Archive for the ‘nature’ Category

I have been struggling all week to find words for the emotions stirred by a yellowish twilight that came one evening at sundown, after a day of rain. It does not invoke despair, like Emily Dickinson’s  certain Slant of light. But it does cause me to pause whatever I am doing, to stand at the window and simply gaze.

When I was a child, my mother brought home a painting she had fallen in love with, and hung it on our livingroom wall. It was a street scene in an English village, all somber grays: gray stone row houses on a gray cobbled street that was wet with rain. Uphill from the houses stood a gray stone church, from a window of which shone a rectangle of yellow light. If I saw this picture again today, I might dismiss it as sentimental. But what caught my mother’s attention, and what makes me remember it now, is that the artist captured that moment of otherness as a storm clears, when we see beyond the everyday world, that strange and solemn moment before the light fails.

The Fort Bragg Haul Road this Saturday afternoon is  like a painting of a European beach promenade. Misty silhouettes in the silvery light, family groups with dogs and bicycles take the air in the short break between storms. The sea roars. A brisk wind lifts delicate plumes of spray from the waves.

The old Haul Road is a local treasure. Built in the early 1900s to haul logs to the Fort Bragg lumber mill, it is now part of the California coastal trail system. Further north, the sea has washed away much of the road, but for close to three miles, between the Pudding Creek Trestle Bridge at the edge of town and the campground at MacKerricher State Park,  it is still reasonably intact.

This afternoon, after a week of rain, people walk with smiles on their faces. The reservoirs and aquifers are filling up, ending fears of drought. More rain is forecast. Today the sky is blue and the sea magnificent.

Mid-morning the sky clears, a break between storms. Our generator rumbles. The power is out, a downed line somewhere back in the forest. So is our cable internet service. From the house we can see spume lifting high over the cliffs. Nothing for it but to go there, to walk the cliff path around the Mendocino Headlands, to exult in the roar, the tumble of white, the spritz of salt spray on our faces. At the big blowhole near Main Street, huge plumes of water rise with a satisfying ker-thump.

We decide to avoid the muddy parts of the trail further on, and head up to Main Street. Nearly all the stores are closed because of the power outage. But Gallery Bookshop, on the corner of Main and Kasten, is open, though unlit. We step in to say hi.

“Electricity, schmelectricity,” laughs Christie, the owner. “We never close. We just do everything on paper and input it later. We have the little swipe-swipe machine for credit cards. The only thing that’s hard to do without the computer is book searches.”

Tony finds a novel he wants, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize. At the checkstand in the center of the store we chat with Christie and two other staff members, Johanna and Jane, about this book and another we’ve been reading lately, A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book. I love the cosiness of these conversations about books. I love being a local in this remote and beautiful place.

Intermission at a Sunday afternoon concert, a knot of people take the air in the porch of Preston Hall. “That’s a beautiful sight,” a woman says, pointing to the rain sweeping in across Mendocino Bay. We are all excited. The weather gurus have warned that this rain is just precursor to a series of large storms expected to hit over the next several days.

“Remember that time we we had twenty, no forty inches of rain in one storm?” someone says.

“What about the time that rogue wave went right over the lighthouse?” Point Cabrillo Light Station, a one-story structure with a turret on top that holds a magnificent first order Fresnel lens, sits on a crumbling headland about fifty feet above the water.

“Not over the light, surely?”

“Over the roof, at least.”

Much damage?”

“Oh yes.”

I mention the first time Tony and I came to Mendocino, in 1970. In Navarro River Redwoods State Park, through which you drive to reach the coast, we were fascinated to see a plaque high up the cliff on the side of the road, marking how high the waters had come in the big flood. The date was 1965, I think. The plaque is gone now, but you can still see evidence of that flood. A whitish fungus covers the trunks of the redwood trees up to the waterline. It is particularly visible at night, illuminated by car headlights, a ghostly presence in the blackness of the forest.

The Navarro River still floods in major storms. Everyone who lives here on the coast quickly learns the alternate routes to reach inland destinations. Tree limbs fall. Mud slides. Sometimes all the roads are closed. Sometimes the power goes out for days. We learn how to hunker down. And afterward, we will have more stories.

An odd rattling sound as I sat at my desk Saturday afternoon. A slightly queasy, seasick feeling in my stomach. A sharp jolt shifted my brain into gear, and I bolted for the doorway.

The 6.5 magnitude quake centered off the coast of Humboldt County wasn’t a big deal here in Mendocino, but it was enough to remind us that we live in earthquake country. I still have vivid memories of crouching under my desk at Stanford University during the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, one hand holding tight to my pencil drawer to prevent pens, paper clips and miscellaneous junk from flying all over the room. After the shaking stopped, my office mate and I went upstairs to see how others had fared. We found a white faced co-worker in the hall. She happened to be away from her desk during the quake. Just as well: a large bookcase loaded with heavy binders had crashed onto her chair.

The recent quake is once again a reminder that there are things we can do to prepare ourselves for earthquakes. I look around my office now and am thankful my bookshelves are securely bolted to the wall.

Here on the Mendocino Coast, where winters are mild and rainy, now is the time to look for the first wildflower, Scoliopus bigelovii, commonly known as Slink Pod. The shady bank down by our creek, where I usually see them, was littered today with debris where the top of an old  fir had fallen, but there was still one plant unsmushed by the crash, a new bud opening, and spent flower heads already slinking off to find new earth for their seeds.

Walking on the cliff trail at MacKerricher State Park yesterday, my friends and I watched a flock of Yellow-Rumped Warblers flitting from rock to rock just above the waves. A willow thicket was nearby, so they were not far from their typical habitat. But an unexpected flash of bright color where the white/gray/brown of our regular shorebirds is the usual color scheme. We speculated that they were attracted by the clouds of tiny flies that hovered above a coil of freshly washed-up bull kelp.

New Years Day. the ritual of changing the calendars. I take down the old  Nature Conservancy calendar, with its beautiful wildlife pictures, and hang its replacement,  the 2010 calendar.  I replace the little tide book tucked behind the portable radio on a kitchen counter. My book shows the high and low tides as a wavy line undulating across the days of the month. My moon chart too is visual: for each month, an arching line of moons, their phases making a dramatic pattern of light and dark across the year. I love these graphic images. I love too, that by comparing the charts for moon and tide,  I can see the pull of the moon’s gravity on water, can glimpse the rhythms that make up our world.

We made the acquaintance of a California Brown Bat yesterday. He had been hiding in a stack of five-gallon black plastic pots on the porch of my garden shed. Daughter-in-law Diana and grandson Timothy needed a pot for some project, and were startled to hear a loud hiss. Two pots down in the stack, there it was: chestnut brown fur, black feet, large yellow-brown fangs chittering angrily at being disturbed in the middle of the day. (Here’s  a picture by Tom Jolly of a similarly angry bat.) Everyone gathered round to look, an opportunity for a conversation with the grandchildren about the useful role bats play in the environment, and about the possibility of building a bat house to encourage more bats to the property. Very carefully, I lifted the pot and set it on its side in a shady place, so that the bat could escape to some more secluded place to resume its sleep.

The last of a wintry sun touches the leaves of the olive tree in my garden. The resident Anna’s hummingbird gathers the last beakful of nectar and comes to perch. A burbling of quail under the bushes. Peace on earth.