County Views.2
I promise this won’t be all smokey skies, but this is the current reality and sometimes one has to stop and capture even the unpleasant moments. These hills are quite close and usually distinctly visible. The good news is the sky did clear a bit again within a few hours of this photo so the sunset was reasonably clear…as seen in the shot of the early sunset taken just about five hours later. (Yes, trust me, a wind and maybe a pressure change really had cleared the sky – it’s a good touch more blue and less gray even if it doesn’t show on your screen…)
County Views.1
Welcome to a new series, to which I’ll be trying to add a new post every day as much as possible. Think of it as the local fire-and-covid-and-whatever-else-may-come version of my Dhaka “if I’ve posted today, it means I’m healthy, coherent, and housed-with-internet enough to load and post something for my friends, family and any other viewers who stumble upon my little visual exploration of my surrounding environment. Since this series will cover some of my very favorite places in the whole – wide – world, you never know what you might see :-). Enjoy…and comment or send nice notes if you feel inspired.
Smoke Gets in … Everything :-(
As a kid, one great pleasure of summer was sitting by a campfire: whether at sleep-away camp or a family camping trip; whether at a National Park campfire program (yes, some actually happened by real, live campfires when Mom took us out camping in the way-back-when…) or the local county park, you could pretty much always count on toasted marshmallows and that magical feeling fire inspires among most boys when it’s under control and after dark .
That was then. This is now. Now is, to be frank, a year which reminds of me of Queen Elizabeth’s declaration that 1992 was an “Annus Horribilis.” Heck, for me 1992 went pretty well because I recall getting tears in my eyes when Ohio’s electoral map went blue and I realized for the first time in my life there’d be an inhabitant of the white house who wouldn’t just hate and judge me for how I was born. (There were fewer letters in the acronym and far less widespread acceptance of us folks on the rainbow spectrum, back then.) But 2020? Definitely annus horribilis territory.
This week’s pile-upon A-H stressor in my home region of northern California? Unusually early wildfires caused by extremely unusual thunder and lighting on Sunday and again Monday last week, which were in turn caused by unusually early and extreme high heat. Sonoma County currently has two active wildfires which have caused a new wave of evacuation orders. This was not an annual occurrence, even just six years ago when I settled here. Yet still we have folks (one of them the current occupant of that house on Pennsylvania Avenue) intent upon denying evidence and steering us ever further into global-warming catastrophe.
It does all get a bit much at times, doesn’t it? There’s been more smoke in the air and bits of ash falling through the air than I myself have experienced, but that’s because I was back east for the worst of the 2017 fires near here. For those who haven’t lived through regional wildfires like this, when you hear smoke in the air don’t think about those summer campfires with a clear column of wood-smoke rising and leaving your clothes with that distinct smell. Think a very heavy misty presence of something that certainly smells fairly smokey but, here 20 or more miles from the current fire line nearest me, not as strong or obvious as those long-ago pleasant campfire smells. It’s heavy, bad for the lungs, oppressive to the spirit, and very visible in the sky – as witness these photos whose names all tell you when they were taken, between Tuesday and yesterday.
The first wildfires near me were sparked by lighting some time on Monday, but it was Tuesday evening that I first watched the sunset out my windows and realized the heavy horizon and dark sun meant more fire smoke. Now each day I check when I wake up, whether the smoke layer seems worse or better than the day before. In the mornings the air is usually much clearer – higher moisture in the air must bind the smoke and keep it closer to the ground or something like that. Yesterday evening was a pleasantly clear surprise, and this morning seemed fine enough that I chose to bike over to Sebastopol to grab a late-morning bite with friends…but then the smoke moved in fast, the air got thicker and yuckier, and biking back wasn’t quite so pleasant. And weather forecasters say there may be more lightning in the coming hours, possibly sparking yet more fires. Annus horribilis, anyone?
I hope to start posting more regularly, perhaps even daily if I get really organized. I’ve taken lots of prettier photos of nice things one can see on and around the bike trails, streets and parks of my home region which I’ve been gladly exploring by foot, bike and even occasionally car for the … seven weeks since I got home.
Urban Aviary: A/V Edition :-)
There’s a first time for everything and so this is my first experiment with recording songbirds in the morning. One of the silver linings to the dark cloud of movement restrictions and social-distancing that has come with the Covid-19 era, at least here in Dhaka, is reduced noise of traffic and a corresponding increase in my ability to hear the natural sounds around me. Since I also spend more time in the apartment since I work from home, I’ve gotten to know our local birds better. One morning this week I awoke to the sweetest birdsong, and if this works out, above is a link so you can hear it. You may need to unmute or turn your volume up. Listen closely in the first seconds, and you should hear a more distant bird calling first – then one near me starts up a bit louder: these two seemed clearly to be responding to each other. If you listen quite closely at the very end you’ll hear a muezzin beginning the morning call to prayer from a bit farther away. I quite enjoy these morning sounds as the sky slowly lightens, and the relative absence of car horns has most definitely been a + in my book 🙂
By the way, if anyone has any idea what this bird is, let me know. It’s one of the lovelier calls I hear sometimes. One can hear crows aplenty – my brother Steve commented on their raucous calls in one of the videos of the urban mango harvest recently.
These next birds I know well and always knew were fun songbirds to listen to. On many of my office days in June (we’ve had partial staff going in one or two days a week to try to be a bit more productive and keep a bit more common team spirit), I noticed that a pair of these myna birds seemed to enjoy my window ledge at least as much as the other bird whose photo there I had published back in January (check that out here: https://somuchworldsolittletime.wordpress.com/2020/01/18/lakes-streets-of-dhaka/) One day they were chirping and singing to each other or to their own reflections in the windwo so much that I simply had to collect a bit of video. It’s rare even with these common birds for them to be so close and still not see you since the window is mirrored and if I was quiet, they stayed a long time.
And finally, a potted plan claimed for bird-dirt-bath use by a local sparrow. For a few days, I noticed more and more dirt on the ground and wondered what – on – earth – was – happening?! I mean, yes we had heavy rain storms with wind…but no other pots created this kind of dirty footprint all around them on that balcony or any other balcony. So wtf?! Then one day I saw a little sparrow flit merrily between the bars on the balcony and flutter its wings to cover them in dirt and “bathe” itself. I assume this reduced little insects or something of that sort. Does anyone know for sure?
Urban Garden.27
Ok, so these two potted plants (or, as our English friends would call them, pot plants) on my balcony just kept kicking up new surprises right up until the moment of my departure. Spurred by the curiosity of so much time at home with a need to get up and walk around and look out my windows in order to unchain myself from my work-at-home computer-email-obsessive habits, I watched as the potted plant on the right sent up new stalks. I calmly assumed that, since the leaves and habit of the plants in both pots seemed quite entirely the same, that the flowers would turn out pretty much the same also. And yet, experienced liver of life that I am, I failed to recall that when one assumes, one makes as ass of yourself and myself :-). Check it out! That big close-up just above here — ain’t it cool! And yet online photo research (for reasons unknown to me, the government of Northern Territory in Australia seems to have a thing with helliconia — or at least to come up early in google searches for photos of helliconia).
To me, this new flower clearly looks like a relative but more of a cousin than a brother of the flowers coming out of the first potted plant to set flowers. To do your own comparisons, and to see yet again why it’s so easy to think those first ones to flower are in fact strelitzia (bird of paradise) flowers rather than helliconia flowers, check out the second post I did from these remarkably productive plants next to my meditation space: https://somuchworldsolittletime.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/urban-garden-13/
Signs of the City.70
So before my cousin Sam asks me where the “sign” is, let me ask a philosophical question: do not markings on roads work to communicate something to drivers? And is the purpose of a “sign” not the communication of information? Are not the markings on a flower an effort to communicate information to potential pollinators? Chew on that before you comment, young man… 🙂
(so much world, so little time....) 