A Surprising Tree in a Place Where Trees Don't Surprise

This is the San Lorenzo Valley in California's Santa Cruz Mountains:

The trees you can see from this vista point along California Highway 9 are almost entirely sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwoods, and their magnificent height and abundance hides thousands of homes -- including Ft. Harrington, which is roughly in the center of this frame -- from view.

The view from this place a hundred years ago would have been very different. After the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 (which actually devastated most of the Bay Area, not just San Francisco), this land was almost entirely clear-cut to provide building materials for the great reconstruction. That means that essentially all of the trees you see in the above photo are juveniles in the reckoning of redwoods, only about a century old. Between 1920 and about 1960, as the second-growth redwoods were growing up, the shorter trees of the blanketing forest allowed some things to exist profitably that are now long gone: many swimming pools behind dams in creeks (because shorter trees allowed more sunlight to reach the ground) and even an airport (which is now the Boulder Creek Country Club's golf course), for example.

Part of a poster for the long-gone Boulder Creek drive-in movie theater from half a century ago -- when the re-growing forest was only about half as high as it is now. Two things that were snuffed out by the forest's re-growth are evident in its map: the airport and a big swimming pool. (Click on the image for a higher-resolution view.) Poster courtesy of Jeff Liebermann. Note that apostrophe abuse is not a new phenomenon.

Many of the trees in the photo at the top of this entry, when seen up close, are members of tight, circular groups. One such group is on the Ft. Harrington grounds:

The summer furniture and patio occupy the footprint of the surrounding redwoods' ancestor, the ancient giant that lives on in its offshoots.

The circle of trees in these groups are sprouts, or "suckers", from the roots of a truly ancient, mammoth, primordial redwood, which may have been thousands of years old when felled. The scale of our patio in this photo shows the trunk size of the ancestral giant. All of our neighbors in "Creepy Hollow" have at least one such circle of sprouts, and those sprouts themselves now are more than a hundred feet tall.

Hundred-foot tall trees, while they may be "juvenile," can still be a problem to those who live underneath them if they are not cared for. Redwoods tend to shed limbs as part of their growing process. Trouble is, the limbs they shed are typically as big as full-grown pine trees in other climes. (Adam, I'm sure, remembers very well how impressive such shed limbs can be when they hit the ground -- he was visiting during a winter storm in the first year or two of our living here when several of them shook the earth. The previous occupant of this place neglected her trees' care.) It's wise to have weakened limbs removed before they break off on their own. Intentionally-removed redwood limbs are called "maintenance expenses;" spontaneous fallers are called "widow-makers."

There are two different ways of thinning potential widow-makers that local arborists tend to use: selective thinning and "columnization."


The above photo shows three circles of second-growth redwoods: the one on our property whose base was shown above (left), one on our thoroughly irresponsible neighbors' property (center), and one on a good neighbor's property (right). Ours is pretty much indistinguishable from the reprobates' cluster, because our tree-caretaker's philosophy is to take only those limbs that pose a danger. His (and our) preference is to leave the trees looking as much like they naturally would as possible, and thus the appearance of our trees is pretty much like neglected ones'.

The right-hand clump shows the other way of caring for them: just shave everything up to the point where you'd better leave needles for survival. Our tree guy snortingly calls this approach "columnization," and, until two weeks ago, I never would have thought that this particular neighbor would go for that look.

But she did. Two weeks ago. Before that, her trees looked pretty much like ours.

I didn't ask her about it, because the opportunity never arose in passing, and, besides, that's the kind of thing we tend to leave each other alone about here in Creepy Hollow.

On Christmas Eve, Diane and I drove up to Pleasant Hill, a couple of hours away, to celebrate the holiday with Grace-the-Granddaughter, Adam, Adrianne, and a whole gaggle of the clan. We didn't get back until well after dark... and were then well and truly treated to what our neighbor had in mind when she had her trees "columnized." The next day, Christmas day, I took a series of photos from late afternoon to dark, that shows her plot:

Afternoon.

Evening.

Night.

What a HOOT! It's like suddenly having an illuminated Washington Monument plunked down in your little hollow! The lights extend well over a hundred feet up the tree (I know; I used a high-precision Fies Protractor for the measurement computations) and are visible throughout the neighborhood. She says that next year she may have the remaining, high-altitude branches festooned with lights, too, and I hope she does. Then it would be a hundred-foot arrow of lights pointing straight UP.

Meanwhile, the Ft. Harrington Christmas Tree was of much more modest scale:

More about Christmas will be posted here soon, but Christmas isn't really over yet. I'll leave you now with how Emma looked yesterday while presents were being opened:

Please click on the above images for higher-resolution versions, especially the ones of our neighbor's tree.

Merry Christmas and Other Things

Merry Christmas!

The sound file, linked above, was recorded by Grace in Adam's studio.

You must click here (or on the picture) and listen to the message in order to view the rest of this blog entry legally. If you do not do so, and yet continue to read the rest, then you are at risk of a visit from Raul's legal team.

2008 Christmas Tree, Ft. Harrington

Speaking of Adam and his studio, the second episode of "Gorilla in the Greenhouse" was released this month. Go check it out -- Adam (the voice of K. J., the eponymous gorilla) has only about four lines in this episode, but he delivers them with consummate professionalism. More than I can say for whoever checked the science in this episode.


This blog's good friend, Theriomorph, and her Hero Dog, Gilgamesh, have suffered a great loss recently. Please visit and condole if you wish; Nellie was an example of why we can be proud to be mammals.

Peace out, as they say, and looking forward to exchanging photons with you all in 2009.

Archbold Stadium and Number 44

Eleven-year-old Sherwood (in sporty sport coat at left) enters Syracuse University's Archbold Stadium to watch the Orangemen play the University of Pittsburgh Panthers on November 1, 1958.

Syracuse University's Archbold Stadium, now long gone, was built in the early 1900's, and was the template for the "bowl" oval stadia that dotted the big-time football map through most of the 20th century. Michigan's "Big House" probably represents the high point of that phenomenon, but other worthy successors abound: the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, the Orange Bowl in Miami, all have roots to some degree to old Archbold.

Halftime, November 1, 1958.

Syracuse beat the Pitt Panthers, 16-13, in this very good year leading up to the great year of 1959. In 1959, the Orangemen won their only national championship, and their great running back, Ernie Davis, won the Heisman trophy, an honor that had eluded his predecessor, Jim Brown.

Dad was a Syracuse alum, and took me to many games at old Archbold Stadium. In front of my eyes, I saw Jim Brown play for Ben Schwartzwalder, and Ernie Davis dance through defenders, and Gerhart Schwedes invent the tight end position, and Jim Ridlon ricochet through defensive lines, and many, many others invent on the fly, and fly high.

When we didn't drive the 65 miles from Norwich to Syracuse on fall Saturdays, I was plastered to the radio, listening to Bill O'Donnell anxiously count the game clock "tick - tick - ticking" down to the end of the game.

I spent my falls enthralled.

And I learned to revere the number 44. Jim Brown wore it, and his triumphant and tragic successor, Ernie Davis, did as well. College Hall of Famer [and in February 2010 NFL Hall of Famer] Floyd Little did so later, too. The number became so iconic that Syracuse University requested -- and was granted -- a new postal zip code, 13244.

Beyond Syracuse, Henry Aaron wore #44 when he broke a cherished white man's record in baseball, and Reggie Jackson wore it in Yankee Stadium as he was strutting his brashness along with his talent.

Archbold Stadium's field is where #44 came to mean something proud for black men, and signify achievement beyond not only expectation, but beyond bounds of provincial preconceptions or stagnant comfort levels.

Last month, we Americans elected our 44th President, a black man who, we all hope, will wear the number as well as those went before him did. I wonder if he knows what "Archbold Stadium" was, or what its heroes achieved. I won't be surprised if he does.

Between the War and Me

Last week's Thanksgiving break was an unusually placid one here at Ft. Harrington. The swirl of family circumstances gave us little to do in the way of entertaining or being entertained, so Diane and I had a very peaceful stretch of four days just to ourselves and our menagerie. I wouldn't want that to happen in very many years, but it was nice for a change, and gave us time to just rest and putter.

Part of my puttering involved the slide scanner and my dad's boxes of thousands of 35mm slides. This time, I concentrated on images from the 1940's and 1950's, including a set from Mom and Dad's first year after their marriage.

They met in Atlanta during World War II. Dad, an X-Ray technician in the service, was stationed at Ft. Oglethorpe at the end of the war, and my mother was working at Grady Hospital, having put her graduate work at Emory University on hold for The Duration. They met at a roller rink, where Dad had gone to accompany one of his buddies who was courting Mom's glamorous sister. The match that actually struck at the rink, though, was ignited by Catherine Murphy and Sgt. Lynn Harrington.

Courting at the Southeastern World's Fair, Atlanta, 1945.

Before being drafted in 1942, Dad had just started his career as a teacher in a high school in Mount Upton, a tiny town along the Unadilla River in Upstate New York, and he was mustered out as close to where he had been roped in as the Army could manage in the hectic, happy days after the end of the War. Shortly after they married, he was transferred to Patchogue, New York (on Long Island), and shortly after that, he was free. He went back to the Unadilla Valley with his Georgia bride, and back to work at the Mount Upton school. That was not surprising; where they lived then was astonishing.

They settled in to an abandoned farm on the top of the western Unadilla slopes, a place they always after referred to as "the Old Farm." The plan, overly-ambitious from the get-go, was to refurbish the place into a decent homestead from its terminally dilapidated condition. Here are a few of Dad's photos from that adventure:

The farmhouse was beyond repair, rotting away. (I don't know who the people are in the above photo; Mom and Dad are certainly not among them. They're probably family members, since folks from Dad's family in Syracuse visited their project often.) Mom and Dad set up perpetual camp in one of the smaller outbuildings, and worked to transform it into a viable living space.

The kitchen, 1946.

The first bedroom.

The sleeping arrangement may look cozy, but -- familiar as I am now with the effects of moisture on straw bedding for our chickens -- if the "mattress" ever got wet, it was bad news.

Working on the roof of the living shelter, 1946.

Mom's hammer-wielding technique could use some work itself here, but there's no mistaking the determination on her face.

Proud roofer on his finished product.

Mom enjoys the view from the front yard, summer, 1946.

Visitors in the summer of '46: Dad's parents with my cousin Allen van Patten in the background.

Dad's mom passed away a year later, a month before I was born. His dad, Arthur George Harrington, was a machine-gang foreman in Syracuse during the depression, and is the child mentioned in this document from 1876.

Mom in what passed for a back yard, summer, 1946.

Visiting (or running from) neighbors, 1946.

Mom, remember, was a recently-transplanted city girl. She never did quite get used to being close to cows.

Harvesting apples from the Old Farm's land, late fall, 1946.

A fine home along the approach road to the Old Farm, winter '46-'47. The Old Farm site is up the hill behind us from this vantage point.

This sort of thing must have been an enormous shock to an Atlanta gal's system -- but she weathered 37 more Upstate winters with aplomb before they, in retirement, moved back South.

The end of one adventure, the beginning of another.

My maternal grandmother holds me in the above photo, probably the first picture ever taken of yours truly, late June, 1947. The Old Farm experiment was done, and they moved to the urban environs of Oxford, New York (population: maybe 2,000 then) one valley to the west. Dad soon took a better-paying job than the little school could afford, and worked with the Norwich Pharmacal Company, eight miles north of Oxford, for the rest of his working life; Mom re-entered the world of biochemical research with Eaton Laboratories, an arm of the same company, and she, likewise, remained employed there until retirement.

In front of our Oxford home, winter 1949.

But the Old Farm remained in them somewhere deep, and appreciation for what it meant, both historically and as part of a fundamental worldview, managed to work its way into me somehow.

This year's was a good Thanksgiving for me, all things considered. A very good one.

Tanksgiving, 2008 [Updated on Dec. 6]

About a week ago, I posted this picture to PicShers, the photo-a-day family snapshots blog:

It shows the intersection of California highways 236 and 9 in Boulder Creek, and was taken on November 19th, 2000. Even last week, the 2000 price of gas looked quaintly low.

This picture was taken a couple of hours ago, from about the same spot:

The gas station has changed companies, and the price board isn't quite so bold about its contents, but if you look closer...

... you'll see that the price per gallon of regular is now three cents less than it was eight years ago.

While that's nice in an obvious way, it's also unsettling. I may just be Joe the Astronomer, not Tito the Economist, but even I can figure out that when the price of such a crucial commodity as gasoline goes through precipitous swings -- in either direction -- it's probably an indicator of a sick economy.

On the bright side, though, I filled the Jeep's tank for less than 30 bucks, and the guy across the street by Johnnie's Market was having a great time with his dog.

Update, December 6, nine days later: the price is down to $1.769. That's a decline of more than two cents a day. At this rate, clearly not sustainable, we'll be down to the magic price of 45 cents a gallon in two months. (That's a "magic price" because, at that point, gas itself is essentially free, since 45 cents per gallon here is for various taxes, so the price per gallon cannot go below that.) This isn't a price fall, it's a collapse. Weird.

Why I Couldn't Make the Bed This Morning

Forty-six Seconds You'll Never Get Back

A Mid-November Gathering of the Clan

Today was one of those extra-special ordinary days, one on which a number of us gathered at Adrianne and Grace's house for a Sunday get-together. The weather was a little odd, as befits some of us, but in a good way (doubling the befitting): unseasonably warm. Temperatures in the high 70's with a low sun angle at midday made for an almost dreamlike environment.

The youngest generation had a ball.

Grace as wood nymph.

Adam and Kiana.

Adrianne's mom, Kathy, and her wonder dog Jack.

Caleb mimicks Jack's ears.

This is pretty much the expression Adam always has when watching his nieces and nephews.

Adam was the main cook for today's gathering, having prepared his extra-special lasagne (and a pot of veggie tortellini) to heat up in Adrianne's kitchen.

A-feasting. Adam and Doug's sister Reva (at left) gave a wonderful toast that included the ones who can't be with us again except in memory. Not everyone is in this photo; a few of the guys were inside, marveling at a miracle unfolding on TV: the 49ers scoring 35 points against an actual NFL team.

"Normal" means something different than it used to for this family, but it's starting to feel okay to me now.

Two Years On

Doug Harrington
October 1, 1966 - November 14, 2006

Alnitak's Having Fun in Containers Day

(With apologies to Mojo el Jefe for appropriating his posts' title format.)

This is a big part of the reason we put up with them. Within just a few minutes this afternoon:

UPS delivers new nesting materials to Al. It looks like his nephew, Cooper, is about to push him off the bed once he gets all nice and comfy, though.

HALP! QUICKPAPER!!

Al's mobility is temporarily hampered.

Yankees 3, Red Sox 1...

... and Most of the Players Are Still Alive.

That most of them are still above ground surprises me a little bit, since the game was played 50 years ago, on September 19, 1958.

(The illustrations in this post are smaller than usual because they are links to much larger and more detailed images in Flickr. Please click on them to see them as I intend them to be viewed. Thanks.)

Yankee Stadium, After the Game of September 19th, 1958

It was the only major-league game Dad and I ever attended together, and the first one I ever saw in person, so it holds a special place in my memory. I doubt that any of the living players remember it at all, though. It was very late in the season, both teams were insurmountably behind the White Sox for the American League title (in those days there were no "playoffs" -- you either won your league or you didn't), and they were just playing out the schedule because, well, that's what you do. But you do it fast; the game took less than two hours (today, a typical major-league game takes about three hours to complete.)

The inconsequential nature of that particular game is probably why Dad and I were able to attend. Dad hated the Yankees, so he sure as heck wasn't going to pay for his own tickets and travel all the way to New York City (which he also detested) to see them. We had a perfectly good minor-league team to go watch, too: the Binghamton Triplets*, just 40 miles down the Chenango Valley from our home outside Norwich, so why go to all that extra effort and expense, anyway? The company he worked for had a couple of season tickets to Yankees' games. The Yankees of that era were almost always in first place (a big reason why Dad didn't like them), so the corporate tickets were usually spoken for all year -- but not in '59, so Dad grabbed the languishing ones for Saturday, September 19th.

Watching Batting Practice from our Loge Perch

What I remember most clearly about the day was, oddly, our welcome at our seats. The seats were on the loge level (a narrow deck between the lower- and second-decks in old Yankee Stadium), with office-style chairs (not fixed to the floor) and a writing surface for keeping score or for resting hot dogs and drinks -- they were like desk seats. A very suave, tall, black usher greeted us at our seats, and whisked a dustcloth over the chairs. He said, "Welcome to Yankee Stadium" in a somber tone... with his palm outstretched in Dad's direction. I didn't notice that latter part, and was awed by the ceremony. I was twelve years old.

Dad was so caught up in the game in front of him that he didn't take any pictures during the action itself. This picture...

Dragging the Infield Between Innings

... is as close to an action shot as I can find in his slides. Too bad -- four players saw action in that game who eventually would be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle started at catcher and center field for the Yanks, Whitey Ford (whose fluid, powerful, left-handed form I still remember with snapping clarity) was their starting pitcher, and Ted Williams, at the end of his penultimate season, pinch-hit for the Sox late in the game. I don't remember that Teddy Ballgame grounded into a double play; I do remember his stroll from the dugout to the plate and the goosebumps on the back of my young neck as he approached the batter's box.

Dad took one more picture after the game was over:

Postgame fans' stroll.

After the game, fans were allowed to stroll on the field (except for the infield area, which you can see being politely guarded by red-jacketed ushers.) After posting this quartet on Flickr, and including them in a couple of NYC groups, I was astonished at the level of viewing they garnered. This shot, in particular, provoked responses from folks much younger than me. For example:

"Chocolatepoint" says:
Baseball looks so much more interesting way back when. I suspect that just being able to walk on the field gave fans a connectedness to the game, the stadium and their team.
Nowadays, we have to rebuild stadiums so that rich people can have more skyboxes, security will barely let people move around and we have far too many whiny overpaid yet underperforming athletes.

... and ...
"sds70" says:
No way teams would let their fans do this anymore :( :( . . Too many security concerns, issues with messing up the grass, etc. . . . That would've been cool to do once

... and ...
"Jersey2Bronx" said:
Its sad that this era is gone.
I did a Yankee Stadium tour 2 weeks ago, and while we got to walk the warning track, we were not allowed to step foot on (or even touch) the grass on the field. The stadium is closed - there will never be another baseball game there, and yet STILL - a "regular guy" like me was not allowed to touch the grass. That in and of it self is contrary to what baseball used to be about. Its gone from being one of the most accessible and inclusive sports to being one that caters to the exclusive who can afford it - "access" for a price.
Sad...

As "chocolatepoint" noted, the connection between the players and their fans has been broken. I don't know when it happened, precisely, but I know it was after 1964. I know that because, in April of that year, Dad and I went to see a spring training game while we were on vacation in Florida. The game was in Daytona Beach, and the teams -- "barnstorming" out of their Florida headquarters elsewhere -- were the Kansas City Athletics and the Houston Colt .45s (later the Astros.) We sat close to the plate, and chatted with the players exactly as we did with the people sitting next to us in the stands: comfortably, without any sense of separation, physically, economically, or otherwise. Two players, both near the end of stellar careers, who I remember talking to were:

Nellie Fox (closing it out with the .45s) and...

Rocky Colavito (ditto with the A's.)

Adam, my son, it was a different time, one in which the players were more like their fans. But it was the same for fathers and sons then, a game you either got or you didn't, and if you did, it was a bond that surpassed time. Really, really strange, when you think about it.

Doug, Adam, and Me at a Baseball Game, San Francisco, Summer 2001.

*I loved going to Triplets games, by the way, and followed several of their players through their careers after Binghamton. One of them was Alphonso Downing, a pitcher who later gave up Henry Aaron's Ruth-surpassing 715th home run; another was Deron Johnson, a big lug who could hit a baseball farther than you could launch it with a bazooka -- but just not very often.