Astronomer Visits Impressive, But Not Famous, Park in a Foreign Land

The Muniment Room of the Birr Castle Archives, August, 2010. This was my "office" while researching connections between the 19th Century Parsons family and America. (90-degree panorama of several handheld vertical frames -- should be clicked on and viewed large.)

The astronomer of this post's title isn't me, who traveled from Santa Cruz County, California, to County Offaly in Ireland in 2010. The astronomer in question is one who traveled exactly the other way, from County Offaly, Ireland, to Santa Cruz County, California, in 1891.

Laurence Parsons, Fourth Earl of Rosse, as a Young Man (photo from the Birr Castle Archives)

The Fourth Earl of Rosse

Had he not been surrounded by superluminous immediate family members, Laurence Parsons, the Fourth Earl of Rosse, probably would be considered among the top tier of Irish scientists and engineers of the 19th Century. He directed the great astronomical observatory in Parsonstown (now Birr) Ireland, including the largest telescope in the world, for more than 30 years. He pioneered the use of infrared sensing techniques to measure the temperature of the surface of the Moon. He was an officer of the Royal Society (and delivered its supremely prestigious Bakerian Lecture on Physical Science in 1873) and was Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin, for more than two decades.

The Fourth Earl inspects a 36-inch telescope at his observatory, late 1800s. This particular telescope no longer exists, but the walls in the background -- support structure for the giant "Leviathan of Parsonstown" -- still do. Between them now is a reconstruction of that revolutionary instrument, designed and built by the Fourth Earl's father. (Photo from Ireland's Historic Science Centre, Birr Castle Demesne.)

And yet, in his own living room, he was overshadowed from a number of directions: his father, William, the Third Earl, essentially invented the single most important tool of extragalactic astronomy (the giant reflecting telescope) before we even knew there was such a thing as "extragalactic astronomy." His mother, Mary, was a pioneer in the infant technology of photography. His youngest brother, Charles, was a prolific inventor who revolutionized transportation technology by inventing the steam turbine -- and demonstrated it in daring fashion to the British Admiralty by bringing his turbine-powered yacht, the Turbinia, uninvited, to Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee in 1897 and outrunning the finest ships of the Queen's Navy that tried to catch the gate crasher. (There is a great action photo of the Turbinia running the Royal Navy silly here.) His cousin, Mary, was a pioneering microscopist, and one of only three women on the mailing list of the Royal Astronomical Society at the time. The other two were Mary Somerville (after whom Somerville College at Oxford University is named) and Queen Victoria herself.

One of the Fourth Earl's travel diaries in the Birr Castle Archives, 2010.

Unlike his revered father and mother, though, Laurence became a world traveler (presaging the globetrotting ways of his grandson and great-grandson in their pursuit of botanical specimens and, in the case of the current Earl, service to humanity through the United Nations). His two long tours of North America, one in 1884 and the other in 1891, are the first instances I can find of his family's venturing into the Western Hemisphere.

Sherwood peruses the archives, Birr Castle, 2010. The white cotton gloves are to protect the old paper from skin oils and acids.

I came across his handwritten travel diaries for those two trips in the Birr Castle Archives in August, 2010. His notes on his second trip, the one in 1891, contained one thing that made the hairs on my forearms stand up in eerie astonishment, and another that is deeply puzzling. Both concern events in places less than 50 miles from my home in Boulder Creek, California -- one of them very, very much less than 50 miles -- almost half way 'round the world from his home in the Irish midlands.

A pair of pages from the Fourth Earl of Rosse's travel diary, 1891.

An Astonishing Personal Co-Incidence

A new generation of research astronomical observatories had barely begun in 1891, incorporating a revolution in location rather than technology. Lick Observatory of the University of California was the first mountaintop research observatory in the world, having gone into operation only three years before in 1888. (Before then, the benefits of good "seeing" afforded by certain mountains' steady airflow, diminishing the wavering scintillation or "twinkling" of starlight, had not been widely recognized.) Lick is located atop Mt. Hamilton, just East of San Jose, California, and is a place dear to my heart. It is also only about an hour's drive from my office at DeAnza College.

Lick Observatory at the summit of Mt. Hamilton, California, September 2008. The great 36" refractor still occupies the big dome; the Ft. Harrington pickup truck squats near the entrance.

Clearly, Lick Observatory would be a necessary stop for the Director of the famous Leviathan of Parsonstown on his tour of North America in 1891, and it was. Laurence Parsons, Fourth Earl of Rosse, arrived in Northern California (by train via Mexico and Los Angeles) in March, 1891. His diary entries concerning his trip to the mountaintop are full of technical detail, but short on context -- and short on something else that I'll get into later. The real immediate surprise to me was about something closer to home. Literally, closer to home.

Shortly after his visit to the top of Mt. Hamilton, he wrote these entries in his diary concerning an excursion to another Northern California attraction:

Sunday (Easter) [March 29, 1891]
Sorry I was taken out by 10-30 train to Mr. Doyles (Menlo Park, a residential spot on the way to Sn Jose) so I missed Church. Holden [Edward Singleton Holden, first Director of Lick Observatory, founder of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and all-around hard guy to get along with --SH] & I lunched & dined with the Ds (Mr & Mrs two daughters & 2 sons) & between drove to the new "Stanford University" which as yet consists of buildings only, unfinished, in imitation of the old Spanish Mexican style. Went on to San Jose and stayed night at the new hotel.

Monday Mar. 30
Started at about 10 for "Big Trees" station on the narrow guage line. The "big trees" are close to the station. They are said to be not far short of 300 ft high but only half the girth of the Yosemite groves. I found it took 7 of my stretches to reach round one say 7 x 5 3/5 feet, 40 1/4 feet = say 12 3/4 diam at 4 feet from ground. [I love the way he "talks" himself through the arithmetic! --SH] In the inside of a hollow one my outstretched arms could not reach across the cavity. The branches are short & poor. The whole forest has contained many similar trees but they furnish the "red wood" which is used for all building construction in these parts (Sequoia Sempervirens: bot name). The wood is soft & not resinous yet very durable. Among other things it is used instead of stone or brick in the linings of the railway tunnels.

From there we drove on to Santa Cruz, a sea side resort with hotel & thence by rail to Monterey also on the sea coast...

Wow.

It is clear that on March 30, 1891, the Fourth Earl of Rosse visited the San Lorenzo Valley, the short notch in the Santa Cruz Mountains in which Boulder Creek and Ft. Harrington are located. The "Big Trees" and the narrow-guage railroad are the first clues -- the private park he refers to still exists as the "Big Trees and Roaring Camp Railroad" complex just outside the little town of Felton, California, just down the valley from Ft. Harrington, and directly adjacent to Henry Cowell State Park.

"Big Trees and Roaring Camp Railroad," 2005. My late son, Doug Harrington, holds his daughter, Grace, on his shoulder in front of a narrow-guage locomotive that may well have been operating when Laurence Parsons, Fourth Earl of Rosse, visited this place in 1891.

Henry Cowell State Park is where I walk my dog. It's Kelsey's favorite place in the whole world.

Kelsey in heaven. Or Henry Cowell State Park. To him, there's no difference.

After discovering this, and having talked to Lady Rosse about the great co-incidence, she searched through the family's photo albums and found one that included the Fourth Earl's visual souvenirs of his second trip to America. In those photos was this one:

In what is now Henry Cowell State Park, California, 1891.

... a place in Henry Cowell State Park that I walk Kelsey past every time we go, near the park's headquarters. The tilted trunk isn't there any more, nor are the people in their formal dress, but the grove is there. It wouldn't be so astonishing if this were a photo of a major tourist attraction, like Yosemite or the Grand Canyon -- but this is a little local park, a dog-walking place, that somehow is shared across the thousands of miles and the century between, and that thrills me. Maybe that's silly. I don't think so.

Sherwood photographing a photograph album from a trip by an astronomer of bygone days to his own present home. The multiple layers of self-referencing in this image make me dizzy.

A Deeply Puzzling Four Blank Pages

In addition to my astonishment on finding that the Fourth Earl of Rosse, all the way from the middle of Ireland, had visited my dog's park, I was intrigued by a curious set of four completely blank pages in his diary, between his arrival at Lick Observatory and his departure. Wasting paper like that was utterly unlike the Fourth Earl (not a single line of paper is blank elsewhere in his diary, and often he wrote things in the margins or gutter), but here were four empty vessels at the most crucial point in his tour (from an astronomer's perspective.)

The mystery will be the topic of a future post here in SherWords, once I have researched the matter in more depth -- which I can do, since the Lick Observatory Archives and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific both have their headquarters just a few miles away!

Stay tuned.

Bridge Idyll

(No, not "idle bridge" -- that would be this one .)

In Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park: part of the railbed of the Santa Cruz, Big Trees & Pacific Railway Company.

There was a very nice, short article about our San Lorenzo River valley in the San Jose Mercury early this summer. It was about a feature that our valley still has that is disappearing from other rivers across America: the swimmin' hole, unfenced, unregulated, un-chlorinated, and probably a little unsanitary, too.

The San Lorenzo River is very short; it runs from the crest of the Santa Cruz Mountains southward to the city of Santa Cruz on Monterey Bay, a distance of less than twenty miles. The whole valley, in fact, can be seen in this photo from a recent SherWords post, from its origin near the bottom of that frame to its outlet in the mid-distance haze. (The smoke plume was from the "Lockheed" wildfire of last month.) Its course runs through a magnificent forest of sequoia sempervirens (coast redwoods) and wends its way through several small towns. A few of those towns dam the stream during the summer to make swimming places for kids (and others) and, especially in its last few miles, there are a number of natural pooling places that require no dammed assistance.

One of those natural pools is in Henry Cowell State Park just south of Felton. (That park was itself a recent topic here in a different context. ) It is in an idyllic place in the park -- if you don't think a railroad excludes the entire concept of "idyll" -- where the river begins its winding path through its final steep canyon to the sea. It is under a hundred-year-old railroad bridge, a bridge that now carries only tourist trains operated twice a day for round trips to the Santa Cruz beach and boardwalk by the Roaring Camp folks.

Shortly after I was finished with summer school in August, I took an early-morning walk with my old Nikon and tripod down the railroad tracks to the bridge. Fog from Monterey Bay still hung at about treetop level in the canyon, lending a muted, diffused light to the redwoods and the forest floor.

The bridge itself posed gracefully for its portraits...

... and I clambered down for a view into the morning's foggy glare downstream:

I resolved to come back at a time when the excursion train was scheduled to cross the bridge, and, after checking the schedule, returned two days later at about 10:30am (after having taken a quick trip to the mountains' crest to snap the above-referenced photo of smoke from the wildfire on Ben Lomond Mountain.)

When I reached the bridge and set up my tripod a little downstream from it, a trio of young girls was already there, enjoying the swimmin' hole under the bridge, taking turns swinging on the long, leisurely rope dangling from the bridge to the water. The photos below, if seen only here, show neither rope nor young girls. If you click on any of the next three photos, though, you should be able to see the long rope near the right-hand bridge pier.

When the train arrived, the girls scuttled, giggling, up the river bank into the woods, but...

... even before the train had completely passed over the bridge, they were back.


This confluence of things from a different time -- an old railroad bridge, a languid river's swimming spot, a swinging rope's enthrallment -- led me to indulge myself in a bit of Photoshop cuteness that I don't want to let myself do very much. I altered one of my grade-level photos of the bridge to include a different destination on its far side:

A bridge too far.

(You really have to click on the above image to see it larger to get all that I want you to see. Please?)

I think of the strolling figure on the other side, walking with measured strides farther on down the track, as my Dad, who was deeply intrigued by trains and especially their railbeds' courses throughout his life. I am not on the bridge yet, nor (I hope) will be any time soon -- but I can sure see it from here. One of my sons has the good grace to be behind me, out of sight in this picture. The other has broken the rules, has impetuously rushed across the bridge ahead of me, and is already out of sight around the tracks' curve, as was always his way.

As I said, I don't want to let myself do this very much. But there was something about the old bridge, and the morning's fog, and the redwood forest that let me do it this once.

Dead Park Walking [UPDATED, July 24]

[Update, July 24:
As Brian notes in the comments, today's action by the State legislature has spared most of the California state parks from closure, if that ever was a serious possibility. Some State parks will almost certainly close, but lists I've seen of the ones on the Governor's plate of possibilities include only those that actually could be physically closed: museums, historical homes, and mines, for example. So it seems that "Kelsey's Park" -- our local Henry Cowell Redwoods -- is likely to remain available to him for at least a while longer.
Now I can get back to the business of worrying about my colleagues' jobs, my students' welfare, my community's ability to function, and the intelligence of my State's leaders.]

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California isn't just broke, it's broken.

How do you close a forest? How do you close a river?
Kelsey and me, 2001, Henry Cowell State Park

The state is in a state of financial collapse. The legislature and the governor are trying to address a deficit of staggering proportions. The numbers are numbing, and beggar attempts to fathom: currently, the figure is $26 billion dollars for the next year. To try to put that in perspective, it's almost twice the entire yearly expenditure on prisons, and almost half of the entire state annual spending on elementary through community college education, and one-third of its annual expenditures on health and human services. Any fix will involve massive reductions in services, and conjures up images of Dickensian despair among the poor.

Just how the State with the world's eighth-largest economy got itself into this horrid mess can be (and is) debated endlessly, but it all boils down to an initiative process which has written mandatory, large expenditures into the State constitution while also making revenue increases almost impossible. We've been heading toward this gargantuan train wreck for more than thirty years, and it's here.

My own job is in jeopardy, of course, since my salary as a community college teacher ultimately comes from the State's coffers. While the people of my local district have been very, very generous over the past few years, taxing themselves to the tune of half a billion dollars to fund capital improvements (including my incredible new planetarium), that largesse can only go to capital improvements -- it can't fund salaries. My department is in relatively good shape, since we teach huge classes... but the folks at the Titanic's stern were in relatively good shape, too, in the spring of 1912.

Kelsey helps his mistress around the circuit after surgery, Henry Cowell State Park, 2002.

Since crucial state functions like education, safety, and social services are about to fall into an abyss, I almost feel guilty writing what I'm about to. But I'll write it anyway.

Bliss, 2004, Henry Cowell State Park

At last look, California is planning to close 220 of its 279 state parks. This supposedly will save, over a two-year period, about two-tenths of a billion dollars, if one doesn't factor in additional expenses that trying to keep forests and beaches "closed" will entail. Among those 220 are the three parks in our part of the Santa Cruz Mountains: Big Basin (California's first state park with an awe-inspiring stand of thousands of years old Sequoia Sempervirens), Castle Rock at the crest of the mountains, and Henry Cowell Redwoods park in Felton.

That last one is what pierces my heart like a shiv, since it is Kelsey's favorite place in the entire world.

Shortly after we rescued Kelsey from the pound in 1998, we took him for a walk in Henry Cowell park. The joy he manifested on that first visit was thrilling: he didn't walk or run, he leapt from place to place along the path. Sniffing, peeing, pooping, bouncing, grinning... it was like he had found heaven after his puppyhood of neglect. The course we took through he park -- a roughly two-mile circuit through the hardwood forest and along the banks of the San Lorenzo river -- burned itself into his brain then, and he and I have followed that course countless times since.

A winter's walk, 2006, Henry Cowell State Park. Our friend Lucile jollies Kelsey, while Diane is tended by the spaniels.

On most of those trips along his circuit, it has been just him and me, and we traipse it a couple of times a month. Now eleven years old, he can tell when I'm even thinking about taking him to "Kelsey's Park," and his usual dour demeanor changes to giddiness. He will remain patient in the back seat as we drive, until we go past the turn that would take us to the vet, and then he begins trembling. As we turn in to the road to the park entrance, he whines a warble that he never does at any other time, and when we get out of the car, he becomes ecstatic. For a while. Then he becomes all business, sniffing every leaf along our well-known path, marking his specific spots until both tanks are empty, and even beyond that. He wades in the river for about a minute along the way, pauses respectfully when horses pass on the horse-trail part of our circuit, and ignores, for the most part, other people and dogs. He has business to do, you know, and doggy newspapers to read on the scents of the grasses and the leaves.

From a horseback vantage point, 2000, Henry Cowell State Park.

River dog, 2005, Henry Cowell State Park.

If and when the park is closed, I suppose we will find other places for special times -- but, at his advanced age, he will lose something that has been an integral part of his joy forever.

And so will I.

Closure of the parks pales so much compared to other losses that will befall this State that I can't bring myself to become too active in protesting them. Many of the poorest among us are about to be handed a slow-motion death sentence, not by lethal injection but by lethal abandonment. My students, for many of whom community colleges are the last, best hope not just for them but for their families, will lose that opportunity. My co-workers will lose their jobs. How dare I worry about what effect it will have on my dog?

I don't know. You try explaining it to him here in the evening twilight of his life. I can't.

His heaven.

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