Flight

(With sincere and abject apologies to the ghost of Robert Louis Stevenson.)

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Photo by Adam Harrington

Like up in the air on my mamma's feet,
Up on her tickling toes,
While the sky so fair behind my hair
Echoes our happy glow.

Photo by Adrianne Harrington

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Gravely Pleasant Memories

More than thirty years ago, during our country’s feckless self-congratulations on having survived a mere two centuries, I lived alone in a rented room in an old house near a graveyard in Oakland, California.

My room was on the first floor, facing a neon sign across the street. The bright sign read (and still reads) “Oakland Crematorium Columbarium Mausoleum.” I didn’t do a whole lot of barbequeing during the year or so I lived there.

The cemetery to which the smoker was attached, though, is a beautiful one, and historic insofar as a European-style graveyard can be in so recently-subsumed a place as California. It stretches up from a genteel neighborhood of Oakland into low hills with spectacular views (weather permitting) toward the west to the Golden Gate and San Francisco. I used to wander its farther reaches, unkempt repositories of the lesser-blessed, and closer better-manicured bastions of merchant princes of the late 1800’s. I wordlessly hobnobbed with Crockers and with Adamses (the patriarch of the latter was the founder of Oakland from Binghamton, NY) and with nameless folks buried by the creek in graves overgrown by brush.

I loved that place.

Fast forward thirty years.

My surviving son, Adam, now lives just a few hundred yards from the room I lived in then. He hikes the cemetery now, in his mornings, and sent along these photos from his walk last weekend:

Steel-colored fog hides the Golden Gate Bridge (it would be in center frame) on an Oakland January. Doug’s memorial bench is a few hundred yards behind this viewpoint. (Photo by Adam Harrington)

Livermore Plot (photo by Adam Harrington)

An important Anglo settler family in Northern California was the Livermores , after whom the city of Livermore, its famous weapons lab, and the prominence atop Angel Island in San Francisco Bay are named. They have a plot along what I came to think of as “Millionaire’s Row,” but, as Adam’s photos show…

Nobody home. (Photo by Adam Harrington)

… the Livermore plot is oddly vacant! Adam says, “If one were to photo-shop the middle R from the family name, he would create quite an appropriate moniker for this oddly empty plot. All the surrounding ones are very much full.”

Live more, friends. Live more.

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Stormy Weather

Yes, it rained pretty hard here yesterday.

No, it wasn’t a big deal.

However, since the fairly typical just-after-the-solstice storm here in Northern California gathered some national (and even international) news attention (and since Ft. Harrington’s dear friend, Lucile Taber, went looking in this blog for updates), I’ll put up this special edition post about it.

Kings Creek from the Ft. Harrington back deck, Wednesday, January 2^nd.

We needed rain pretty badly. Last winter (the usual rainy season here in the Santa Cruz Mountains) was exceptionally dry, and that’s bad news for an isolated community like this that depends on groundwater for all of its water needs – not just for household use, but for emergency agencies, firefighters in particular. The picture above, looking downstream along the creek through the heart of Creepy Hollow, shows how depleted the watershed had become. It was taken a day before the forecast triple-storm was to hit our area.

Thursday, January 3^rd, brought a little spritz of a shower… but yesterday, Friday, January 4^th, brought the first big rainfall we’ve had in two years. According to the Ft. Harrington rain gauge, we had 6 ½ inches in 24 hours from 5pm Thursday to 5pm Friday, and by mid-afternoon Friday, the creek looked like this:

Kings Creek from the Ft. Harrington back deck, Friday, January 4^th.

I estimate that the creek rose about three feet in that 24-hour period, but it wasn’t even close to being a worry for anyone here in the Hollow. Oldtimers hereabouts say that the creek can crest above the red patio at the right of the frame in the above pictures, but we haven’t seen that in our decade here. We have seen the creek significantly higher than it was this week, though:

Kings Creek in the winter of 2005-06.

Creepy Hollow, with Ft. Harrington at its core, is sheltered by high mountain ridges from most winds in winter storms, and it was for this one. While Northern California in general was blasted by sometimes hurricane-speed winds, our air was relatively tranquil during the downpours. We are, however, dependent on the electrical power grid for our distributed electricity, and that grid failed (as it usually does several times each winter.) The Hollow was without electrical power from the grid for most of Friday – but that’s no never-mind, since almost every house in the Hollow has a generator like the Fort does. Loud, is all, not major bad news, since the generators keep the refrigerators, furnaces, and lights going. The worst inconvenience for humans is that cable TV (and internet services) go out when the main power grid does.

When a storm is over, the creeks and rivers exhale mist among the redwoods. These two pictures are from "downtown" Boulder Creek this afternoon. (Click on any image for a bigger version.)

Kelsey and I surveyed the Creek this afternoon (make sure the volume is turned up on your computer and then click the arrowhead):

In this clip, I address Kesley as "Kelsey-the-Dog," which is actually what he's usually called around here. I don't know why, since there's not much doubt about whether he's a dog or not.

All in all, the storm was a blessing for us, not a problem. It was a blessing because it recharged, all in one shot, the groundwater on which this entire community vitally depends. However, it would have been a big problem for me if it hadn’t happened while I was on winter break from school: any highway I might have tried to take from Ft. Harrington to Silicon Valley was closed due to mud/rock/dirt slides or downed trees. But I didn’t have to go anywhere, so Mrs. Fort and I and all the fourfeet snuggled down and napped through most of it. So did the chickens, but in their house, not ours.

Earlier storms have not been as benign. Below are some scenes from previous winters:

Above, Adam and Ryan survey some storm damage on the Fort's main building's roof in 2001.

Things get really bad when the wind does get fierce here in the Hollow: redwood branches can’t take the strain, snap (with a sound like a rifle shot) and fall their hundreds of feet onto whatever happens to be below. Those falling branches are called “widowmakers,” and the one above fell just up the road from the Fort in the winter of ’01- 02.

When a winter storm brings snow, it also brings carloads of folks up from Silicon Valley to revel in it. Above is a group of DeAnza students frolicking at a vista point above our San Lorenzo Valley in the winter of 2004-05.

The San Lorenzo Valley in 2004. Ft. Harrington is somewhere close to the middle of this rainy frame.

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I Didn't Plan on This Post

This blog is supposedly written by an astronomer, and is supposedly in part about astronomy, but you wouldn’t know it recently without the verbiage around its Blogger frame.

A historically significant Galaxie.

I really am working on a couple of big posts about science and community colleges’ ways of wrenching it into relevance for our students. Multi-spectral views of the “grand design” spiral galaxy M74 are in the offing here in SherWords, for example, and in the works are guest blogs from electrifying explainers of modern Meteorology and Geology. Let’s hope that the latter guest appearances happen before global warming and/or earthquakes kill us all. (The astronomer is holding a major asteroid impact back as a trump card.)

But, meanwhile, Fort Harrington just insists on continuing to happen. And, particularly, its short, supposedly “dumb” denizens insist on being cute in ways that can’t be ignored, unless you can ignore a baseball bat applied to your nose.

You think being cute is a once-in-a-while thing? HAH. These critters work on it full time, and sometimes perversely. For example, the last post in this blog was a presumably unusually-cute picture of Emma. Yesterday, she just had to trump that with the prettiest picture ever taken of her, seriously:

Emma, January 2nd, 2008

And, the day before that (New Year’s Day), Guinness and the still-acclimating Finn McCool just had to practice their Hallmark audition:

Finn McCool and Guinness celebrate New Year's Day, 2008.

And, yesterday, even the chickens had to get into the “You just TRY to leave this out of your precious blog, pinky!” game, notably the remarkable Specks…

Speckles surveys the deck rail after the solstice.

… and Bratty, the Black Giant.

Bratty perseveres, kicking dirt to uncover worms, a month after the loss of her sister.

Bratty’s picture is both warm and heartbreaking to Diane and me. Pepper was her nearly identical sister, and (if you can believe it), Pepper’s eyes were even more startling in their warmth.

Emma

Sweet Emma, the only female 4-foot in Ft. Harrington, doesn't get enough attention here.

Pretty, yes?

So here she is (an hour ago).

Detritus

Eye of Guinness.

Digital photography has its own extravagance, a profligacy, an excess of images born of exuberance that spins its own dust bunnies. While I’m working on a few more significant entries in this blog, I thought I’d grope around under my virtual couch and splash a few images up here that have languished at the tail-end of my Nikon’s memory chip for the last month or so. Nikon-bunnies, as it were or was or is.

Murk!

The above is a really, really bad picture of me. At the right side of the frame, you can trace out the arc of my left arm, in the left-center, you can see the black circle of my camera’s lens, in the upper-left you can sort of see my gray-headed, um, head.

… but, if you zoom out a little …

… you can see that it’s actually a pretty good picture of the Little Prince, the Magic One, the Guinness!

This is the season for…

… the holly…

… and the (English) ivy!

(Holly and Ivy are long-time and exuberant dominant ladies of Ft. Harrington’s front yard.)

And it’s the season for something that I wish everybody all the time anyway: peace on your earth, and good will to all your men and women and children, and thank you for visiting here, God bless you.

HAPPY- HAPPY to you all! (And joy-joy, too!)

The main man of the Fort, the Kelsey, the ferocious and the virtuous, naps. A lot.

And he wishes you the best for the holidays and the new year.

Rac Attack

My first impulse was to blame my neighbor. My second was to blame the freakish weather of the past two years. But, finally, I had to blame myself.

Last week’s Thursday was USA-ian Thanksgiving day. We had friends here at Ft. Harrington to help us celebrate the day and help us eat the traditional poultry. During the evening’s joviality, I forgot to close the chickens’ run door, leaving them vulnerable to predators.

For the past several years, there has been no reason to worry about that. Any encroaching varmint was welcomed by alarm barks, loud and furious, from Kelsey. This year, probably because of a two-year major drought here in the Santa Cruz Mountains, even our usual raccoons vanished, leaving our plums to drop uneaten from their trees. (And on to our deck, making a mess.)

One of our neighbors, though, leaves food for his cats outside his front door, because his cats can’t come inside, because they can’t get along with his dogs. A couple of weeks ago, a juvenile raccoon discovered this free food, and started stopping by on a regular nocturnal basis. Since no other raccoons were around, because – I guess – of the drought, which has dessicated the hollow’s creek to a trickle and wiped out the crawdad population, this youngster became bold.

He found our chicken run and, I’m guessing, waited until a gate was left open. That happened on Thanksgiving night.

We heard nothing that night, nor (evidently) did the dogs. But the next morning, we found pieces of Pepper scattered around the garden and the rest of the flock cowering in various places.

That night, we made sure to secure the chicken run as usual… but the ‘coon now knew that chicken dinner was to be had here. The young ‘coon ripped a large wooden piece from the run’s door and ripped into the run at about 3:30 in the morning. It made the mistake, though, of going after Xena, who resides in the uppermost portion of the run at night. She screamed loud enough to wake me, Mrs. Fort, and all the dogs. In various states of undress (which, for the dogs, was total, of course) we raced out to the chicken run and chased the little ‘coon away.

We also scattered the chickens away, since all the doors to the run were opened in the fray.

For the next hour, she in her nightgown and me in my robe, we scoured the compound for frightened, hidden chickens, finally locating and gathering them all at about 4:30am. We carried them into the potting shed for safekeeping, and did our best to finish our night’s sleep.

The following day, I prepared the potting shed as best as I could to be a temporary home for the 10-chicken flock.

Potting shed as refuge. The chickens at bottom are the two inquisitive ones: Specks and Lacey.

The plan now is to keep the chickens in the potting shed at night for another week, hoping to convince the young ‘coon that the chicken buffet is closed. Meanwhile, I’m “hardening” the chicken run doubly: by installing hutches within the run in which we can enclose the chickens at night and by reinforcing various vulnerable places on the run’s exterior fencing.

Morning after a busy night of pooping on black plastic. (Xena is at bottom-center, the little warrior princess!)

Meanwhile, I can’t walk by the chicken section of our grocery store’s meat section without feeling a little queasy .

'Bye, Pep

Pepper, 2005

Fort Harrington's chicken compound was attacked by a raccoon on Thanksgiving Day, 2007. Of the eleven birds, Pepper was the only fatality. The incident will be recounted in more detail later, but I thought Pepper should have her own post now.

Bless you, Pep. You were a good chicken.

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More Friday Hooky

Edible art

We took the day off and traveled North to San Francisco again last Friday, this time to visit a trendy little restaurant with our friend Lucile. The restaurant is the café in the de Young museum of fine art in Golden Gate Park.

Last April we took a similar weekday trek, documented in the blog entry you can see by clicking here. On that trip we visited the de Young’s sister museum, the Legion of Honor. The de Young is a larger and more modern institution. It re-opened in 2005 after its old building had been torn down in 2000 and a new, stunning architectural marvel built on its old footprint. Our visit was on a densely-foggy day, so I have no external views of the building (but you can see one on the museum’s website by clicking here.) Its interior and surrounding grounds are every bit as much works of art as any item they contain.

Please click on any image to see a much larger, better version.

There are airy spaces…

The Piazzoni Murals Room

… passageways that lead the eyes and then the body to follow them…

… startling things in lofty places…

… odd creatures in exterior spaces…

Zhan Wang’s “Artificial Rock” appears to lumber toward a museum entrance.

… and exterior gathering places whose attraction isn’t hard to pin down.

Like the Legion of Honor, the de Young has a vast permanent collection of classical and historic works.

Visitors contemplate Frederic Edwin Church’s “Rainy Season in the Tropics” (1866)

However, possibly because of the innovative nature of the physical place itself, the de Young’s permanent collection seems to have a greater presence of works of whimsy, or experiment, or current social impact than the Legion of Honor:

Who hasn’t felt like this once in a while? (I didn’t record the sculptor’s name or the title of this piece, but will make a point to do so on our next visit.)

“Rover’s Garden Grows” (1991) by Dale Chihuly and Italo Scanga

“Cod Tureen” (1997) by David Regan. Modeled after Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Large Fishes Devouring the Small Fishes,” this is a working tureen. I doubt very much that I would have the stomach to eat anything that came out of it, though.

Perhaps it was a vestige of a dark mood, but the most moving things to me that I saw that afternoon were two works directly adjacent to one another, made of the most mundane materials: concrete, old furniture, and burned wood.

Detail in Cornelia Parker’s “Anti-Mass” (2005)

The plaque on the wall next to this free-hanging cube of pieces of burned wood reads, in part: “This sculpture is constructed from the charred remains of a Southern Black Baptist church that was destroyed by arsonists. […] Parker’s cube appears to defy gravity, providing a monumental object for quiet meditation and reflection."

Church and chair.

The above photo shows the entire work, but by necessity only in two dimensional projection, which diminishes its impact by several orders of magnitude. The little object on the floor to the right of the cube is this item:

Untitled sculpture by Doris Salcedo (1998)

The plaque for Salcedo’s piece reads, “Colombian-born sculptor Doris Salcedo uses a common household artifact to register the loss of human life to political violence in her native country. Encasing a side chair […] in rebar and cement, she transforms a familiar object into [a] disturbing record of the people who have disappeared, a haunting reminder of those citizens who have suffered the effects of civil war and government corruption. Although she has eliminated references to blood and corpses in her work, Salcedo registers her protest just as vividly through her juxtaposition of humble, domestic artifacts and brutal building materials.”

These are just a few of the 108 photos we saved from the visit, and we have at least tenfold more images in our minds’ eyes. If you are ever in San Francisco and have half a day to spare, you could do much worse than spend it at the de Young or the Legion of Honor. Of course, you don’t have to physically visit San Francisco to enjoy their web presence.

Mrs. Fort (in red) and Lucile on the lower floor of the museum’s store.

We visited with Lucile for a while both before and after our museum adventure. More precisely, we visited with Lucile and…

… with Terri, and…

… with Shady, and…

… with DP. Three more stunning works of fine art.

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Laughter Won

In the previous post, I waffled about whether today's family gathering on the anniversary of Doug's death would be one of tears or laughter.

It was a celebration, and I think we all in our own ways feel a little (or a lot) liberated by it.

The presence of very young children helped keep us focused on the future, and the positive, and the love, and the joy. Without that focus, whatcha got left but poopy diapers, anyway?

Parris snaps Adrianne and his granddaughter (Adrianne's niece) Kiana.

Instant gratification.

There were only 16 people at this little gathering. Here, the bunch gathers for a group portrait or two.

Table in the lower-left corner of the previous photo.

This table was the "workbench": a place where Adrianne had laid out tools for us all to add pictures and other memories to a scrapbook, and she had invited us all to bring whatever we wanted to add to it. The intent was to construct a tangible collection of words and pictures and memories of Grace's dad for her to keep close as she grows up and grows away from Doug. That will certainly be the lasting product of the effort, but its immediate product was a focussing of stories and joy and, yes, laughter from all of us about Doug. The scrapbook project provided a place of exuberance. I think we all felt a liberation from grief, and a permission to laugh. And we did. And we did. And we did.

Detail from the "workbench."

The man in the picture will be known to SherWords regulars; it is Grace's 12-th great grandfather. Well, one of the 4,096 of them, but the one through whom the Harrington name comes.

At the end of the gathering, we posed for group photos. (In a perhaps futile effort to not put too much personal information out there in so public a place as a blog, I'm going to not use last names in the identifications.) I took the first one:

CLICK THE PICTURE TO ENLARGE IT. REALLY.
Front and center: Adrianne
Arc behind Adrianne, left to right: Kathy (Adrianne's mom), Lynda (Adam's SO), Dierdre (Parris's wife), Parris (Doug's stepdad, his mother's second husband), Andrew (Lynda's son)
Third row, left to right: David (Reva's SO), Reva (Doug's half-sister, Parris's daughter), Kiana (David and Reva's daughter), Mike (bassist in Doug's band, Defiance), Mike's daughter Angelina, Mike's wife Toni, Adam (Sherwood's son), Diane ("Mrs. Fort," Sherwood's spouse & keeper)
Toppermost of the Poppermost on Uncle Adam's shoulders: Grace the Magnificent.

There will be a quiz. Just be thankful that Doug's uncles and their progeny were too far away to participate.


... and one last group photo by Andrew, which proves that I was actually there. It will be left as an exercise for the reader to figure out which one I am. (Hint: many, many years ago, when Adam was a small boy, a friend of his once described a suspicious character in the neighborhood as being "real white, you know, like your dad.")

The T-shirts we're all wearing were Adam's inspired idea and gift to us all. He showed up with a big cardboard box full of them, all correctly sized (except for Diane's, for which he earned many, many positive points from her). They bear reproductions of a flyer for an early headline performance in a San Francisco club of Doug's band, Defiance, in the 80's.

Adam, Andrew, and Defiance tees.

Doug at Boulder Creek

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