9.18.2002
I'm still battling the worms today (see yesterday). I'm spurred on by the thought that these caterpillars will soon transform into moths which will again lay eggs. I don't want this happening inside my house. Also, every crack that an oakworm can crawl through will be an entryway for cold come winter.This is, after all, a case of nature coming through the cracks. We try to keep her out, to keep our lives from the messiness that ensues. The worms are compelled to crawl upwards, and likewise, they are compelled to drop down again on fine strings. The worm becomes a moth becomes a worm becomes a moth. They just crawl and eat and drop and cocoon and lay eggs and pupate.
We build walls and flooring and roofs to keep all this messiness outside where it belongs.
When I lived in Mexico we had stick walls and palapa roofs and no glass in our 'windows'. The line between outdoors and indoors was very fine. Our indoors did nothing to hold back the night. Gossamer netting was the thin line of defence between scorpions, mosquitos and us. Crabs, giant black ants, and fighting red ants marching across the kitchen counter while I prepared meals was normal; checking the bedding and clothing for scorpions routine; boa constrictors in the roof considered lucky -- no mice.
I was used to all that once, and was proud that I lived that way. I still admire that style of living. But right now I'm glad it's my front door covered in worms and not my mosquito netting.
posted by Lisa Thompson 10:43 PM
9.17.2002
You know I love nature -- I love living in a place where I can observe nature firsthand. I'm priveledged to watch acorn woodpeckers and osprey and chipmunks while I work. Today I saw river otters at play in the bay, but there's a *darker side too.phryganidia californica
Damn them! Oak trees border my entire house and line my driveway. Thus, there are lots and lots of little california oakworms hanging around. They drop out of the sky on their silky threads. They drop on cars they drop on heads. A couple of weeks ago I'd find the occassional caterpillar transported into the house by me or my dog, but it turns out that that was just the beginning. They're really quite small and so I didn't really mind scooping them up onto the back of an envelope, opening the door and shaking them out into the world.
Sunday, I found three caterpillars on my bedspread at different times throughout the day. Hmmmm, I wondered. The first couple of times I thought that perhaps the worms had crawled out of clothes I'd taken off and carelessly laid upon the bed. But that third time I turned a wary eye up at the ceiling.
Yesterday I found that the front door and all of the outside walls of my house were covered in the little caterpillars. That was creepy. Today I came home from a day of kayaking to find the little buggers all over the inside of my house. Extremely creepy. I have scooped approximately 50 of them in the past 3 hours -- at least 6 or 7 of them from my bedroom or from the top of my bed.
California oakmoths are partial to oak although they will attack other hardwoods if needbe. The moths laid their eggs here in June and July. The caterpillars emerged in the last couple of weeks. They feed at night and during these indian summer hot days apparently they seek shade. And I'm it. A second generation of moths will occur in October or November whose progeny will hatch and overwinter as larvae on the bottoms of the leaves -- whatever leaves are left.
I've also been wondering about the small golden-colored balls dropping out of the trees. I thought that this was something the trees were shedding. I hear them falling all day and all night when I'm outdoors. It sounds a lot like a steady but slow rain. They turn out to be called frass -- they are the droppings from the voracious worms. The droppings will grow in size as the caterpillars grow. That's good to know. I'll be able to keep track of them easily.
Large oakmoth infestations are cyclical, apparently 2000 was a big year. The oaks can't take several years of heavy defoiliation in a row, and it's not wise for an insect to wipe out it's source of nourishment. I haven't heard that this is a big year areawide -- but it's a big year here at my place.
I hope I didn't startle my neighbors just now. I hosed down the outside of my house by the headlights of my truck. So much for not killing anything -- I guess I reached my limit.
*"darker side" is a bit strong. Let's just call this the less glamorous side of nature.
posted by Lisa Thompson 10:27 PM
9.14.2002
My friends invited me over for an impromptu dinner of salmon and berries -- oh to eat like a bear! I declined due to a hot date with my soul tonight. Sometimes I really need a night of quiet solitude with no plan.So briefly....lest I neglect my date.
Same friends took a swim with me late this afternoon. We wondered what it is about swimming that makes you feel so great afterwards. The water can't be too warm, but can be salted or fresh for the effect to occur. Is it something so logical as negative ions or increased endorphins? I prefer to think it has more to do with state. We are, after all, 97% water ourselves. On a cellular level we are liquid, and our cellular memory is of liquid.
When we return to the water, we leave so much of our physical legacy behind. Stepping from the airy shore we swim through a bouyant atmosphere which we can finally see. It cools our skin, we displace it as it clings and drips from us, moves aside for us, and cradles us. Floating, we defy gravity. Kicking and pulling, we abandon bipedalism.
I need water like some people need trees, mountains or desert. It's good to know what you need.
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For Josef at A Blog Ringing in the Empty Sky, a kindred spirit in blogging:
Be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day the world is to be freshly clothed.
Teilhard de Chardin
-a morning prayer
posted by Lisa Thompson 8:34 PM
9.13.2002
my first north millerton paddleWind from the south today -- unusual. It really began to pick up in the half hour before I went out. It began as a gentle wash but by the time I brought all my gear down the wind was up to probably 15 knots.
I tacked upwind at about 110 degrees and then tacked back with the wind at my back. Left just ahead of the high tide.I wore my paddle skirt but didn't attach it to the boat -- trying to take advantage of the rare sunshine. The wind was to my advantage once I reached the inlet and made it past the small mouth eddy. I was able to float with very little paddle input deep inside the little arroyo. I floated past a preening egret, cleaning his long feathers. There were lots of egrets. I could hear and see crabs scuttling up the banks to my right into the low scrubby grasses whose vines remind me of mangroves. The mud, the crabs, the abundance of life here all remind me of Mexico or the Everglades anyways.
The tide gently floated and twirled me. I closed my eyes and heard nothing, I opened my eyes and heard the wind ruffle the feathers of an egret.
There is a breach down here in the old railroad track where the tidal water was rushing in. I didn't go in cause I wasn't sure about getting back out. I suppose I could have ported back if needbe. There was a blue heron guarding the entrance, watching the flippling little fish in the short rapids. As I came near he suddenly called out and then flew across the little body of water into the wetlands between me and the bay. As I floated past the breach I could see lots of surface activity in the water beyond the old railway. It looked like small fins and reminded me of bat ray wings. But it's extremely shallow coming in here and I can't imagine how they would have arrived.
Heading back I saw a couple of cormorants, so I suppose that I could have seen the rear of a diving cormorant or two.
As I continued to drift beyond the breach I was struck by wide snakelike wounds that meandered east-west across the floor of this body of water. I was in less than 10" of water. The lines were about 8" wide and symmetrical. The angles and length between curves seemed symettrical too. They were very unusual. I guess that what causes them is the sun's heat when the water completely recedes from this mudflat. Over time the hairline cracks widen and smooth out with the constant ebb and tide of water to ease the hard angles.
This water sits on top of the San Andreas faultline. The epicenter of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 is only several miles away. Could these curvey lines be related to the fault? I don't know.
I took the opposite tack coming back across so that I'd be heading into the waves for the last tack back into the beach. Saw a harbor seal pop up about forty or fifty feet off the end of the pier. Sometimes they are curious about kayakers and I waited hoping he'd surface again. This time of year there are plenty of kayakers about -- too many for a harbor seal's taste I'm sure.
posted by Lisa Thompson 6:47 PM
9.12.2002
9.12.02I can't stop listening to Rabbit Songs by Hem.
It's the best thing I've heard...After some thought I've changed my mind about the value of celebrating the 1-year anniversary of 9-11 yesterday. I think that marking the day with some kind of personal ritual has benefit. I do feel better knowing that a year has passed and that we are still intact as humans -- it felt good to write '9-12-02'.
I watched a documentary on HBO last night that had footage from the day. I never saw too much of it cause i didn't have tv back then. It blew my mind, mostly because so many people were directly involved and affected, not just those who were in the towers or who died there, but all of lower manhattan as the clouds of destruction blew down the streets and covered everybody in dust.
The most powerful thing for me to remember is how we all felt sorrow at the same time, and that for a day or a week, most of the planet united around that.
Just as my whole life stops when my back goes out, the world stopped when it saw such horror perpetrated by fanatics against innoocents. It's just good to know that we care, it's good to remember that we do.
posted by Lisa Thompson 11:44 PM
9.10.2002
9.10.02I said goodbye to a new friend last week. She left her home of many years, and a town she loved, to live in an assisted living facility in another state close to her family.
She did this with grace and dignity that saved the parting from sentimentality. She knew that the time had come to leave her home, and she didn't rail against the unfairness, or bitterly rue the day -- nor did she break down -- at least not in front of her assembled friends and neighbors. Instead, she thanked each friend and neighbor for their contribution to her and shared a private moment with each. I can't imagine what it would be like to be driven away from my home knowing that I would most likely never see it again. What a tough passage to undertake.
It's tough hanging in. It would be so much easier to die in a sudden fashion -- by accident or heart attack. The suffering would be less. What my friend is going through now, adjusting to a new life in a new place is tough, but it's part of a long life well-lived. Truthfully, it's more fortunate to live through the sadness of moving on, to say a conscious goodbye to the people and places we love, than it is fortunate to die without suffering. Suffering is where we find out what we're made of and what others are made of. She has awed me.
I saw an old friend last week too. He was visiting from the east coast. It was like falling off a log to spend the day with him and another friend of ours. What a blessing to have friends like that -- where 10+ years can go by and it feels like it was yesterday except that we're talking about what we've done in those years. It's really been 18 years since we spent time together on a regular basis. If we keep up this rate of getting together, and live normal life spans, we only have 4 or 5 meetings left. That thought makes life seem too short.
These separations are what happen because we move. We move around the country and around the world. I've left southern California for northern. For awhile I left the country altogether. I've been keeping up a hectic schedule of driving to southern California to stay close to neices and family, but it's too hard on me to keep it up. I have friends everywhere. Hell, it's even hard to get together with friends here in the bay area. Oakland and San Francisco are an hour and a half away. The closest big towns are 35 minutes away. Time and distance make it hard to get together. I think that's why the tv show 'Friends' is so appealing -- how great would it be if all the people you wanted to be near were near?
This is why I feel a big interest today in lifeforms that don't move, or don't move much. I'm drawn to the sponges, the barnacles and oysters, the clams, mussels, limpets, piddocks and sea stars.
Did you know that a sea star can travel 3-4 miles in a month? I'm taking them off my list. They move too much for me right now. I'm collecting friends that stay put.
Sponges multiply. In the sheltered part of our beach there are few sponges, but in the cove to the north where the wind waves and the tidal action is more constant there are many. The waves must cause breakage. When a piece breaks off it lodges nearby and becomes an autonomous life itself. A sponge neighborhood is thriving along this shore.
Most of the barnacles here are acorn barnacles. They are sessile, from the Latin meaning to sit. They attach themselves to a permanent base after a short period of free-swimming early in life. They afix themselves with a cement-like glue and they stay put. Some attach themselves to a moving object, of course, such as a boat, or even the carapace of a crab like one I found the other day -- covered in little acorn barnacles. They must have really slowed him down.
At low tide today I sat and watched a part of the shoreline that was several inches below water. The water was moving but gently, and there were no crabs or other ambulatory species about. But the life force was abundant. Any given rock might house oysters, mussels, limpets, barnacles, and sponges, along with unidentified algae. The clams or mussels in the area were noisy with clicking and once a minute or so somebody was shooting a spray of water. I was never looking directly at the place where the spitting came from.
I've been wondering why I rarely see crabs walking about the flats during low tides, but I find crab bodies after every high tide. Today I stopped looking. I'm learning to take comfort from the sessile forms of life. I've never been a person who stays, but its something I aspire to. I'll watch the tidepools and the mudflats and sit. I'll just sit and watch.
posted by Lisa Thompson 9:09 PM
9.4.2002
9.04.02"Excavations in the ancient city of Ephesus on the coast of Turkey have uncovered a colonnaded marble road from the harbor where distinguished visitors in Roman times could make a triumphal entry after landing. The point of debarkation is now over a mile from the sea."
Waves and Beaches
-Willard BascomThe sea and land perform a dance that continually alters the places where they meet. The sea adds sand to a coastline, filling in bays here, straightening shorelines there. The sea breaks down rocky cliffs then oblique currents carry the resultant sand away, leaving less land in its place.
Wind waves begin with wind over calm seas -- surface tension is created by the wind and ripples form. The sides of these small waves catch more wind and the waves grow -- absorbing the energy of the wind. The velocity of the wind, the duration of time the wind is blowing, and the extent of open area the wind is blowing over (fetch) all determine the size of waves.
The actual sea is much more confused than this. There are counteracting winds, old seas, tides, friction applied to air whose turbulence creates new wave action.
Over distance, small waves become larger, that is, their period and their height increase until a point at which the sea is as big as it can be given the velocity of the wind. Increasing the fetch or lengthening the amount of time the wind blows cannot create higher waves. This is a fully developed sea.
There are limits. It's good to know that about waves. A wave will break when it reaches a ratio of 1:7 - height to length.
Of course, sometimes those limits are beyond human capacity to survive. Joseph Conrad in Typhoon describes it like this:
"It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath...This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one's kind."
I've felt that way paddling out through mild shorebreak. Some days I feel that way just contemplating whether or not to answer the telephone.
Today I watch the small bay waves push a berm of sand beachward. A juvenile double-crested cormorant swallows a little fish pulled out of the sea grasses and shakes the water off its head. Most seas are not fully developed. Most seas come in peace and take no lives, content to move a little sand today, and a little bit more tomorrow.
posted by Lisa Thompson 10:33 PM
9.3.2002
9.04.02I've worked a long day and though I have much to say, don't have energy to say much.
I will share one of my favorite William Stafford poems, though:
Representing Far Places
In the canoe wilderness branches wait for winter;
every leaf concentrates; a drop from the paddle falls.
Up through water at the dip of a falling leaf
to the sky's drop of light or the smell of another star
fish in the lake leap arcs of realization,
hard fins prying out from the dark below.Often in society when the talk turns witty
you think of that place, and can't polarize at all:
it would be a kind of treason. The land fans in your head
canyon by canyon; steep roads diverge.
Representing far places you stand in the room,
all that you know merely a weight in the weather.It is all right to be simply the way you have to be,
among contradictory ridges in some crescendo of knowing.-stafford
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I can't write like that. Not many can. He's the best poet I know.
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Check out this new blog by Ken Thompson: Brooklyn Memories. He's collecting and telling stories about Brooklyn. The inaugural memory is a sweet story about kite-flying and an unexpected friendship back in a time "when being an elevator operator was a skill job". I like it a lot.
posted by Lisa Thompson 9:22 PM
9.2.2002
9.2.02Today I urge everyone within earshot to add their voice to the gathering opposition to Bush's war. Move On is collecting signatures and statements to be presented to Senators. On August 28th, they hand-delivered same to Senate offices around the country. Our representatives need support if they are to stand up to Bush and his cronies. They are more likely to act if they know they have the people's say.
As politicians from Scowcroft, Kissinger, Feinstein and Leahy, to world leaders such as Nelson Mandela speak out, it is imperative that we, the american people, speak out also. Silence is a mandate of its own.
I hope that Colin Powell publicly voices his opposition to this catostrophic idea soon.If you'd like to write a personal letter to the President, here's his address:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
posted by Lisa Thompson 7:56 PM
8.30.2002
8.30.02
Inverness….I’m a night driver. I drive amongst the trucks on I-5 between LA and San Francisco through the hot August night. The trucks, they comfort me. They line the edges of parking lots and fill the rest stops, engines idling as drivers sleep…or rest…their logs must show that they rest. Truck drivers spin out the nights doing the work of Atlas, keeping the stuff of life moving north and south along the valley corridor that is California. Like cowboys of lore mostly they travel alone, trading stories at truck stops and communicating in spare bursts via cb radios – technological cups to the wall.
When I was a teenager and began to travel the central valley path from my early LA home to what would become my adult homeland in the bay area, we used to find these books in truck stop lobbies along the route. They contained essays about truckers and the world of truckers. One in particular called ‘The Trucker’s Wife’ stands out. It begins “She’s the woman behind the man behind the wheel keeping America strong.”
But in truth, I’ve loved truckers since I was a little girl. I used to make the universal gesture out the window of my daddy’s Cadillac asking for the pull of their air horns as we sped past them on the highways of my childhood. Later, returning from Lake Tahoe, my girlfriend Gabriele flirted with a cute young driver as we passed him and he passed us in a game of tonage. We got a blast of reality when he approached our table in a coffee shop later. He asked us to go back to his truck with him and smoke a joint. I think his name was Rusty…we debated, but didn’t go. Years later I was driving from LA to my home in Nayarit, Mexico and found haven from a long windy, wet night at a trucker gathering place in Arizona off I-10. I must have been quite a sight. I was driving a ’69 Ranchero laden with bikes, hang glider and assorted other junk, sharing the front bench seat with my black lab Dinah. The exit led to a long road filled with trucks and cafes. I hesitated getting out of my overloaded car wondering if I would I be safe. But I’ll never forget the friendliness and lack of edge I was encountered with. It was like the social after-service part of church: we could have been standing around with styrofoam cups of red punch rather than steaming bad coffee. They gave me road tips and made me feel that my 3-day car-journey across Mexico was a rational thing to do – an idea not shared by many.
But I love truck drivers now because they have a code. In this mucked up world of grey ethics with leaders whose speech evokes cartoon bubbles over their heads, with half-truths weighing us down and often no clear “right thing to do” in the face of injustice, you gotta love guys with a code. They may not live by a code, but they do drive by one.
Trucks stay in the right lane on a two-lane road unless they’re passing. Of course that’s the law, but they do it. They let a faster truck pass them – they don’t speed up in a show of pride and feathers like motorists will. When there’s enough room for the passing truck to come back over to the right, they signal with their lights. Hmmm…downright neighborly, respectful even. Trucks move to the left lane if a truck or car is pulled over on the right. Ditto when passing on-ramps. You never know when somebody might need to use the right lane to get up to highway speed. Trucks blow their air horns when little kids, or grown women, gesture madly out the window.
In all these years of trucker worshipfulness I finally got to help a couple of them enforce their code last night. A highway sign warned that the right lane was closing in a couple of miles. When I saw brake lights up ahead, I pulled to the left lane and finally came to a stop behind a truck, warning lights flashing. The truck behind me put his flashers on to warn more trucks behind him. He turned off his headlights so they wouldn’t blind me. Kindly. All was right in truckerland. But soon there was trouble in the ranks. To our right, two trucks trying to cut in. They hadn’t veered into the left lane, but were using the right lane to outflank their brothers. How did the truckers ahead and behind me respond? By closing ranks. We held the line. The truck in front of me, my little truck’s nose to his tail and the truck behind me moved as one, inch by inch as traffic moved in staccatos of speed or noodled slowly, keeping those outcasts out. This was the code in action and I was helping to enforce it, at the risk of becoming a Mazda sandwich or burning up my clutch.
Afterwards, when we had successfully kept the errant trucks out of our lane, I wanted to invite them to pull over with me, to drink a hot coffee and a discuss of the code…but I thought they’d probably just want to smoke a joint with me, so I passed them, and left them flashing their lights, diminishing in my rear view mirror.
posted by Lisa Thompson 6:01 PM
