Category: EAST The Neighborhood Voice

For two years, from June 3 1999 through 2001, while I was the Executive Director at the Youth Science Institute, I was asked to write a weekly column for a local newspaper called EAST The Neighborhood Voice, that was freely distributed throughout eastern San Jose from Milpitas in the north to Evergreen in the south. It was a good opportunity to focus on the organization which was founded on the Eastside more than 45 years earlier to provide natural science education for children. The articles are posted here.

Over the Edge

Photo graph of road curving through treesAs I rounded the bend, there it was. Off the road caught by a tree, a white car was hanging onto the slope. If it were not for the brush on this precipitous drop into the ravine that carried the creek, the car would have rolled and rolled. coming to rest at the bottom of the canyon. The driver ahead of me had stopped and was looking down to see if anyone was inside.

But the event had happened earlier and there was a bright green sheriff’s notice on the window on the driver’s side, a window that was almost horizontal as you looked down into it. Arrangements were, no doubt, being made. The car was empty.

The other driver and I exchanged speculations, told of other events we had seen, and continued on our way reminding ourselves to be careful.

About a decade ago I saw a car off the road at about the same spot. A green car hung suspended on the asphalt curb that marked the edge of the road. All four wheels were off the ground, the front wheels dangling down the slope with the weight of the engine lifting the rear wheels off the pavement. How had anyone managed to leave the road at such an angle, I wondered?

The car was gone by evening.

The next night I returned home late. As I rounded that bend at close to midnight, I found a towing service and sheriff’s car parked on the road. I waited as the mangled remains of that same green car were hoisted out of the canyon. The driver had not survived this second trip over the edge, and that had been her intent all along.
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For almost three decades I have traveled this road every day, five miles up through twists and turns that in some places have narrowed to a single lane where the hillside has crumbled or slid into the canyon below. If it’s winter with a storm pounding the mountain, the house I arrive at beyond the end of the road is sometimes without power–occasionally for days at a time. Our well has run dry; fires have threatened; there are rattlesnakes, coyotes, and evidence of mountain lions, and there is no corner store to run to if we are out of milk. Why do I live here? There are many who think I am crazy.

And maybe I am. When someone new moves to the mountain, we all wait and see how long they will last. There are really only two possibilities: less than two years or forever–on this mountain or another.

But a move to a mountain is only one way we humans put ourselves to the test. There are others as well. Some do it through work, some through athletic endeavors, some through art, music, dance, knowledge. How far can we go? What is beyond the bend? Is it a road we want to continue to travel the rest of our lives? Is there a place to turn back?

And always there is the fear–or allure–that when going around a bend a little too fast, we just might go over the edge.

 

Good Chemistry

A group of children are playing statue on the lawn. The leader yells ‘freeze”, and thy all stop still as a rock–or at least as still as children can be. There is no doubt that these kids are made up of snips and snails and puppy dog tails. But that’s not all. They ar also made up of just one hundred eighteen elements that chemists have identified. These elements combine in enough ways to create everything we know.

Some of those same hundred plus elements make up the copper-colored rock on the hillside that breaks loose and skitters down the bank into the road, causing a car to swerve to avoid it. The rock moves faster than the children, but, of course, it is not alive. That is unless you consider the electrons spinning around the protons and neutrons in these one hundred eighteen elements a sort of life. Or you are a Tarahumara Indian who knows even rocks can be alive. Everything in sight is made up of arrangements and rearrangements, links and bonds, emulsions, suspensions, layers, fusions, transformations of the same one hundred eighteen elements. These are not just random arrangements. These are arrangements that follow the rules.

For centuries inquisitive minds have observed the world and have developed theories about how it all works. Little by little–sometimes two steps forward and one step back–we have pieced together information to help understand our lives and our world. Sometimes it’s for the better, sometimes for the worse. Scientists started naming elements over two hundred years ago, and it hasn’t stopped yet.

Some of those children on the lawn may continue this quest. They may discover combinations that will lead to cures for disease or weapons for destruction. What is the combination of snips and snails and carbon and oxygen that will lead one to be a chemist, another a dancer, a third a philosopher?

Osteoporosis and Breast cancer are also considered as the best food for a healthy sildenafil super active and balanced diet. At the point when incitement causes neighborhood arrival of NO, restraint of Pde5 cheap cialis by sildenafil causes increased levels of cGMP in the smooth muscle cells. Taking bath in hot water buy online viagra midwayfire.com and taking anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen may improve your health. Which One is better for Treating Erectile Dysfunction? The medicine which has been suggested to all the users by far is viagra for free . That question is one that may be answered by those for whom the fascination of the atom is too great to resist. One such person, not long ago a child like those on the lawn, my be Yinon Bentor. I do not know him except by his work. In 1996, as an eighth grader in North Carolina, he started a project to enter in a science fair. The periodic table is a chart that lists all the known elements in groups according to their properties. Yinon found very little online on periodic tables, and for his project he created an interactive periodic table for the web. He completed the project in about a month.

Yinon has continued to update his project and it is still available for all to see. What I have learned from viewing his work is more than I remember from a semester of chemistry/\. It is a glimpse into the world around us through the eyes of a youth who takes nothing for granted.–one who sees the grand in the miniscule, and who has not learned his limitations and therefore has none.

I am not a  chemist, but I’m impressed. To see if you are, visit http://chemicalelements.com/

 

Night Moves

Off in the distance I catch the baritone “Whoo, who-who-whoo” of a Great-horned owl emerging from the dark silence of the night. In reality the night is neither dark nor silent. Insects drone, stars twinkle and a moon is rapidly appearing through the lace edging of the chaparral. It is the time of night when most people are thinking of pulling the blinds, closing the doors and turning on the lights.

They are not alone in their retreat when the sun goes down. The quail, now mostly adolescents replacing the tiny chicks of early summer, come down for a final drink from the pond before disappearing until dawn. Other birds take their turn too. In the bird world only the owl and the poor-will (that flies up in alarm from the road when danger threatens its young) seem to relish—or tolerate—the night, flying up in alarm from the road when danger appears and threatens their young.

After a decorous pause the owl is treated to an answer to its question. A pitch or two higher and several trees closer, a similar quartet of “who-whoos” is clearly sounded in response. A conversation ensues, each owl answering from a slightly different angle as they scout out the territory. Coming closer and closer, at last a shadow passes noiselessly above in the now-risen moon and perches atop a telephone pole. The pair will be back for a night or two and then vanish. But they will return in a month or six weeks after touring the territory they claim as their own. And who among us would say it is not?

A shape emerges from the bushes. It is large and round and dark and seems to roll along the ground. Behind comes another, and then a third. Clearly they know where they are going and head for the garbage can, securely fastened with a bungee cord. The largest shape rises up and the can goes down. Another climbs on and, like a lumberjack in a river full of logs, rolls it into the drive. At last, frustrated at their failure to reveal the treasures inside, this raccoon trio, the bandits of the night, gives up and heads for the pond. They slosh and they splash in the moonlight knocking down cattails and churning up mud until it’s time to move on. With one last hope at finding a meal they climb the porch steps and peer in through the screen. Leaving muddy footprints for dawn to discover, they melt back into the shadows with scarcely a sound.
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Deer move fearlessly through the meadow. Some of my flowers that bloomed during daylight will be decapitated before the stars go out. A lone bat scoops up insects along an erratic path through the sky.

There are nights when coyotes howl in the distance, mornings when I find leaves of lettuce or cabbage in the garden with holes in them that were not there the night before.

Lights go on in a few houses down the valley. Down the trail in the moonlight I see the shadow of a couple walking slowly, holding hands. The night is has a little something for everyone.

Here’s To You

Sunset on the MountainI turned into the driveway. A red and white car, early ’80s vintage, blocked the one lane dirt road that runs about an eighth of a mile from the road to the house. Finally the car’s four young occupants saw me. I backed out so they could clear the drive, and i waved as they passed, asking through our open car windows if everything was alright. They looked sheepish and one of them grinned and said, “Yah”.

There are occasional visitors on the long winding drive. The house, nothing grand, cannot be seen from the road, and the drive looks temptingly like a dirt road to nowhere. But I yond, a scene that remains much as it has been for hundreds of know where it goes. It leads to views of mountains and valleys and an ocean beyond, a scene  that remains much as it has been for hundreds of years. The view never fails to intoxicate me.

I rounded the bend in the drive. What was that I saw on the post? It was red. A plastic cup. And there on the ground the unmistakable reflection of sun on aluminum caught my eye. I parked my car and walked down the drive to the edge of a slope that runs almost straight down more that a thousand feet to the San Andreas Fault.

There was another can tossed on the side of the drive, another in a bush, two or three down the slope and another in the lower limb of a tree. Bud Lite. Looked like the quartet in the drive had demolished a twelve pack. And it became clear I had come across them at the moment they were relieving themselves on their way out of the drive.

Across the valley the pines cascaded down the opposite ridge interrupted by occasional steep meadows and rock outcroppings. The sun hung in the west barely touching the horizon, low enough to illuminate the hillsides but leaving the valleys and lower slopes in deep shadow. On the opposite side an almost full moon began peeking through the chaparral.

The sun dropped below the far hill and the moon rose, the two painting the sky and clouds in sliding colors that changed with each moment. The shadows this pair produced had more hues than I new dark could paint. I will never drink in enough of this scene.

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When i was young, I first learned what it meant to be intoxicated. It is a heady feeling. You feel as if you are in charge of the world. Although I soon learned this was far from the truth, I have been glad to find that euphoria exists beyond Bud Lite.

I hope my young friends had a sip of my brew along with their own and will acquire the taste. It is one I am happy to share with good company.

 

 

 

Humans in the Mist

mountains rising above fog in the valley belowIn winter I wonder if it will ever stop; in summer I wonder when it will start. I’d like a little rain about now. It’s not that there isn’t plenty of water in the air. For the past several days the fog has come in at night, settled in valleys and over the Bay, keeping things cool and comfortable. But I know there are still weeks and months ahead when no rain will fall and even the fog will depart to the open ocean.

During these long hot days of summer, as streams run dry, a longing for water leads many of us to seek out the nearest pool. Just at the time no rains fall to settle in these gigantic holes we have so painstakingly dug, we need more and more water to fill them up. And we need more and more to keep our lawns green, keep our flowers blooming, wash off our perspiration, and keep our cars shiny.

Cleverly, we have devised many ways to capture the rain when it does fall, and we’ve learned to move it to where we want it. We build dams across rivers, fill reservoirs and perc ponds, and dig canals that go through mountains. So far–at least most of the time–things are working well–at least in California.

There’s no doubt that a few things have changed. Fish have departed from rivers now dammed to form artificial lakes. But we farm fish and restock lakes. Underground water levels have dropped and wells have run dry. But most of us no longer rely on wells for our water.

We didn’t do ten or twenty kicks and think we were done, we would do a couple of order levitra online hundred and chide ourselves for being lazy. And hence avoiding lower back pain, in the first instance, check out premature ejaculation pills given using the discount priced viagra health care professional. The causes of cialis generico canada visit my robertrobb.com weak erections range from lifestyle choices to serious underlying health conditions. They may be able to order sildenafil recommend someone for you to see that could give you a more detailed opinion. When faced with a challenge, we humans are resourceful at finding a solution. It will be interesting to see what we come up with next as more and more of us need more and more water. Will we learn to extract water from the briny deep or from the fog? Who needs fog anyway?

Well, redwood forests do. And so do banana slugs that live there. Ever notice how the redwood forests grow only where daily fog is common? Redwoods flourish and grow to proportions that astound us because they get plenty of water from fog drip, the water loss from their leaves reduced by misty shade.

But what if we transformed that fog into water? Couldn’t we use that water to put redwood trees wherever we wanted? I remember an article in a Sunset Magazine some years back about homeowners who had established a redwood grove in their backyard in the heart of Sacramento. Pipes ran up the trees and were automated to turn on a mist at night. We could each have our own private forest in our backyard and not have to worry about driving for an hour to Big Basin to picnic in the woods. What an idea!

So what have we got to lose? There would be no more dangerous night driving, no more mornings when you wish you had a sweater, no more misty moonlight, and no more really bizarre looking slugs. Who would miss the fog?

Flocking Together

I have always taken birds for granted. They all looked pretty much the same to me as I was growing up. My grandmother once had a canary, but except for being very colorful, it seemed just like an ordinary bird. Of course, some birds were big than others. In the Midwest there were pheasants in fall. Chickens and turkeys were so domesticated they didn’t really seem like birds at all. On vacations I sometimes saw birds that were unique. They were either in zoos or near oceans. Pelicans and egrets come to mind.

So I was little prepared for the extreme birding I found when I started working for YSI. Early on I learned of a trip a few folks were planning to Marin County. The intent was to see birds, especially hawks, sailing on the updrafts created by the Golden Gate in the stark and beautiful headlands of Marin just above and beyond the Bridge. Thinking this would be a good opportunity to learn a little, I joined the group. I was prepared to walk and talk, look at birds casually, eat lunch, and have a good time with good company.

We arrived at a spot high above the Gate that could only be accessed through prior arrangement. The rest of the crew broke out binoculars that they used as easily as I use the spectacles perched on my nose. They scanned the skies. One of them unloaded a chalkboard on which was written the names of several species of hawk. To me a hawk was a hawk, and I was lucky to know that.

They spotted hawks all right. And they knew their names. Soon they were gleefully tallying their “prey” on the chalkboard. There was good-natured banter as the group tried to keep from counting the same bird twice and tried to identify some of the trickier ones as they soared hundreds of feet above.

An hour passed, and another. I had been discovered as an interloper early on. While this sport continued, I sat on a bench conveniently placed so it looked out to sea and across the strait. It was early afternoon.
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Suddenly ships came into sight–many ships. They formed a line steaming straight for the Gate. There passing beneath me were sailing ships from the pages of history books, gray navy ships conjured up in World War II, ships of all shapes and sizes. It was Fleet Week and I had the prize grandstand seat.

As the afternoon wore on, the avian specialists yearned to pursue their sport farther up the peninsula. A spot known to some as a keen one was our destination, and we loaded up to seek it out. What they had not considered was Fleet Week. Traffic was pouring into the City. In order to head the opposite direction, we needed first to cross it. This proved difficult–no, impossible.

We found ourselves in Sausalito, unable to get out. There was nothing to do but stop. We could not go north, and we certainly would get nowhere going south. We ended up on the water’s edge just north of the Bridge. Sitting on the bulkhead, our feet dangling over the Bay, we settled in just as the Blue Angels arrived flying a few feet above the water directly in front of us–under the Bridge.

Now this was some kind of extreme bird watching!