Saturday, October 21, 2006
Dottie puts together a “little” picnic every year and has found the perfect spot for it at Henry Cowell State Park. This year there was a new participant, Chloe, who had a wonderous fine time, if I am any judge of dogs. Her human companions did too!
Only nine days without rain and/or snow. The wettest March in one hundred years. We at least have a roof over our heads. But that’s yet 
This Purple of Romagna artichoke is the centerpiece of one of the vegetable beds.
Today is the first day of July. I am reveling in raspberries. I hung CDs amongst the berries to flash in the sunlight and scare the birds away. It’s working. Those flashing CDs even startle me, but I don’t scare easily.
A heat wave, and a surfeit of cucumbers, peppers, parsley, tomatoes, potatoes and garlic left me with only a field of wildflowers at Wildseed Farms outside of Fredericksburg, Texas, to show you.
| Tuesday, April 18, 2006 | |
| The carpet arrived, but not without Gordon having to go down the hill into town to meet the man who was to install it. He claimed to be a confirmed flatlander who never would have taken the job if he had known he would have to drive up a mountain. Once he got here he was fine and helped rehang the bedroom door and move the bed back in. Too bad we didn’t have him rehang those darn closet doors too. | |
| Saturday, April 22, 2006 | |
| Before | Slightly After |
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| And now! | |
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| My beautiful hippari from Kasuri Dyeworks in Berkeley has been in the closet too long. I thought it was time for it to come out. | |
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| Not everyone is lucky enough to have an original Thomas Frost photograph, or to know the original Thomas Frost personally for that matter. His photograph of ice has a niche of honor in the new scheme of things. | |
| And the 5%? | |
| So, now the hard part. You probably noticed a missing lampshade in the otherwise perfect room pictured above. This lampshade was water-damaged. Its partner fared better but still is very old and looks pretty grungy in such elegant surroundings.
But do you think I can find a replacement? These shades are more than thirty years old and are flat on one side because they fit on wall lamps. I currently have the name of a person who might know the name of a person who does custom lampshades. Let me know if you have any leads. They are 15″ high and 12″ in diameter across the top. But 95% isn’t bad. |
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Mimi the cat has finally settled down in her customary place in sunbeams on the down comforter on the bed. The sun has come out and she has overcome her pique at us for having moved the mattress off of the living room floor in front of the fireplace.
Click for Chapter 1 Click for Chapter 2 |
The latestA woman at the Benjamin Moore paint store in Los Gatos where I buy all my paint knows a man in Santa Cruz who makes custom lampshades. She has taken one of the shades to him to see how much it would cost to make a new one. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll just stain the other one to match. |
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Roof – Chapter 2 – the sequel
The magnitude of losing the roof has morphed into an intensive and exciting restoration project. Necessity has caused us to make some changes we should have done anyway, but never quite got around to.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
There is definite progress. Insulation went in today, and wall board is up and will be textured tomorrow. Can paint be far behind? Mimi the cat is delighted to be able to go into her bedroom again (the door has been closed for weeks), although there is still no bed in there upon which to lie and soak up the morning sun.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Much progress this weekend. Painting and the beginnings of a new closet. No wimpy colors here! Tomorrow we get measured for new carpet. (Oh, no! The old one is so attractive.)
Before
Slightly after
Sunday, April 2, 2006
The painting is done, the new closet shaping up. The carpet has been ordered. I predict move in to be in two weeks or less. Stay tuned. In the meantime….
Mimi sleeps on on the mattress on the down comforter in front of the heater on the floor. She’s in no hurry for a quick fix.
Thursday, April 6, 2006
The tree guys came and spent the day cleaning up the mangled trees that were part of last month’s weather event. They were planning to come on Wednesday, but it rained–just as it has almost every day in March. Nice to have a roof over our heads.
Friday, April 14, 2006
The carpet arrived at the installers today, but they missed us when they tried to call to set up an appointment for installation. We will do that on Tuesday when they open again. My guess is that it should be done by next weekend. We are ready to move back in.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Two nights off the floor! Slowly we move back in. We tried rehanging the closet doors. It was a routine worthy of Monty Python (notice the slight offset at the top). There is another set to go in; we will persevere–eventually. The baseboard behind the bed is nailed in; the rest is not.We won’t move other things until it is finished. But moving the bed out of the living room has enlarged the rest of the house.
Mimi is not feeling well this morning.
Click for Chapter 3
Roof – Chapter 1 – “thar she blows!”
Sunday, March 5, 2006
I worked in Palo Alto on Monday and it was pouring. I had my Spanish class in Los Gatos that night and drove there in a deluge. After class it was still raining and I wondered what conditions I might find on the mountain. But I got home without incident.
About 11:15 I was sitting in bed reading. Gordon was already asleep. It was still stormy and extremely windy. Suddenly there was a gigantic rumble. The house shuddered. Gordon bolted up. The cat looked alarmed. There was a crash and then just the wind. I took the flashlight to look outside and see what had happened. Maybe a tree limb had crashed into the house. When I went out to the driveway, there was part of our roof leaning against our cars. It was the part from directly over the bedroom.
I called the insurance company.
The next morning I called roofers. They were all busy and only one returned my call. On Wednesday we got a quote for the roof. We took it.
On Thursday workers came to tarp it. The insurance company had promised to have an adjuster call in 48 hours, but that passed and it rained on.
We had buckets all over the bedroom. By Tuesday night when I got into bed in a seemingly dry part of the room and opened a book to read, a drop landed squarely in the middle of the page. We wrestled the mattress into the living room where it remains and will probably stay for a while. We tarped the bed. This shows the area that was directly above the bed as it looks now.
Finally on Friday afternoon, we heard from the insurance company. They sent someone up from a company they hire to intercede in this kind of event. Our guy was supposed to inspect and report back to them. Instead he recognized our plight and immediately swung into action. By that evening we had a crew here ripping off wallboard and insulation in the bedroom. They set up five gigantic fans that are roaring away in there right now and need to run all weekend to dry it out.
It snowed on Friday.
Saturday was clear. Our roofer thought he could get a new roof on before the next big storm came on Sunday (today). The foam roof needs to have a waterproof coating rolled as a final step. A temporary coating was installed until the weather is dry enough to do a permanent one.
With the soggy insulation ripped out in the bedroom below, you could see patches of sky when the tarp came off.
The new roof was finished just in the nick of time. The wind is up and a new storm should be here by evening.
Mimi, the cat, has been remarkable. She underwent a personality transformation during our trip to Sunriver. For all of her eighteen years she has hidden in the closet whenever there was anyone in the house.Most people don’t believe we have a cat. They have never seen her.
But Mimi LOVES having the mattress with the down comforter in front of the heater in the living room. She sleeps right through the constant stream of roofers, demolishers, and contractors parading through the house.
Occasionally she will nervously lick her foot.
You would think that after taking three giant bags to the thrift shop yesterday and two bags of books to the library, there wouldn’t be that much stuff left from the bedroom. Yet I am sitting here in my always impeccable office surrounded by all the stuff that was once in the bedroom. At least I now have an excuse for it.
Needless to say, life here is not same old, same old at the moment.
Click for Chapter 2
Worms
The spade cut into dirt that in summer was rock hard. But it had softened a little after months of rainy, drippy, fog-filled days. I lifted out a chunk of compacted earth and turned it over revealing long taproots of weeds now pointing skyward. As I crumbled it apart with my gloved hand, a giant earthworm fell free and back into the hole.
Another shovelful of dirt revealed more earthworms. Some big and fat, pink or gray, almost five inches long; some tiny, like bright coral wire twisted into switchbacks making their length impossible to determine. How did these damp creatures shining with moisture stay so clean crawling through dirt? And how did they stay moist through a summer so dry it turned the earth to stone? In this compacted earth were worms–many worms–living in dirt but looking cleaner than the most fastidious among us.
I took all these worms as a good sign. I was digging a new garden bed in an area that had long held only weeds and a path leading out into the wild. Earthworms indicate healthy soil–or at least that’s what I have come to believe. But how did they manage, these soft-bodied creatures, to get through this dirt that was so hard it took a fair amount of effort for me to break it apart? As each clod broke off in my gloved hand, worms appeared. (I have always been a little squeamish about these slimy creatures and only recently have I been willing to pick one up even with a glove on.)
I began to take notice. I started watching for them, noticing different kinds, looking at their movements, trying to figure out what pleases them and what does not. I found I had more questions than answers. They seemed to move forward never satisfied with being left where I found them. Or were they backing up? Their pointy ends tested the ground. Were they looking for an opening? Their bodies rippled along behind them, first long and thin, then short and fat as they flowed forth after I had so abruptly revealed them. They wiggled and stretched and finally disappeared back down into the soil. Had this hard packed earth swallowed them or were they swallowing it?
When they fall, do they all land right side up like a cat? I watched to see if they tried to turn over, if they spiraled around from their head to their tail trying to right themselves. As worm after worm, large and small, fell, I watched. And not once did I see any indication of turning over. Do worms know which way is up? So many questions! I was sure I would find answers.
But then it became clear. There was really only one question that mattered and the answer was not so easy. Why do I care?
Grow Your Own
The first light of dawn brightens the east as I get out of bed, put on my robe and walk out to the kitchen. I pour some dry cereal in a bowl, open the refrigerator, get out a plastic jug of milk and pour it on the cereal. The automatic coffeemaker, which I filled last night with freshly ground coffee, has started and is scenting the air with the unmistakable aroma of a new morning. I sit at a table on the porch watching the sunlight slowly reveal a scene that people in these parts have seen for hundreds, or even thousands, of years. The view is of a hillside covered with trees—trees that have been there for decades and their ancestors for centuries. But a few things have changed.
Food, clothing, shelter are still the fundamentals of my life as they were in the lives of those who lived here centuries ago. But how I come by these essentials is not the same now as it was then. Take that bowl of cereal, for instance. Grain it is, but not grain I have grown or gathered. Not grain I have ground or cooked—not grain that has come from my neighborhood. I do not know the route this cereal has taken on its way to my bowl.
A century or two ago I would have grown and ground my grain. A few centuries before that my cereal would have been made of acorns gathered in late summer, enough to last for an entire year. In either case the grinding and cooking of the grain would gave been a necessary part of getting that cereal into the bowl—a task I now relegate to unknown hands in unknown places.
How did people manage to do these things I most certainly can not? In many ingenious ways, it seems.
Acorns, the staple of the native Ohlone people, were processed by grinding or pounding on rocks that often had been used for centuries for that purpose. The meal from this grinding was leached in baskets designed for the purpose to extract the tannins produced by oaks. The meal was then cooked, but in a way that seems incredible to imagine. An exquisite basket about a foot and a half in diameter made of native grasses was the cooking pot. The basket was woven so finely that it held the porridge without leaking. Heated rocks were added to the mixture to cook it.
YSI has such a basket, one that was used up until the early part of this century. Remains of acorn porridge, perhaps a long-forgotten breakfast, can still be seen between the finely woven rows in the bottom of the basket.
Did people become accustomed to this fare and look forward to its familiarity like we do with our favorite cereal? Did the smell of it cooking come to signal the start of a new day? We homos in this world have more in common than we realize. We all share the continuing certainty of mornings, which offer a fresh start to any of us who will take it.
Grain may be ground, acorns may be pounded in YSI’s school programs’ Ohlone Indians and Pioneer Organic Garden. For information call (408) 356-4945.
It’s About Time
The band-tailed pigeons have returned. Not that they’ve been gone; they’ve just been eating acorns in the woods.
Elderberry bushes and band-tailed pigeons have both been here far longer than most of our ancestors. The elusive band-tails come out of the woods as soon as the elderberries start to ripen on sunny slopes in summer. And the elderberries start to ripen as soon as it’s warm enough. Where I live this can mean any time from the Fourth of July to mid-August.
The band-tailed pigeon is not your ordinary pigeon. This large light-colored bird with dark bands across its tail endears itself by perching on the highest tiniest twig or wire it can find where it teeters back and forth alarmingly trying to get its balance. I usually start seeing them low on the mountain where the elderberries ripen in late spring. Week by week they work their way uphill as the elderberries ripen at higher and higher altitudes. When the elderberries are gone, the band-tails disappear until the next year when, somehow, they know precisely when and where to find a new crop.
Imagine yourself living without a watch, without a calendar. The adjustment might be jarring at first after having lived your life with time regimented by the precise increments these tools provide. How would you know when to get up, when to go to work, when to eat? You would know. You would know in the same way the band-tailed pigeons know it is time to climb the mountain following a trail of ripening elderberries.
Is there a way to capture some of this same freedom of opportunity in a world that now familiarly deals not just with minutes, but with nanoseconds? Can the tyranny of time somehow be kept at least partially at bay?
The first time I became consciously aware of the dramatic role my surroundings could play in orienting me in time and space was during an all night car trip with friends when I was in college. I was next to a window in the back seat on one of those dark, but bright, moonless nights—the kind where each star stands out brilliantly against a deep navy sky.
We were traveling east to west on a course that went unswervingly across a broad expanse of the Midwest. I slept and woke periodically and suddenly realized that the heavens were shifting above me. In that one night I learned how far the heavens travel in ten hours and got a sense of the passing of time that transcended the tick of a clock—a lesson that had eluded me during all the sunrises and sunsets of the two decades before.
I have a friend who had high blood pressure whose doctor prescribed that he quit wearing a watch. Although he works for a high-tech company, has three children and many commitments to his family and community, he took his doctor’s advice. He does not ignore time; he asks others what time it is when he senses he needs to. He finally got over looking at his wrist every few minutes. He is much more relaxed and seems not to always be in a rush. His blood pressure is now normal.
I am not advocating a life without calendars and clocks. But maybe having a few touchstones in the world to help locate us in time and space without worrying about the hour, the week, or the year can give us a chance to savor more elderberries when they are ripe.
Investing in Children
Are you an investor? You may be without knowing it. It doesn’t take a portfolio of stocks or mutual funds riding the ebb and flow of the market to make you one. If you occasionally put a few coins in a donation box or turn in your old clunker to the YSI Thrift and Gift, you are making an investment—an investment that may help change the community you live in.
The modern-day business world operates on a bottom line mentality. Back a few hundred years ago, when modern business practice was evolving, the notion of public corporations to provide services for the general good of the community developed. Then, corporations were seen primarily as providing a public service rather than as a means of making investors rich. Most employees were loyal; many companies were benevolent; those that weren’t became the targets of labor unions. The focus was more on the consumer than on the investor. Times have changed.
Recently a new type of corporation has evolved to fill a need once filled by churches and benevolent businesses. Not-for-profit corporations have blossomed over the past few years to provide enhanced education, health and human services, to support the arts and the environment—all things we value, things that make life worth living for many of us.
As with other businesses, not-for-profits need investors too. But the return on the investment may be a little harder to measure than simply counting stacks of coins. How can you, as an investor in a not-for-profit, tell if you’re getting your money’s worth?
First, if it’s local, you might want to visit and see how things are going. Often your gut level reaction is your best guide. Next, as with any company you invest in, you need to read the information you receive. See if it provides you with details of substance. See if it portrays a service that you can truly feel good about supporting. If it’s appropriate, use the services, or talk to people who have. Finally check the financial health of the organization. Is it run efficiently? Is it paying for a quality staff? Neither too much nor so little that its employees have to rely on other not-for-profits in order to live. Is it using its money for the services you think you are supporting?
Although not-for-profits do not pay taxes, they do file a tax return each year with the IRS. Called a 990, it makes a 1040 look like child’s play. The 990 is a public document that is available by request from all not-for-profits, who may charge a small fee for copying and mailing it. (You don’t want your investment dollar used to send 990s to other investors.) It shows in great detail the financial picture of the organization including the amounts spent for programs, administration, and fund raising.
Remember, it is your money, and you need to get a return on it even if the gain is simply a better world to live in—one that provides for its children, that takes care of its poor, its sick, its needy, that enriches its citizens lives. Diversify if you like, or pick what is significant to you. When it comes to investing not all bottom lines are created equal.
The Youth Science Institute’s most recent Annual Report may be seen at www.ysi-ca.org. Its 990 may be requested at (408) 356-4945 ext. 10.
Katy Did It
There I was minding my own business when suddenly my eyes fell on a huge—well, at least a large—bug snuggled into a dim corner of the living room ceiling.
Bugs were not something that were taken lightly when I was growing up. To this day I can lose my mother during a phone conversation if she spots a wayward cricket or spider invading her turf. I never shrieked like other girls did when I saw a bug, and I tried to act cool when I spotted an insect, mouse, or snake; but I certainly didn’t qualify as a nature girl. Inwardly I knew my bravado was false.
I still do not know much about bugs and am not inclined to cohabit with them on my side of the screen where they so cleverly hold me hostage. So when I saw it, I knew this bug had to go. I got closer. It wasn’t a huge spider like I had originally thought. It was something I had never seen before. Would it jump? Would it fly? What was my next move?
I am here to tell you that I’ve come a long ways. I went to the kitchen and found a jar with a good screw on lid, got a small ladder, and climbed up close enough to take a pretty good look. The longish brown creature looked so interesting that I felt compelled to find out what I was dealing with. I swiftly popped the open jar over it, and it obligingly fell in. I capped the jar in a hurry, and a good thing too. The creature appeared to be a mighty good jumper.
Close inspection revealed a brown insect with long hair-like antennae and a backward jointed leg as long as the body. Leg, rather than legs, because it had lost one of them. A Field Guide to the Insects resides on my bookshelf. It is a good picture book with a lot of scientific words I haven’t learned yet. In the section of pictures of grasshoppers, crickets, and cockroaches, a Bush Katydid came pretty close, but it was green, not brown. And it had wings. Where wings would normally be my creature had a blocky triangular piece of body.
I would need help finding out what I had stumbled on. Fortunately I work with a group of immensely talented and knowledgeable people who more than make up for my deficiencies. A call to Pat Kucker, YSI’s Sanborn manager, a talented biologist who has taken care of YSI’s insect zoo for more than a decade, led me to believe I indeed had a katydid. She promised it a starring role in the Habitat Hunt and Bugology summer camps the next day.
But what should I do in the meantime? I didn’t want my insect to die! I read on a bit. This group of insects eats plants. I would feed it lettuce. I dropped part of a leaf into the jar. It fell on the katydid who eventually found its way out. I put the jar on the mantle and waited. I checked back in two hours. It was eating its lettuce. So here I was, with an insect in a jar on my mantle that I was sharing my dinner with.
I drove my bug to summer camp the next day. When I walked in with it, a young camp instructor recently graduated from high school and headed to Harvard in the fall to start a biology degree calmly said, “Oh, a Shield-back Katydid.”
Wait until my mother hears about this.
The Science of Sexism
Like many others, I was riveted by the very classy Women’s World Cup Soccer Finals. And, like millions of us, I rejoiced in the victory of these amazing women athletes and celebrated the incredible distance women have traveled in my lifetime. When I was in high school, soccer did not exist. Girls who played basketball were allowed only two dribbles before passing and could only play half the court—presumably due to their delicate constitutions. Then only girls played basketball; women did not. Today that seems to me to be such a far distant lifetime that I can’t imagine having been there.
The day after the triumphant soccer victory, forty-three percent of the runners at the Chronicle Marathon in San Francisco were women. A marathon is more than 26 miles! There can be little doubt that girls and women have made remarkable strides in athletics. But how are we doing in other areas? And how are the boys and men doing?
All in all not too badly, I think. Men are now nurses and women are dentists; men are telephone operators, women trim trees. Social change takes time. And in the arts, life has always been free to those who seize the moment.
The trick, for those of us who would offer the whole world to all kids of either gender, is to be vigilant. To make sure that the subtle expectations we have for our children don’t shut down avenues of possibility that could open up the universe.
At YSI summer camps this year thirty-nine percent of the participants are female but in kindergarten and first grade forty-two percent are girls. Do girls lose interest in science as they grow older, or is something else going on here? Do we tease toddlers into thinking bugs are fun and dancing with abandoned is one of life’s pleasures only to later let boys know dancing is for girls and girls know bugs are scary things to shriek at? If Curious Chemistry were called Kitchen Chemistry, would boys no longer outnumber girls two to one? And why, oh why, does the very popular Physics camp have boys outnumbering girls almost six to one?
To be sure we don’t have all the genetic answers either. Forces of many millennia have led to physical differences between men and women. We all recognize that generally women’s pelvises are wider for carrying children, men’s muscles are larger for providing food and shelter. Surely these are only greater manifestations of more elusive genetic differences which have yet to be completely cataloged.
But given what we do know, we have a chance to offer much to our kids, both boys and girls. We can offer them possibilities we were never permitted to consider.
Those women of the Rose Bowl–twenty-something, thirty-something, moms, friends, heroes–offered the world to all of us. They let us know that anything is possible. Do we have the courage to offer that to our children?
Flights of Fancy
It was July 3, a day before one expects dazzling aerial displays. And it was the middle of the day, about two o’clock, long before the prime pyrotechnic hour. On this nearly perfect afternoon I sat in the shade of an apricot tree looking at the mountains on the other side of the valley, the valley containing the well-known San Andreas Fault, contemplating the slow changes that had shaped these heights. The large oval of sky above was a blue no pigment can match. It was a deep crystalline blue, filled with depth and light and framed with black-green pines, gray-green oaks and yellow-green elderberry. The rugged textures contrasted sharply with the smooth polish of the sky. Bees worked orange, magenta, and lavender blossoms. Hummingbirds climbed high, dropped, and then rested on low slung limbs. Warm enough to encourage complete relaxation of mind and body, the day was also cool enough to keep the sometimes-maddening insects at a warmer level high above the ground. I floated, like a bather in a tepid ocean.
Suddenly the oval sky was pierced diagonally by a bird flying fast and straight as an arrow. Another bird followed and then a dozen more. Another dozen and another. Now swooping, pirouetting, diving, turning. The sky was filled with birds with light underbellies, black wings and tails and fast as lightning. The warm silence of the day was punctuated with the sound of cheeps and chirps. The hummers abandoned their acrobatics releasing the air to these sky dancers. Wings fluttered then canted in motionless aerodynamic perfection as the sleek forms knifed through the blue. The appearance from below suggested penguins swimming swiftly and effortlessly through a glacial blue ocean, but flashes of brilliant iridescence caught in the rays of the sun as the birds wheeled about the sky. Never stopping, the plunging, soaring, seemingly random dance continued on and on leaving me dazzled and transfixed.
Finally, little by little, the air cleared. Only a few random swallows remained feeding on the insects that had produced this amazing spectacle. More abundant insects further on lured the rest of the troupe to new performances for other audiences.
And suddenly the day once again became still. The seemingly eternal mountains on the other side of the valley continued their unseen drift northward interrupted every decade or two by a minute, but sometimes devastating, lurch. More insects with life spans of an hour, a day or a week filled the sky again. Will there be Violet-Green Swallows bringing brilliant performances to languid summer days as Los Angeles glides steadily northward and aligns itself on the ridge across the valley some millions of years from now?
What a vision of independence for mind, body, and spirit this spectacle encouraged! And what a stage setting! No Independence Day festival can rival this celebration of freedom; no fireworks can be as grand.
Sometimes Nature Stinks
I know more about skunks than I did last week. Although I did not have a personal encounter, I have a friend who did.
Gene lives in a well-established, heavily populated neighborhood close to a creek. An enthusiastic birder and naturalist, Gene had set about trapping a family of feral cats that were foraging on birds at his bird-feeder. Using a live trap, he captured one of the cats and enlisted the help of the humane society in removing it. He reset the trap to try again the next night. In the morning the trap held more than he had bargained for. Instead of a cat, he had himself a skunk. This time the humane society, far from rushing to his rescue, gave him advice on how to release the skunk while remaining unscathed.
Gene donned a garbage bag with openings cut for arms and head, took a piece of old carpet to put over the cage and sallied forth. Waiting for him was not only the caged adolescent skunk, but another skunk, possibly a sibling, standing by the incarcerated animal. The second skunk did not flee as Gene had hoped, but sauntered off a ways to watch the proceedings.
Attempting to maintain a level-head, Gene covered the cage, except for the end with the door, with the carpet. Carefully he opened the door and waited for the skunk to scamper out and join its friend. The skunk did indeed exit, but rather than scurrying off, came around the cage, sniffed Gene’s sandaled feet, and ultimately walked off to join its companion while Gene stood still as a statue. After the pair disappeared beneath a nearby shed, Gene took a deep breath once again, thankful to have no lingering memories of this encounter except a vivid mental picture.
I have only seen skunks occasionally and always from afar. Apparently these primarily nocturnal animals give a warning before spraying the potent potion we associate with them. They stomp their feet and hiss or growl before they spray from glands located near their tail. Common wisdom has it that a skunk’s eyesight is poor, so it is possible to sneak up on one unnoticed. And, supposedly, if you pick a skunk up by the tail, it cannot spray because it needs to have a firm stance with its hind feet on the ground before it can discharge its musk. This is not a theory I yearn to test.
On a loftier plane this encounter leads to musings about how we can cohabit peacefully with wildlife. Many animals are fairly successful at sharing their territory with humans as they move in and may keep a low enough profile that we do not know they are there. But eventually a conflict develops as space diminishes. Unwelcome encounters for both man and animal lead to confrontations that neither wins. What value do we place on sharing a world with wildlife? What are the rewards? How can we manage?
Until 1993 YSI provided animal rehabilitation for sick and injured animals at its Alum Rock site. Often when an animal recovered it was released into a world that caused its sickness or injury in the first place. This service was discontinued primarily for lack of space and money, but also because YSI’s primary mission was education–education that often poses difficult questions that have no simple answers.
Snakes Alive!
A yard-long gopher snake lies stretched across my driveway. Having lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains for over a quarter of a century, I have learned to recognize a snake when I see one. This is definitely a snake and, more specifically, definitely a gopher snake.
Both gopher snakes and rattlesnakes live around here. I’ve happened on both. It’s simple enough to tell them apart even though they are similar in color. Rattlesnakes have a distinct head and tail. And, after all, what is there to describe other than a head and a tail. In between a snake looks a lot like—well—a snake, although maybe a snake of a different color or stripe. This snake has no rattle on one end, no diamond-shaped head on the other, just an elegant snake body tapering to a point with a sleek integrated extension-of-the-body head on the other end.
I stop about two feet away. The snake doesn’t notice me. I decide to watch. When you see a snake, any kind of snake, you know you have the advantage. The snake has not seen you yet. If it had, it would be gone, more startled by you than you by it.
The snake doesn’t move. An ant marches deliberately toward the midsection of the snake carrying a leaf stalk many times its height. It reaches the snake and becomes confused. It turns and scurries toward the head of the snake. All I can see is the bobbing leaf stalk moving up the length of snake. The ant loses its scent trail and turns back to scurry along the snake towards its tail. Once again it loses the scent and turns toward the head. Three passes back and forth. Finally the ant climbs on the snake’s tail, is again confused and goes back to pacing the snake’s length.
The inert snake flicks its tongue and moves forward almost imperceptibly. Smelling the air with its forked tongue, slowly, ever so slowly, the snake moves forward a bare fraction of an inch at a time. Ten minutes pass. The snake has moved a foot. The ant still scurries back and forth on the other side of the snake. The snake continues its slow progress. Finally the snake moves far enough for the ant to find its path. It eagerly surges forward, but encounters another ant, one of a different species. The ants engage each other. A battle ensues. The ant that finally got past the snake abandons its stalk and repeatedly attacks the intruding ant. It seizes the ant, which is almost its same size. Forsaking its plant trophy, it carries its captive, still struggling, down the preordained path.
The snake moves another six inches, a millimeter at a time. It becomes infinitesimally more animated. Its tongue flicks faster; it starts swaying its head from side to side. Twenty minutes have passed. The ant has carried off its victim. The snake is gradually being swallowed by the chaparral leaving a furrow in the dust of the driveway.
The beginning of this story? The end? There is no beginning; there is no end. Life continues.
To compare a gopher snake and a rattlesnake visit YSI in Alum Rock Park.
Summer Fun
School is out. Trees are in flower. Time for the slow easy days of summer. But wait. There is a hum, a buzz, a roar around here. The energy level is rising, pulsing, really vibrating. What’s going on? Ah, it’s summer camps again at YSI.
Things really get going in January, building in a gradual crescendo to June. Decisions are made about what camps to offer and where to offer them. There are always so many more ideas than time. In March camp registration starts. Parents agonize over whether their child will go for Bugology, Phunky Physics, Jurassic Giants, or Indian Summer. Startled into realizing school will be out soon, they start thinking about vacation plans. Choices are made. Camps start to fill.
Teachers are hired—over forty of them—along with a camp aide for each. The humming gets louder.
Familiar faces appear, camp teachers and aides from former years. We hug and talk about what they’ve been doing since last summer, new ideas they have for this summer. Some were once YSI campers who became camp aides and then instructors. Vanessa has gotten her credential and is teaching at a year-round school near Sacramento. Will won’t be here this summer; he’s in Costa Rica. Lori will be back for a few weeks and so will Kim. Kyle can’t teach camps the first week because his sixth grade class is not out yet for the summer. Jeff will back for Bike Hikes. So much history!
By May there is a positive buzz of activity. As the weather warms, kids drop by in the afternoon. Riding their bikes around after school, they bring their friends in to show them where they went to camp last years, where they’re going this year. They stop to see the animals, to talk about what they’ve been doing, to just hang out with their friends.
Camp teaching kits are brought out of storage; stacks of them fill every free inch of space. Craft kits are replenished with glue sticks, straws, coffee filters, feathers, beads, egg cartons, anything that might be used by a creative camp instructor. First aid kits get new band-aids and items we hope never to use.
Finally the day arrives for the teachers’ meeting. Matters philosophical and practical are considered. What about evolution? What if a parent doesn’t come to pick up a child? Who knows the most about geology? Botany? Chemistry? What’s the best way to store a fishing pole? A collective wisdom develops that far transcends anyone’s personal store of information.
And then its summer. An instructor props open the trunk of her car with a baseball bat so she can unload balloons half covered with paper mache; another emerges with fourteen fishing poles. A seven foot wooden dinosaur skeleton stands under a huge oak. Binoculars and bug nets rest on a picnic table. Campers arrive carrying lunches, riding bikes, bringing pets, chasing friends, laughing, crying, running, sitting.
And so the summer goes. The roar turns into a symphony performed on the instruments invented in Invention Convention, the test tubes filled with water in Curious Chemistry, the singing of bicycle tires, the sighing of wind in the trees and the hum of insects.
What a way to spend the lazy days of summer!
You Can Look But You Better Not Touch
© 2002 Charles E. Jones
Got an itch to take a hike? Here it is spring (or is it summer?) at last. You’re sitting in a windowless cubicle or maybe even an office with a view dreaming of the glorious blue sky with birds circling effortlessly on warm updrafts over gently tanning hills. Your heart longs to be there. Time to escape from this Silly Valley. Time to take a hike.
Choose any of the close-by trails. Maybe one at Almaden Quicksilver or Sanborn or Alum Rock Park. Walk a ways. As you look around, you notice the lush vegetation of California’s Coastal Ranges. You spot an attractive plant with shiny green leaves, gently lobed and furrowed, perhaps, tinged with red and gold. It may be at ankle height alongside the trail. It may be a tangle of brush or a vine scampering up a tree with reddish stems climbing for light at the top. Birds flit about eating the small white berries clinging to the stems. If it’s evening, you may spot a deer browsing on its leaves of three. As you brush against it, that itch you had becomes a full blown, mind-possessing, all-consuming reality. You have poison oak.
This is not to say that you are doomed to get poison oak every time you take a stroll in the country. I have never had it despite years of living and working close to it. I have brushed against it and, at least at one point, grabbed onto it and miraculously never suffered the consequences. Apparently some early Native Americans were desensitized to poison oak, but since they also had cures for it, we can guess this wasn’t true for all of them. In early times poison oak was used for everything from spits for fish to shafts for arrows, from black dye for baskets and tattoos to cures for warts. We humans are amazingly resourceful.
Oil in the leaves and branches is the culprit that causes all the problems. Smoke from burning poison oak should definitely be avoided. Firefighters breathing burning poison oak can suffer serious lung irritation. I had a friend whose husband was a firefighter for the California Division of Forestry. During one brush fire the smoke from burning poison oak got up his pant legs and caused a rash that put him out of commission for several weeks.
So what does this mean for you? Should you take that hike? Of course you should! Just learn to recognize poison oak and pay attention. And when your child presents you with a handful of beautiful red leaves, three to a stalk, in the late summer or fall, wash, wash, wash that child. Watch for a rash, and see a dermatologist if things start looking serious. But poison oak is much less serious than the ailment you get from staying home and not following your heart.
To get more information on hiking trails close to where you live contact Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation Department (408) 358-3741 or http://www.parkhere.org.
Down at the Thrift and Gift
Need a hockey stick? A purple belt? A toaster? A manual for an Apple IIc? Or a life-size picture of Joe Montana? There’s every good chance you can find it at the YSI Thrift and Gift Shop. In 1993 a dedicated, and perhaps a little crazy, group of about 150 volunteers from the YSI Guild took the plunge and opened a Thrift Shop on Alum Rock Avenue in a building that once housed Reed’s Sport Shop. With hesitancy and excitement (“What will happen after we’ve all cleaned out our garages?”) the shop was opened for its first two weeks of business in December.
The building seemed gigantic, almost twice the size of what the Guild members were looking for, but the location seemed perfect. The plan had been to open after the holidays, but in order to make enough money to cover the rent, the store was opened for two weeks in December. From the moment the doors opened the endeavor was a success. Soon every nook and cranny was filled. An upstairs room crammed almost to the ceiling with shoes rivaled Imelda’s closet. A back room was set aside for books. A vintage clothing department started to take shape and was open by appointment only to local school and community theater groups. A wall in back was set aside for fixing ailing electronic donations. Sections for storage of decorations for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the Fourth of July lined the halls.
And so it has been ever since. Front room volunteers serve customers and ring up sales. Back room volunteers work on Black Mountain, the name given to the heap of stuff that often arrives in black garbage bags, sorting, tagging, and sometimes even trying to identify items. There is always an abundance of food, jokes, laughter, and chatter in the back room. Day managers handle on-the-spot decisions and “vice-presidents” in charge of ladies’ lingerie, sporting goods, books, toys, housewares, jewelry, greeting cards, and craft supplies, to name just a few, set the tone for the departments. Regular customers are greeted by name and new merchandise is always available. The ambiance is part old-fashioned general store, part community center.
Although the proceeds directly benefit the Youth Science Institute, the benefits reach much farther into the community. When teachers, some of whom are Guild members, need “gang neutral” attire for their students, the Thrift Shop donates it. When a house burns down, the Thrift Shop may provide the occupants with a gift certificate. And items that do not sell after three months are donated to Hope Rehabilitation Services. This is the ultimate in recycling.
Who are these Guild members? They are hard-working, fun-loving democratic folk, generous with their time, whose kindness to each other spills over in abundance to their customers. No one is in charge and everyone is in charge. They are people who quietly and steadily make a difference. One may well be your neighbor.
The YSI Thrift and Gift is located close to the corner of White at 3151 Alum Rock Avenue in San Jose. It is open from 10 to 4, Tuesday through Saturday. The phone number is (408) 272-1301.
Getting in touch with nature in Alum Rock Park
I first learned about the Youth Science Institute (YSI) in 1990 when I became its Director of Operations. As I drove into Alum Rock Park for the first time (I had never been there even though I had lived in Santa Clara County since 1964) I realized it was a place of unique beauty. The seven hundred acres nestled in the foothills on the western slope of the Mount Hamilton Range was home to the small stone building that housed YSI. As its founders said, it was a small building for a large dream.
In the fast-paced world we live in, there’s a certain comfort knowing that some things never change. We share with all who have gone before us a concern for our children and the opportunities we long for them to have. Back in 1953 our parents and grandparents and others with great vision gave substance to this yearning. They looked at the abundant richness of the landscape around them. They noted the increasing insulation their children had from this wealth as the city grew up around them. And they determined to find a way to bring their children back to the land to learn the lessons it had to teach.
Thus YSI was founded using Alum Rock Park with its perennial stream, varied wildlife, diverse vegetation and unique geological formations as the setting for a project that has now stood the test of almost five decades.
I’ve come to know that small stone building in Alum Rock Park very well and to marvel at the wonderful people who make it come alive each day. That small building continues to attract hordes of school children and families who visit YSI each year. The tile and concrete floor of what was once a concession stand in the more than century-old park remains. The building, once used to dispense popcorn and cotton candy, is now home to hawks, owls, toads, and newts, animals found in the Mount Hamilton range. The animals, many non-releasable because of injuries, give young people a close-up look at creatures from the natural world. It is also home to teachers young and old who share their knowledge of and enthusiasm for the world with all who wish to learn.
We live in a charmed world with access to things only once imagined. But we have lost a little in the process. There is little chance to feel a feather, watch an anthill, count a tree’s rings, or skip a rock across a pond these days. But YSI provides these experiences. Its exhibit space includes the whole outdoors. Its rhythms follow the seasons; its lessons are as varied as the wind. It is the antidote to the stresses of life we all experience. YSI belongs to everyone.
Until last year’s storm damage is fixed the Park is open to walk-in traffic only, but it is well worth the walk. Like fifty years ago, there are many lessons for all of us to learn. And there is a nice silence and solitude without traffic that allows room for gratitude to those who earlier provided a way for us to learn those lessons.
The Youth Science Institute at Alum Rock Park is open daily throughout the summer from Noon to 4:30 p.m.
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Anne's books
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