11.30.2002
I had a tour yesterday of the "paper streets": pathways, no more than single track dirt trails mostly, that wind through the two valleys of Inverness. On a map, these paths are laid out as streets, but were never built. On them, one can get from place to place without having to use the car streets much. I had stumbled upon one path and had used it to cross from Second Valley into First. Others I had glimpsed but assumed they were private paths. They aren't, but they contain the private comings and goings of a town.
One winds its way onto the back of the Episcopal church property and the path widens in several places where altars are erected, and ends at a large stone cross.
Berkeley has paths like these, more urban, of course, and they are called "steppes". Sausalito has them as well. One such famously extends into the bay at Pelican Harbor, and boats were, for a time, not allowed to dock on that "street" until the harbormaster passed back into the town's favor.
You think that you know a town by what you see, but there remains a hidden life waiting to be revealed. In the film 'Rivers and Tides' about the art of Andy Goldsworthy, he recounts a conversation with an old woman who had lived in the Scottish town where he lives all her life. She said something like this: You think you know this street because you know who lives here and all of their children, but when I walk down this street I don't see just them, but all of the people who used to live here.
It's time in a place that reveals it's treasures to us, and our connection to it. I've been drawn to Inverness since the day I first saw it. What I loved about it then I still love, only now I'm beginning to know what I love. I've only caught a glimpse of the treasure at the heart of the town, only a glimmer of the depth of it, and I'll continue to wander the paper streets searching for more.
posted by Lisa on 6:21 PM link |
11.29.2002
Starting with Little Things
by William Stafford
Love the earth like a mole,
fur-near. Nearsighted,
hold close the clods,
their fine-print headlines.
Pat them with soft hands --
But spades, but pink and loving; they
break rock, nudge giants aside,
affable plow.
Fields are to touch;
each day nuzzle your way.
Tomorrow the world.
posted by Lisa on 10:06 AM link |
11.26.2002
There is a cast of birds who regularly inhabit my beach: all loners. There is the almost invisible spotted sandpiper who follows the scalloped line of the water, a dark-eyed junco who sings from atop the boat pulley, and a great blue heron who mostly dominates from the end of the pier, or at low tide evenings fishes from shore.
Ours is a great beach for solitude. I often see footprints but only rarely do I run into my neighbors. It is a thinking place. Dramatic changes in lighting, sky, temper and temperature make it a new place full of wonder with each visit. The scope of the landscape and the drama of the beauty make it a place of constant reflection: like stepping into a room where there is always only yourself.
The colder waters have brought more plentiful food and the winter residents gather offshore. I can hear them from the beach. The cormorants are growing in number -- a quick count through my binoculars says close to 700. White and brown pelicans mix with gulls of indeterminate kind. On the opposite shore, egrets and terns.
The breadth of what I see as well as the range of what I can see from here is particular and rooted in this beach. Each day as I walk from one end to the other, low tide and high, it becomes more a part of me, more a part of how I look, where I look, and what I look for. Huge parts of the bay remain unseen. I wonder how to include more of it in my seeing without
losing the depth of vision that comes with this focus on the particular.
posted by Lisa on 5:41 PM link |
11.24.2002
We gathered in the theater downtown and the movie hit the screen and together we were moved . Every seat filled. The movie is called "Standing in the Shadows of Motown" And we were blown away. This documentary chronicles the men behind the sound of Motown. They created it. They played on thousands of Motown songs with hundreds of hits -- as the movie states, they created more hits than the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Elvis combined. They were called the Funk Brothers, and all the Motown stars went to Studio A, or the "snakepit", to get the magical sound that these guys made. The Funk Brothers were behind much of the music of bands like the Supremes, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and Gladys Knight.
In the audience we laughed, tapped our feet, and even broke out in spontaneous applause at one point in the film. At the end, people stayed in their seats to chair-dance to the credits.
The movie begins with a dialogue with Joe Hunter, piano player with the Funk Brothers until 1963. He says time went by and by, and we wondered if anybody would ever know what we had done. Last night we gathered in that theater to witness what they had done.
The Funk Brothers were paid for their work, and were known by fellow musicians in their industry in their time. They enjoyed a measure of success, but have never been widely recognized for their collosal achievement. It is so important that this movie is playing in theaters and that people have an opportunity to see it in that setting, so that their work can be known by communities, not just by individuals in their homes. Several of the Brothers died before this film was made, and before the recognition that is now coming their way. One of them was a guitarist named Robert White and when Motown left Detroit abruptly to move to Los Angeles, he was one of a few Funk Brothers who followed them there. One of his friends went to visit him and as they walked into a restaurant the famous guitar hook that he had created for 'My Girl' began to play. Robert White turned to the waiter and said, "hear that?, I..." and then stopped. The friend said, "you were gonna to tell him that was yours, why did you stop?" And Robert White said, "He wouldn't believe an old fool like me did that?" He died under-appreciated, and that is the crime that this movie is addressing for those Funk Brothers who are still alive.
One thread that runs through the work and their talk about the work is the tremendous soul that these men have. They are connected to each other in a deep way, and they are connected to music that way also. The stories of being drawn to an instrument like a calling: one of the Funk Brothers grew up dirt poor and fashioned a guitar by attaching a single string to the side of his house, and made music by plucking it and by running a piece of glass over the surface; another tells a story about his father who attached a rubber band to both ends of a bowed stick, then planted one end of that stick in an ant hill and made the ants dance.
These men love each other like family and this is the film's greatest contribution to its audience. Most of them have thrived as people because of their soulful connection to each other as brothers, as musicians, as idea. They missed the recognition of their contribution to music, but most of them don't seem to have suffered as people because of that lack. They don't appear bitter, but truly grateful that they are now coming into appreciation. When Motown closed its Detroit doors one day without any notice, most of them just went back to doing what they had done before the Studio A era -- playing in clubs and wherever else they could.
"Standing in the Shadows of Motown": it's a beautiful thing to see -- you can hear the music, and you can feel the heart in every note.
posted by Lisa on 9:11 AM link |
11.21.2002
I was looking for the origin of the term "murder of crows" when I found a discussion on a word origin forum covering just that topic.
Apparently, the use of murder to mean a group of crows is poetic but not scientific. The reference isn't noted in the OED. But it is noted in An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton. So are the following uses of collective nouns, many of which have been in use for many years by hunters, fishermen and other common (non-biologist) folks:
A covey of partridges
A rafter of turkeys
A brood of hens
A fall of woodcocks
A dule of doves
A wedge of swans
A party of jays
A company of parrots
A colony of penguins
A cover of coots
A sord of mallards
A dissimulation of birds
A peep of chickens
A pitying of turtledoves
A paddling of ducks [on the water]
A siege of herons
A charm of finches
A skein of geese [in flight] a tidings of magpies
A cast of hawks
A deceit of lapwings
An ostentation of peacocks
A bouquet of pheasants
A congregation of plovers
An unkindness of ravens
A building of rooks
A host of sparrows
A descent of woodpeckers
A mustering of storks
A flight of swallows
A watch of nightingales
A murmuration of starlings
A spring of teal
A parliament of owls
An exaltation of larks
posted by Lisa on 8:56 PM link |
11.18.2002
what I hear:
Cormorants calling as individuals startle and fly from one group to another; flapping take-off of brown pelicans; lapping high-tide water on the pier and on the beach; a loud truck from across the bay speeding towards Marshall; concentrated sigh of my bird-watching dog flopping on the boards of the pier.
see:
Cormies spread out as far as I can see, more than 400 now by my best count. They move, you see, and are difficult to count. Brown pelicans amongst the cormorants. Four or five harbor seals swimming and diving amongst the birds -- food must be rich and prevalant. A rowboat heading towards the shore opposite and to the south, three men leaving a moored boat? The hills to the east and even directly across to the northeast are mere impressions of outline inside the misty white of sea and sky. The steely water is rippled but glassy, reflecting the flora of the near cliffs.
feel:
The wind picks up speed and blows from the southeast, cold and steady.
see:
The water surface is textured by the wind. The glassiness is gone, replaced by small surface waves.
hear:
The air rushes past my ears.
feel:
Contentment and longing. Energized yet yearning for a morning nap. Desire for unending days with no plans and only time stretching before me...unflinching possibility. It's beautiful but it hurts.
posted by Lisa on 8:17 PM link |
11.15.2002
From a time, not too long ago, when the skies filled with birds, and when we had even more fear and less understanding of the world around us than we do today:
Audubon Reader
John James Audubon
as read in Diary of a Left-Handed Birdwatcher
Leonard Nathan
'Audubon describes the return of the Passenger Pigeons to their roosts on the banks of the Gren River in Kentucky:
As the period of their arrival approached, their foes anxiously prepared to receive them. Some were furnished with iron-pots containing sulphur, others with torches of pine-knots, many with poles, and the rest with guns. the sun was lost to our view, yet not a Pigeon had arrived. Every thing was ready, and all eyes were gazing on the clear sky, which appeared in glimpses amidst the tall trees. Suddenly there burst forth a general cry of "Here they come!" The noise which they made, though yet distant, reminded me of a hard gale at sea, passing through the rigging of a close-reefed vessel. As the birds arrived and passed over me, I felt a current of air that surprised me. Thousands were soon knocked down by the pole-men. The birds continued to pour in. The fires were lighted, and a magnificent, as well as wonderful and almost terrifying, sight presented itself. The Pigeons, arriving by thousands, alighted everywhere, one above another, until solid masses as large as hogsheads were formed on the branches all round. Here and there the perches gave way under the weight with a crash, and, falling to the ground, destroyed hundreds of the birds beneath, forcing down the dense groups with which every stick was loaded. It was a scene of uproar and confusion. I found it quite useless to speak, or even to shout to those persons who were nearest to me. Even the reports of the guns were seldom heard, and I was made aware of the firing only by seeing the shooters reloading.
...The Pigeons were constantly coming, and it was past midnight before I perceived a decrease in the number of those that arrived...The howlings of the wolves now reached our ears, and the foxes, lynxes, cougars, bears, raccoons, oppossums and pole-cats were sneaking off, whilst eagles and hawks of different species, accompanied by a crowd of vultures, came to supplant them, and enjoy their share of the spoil.
...Persons unacquainted with these birds might naturally conclude that such dreadful havock would soon put an end to the species. But I have satisfied myself, by long observation, that nothing but the gradual diminution of our forests can accomplish their decrease, as they not unfrequently quadruple their numbers yearly, and always at least double it.'
Of course, passenger pigeons became extinct in 1914.
Hard to imagine a bird so prolific that Audubon once traveled 55 miles while migrating flocks of passenger pigeons filled the sky the entire way. He reports that these numbers continued for three days hence.
I live in a mecca of birds and birdwatching, but birds never fill the sky. It must be an awesome sight, one that can still be seen in certain places along their migratory routes: the Everglades, or Izembek Lagoon in Alaska.
My appreciation of birds lies separate from their numbers. I love in each it's surprising beauty, it's mastery of the sky, and it's song. Yesterday a song sparrow flew hard into the picture window of my house. I brought him inside and held him, letting his last warmth flow into my hand. His broken neck a particular sadness.
posted by Lisa on 8:17 PM link |
11.10.2002
The big storm arrived Thursday and has lasted til today, or else a series of storms has been here, one after another. On Thursday night winds up to 70 mph closed the Richmond/San Rafael Bridge. Here, nothing so dramatic but we woke Friday to downed and split trees and branches littering the roads.
Our beach was transformed and is taking on its winter shape. The sand is split where the creek has gained breadth and strength. The high tides of this weekend have furthered that breach and now there is a several feet deep trough to cross.
This morning I watched a grey squirrel being aggressively chased by an acorn woodpecker. She was chattering, diving at the squirrel and chasing him out to the very end of an oak branch. He stayed still but the woodpecker wasn't satisfied. She dove at him again and he made a heroic leap onto a very thin branch of a redwood tree. That branch was new and bent almost parrallel with the tree trunk and the squirrel hung on until it steadied andd then he miraculously made his way up it. Still the woodpecker came at him, and she chased him all the way to the top of that tree. He held his position then very quietly. She waited just around the trunk from him and down a couple of feet -- daring him to move. Finally, she tired of the game and flew off, joining a chorus of birds enjoying the morning's break in the weather.
Aftwards, we drove to McClure's Beach at the end of Pierce Point. By the time we got out of the car it was into a mini-squall: sideways rain, heavy winds and no thanks. We backtracked then and went out to North Beach on a quest to see the massive waves that were rumored coming in. As we left the point the weather calmed quite a bit, so that it was only drizzling and windy as we walked down to the sand.
The waves were somewhere in the 8-12 foot range. Not quite the 20-footers we were hoping for but still formidable. The ocean and sky a wash of white as clouds met churning foam. The breakers were pushing thick, fluffy foam up the sand. It piled up there and shook under pressure from the wind until ultimately pieces of it would be torn off and blown across the sand and into the dunes.
We caught some of the action here (2.6MB) in true Andy Goldsworthy fashion.
posted by Lisa on 10:34 PM link |
11.07.2002
11.7.02
From 'Diary of a Left-Handed Birdwatcher'
by Leonard Nathan
'I dream of the sacred book of birds again. I dream that I open it to an account of a fifteenth-century Italian traveler, one Virgilio Stampari, concerning the poet Abu Ibn Sulam, who, blind from birth, is reputed to have composed 999 poems, each with a different bird in it, some of them -- like the Silver Sparrow and the Rainbow Cuckoo -- already extinct before the Flood. Not a single example of Abu's work remains. For to this poet, to sing was to compose -- or to compose was to sing. Thus his poems flew off into the air like birds loosed from a cage.
Stampari also tells us that crouched at the poet's knee was a slave boy who could whistle to perfection the songg of any bird that came to drink or bathe in the waters of the fountain on whose steps the poet sat every day, all day. The boy was otherwise mute, his tongue cut out by the pirates who sold him to the poet. Listening to the boy's imitation of a song, Abu would promptly create from it a poetic bird more vivid, more alive, more whole than the original.
Stampari was not an eyewitness to this marvel but, he tells us, offers the reports of Syrian merchants, how trustworthy he neglects to say He concludes with this cryptic observation: "Perhaps after all, truth follows fact, although at some distance, but the mouth is a cunning instrument."'
posted by Lisa on 7:22 PM link |
11.06.2002
11.06.02
I'm waiting for the rain. Tonight, they say, she's coming, and when she comes she ain't gonna stop for days. One days-long, fat storm to soak dry-fallen-leaf-strewn paths with high winds to bring down tree limbs and rattle windows. Well, bring it on, I say. Recently I spent a couple of years in southern California, scene of my childhood where it barely rains. Rain is always somewhat startling there, and it doesn't really fit in. Here in northern California rain defines an entire part of the year with pre-rain preparations, rain back-up plans, rain damage control, talk of rain, and the rain itself.
Tonight I'll dig out my mud boots and lean them next to my cool field hat by the door. I'll build a fire and sip tea and read a book about migratory birds. I'll wake up at the sound of rain on my skylight and give thanks for the water coming down from the sky -- may it fill road-holes with mud, may it bless the parched earth.
Tomorrow at the post office people will arrive to check their mail amidst showers. Greetings will be louder and happier than before as people shake the drops off their first-day-of-the-season-raingear.
Some years are dry, but most of the time we can count on water falling from the sky. Ain't it fine?
posted by Lisa on 8:09 PM link |
11.02.2002
November is here bringing schizophrenic weather. In the morning, we blazed a fire to keep out the thirty-something cold yet this afternoon walking I could have worn shorts and been comfortable. I dove in the bay, too, thinking that this could be one of the last tempting days to swim. The water has grown pretty cold in the last two weeks.
The first 20 yards are so wonderfully refreshing. I swim like a native daughter, like a river otter, like a tadpole; the grasses part and wave at my passage. I feel alive and......cold. I turn around and head back to shore -- my nether regions go numb, my stroke slows, limbs weaken. I run up the sand and rub the towel over my body. It doesn't offer comfort, the towel feels peculiarly distant from my cold skin.
I wonder how far into the calendar I'll be able to go. Will I get a late November swim in, dare I in December, January, February? I have a friend who used to swim from Easter thru Halloween every day -- but that was in Puget Sound. The cold water here is probably warm water there. If I keep it up, I'll get used to it. Maybe I'll develop a light outer layer of insulating fat to keep my body temperature stable.
A sailboat sat offshore during my swim. At first glance I thought it was moored, but then I realized that it was at full sail, but going nowhere. November -- dead calm blue steel water. Either river otters or harbor seals were swimming and playing all around the boat.
At Abbott's Lagoon today we saw a couple of Golden-crowned Kinglets, a Merlin and Sparrows -- White-crowned and Song. We watched two male Harriers hunting at pretty close proximity, and saw an immature coming into male plumage. We saw seven Black-shouldered Kites -- all sitting in one area together at the shore near the back of the pond. On the drive back into town we also saw an immature Red Tail sitting on a fence post. (I used my new digital camera unjudiciously but can't share the photos yet as I need a USB adapter -- maybe tomorrow.)
I've discoverd a website that's a fantastic resource: istockphoto.com. You can find great photos to download and the prices are beyond reasonable, they're downright cheap -- along the lines of 40 downloads for $10 and 500 downloads for $100. If you're a photographer, you can upload your shots and your sales can buy you more downloads. It's all royalty-free.
posted by Lisa on 5:13 PM link |
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