beaches, wetlands like those around San Francisco and San Pablo Bays, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta could all be inundated with a small rise or dessicated with a drop in sea level. Most, if not all of California's waterways are already major areas of contention and acrimony between agriculture, developers, environmental groups, recreational interests, government offices and bureaus at both state and federal levels, corporate interests and ordinary citizens who depend in one way or another on these resources. What should the priorities be and who should set them? Who indeed, is setting them now?

I can not help but think preventative discussions and action such as Governor Schwarzenegger's attempts at levee repair are truly in order. It does not matter who gets the credit although politicians and corporate interests would have us believe so; someone must start the discussion.

The future of people on the leftcoast depend on it.