Northward ho!
Which is not to say that I am self-referring as a prostitute here, I'm just trying to cleverly note that I drove up to San Francisco last weekend, with a soupรงon of Marin and also Berkeley thrown in for good measure. Back in the day, I was part of a monthly supper club that met, well, monthly -- one person would cook for everyone, meaning that you got to have exciting and delicious meals with good company every month while only having to deal with the stress of meal prep like every 9 or 10 months or so. Anyway, suddenly all the supper club folk are getting married -- I went up for Shapiro's wedding in June , and now I drove Pepe (that is my LA-style sportscar's name, Pepe S., because he is so peppy and snappy (oh, to have six cylinders firing away when I press down on the gas!)) up to SF for MassageGirl's wedding, with a bonus engagement party for Lefty thrown in on the previous evening (not to mention Goldie's upcoming nuptuals in Canada and then California -- J-ka and I now the final holdouts). Of course, no Bay Area visit for a wedding is about just the wedding: there is always food, nature, and a range of aesthetic enjoyment, along with familial bonding with young Stovielet and nostalgia for times past.
The drive up is like 5 1/2 hours (when you're in Peppy Snappy [Mylastname] going like 80 the whole time) but the entire last hour felt "local" to me, because suddenly I went from mostly unfamiliar territory to being in my old hiking zone radius. When you live in a place a long time -- and I say this as someone who has for the last four years and change been moving far too frequently -- you get grounded in ways that I personally find deeply satisfying. I remember one time towards the very end of grad school taking off from the Oakland airport and heading northeast and looking down from the air and being able to identify every major street and locating all the apartments I'd lived in and all the parks in the Oakland and Berkeley hills that I'd hiked in, and having history and experiences and memories (mostly good) all over the territory we were covering, and it feeling so lovely, like I really belonged there, and had inscribed it into my memory, and in some ways been inscribed into the collective memory of the place. You know, like the carbon dioxide once in my lungs was probably still floating around somewhere. Happy as I am in LaLaLand, I completely long for the day when I feel so part of and inscribed upon a landscape once more. Which perhaps will be this one -- we'll see. Anyway, once I passed Livermore, highway exits became not just names but places I had kayaked, or nearly stepped on a rattlesnake, or been hypnotized by waving grass, or had romantic picnics, etc. etc. It was nice to be back.
We walked to Sunday morning brunch in a place that is not only tasty but also aesthetically pleasing on every level, to the point where even the outdoor menu holder is perhaps the coolest thing ever.
The view from the brunch place was a bit more prosaic,
although I found the store inventory somewhat mysterious (as if a store owner had been playing the old Sesame Street "one of these things doesn't belong" game). Tummies full and snacks purchased, and with the autonomy granted by having Pepe at my beck and call, Stovielet, L'il Abner and I headed over to one of my favorite beaches in Marin, Rodeo Beach (two linguisticky issues with the beach: it has no relationship of any kind to an actual rodeo, as far as I know, and also it is adjacent to Fort Cronkhite, which invokes both Walter and illness (German Krankheit), neither of which are the prettiest associations) and headed up the one of the hiking paths to the northwest.
Like many beautiful and hilly places adjacent to a narrow waterway, this land was once a military installation, and there are all kinds of rusty and charming-in-their-disuse remnants of this military past, like fallen chain link fences,
and cannon mounts,
and bunkers that are tempting spots to jump out and try and frighten your oh-so-skittish sister.
More pleasing of course, was the view. To the north,
(still facing north here, I just wanted to note that I like how you can tell which mini islets and cliff faces are the favorite resting spots for our avian friends)
and west,
and southeast, back towards the city.
At our lunch spot there were at least two hawks (as-yet still unidentified by us, but with a whitish tail with two black bands) and a kestrel doing all kinds of exciting flying using updrafts to hover way above the ground (while still flying below us, actually -- we were pretty high, and there are some dramatic drops), and skimming just over the scrub looking for rodents and other edibles, and also a pair of lovebird type crows, shown here, who also engaged in exciting updraft riding with the lady crow for some reason clucking like a chicken. A lot. For real! We all heard her. Any explanation for this from anyone more than welcome, really.
Also fascinating to me was the patterning of the water streaming back to the ocean as interrupted by rocks, which I rarely get to see from above, but is really beautiful.
and stays visible much longer than one might expect.
It was imagery like this that kept me going through the darkest, most methane-laden parts of Route 5 on the way back home, where the air not only looks terrible, but smells even worse. My friend J-F says it's the fault of the cows, but I kind of feel like we're all to blame. (Well, not you people reading this from far, far away, although maybe the flapping of a butterfly in Chicago or DC or Korea or wherever can cause smog and horrible air pollution in the Central Valley.)
The drive up is like 5 1/2 hours (when you're in Peppy Snappy [Mylastname] going like 80 the whole time) but the entire last hour felt "local" to me, because suddenly I went from mostly unfamiliar territory to being in my old hiking zone radius. When you live in a place a long time -- and I say this as someone who has for the last four years and change been moving far too frequently -- you get grounded in ways that I personally find deeply satisfying. I remember one time towards the very end of grad school taking off from the Oakland airport and heading northeast and looking down from the air and being able to identify every major street and locating all the apartments I'd lived in and all the parks in the Oakland and Berkeley hills that I'd hiked in, and having history and experiences and memories (mostly good) all over the territory we were covering, and it feeling so lovely, like I really belonged there, and had inscribed it into my memory, and in some ways been inscribed into the collective memory of the place. You know, like the carbon dioxide once in my lungs was probably still floating around somewhere. Happy as I am in LaLaLand, I completely long for the day when I feel so part of and inscribed upon a landscape once more. Which perhaps will be this one -- we'll see. Anyway, once I passed Livermore, highway exits became not just names but places I had kayaked, or nearly stepped on a rattlesnake, or been hypnotized by waving grass, or had romantic picnics, etc. etc. It was nice to be back.
We walked to Sunday morning brunch in a place that is not only tasty but also aesthetically pleasing on every level, to the point where even the outdoor menu holder is perhaps the coolest thing ever.
The view from the brunch place was a bit more prosaic,
although I found the store inventory somewhat mysterious (as if a store owner had been playing the old Sesame Street "one of these things doesn't belong" game). Tummies full and snacks purchased, and with the autonomy granted by having Pepe at my beck and call, Stovielet, L'il Abner and I headed over to one of my favorite beaches in Marin, Rodeo Beach (two linguisticky issues with the beach: it has no relationship of any kind to an actual rodeo, as far as I know, and also it is adjacent to Fort Cronkhite, which invokes both Walter and illness (German Krankheit), neither of which are the prettiest associations) and headed up the one of the hiking paths to the northwest.Like many beautiful and hilly places adjacent to a narrow waterway, this land was once a military installation, and there are all kinds of rusty and charming-in-their-disuse remnants of this military past, like fallen chain link fences,
and cannon mounts,
and bunkers that are tempting spots to jump out and try and frighten your oh-so-skittish sister.
More pleasing of course, was the view. To the north,
(still facing north here, I just wanted to note that I like how you can tell which mini islets and cliff faces are the favorite resting spots for our avian friends)
and west,
and southeast, back towards the city.
At our lunch spot there were at least two hawks (as-yet still unidentified by us, but with a whitish tail with two black bands) and a kestrel doing all kinds of exciting flying using updrafts to hover way above the ground (while still flying below us, actually -- we were pretty high, and there are some dramatic drops), and skimming just over the scrub looking for rodents and other edibles, and also a pair of lovebird type crows, shown here, who also engaged in exciting updraft riding with the lady crow for some reason clucking like a chicken. A lot. For real! We all heard her. Any explanation for this from anyone more than welcome, really.
Also fascinating to me was the patterning of the water streaming back to the ocean as interrupted by rocks, which I rarely get to see from above, but is really beautiful.
and stays visible much longer than one might expect.
It was imagery like this that kept me going through the darkest, most methane-laden parts of Route 5 on the way back home, where the air not only looks terrible, but smells even worse. My friend J-F says it's the fault of the cows, but I kind of feel like we're all to blame. (Well, not you people reading this from far, far away, although maybe the flapping of a butterfly in Chicago or DC or Korea or wherever can cause smog and horrible air pollution in the Central Valley.)
posted by Pangea at 11:35 PM
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