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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More from the HamCam

I seem to have the blogger's blahs now -- nothing has struck me as particularly post-worthy for a while, and I haven't even had the excitement and triumph that replacing a fuse can provide.

So, to reward SherWords' regular clickers, I'll go back to an old standby: some images from the webcam at Lick Observatory, introduced very early in this blog's history. The eight images below were captured in real time (not via the HamCam's daily archive, which probably would have produced a more spectacular collection, but that seemed to be "cheating" in some way), and are my favorites since last February.

The view is toward the northwest, and takes in much of "Silicon Valley" at the south end of San Francisco Bay. Clicking on any image will take you to a much larger (1280 x 960 pixels) view, and each is worth that effort.

Sunset on March 4th.

An April afternoon.

Dusk on April 4th.

Dawn, April 24th.

Sun through smoke, September 6th. The smoke seen here is mostly from a large wildfire in far northeastern California, wafted here from its source down the great central valley and through the San Joachin Delta to the Bay.

First showers of the season, September 19th.

A dramatic October afternoon.

An ominous October evening.

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Playin' Hooky

(Above: a lion guards the entrance to San Francisco's Legion of Honor art museum.)
Click on any picture to see a higher-resolution version.

One of the really cool things about being the head of one's own department in academia is that you get to schedule classes. If you're sufficiently selfish, that means that you can schedule yourself in such a way that you don't have any Friday classes, and, if a particular Friday has no committee meetings (or socialist cabal plotting sessions to overthrow liberty as it's known in North America, whatever), then you can say WOO-HOO!! on that Friday and run away with your wife to San Francisco, AKA "Oakland's Disneyland."

So, that's what we did on Friday, April 27th. We scuttled our way out of the San Lorenzo Valley, a rustic, rural, down-home, country sort of place, and drove up north about 75 minutes to the posh and swank city of San Francisco -- where one of us was born and the other lived and worked for two decades, and where our dear friend, Lucile, lives. And we went to an art museum, the Legion of Honor, which backs up against the Pacific Ocean near the
Golden Gate Bridge. All three of us (Mr. and Mrs. Fort and Lucile) have been there many, many times before... enough to know that the exhibits are ever-changing and ever-fascinating.

The main attraction today was a display of early-20th century jewelry. Lucile and Diane loved it, I appreciated it, and no photos were allowed.

After viewing that exhibit, we wandered around the grounds:

Legion of Honor entry.

My office (I wish).

"The Russian Bride's Attire" by Konstantin Makovsky, 1887, a small part of the museum's permanent collection. I have been attracted by the work's colors and understated contrast on my every visit to the museum, but this is the first time I've had the photographic wherewithal to capture some of what its presence brings to the viewer. Hope it works for you!

Lunch in the alfresco cafeteria.

A bust of Voltaire by Jean-Antoine Houdon, 1781. I just love that expression, and I may use a cropped version of this bust as my avatar sometime.

On an earlier visit to the Legion of Honor, Diane and I had searched for paintings in which classic King Charles Spaniels (the precursors of our "Cavalier" King Charles Spaniels, Jax and Emma) could be seen. This is one of them, Gabriel Metsu's "Woman Playing the Viola da Gamba", in which a little dog, upon further inspection...

... is a Jax-like tricolor. For what "Jax-like" means, click here.

The front yard of the Legion of Honor.

A funny-looking orange bridge that can be seen from the front lawn of the Legion.

Our dear friend Lucile, who accompanies us on most of our forays into San Francisco, lives on Mount Davidson (a peak named after a 19th century astronomer and geodicist and the person most responsible for convincing James Lick to will his fortune to astronomy rather than self-aggrandizement, but I digress...) Above is her welcoming front staircase.

Lucile's home has been undergoing much renovation, restoration, and re-invigoration for several years now, and a major figure in that effort has been Kevin, a contractor and artist. Kevin does major remodeling... and outstanding portraits! Above is Kevin's rendition of Lucile's wonderful pair of Oriental Shorthair cats, Teri and Blue.

Across the street from Lucile's house, a pair of terriers keep an active eye on the neighborhood.

We left home in the late morning, arrived back home in the early evening, and marveled all the way about how lucky we are to live in the midst of a forest that is so close to a vibrant center of culture. I'm not sure where else we could feed 12 chickens in the morning and, 90 minutes later, be in a museum whose entry surrounds us with Rodin works... and provides the jaw-dropping external scenery of the Golden Gate.

Life is good, sometimes, really, really good.

Half Dome? Full Tenon!

Click on any image to see a larger, higher-resolution version.

Half Dome Mountain in the Early Sun of March, 2007

One of my first posts in this blog was a gushing tribute to Lick Observatory's "HamCam" as perhaps the finest webcam of places I've actually been. I'll still hold by that assessment, based on a combination of image size and dramatic scenery. But if the only criterion were scenery, I'd have to go with any of yosemite.org's webcams, especially the "View from Below Sentinel Dome." This is the current version of "View from Below Sentinel Dome" (or should be):

I like that view primarily because of the grandeur of the vista, of course, but also because it shows famous "Half Dome" mountain for what it really is: a narrow slice, almost as steep on its "back" side as it is on its more photographed side, and a very, very odd-looking mountain, indeed.

Half Dome's more-photographed side: in gathering evening twilight from the Ahwahnee Meadow, August, 2005. (Photo: Sherwood Harrington)

Afternoon March sunlight, captured by the "Below Sentinel Dome" webcam.

The "Below Sentinel Dome" webcam view is very close to my absolutely-favorite view of Half Dome, the one from Washburn Point along the road to Glacier Point:

The "Giant Stairway" of Yosemite as seen from Washburn Point: Nevada Fall (right) and Vernal Fall (lower-center). The great tenon of Half Dome Mountain stands tall at left. (Above three photos by Sherwood Harrington, August, 2005.)

The absolutely most stunning version of the view from Washburn Point that I could find on the web is this one. Be prepared to pick your jaw up off the floor if you click that link.

Sherwood and Diane Harrington and the Merced River, December, 2001 (photo by a passing German tourist.)

Sherwood and Diane love Yosemite... and Yosemite has been very good to us, too! Click here to see our amazing Christmas in Yosemite of 2001 -- thanks to a lottery!