Paths and Parks, Poppies and Panoramas
In May, I spent a few weeks of holiday back in Sonoma County. As ever, I spent as much time as I could on the bike trails and in the parks. As you’ll see in these photos, the California poppies were in bloom, the days were usually sunny but sometimes – as when Amy & I climbed to the top of Hood Mountain — pretty cloudy and even occasionally rainy. (That’s rare for May in California, in case you didn’t know.) In Haiti, where I’m spending most of my time these days, I rarely have the chance to linger by streams with wading birds and gliding ducks, or to enjoy little irises or turkeys fanning out during a hike in the woods. I’ve also included a couple of shots taken at Dolores Park, one of my favorite spots in San Francisco, which has been under reconstruction much of the past year and now looks fresh, new and as popular as ever.
The Trouble with Trees…
Taking pictures of them, that is. Especially when they’re 2,000 years old, enormous, and have curious and fascinating extrusions angling off in interesting directions. Or when its just grand and full, and no photo your little pocket-camera can capture could ever convey the enormity of leaning against its trunk and scanning the grey skies through its dense crown. That’s all my way of apologizing for the inadequacy of my attempts to show two of the grand heritage trees that can be found at Jack London State Historic Park, where with Steve & Mom, I spent a chunk of one of the last days of 2015. Mom and I had been before, to learn more about the man and his family and ideals and history. Really remarkable stuff, and it was clear to me that Chuck (my eldest brother) would have been good friends with the guy – seems he was quite the cut-up, aside from being quite work-driven and really a fairly original thinker in many ways. (He tried to experiment with sustainable farming in the first decades of the last century — well before the dust bowl first made obvious how badly we were over-farming the continent!) Anyhoo — here are just a bunch of shots from a hike Steve & I took to a remarkable, lone ancient redwood. I guess it’s the only old-growth redwood left, i.e. the only one that didn’t get cut down and turned into planks for housing some time between 1850 and 1980 or so. I’m fairly sure we saw new-growth redwoods coming back in various spots along the walk, which is nice to know. So many SF tourists stick with Muir Woods, which is certainly lovely but also a great deal more densely crowded than the many magnificent state parks which dot the coastal mountains both north and south of the city. If you’re interested in redwoods and considering a trip to the city, do think about ranging further afield…it’s well worth it.
That’s Steve with the ancient redwood behind him, especially the multi-tiered burl, which may look like a fungus or problem but is apparently one way the tree can reproduce itself if it needs to. I’m not quite clear on the mechanism, but it’s clear the coast redwoods have multiples systems of reproduction. Further down there’s a shot of me & Howard & Gene at sunset on the last day of 2015, at Limantour Beach in Point Reyes National Seashore – another great bay area location well worth visiting. 🙂
Family Holiday…at Home :-)
2015 was the first time since 2005, when I started this whole global-wanderer thing, that I’ve been at work only one flight away from the US, and in the same time zone as my mom and one of my brothers. This was also the first holiday season in more than a decade where both my brothers and I managed to get together in one place. Not only several lovely meals and afternoons together, but a trip to the local, fantastic, brewery in honor of my biggest brother’s new brewing ambitions. My sister-in-law generally stayed behind the camera, but certainly helped fill out the festive feeling for everyone. We got out and about a good deal, some with just mom and Steve who were able to stay longer, and some with Chuck as well. Lovely, and I’m going to let the many pics just speak for themselves. Some are really just family stuff of limited appeal to most of my readers…apologies, but it was special for me. 🙂
Seasons in Sonoma County
When I moved from New York City to southern California, a long-time family friend told me I’d miss seasons. While not untrue, this was also not entirely true. The joke among southern Californians at the time was that there were seasons but they were just different from the classic northern four — in LA, one had fire season, mudslide season, etc. Now I’ve spent the past decade and more roaming among assignments mostly well within the world’s tropical bands, I’ve learned more about the seasons not of winter and summer, autumn and spring — but of wet and dry, all too often also of malaria and cholera. As a world we seem also to be learning about the less-bad and even-worse seasons to attempt crossing the Mediterranean in an overcrowded wooden boat in the urgent hope of providing for yourself, your children, your spouse some kind of safety or opportunity more than you and yours face in the horn of Africa or parts of the Arabian peninsula. And meanwhile, would-be presidential politicians in the US whose great-great grandparents left northern Europe as economic migrants wax sanctimonious and try to bar the gates behind them and limit opportunity only to those who look, think and act like them. Ah well: when the politics and pain of the world get too much for me I think about the green grass of winter, and the brown grass of summer, on the hills of California.
Herewith some examples of the same places, at different times of year. And let me add, for blog readers new and returning: I’ve made some changes in design and layout recently. One feature I’m personally addicted to is the header image on this page, which should shuffle through a bunch of different images, changing pretty much each time you come back to it. I’ve tried to pick some of the most interesting things I’ve seen since I started this little blog thing in early 2005…so please, if you see things up there that you especially like, or that you think aren’t strong or interesting enough, drop me a comment or shoot me a note. I’m enjoying fiddling with the design and layout, and always love to hear from readers, whether I’ve met you yet in person or not. Thanks!
On & Around San Francisco Bay
…plus a few remnants from a series one might call ‘airports of the world.’ smw, slt has not gotten out and about with the camera much these past weeks, but I did realize there was a small cache of photos from some boat trips on the bay, and some hikes in Marin and Sonoma counties, that had not yet been posted. Since I get a bit homesick sometimes when I’m so far away, I’m putting these up so that I have an easy way to scan over them from time to time and remind myself what home looks like. Maybe some of you will enjoy it as well. All the photos have descriptive file names that show up if you hover over them or open them separately, I think. In the slide show below, you’ll see a panorama which goes from the Bay Bridge on the left (east), across the full waterfront of northern SF, to the Golden Gate Bridge & Marin Headlands on the right (west). Further down you’ll see some hiking shots from the trails in Tennessee Valley (Marin county), and Annadel State Park & Hood Mountain Regional Park (Sonoma County). In one of them you’ll see frost on the ground in the shadowy foreground: that was Christmas day last year – ah, how I long for frost on a hot afternoon here in Port au Prince! At the end are some photos of me and friends – at Wolf House in Jack London State Historic Park (Sonoma County) … and, well, me looking as lost as I felt, with some colleagues in Casablanca airport on my way home from Sierra Leone, last December. Our flight out of Freetown had been at some crazy hour like 2 am or 3 am or something, so we took the ferry over to the airport at 10pm or so, and snoozed in the waiting area and then flew for three hours to Casablanca to land at something like 8 in the morning. Oy, airports in which we have waited listlessly: might be a future series, what do you think?
California Scrapbook
So smw, slt has again left the continent and headed off to work. This time our work really won’t be anything we document on here, so both to clear my own to-do list, and to leave my friends with a sense of how well-rested I’ve become from these past two months in my spiritual and now literal home of California (well, literal in the sense I actually have a home there waiting for my return, not in the sense I’m there at the moment or expect to be for the next few months…), I’m giving a you a scrapbook of shots that piled up since my return from the ABQ wedding in mid-August. The bay, the golden gate bridge and Marin headlands as seen from Fort Mason; various scenes of Napa and Sonoma counties as seen from hikes & bikes around new new home base; some shots from a couple days last week (!) in Los Angeles – back to Topanga Canyon & the fountain in Grand Park on a nearly-full-moon night (the next night, we stood out on my balcony up north to watch the lunar eclipse at 3AM, how cool was that?!)…and scenes of the bay’s wetlands around Palo Alto as seen when I had the privilege of riding along for some training with my friend Amy who’s getting herself trained to fly a small plane.
If you’re curious about the work, there was a PBS frontline documentary filmed in early August at that project where I’ll very soon be working; from Europe I’m unable to launch the link but I’m fairly sure if you’re in the US you can find it here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ebola-outbreak/
As the man says, be well, do good work, and keep in touch. It’s certainly what I plan to do! Cheers.
(so much world, so little time....) 