Which raises a question: where do I write about my hikes and post my pix? The working plan is to keep posting them here, so as not to annoy any readers looking for more general-interest hiking stuff at Two-Heel Drive.
So those of you who can’t live without my weekly ramblings through the dirt can keep on checking in here.
I’ve got the beginnings of a hiking blog going. Working title: Two-Heel Drive, A Hiking Blog.
Took this last night with my new digicam.
It’s been awhile since I posted a bunch’ pix here, so what the heck. Haven’t
done any notable hikes in awhile, but I do have a new camera I’m getting used
to.
It’s in the owner’s manual: the first subject of all photography must be one’s
cat. Or dog. Or child. Well, we have only one of the three in our household,
so Floyd gets to be Camera Subject A, whether he likes it or not. From the look
on his face I’m guessing, not.
I’m posting this one to prove that Floyd does come out of his hiding
place in the closet. But this is as close as he’ll let me get to him. Oddly
enough, though Floyd would sooner gouge his eyes out than allow me to touch
him, he gets very jumpy and irritable if I’m out of the house for too long.
When I go camping he keeps Melissa up all night, running out to the front door
and back, whining and making noises to the effect of "all my things are
not in place here, and this must stop NOW."
Now, for something completely different. A couple weeks back I sent my mom
a link to an ad for a boat somebody
is trying to sell. It’s 49-foot yacht built in 1951 for a grocery store
chain magnate. Sometime in the early ’90s it came into the possession of a documentary
filmmaker who restored and remodeled it to gorgeous condition. She forwarded
the link to Ed, my stepdad, who immediately called up the guy and told him he’d
be out to the coast the next weekend to take a look at it. Ed has owned dozens
of boats in his life so I knew he’d appreciate this one.
Ed in his element, with boats on all sides.
Mom and Melissa wait for the boat’s owner to show it to us.
The guy takes us through the boat, showing us its every detail, lovingly restored
by hand, by him. Shoulda seen the guy’s eyes light up, it’s like he was explaining
how his son was the quarterback of the local high school team that had just
won the state championship. I almost grabbed him by the shoulders and said "look,
mister, you must not sell this boat. Would you sell your own child?" We
were tempted to put in an offer on it, fantasizing that we could own the boat
and live on it, but there are all sorts of regulations regarding people living
on boats, and the cost of the boat plus the cost of keeping it berthed, insured
and afloat would’ve been quite a bit more than we’re paying in rent. Ed was
even more sorely tempted — there was no part of this boat in any condition
less than immaculate — but the notion of trucking it back to Illinois, where
the water in the river isn’t really deep enough for it anyway, eventually returned
him to his senses.
Bottom line: You can see how easy it is for people to lose all sense of proportion
and rationality in the presence of the right boat.
Seals rest on a chunk of lumber in the Sausalito harbor.
We had dinner in a restaurant at the waterfront. Nice view of San Francisco
through the window; I’m glad it’s not my job to wash it.
Lots of boats were in the bay to watch the Navy Blue Angels perform.
A rock-balancing artist performs for the folks walking past on the sidewalk.
We took a quick jaunt up to the Headlands to gape at the coastline. This is
one of my favorite spots in the Bay Area.
You can’t take a bad picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, especially when it’s
not fogged in.
We spent the night in a hotel in San Francisco. The red blur is a a very cool
early ’60s Chevy convertible.
Something completely different, Part 2.
My longtime online pal Gerald from Germany
is visiting family in the Bay Area this month. We got together Sunday and took
a nice walk around Lake Chabot.
The lake has a marina where people rent boats, canoes and other vessels. We
opted for staying on the ground.
It’s quite a scenic little lake, with campgrounds, trails, etc.
Here’ s an intriguing characteristic of my new camera: when the battery runs
down, the lens cover doesn’t open all the way.
Gerald noticed this rattlesnake before the rest of us. It was perhaps 10 feet
away when we saw it. As we stopped to watch it slither away, it would shake
its rattle at us every few seconds. Suddenly it struck me that for all the rattler’s
notorious reputation, it’s actually a rather polite little beastie. If you get
too close it turns on the rattle, as if to say "please take note of the
venomous snake in your vicinity, and step away with caution." Vastly superior
to the bite-first-and-ask-questions-later variety of wildlife.
Gerald and Annette, his lovely wife.
After walking ’round the lake we retired to a slurpee shop in Castro Valley.
There were many shops nearby, including a crafts shop full of Halloween decorations.
"In Germany we call this kitsch," Gerald said. "That’s what we
call it here, too," I replied.
There’s a passage in the movie about Woodstock where Joan Baez takes the stage and sings a haunting a capella rendition of "Joe Hill."
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me.
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” said he,
“I never died” said he.
“The Copper Bosses killed you Joe, they shot you Joe” says I.
“Takes more than guns to kill a man”
Says Joe “I didn’t die”
Says Joe “I didn’t die”
She’s this tiny waif on a giant stage, standing alone beneath a spotlight, belting out this old labor anthem to 500,000 kids who had no idea who Joe Hill was. The first time I saw it, I realized the power of a song to drill its way into the brain.
I saw Joan Baez sing that same song yesterday with her acoustic guitar, and a couple guys with electric and slide guitars for backup. It wasn’t the same, as it never could be. I already knew the wonder of "Joe Hill." What I never realized, until yesterday, was the wonder of Joan Baez.
In the old days, Baez sang with this fluttering vibrato in the higher registers that gave me the willies. She started out as a lefty folksinger before I was born and never strayed. She had her moment in the ’60s — a fling with Bob Dylan, the Woodstock appearance, etc — and as far as I was concerned, she was an icon of that time whose time had passed.
Last week another ’60s icon — Bob Dylan — was on PBS for two nights in a documentary by Martin Scorcese titled "No Direction Home." Baez appeared throughout the documentary trying to help explain Dylan. She lived with the guy, loved the guy, had become absolutely fed up with the guy and was no more able to explain Dylan than anybody else was. Throughout the interviews she came across as classy, witty and a bit hardened by the events of the past 40 years. Baez almost cynical after all these years. Imagine that.
So yesterday I went to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, a free event in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, with no particular agenda in mind beyond picking an interesting act from the five playing simultaneously on stages scattered throughout the park. I got there early, before the music started. I’d never heard of any of the opening acts and the only name I knew well in the early afternoon lineup was Baez, who came on at 1:15. I’d never seen her live and figured at the years had to have taken some of the edge off that voice of hers. I also figured she’d draw a huge crowd in a lefty town like San Francisco.
I wanted to see the same Joan Baez I’d seen in the Dylan documentary, and I knew that meant I’d have to be right up front. My plan: Insinuate myself into the front row one act before Baez, then hold that ground till Baez’s set was over.
The plan worked like a charm, with one unexpected bonus: After I’d tiptoed through the maze of blankets to find a foot-wide patch of grass right next to the fence separating the crowd from the stage, I looked to my left and noticed the guy sitting there looked familiar. He looked at me and we had a moment of recognition: it was Maurice, the landscape photographer whom I’d met via FOMFOK, the hiking group I hang out with now and then.
It turned out to be a good omen. Patty Griffin came on stage in a few minutes and proceeded to blow me away. She does ballads, blues, country, traditional, sings with genuine power and emotion. A woman next to me with a camera and a giant zoom lens is taking dozens of pictures; I see her aim her lens away from the stage and notice what she’s shooting: Baez is sitting on a platform by the stage, checking out Griffin’s set. She’s drinking Budweiser from a can at 12:30 in the afternoon. Helps her voice, I bet.
Griffin finishes her set to a standing ovation. About 15 minutes later, right on schedule, Baez appears on stage. She sorta threads her way through the first couple songs, not making much of an impact. "Geeze, Patty Griffin was better," I’m thinking. Well, Joan was just warming up.
I don’t remember the exact sequence, but I know things got better when she did a cover of Johnny Cash’s "Long Black Veil." Somebody in the crowd yelled "Joe Hill," and that’s when she played it. Then she said "This is a giant song by the guy who did all the giant songs." It was Dylan’s "Hard Rain." The crowd sang along, and she was hitting her stride.
Baez has to have that one a capella song that freezes the audience in its seats. This time it’s "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." She almost hits some of those high notes of her heyday; I’m thankful that she doesn’t. It’s a riveting song, bringing mad applause from the crowd when she finishes.
She sings a heartbreaking version of Woody Guthrie’s "Deportee," a song about Mexican migrant workers killed in a plane crash on their way back to Mexico. She closes her set with "Jerusalem," the Steve Earle song that imagines (somewhat naively) that one day the children of Abraham will live together in peace. When it’s over this young woman throws a bouquet of flowers on stage, and Baez picks it up, beaming.
I’m fairly stunned when it’s over. Against all odds, to my mind, Baez has put on an amazing show.
I realize immediately that I’ve just had one of those transcendent musical experiences that will not be equaled anywhere else at the festival. It’s not even 2:30 and there’s at least four more hours of music to check out. It’s a relief to have the "Oh Yea!" moment out of the way, so I won’t have to spend the rest of the afternoon darting from stage to stage looking for it.
With no goal for the rest of the afternoon, I just wandered around from stage to stage. I happened past the Arrow Stage when Rodney Crowell was leading a sing-along version of Dylan’s "Like a Rolling Stone." Cool moment.
Also caught the set of the Knitters,’ a country band made up of former members of X, the famous L.A. punk band of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Lots of fun: fast, rowdy country. Met some people I know from the paper, one of whom looks upon Del McCoury as a bluegrass version of God incarnate. When another mentioned he hated Del McCoury, I thought sure a fight was going to break out.
The last band I saw was Los Super Seven, a conglomerate of Tex-Mex virtuosos. Their first song, sung by Joe Ely, one of my all-time favorites, was "Deportee." Not quite as soul-rending as Baez’s version, but strong nevertheless.
My only lament from Hardly Strictly Bluegras is that it’s getting too big for its own good. The area around the Banjo Stage was mobbed with people… must’ve been 5,000 of them out there. But bigger crowds will attract even bigger talent in years to come, so there’s always that to look forward to.
Pictures from Saturday here.
My digital camera gave up the ghost over the weekend. Picking a digital camera is a dreadful slog through a zillion options, none of which all reside on the camera you want at the price you’d prefer to pay. So here’s what I did: I ordered one most similar to the one I already have, because the latest model does everything my old one did at half the price.
Even though my last Canon had a manufacturing defect that caused its early demise, I still have no gripe with Canon gear. Mine took pretty good pictures, saved me tons and tons on film, processing and printing, and worked fine, till it didn’t.
Having no pictures to post also offers me a perfect excuse to avoid writing about what I did over the weekend, which mostly amounted to hiking 10 miles uphill, camping out, waking up the next morning, stowing all my gear and walking 10 miles downhill where I started. I might decide to write about it later in the week, but maybe not. I was never more than eight miles from home (as the crow flies) the whole time, so the scenery is very familiar.
Next weekend I’m going to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival for the third year in a row, so I’ll have lots o’ fun pictures of Bluegrassy stuff, assuming my new camera gets here in time.
OK, last week I promised more about Yosemite. Here goes:
Day 1 (Tuesday):
Arrival at the Bed & Breakfast. We track down the owner of the B&B, a retired federal judge who has a small ponytail and walks with a strange waddle/shuffle that suggests too much time on horseback or the need for hip-replacement surgery; perhaps both. (The judge, a purposefully crusty character, was responsible for dispensing justice within the national park’s borders; I sense litterbugs ending up in Leavenworth)
He shows us around. Reminds us to close the doors to keep the bears out.
We unpack, then retire to the back yard, where a large double hammock has been assigned to tenants of our room (called the Alpenglow, which describes that yellow-orangeish glow mountains get from the day’s last rays of sunlight). I lie down in the hammock, beer in hand, and briefly consider spending my entire vacation there. Temptation is strong, yet I resist.
Day 2 (Wednesday):
Having resolved not to spend vacation in the double hammock, I’m obliged to find a place to go hiking. Yosemite has hundreds of miles of trails, so settling on one is no small task. I fantasize that one day I might hike the Pacific Crest Trail, which starts in Mexico and ends in Canada. The trail goes through Yosemite, and has one stretch near the main road at Tuolumne Meadows, going to a place
called Glen Aulin. People who hike the whole trail are called "thruhikers" and I ponder the odds of meeting one. Given that only a few hundred attempt the whole trail every year, and that only a tiny fraction finish, and that the trail’s 2,000 miles long, and that it takes six to nine months to hike it, I see these odds at less than zero.
So I park my car at the Glen Aulin trailhead, and as I’m getting out, I see a bearded guy with a backpack headed my way. He’s wearing shorts and I notice his legs have a deep-brown tan you’d normally associate with beach lifeguards. I ask him if he’s a thruhiker and sure enough, he says "yeah" and asks me if I know where the grocery store is. I tell him it’s probably around here somewhere. He tells me he started out in Mexico, hiked to the southern Sierra, then caught a ride to the Canadian border and hiked south from there.
He seems to be in a hurry, which means he probably ran out of food yesterday because he knew he could resupply at the grocery store, assuming he can find it. We chat for another minute or so, then he’s off down the road in search
of the store.
About a mile down the trail, I see a backpack on the ground and an hiker soaking his feet in the Tuolumne River. "Are you thruhiking?" I ask him? "No, I’m just resting here," he says.
The Glen Aulin trail is a fairly easy hike, hillwise, though it’s a 12-mile round-trip rather than the 9.5 jaunt that my guidebook promises. I stop for lunch near a pedestrian bridge that crosses the river at the beginning of a
cascade. It’s another three miles to Glen Aulin and back from here, and I figure this is as good a turn-back point as any other. When I get back to the room and dig out my guidebook, I learn that three lovely waterfalls are just down the trail from where I gave up. At least I have an excuse to go back.
Day 3 (Thursday):
Another hike day. I choose the Panorama Trail, which starts out at Glacier Point and goes five miles, mostly downhill, to Nevada Falls, passing the little-known Illilouette Falls along the way. The trail forms a ragged semicircle with the Half Dome in the center. Along the way my eyes are always drawn to that strange hunk of ruck. Maybe the rock is so big that it has its own gravity, which just
naturally attracts objects with lesser mass. Or maybe the curved surface seems like a cathedral’s roof, giving it a divine aura.
Whatever the rock’s strange magic, it’s shrouded in morning mist when I arrive, adding to its mystique. It’s just layers of granite, I try to tell myself.
As for the hike: four miles of down and about a mile up; the opposite on the way back. Not too bad till about mile nine, when, scenery or no scenery, I’m getting sick to death of this trail.
Melissa and I have a real meal in the Mountain Room at the Yosemite Lodge (really expensive, too, but hey, we’re on vacation, right?).
Day 4 (Friday)
My feet beg for a day off, so Melissa and I set out in the car for a High Sierra road trip. We take Highway 120 out of the park at Tioga Pass and head south to an area called Mammoth Lakes, which is a major ski area in the winter but seems listless and devoid of purpose at summer’s end.
We have lunch at a little diner called Tom’s Place. Because we have to. Mostly, I stop and take pictures of the scenic splendor, which is abundant. After you’ve hiked up and down some of these hillsides, they seem much nicer from a distance. We stop at a place called Convict Lake, which is achingly gorgeous and surrounded by terrible gray peaks that seem to promise a bleak outcomes to any who dare to go there. The lake got its name from a famous jailbreak of the 1870s, when a band of desperadoes went on the lam, got involved in at least a couple shoot-outs with posses and had a showdown near this lake. A lawman was killed and some of criminals disappeared into the mountains, never to be caught. My hunch is they became coyote food after a couple days up there.
Day 5 (Saturday)
Tossing common sense to the wind, I decide to spend a weekend day in Yosemite Valley, which is mobbed with humanity. Mostly I’m wandering around looking for interesting things to take pictures of.
At one point I’m parked off the road and I see this young couple taking pictures of each other on this rock next to the Merced River. I offer to take their picture; the guy hands me his camera, I look through the viewfinder and the guy says, "hey, you’ve got it backwards." Sure enough, I’m looking through the wrong end of the camera. Yeah, so now that guy (he sounded French to me) thinks all American tourists are morons, but hey, hey probably already knew that, right?
The amazing thing about spending the day surrounded by masses of tourists is that the valley’s scenery trumps humanity. Every time I look up at the canyon walls I see an amazing rock formation that I hadn’t noticed before. Happens over a dozen times.
That night we went to dinner at the Wawona
Hotel and had another of those amazing meals more often associated with dining in San Francisco. After dinner we stopped by this little salon area where this buddy of Krustee the Innkeeper was playing piano and singing show tunes. A buddy of his takes over the piano for a moment and relates a tale of how he was performing at the famed Ahwahnee Hotel one night, when a woman in the audience requested that he play "Forever Young" to celebrate the woman’s mother’s 85th birthday.. You may remember Forever Young was recorded by Bob Dylan, who was once married to Joan Baez, who also recorded the song. Well, it was Joan Baez requesting that song for her mom that night.
The regular piano player guy comes back with a slideshow about the history of Yosemite. He tells us about the strange tradition of the firefall,
in which a huge bonfire was ignited at the top of Glacier Point, then shoved off the cliff for the amusement of campers down in the valley. The park service stopped the practice in the late 1960s — not because shoving an inferno off a three-thousand-foot cliff posed a forest fire danger, but because the park had become so popular that thousands of people would gather in the valley’s meadows to watch the firefall every night, trampling all the meadows’ tender grasses, flowers and other flora. Ah, tourism.
Well, those are the highlights. Sorry, no new pictures this week, I got lazy over the weekend and the camera never left the shelf.
I’ll write more about Yosemite when I’ve got more time, but for now, here are
a few pix to whet your appetite.
Wednesday morning along the Tuolomne River on the Glen Aulin Trail, a segment
of the Pacific Crest Trail.
Thursday morning on the Panorama Trail, overlooking the Half Dome.
Friday morning near Tioga Pass in the Yosemite High Country.
Friday afternoon at Tunnel View.
Saturday afternoon near the base of El Capitan.
Lots more pics and a bit of commentary at my
Flickr photo-sharing page.
I’m trying something different this week: posting most of my pictures at flickr.com,
a photo sharing site, and putting a few highlights here on the main page.
To get started, check out my Yosemite
2005 photo album.
When we were leaving for Lassen last week, one of the last news items I noticed
was that the levees keeping water out of New Orleans were starting to give way.
While we were camping the city of New Orleans filled up with water, turning something
nasty but containable into a certified national disaster the likes of which the
country has never seen, not even on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
As the Led Zeppelin song went, “when the levee breaks, got noplace to stay.”
Or hide, in the case of the Bush administration, which is looking like the
gang that couldn’t shoot straight. But you know what? The Bush gang did a fine
job of cleaning up Florida — you know, that key state full of swing voters
— in an election year when three hurricanes struck in a single summer.
But no levees gave way, leaving, say, Miami or Tampa under water.
Since Bush is the boss of the whole country, he’s got to take his lumps on
this one. Disaster happens on your watch, the response is a national shame,
you have to face up.
Truth is, though, that the your everyday cynical political calculation is the
real culprit here. What happened last week was that Bush & Co. knew from the
get-go that they had few friends in a 60-percent-black city like New Orleans.
They were in no hurry to help because they had no votes to gain, and they gambled
that Katrina would be a three-day story that disappeared once the waters began
to recede.
Only the waters didn’t recede after three days. They kept rising. Once the
Bush gang knew they had a genuine 9/11-style catastrophe on their hands, they
had to do something about it. But by then the city and all its infrastructure
was ruined. So it took a few more days to get military boots on the ground to
restore order and usher in relief supplies. Add it up and you’ve got thousands
of people suffering for a week with no electricity, no fresh water and only
whatever food they could scrounge or steal.
The Bush people made a similar calculation during the California energy crisis
of a few years ago. Nothing was done to intervene when canny energy speculators
were manipulating the state’s energy market and costing its taxpayers billions
of dollars and forcing rolling blackouts during the hottest days of the summer.
Why didn’t Bush act? Because he had nothing to gain in helping a state that
didn’t help him get elected. If the California equivalent of the levees giving
way — a devastating earthquake — had happened during the electricity crisis,
Bush would’ve been in the same jam he’s in today. He and his people rolled the
dice and lucked out. And guess what: California voted for a Democrat in the
next election, just as his people predicted.
You hate to think of politicians making these “what’s-in-it-for-me” calculations
when thousands of lives are at stake, when a jewel of a city has been turned
into a steaming toilet bowl. You hate to see people pointing fingers when they
oughta be lending a hand.
But this is how the world works and, I suspect, always has.
And with that thought, I’m leaving for Yosemite National Park, to walk in the
woods and gawk at big trees and amazing rocks, which always seem to avoid getting
themselves into these predicaments.