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| Farallon View From Mt. Tam |
I was surprised to see that the Sleeping Maiden had her head in the clouds this morning as I began walking to the beach. Just yesterday I was on Mt. Tam and was able to clearly see the Farallon Islands and even the blue Pacific Ocean stretching to the horizon beyond them. It was cold, too. The temperature at West Point Inn was 43.6 degrees just before I saddled up my ebike to ride out there.
This week brought my first rides of the new season. I just barely dodged a downpour on Wednesday, had my legs go numb from the cold on Thursday, and got sprinkled on today (despite no rain in the forecast).
Yesterday's ride to Mt. Tam was one of those diamond days of sparkling clarity, where you can see detail on the slopes of Mt. Diablo. It felt like, if I could get high enough, I might even be able to see the Sierra Nevada (as I did in this post from February 2014).
Traffic was mellow on the climb up Shoreline Highway until I got near the turnoff to Panoramic Highway, when a tourist bus and maybe a dozen or so cars passed me. I looked at my watch and figured they were all heading for their 10 a.m. reservations at Muir Woods. Once past the Muir Woods turnoff I practically had the road to myself. I noticed the surprising October azalea blooms had faded, but the glistening scarlet flags of California fuchsia seemed to have gained new strength from the recent rain.
It wasn't long after I stopped pedaling and locked my bike at Rock Spring that I appreciated how cold it was, especially in the shade and wind. As I hiked out to the trail cams I noticed there were very few insects out, and I didn't see any at all on the still-flowering coyote brush. There was an interesting insect hatch going on, though, with snowflake-sized creatures twirling in the breeze like falling maple seeds. There was a group of mourning doves in the trees nearby when I first noticed them, and I thought the insects were feathers coming off the doves from preening. I tried to catch one to get a good look at it, but I missed a couple of times and gave up because I was too cold to stand around trying to catch falling fluff.
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| Found this good-sized rattlesnake's shed skin in the grass near the off-trail coyote brush I was checking for insect life. Although I was carefully placing my feet before I saw the skin, I went double-careful afterward. |
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| At first glance I thought this gray-camo BMW had been vandalized in the parking lot, but on closer examination it had pretty obviously been in a serious crash. |
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| A couple of foxes following the mostly dry creekbed before the first rain of the season. |
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| Last year's first rain was a gully-washer, but this year's barely raised the water level (there's a fox skirting the right side of the pool). By the next day, the creekbed looked as dry as it had before the rain. |
I got some sad news this week when I stumbled onto the obituary of an old friend I'd met back in the '80s at photography school in Santa Barbara, who died a few weeks ago around his 61st birthday. Scott Starr was the quintessential California beach lover who nevertheless hailed from Lafayette, Louisiana, (which he pronounced "laugh yet"), a place where he said people are proud to be called coon-asses. Scott definitely brought that down-home, coon-ass sense of humor to his life in the Golden State.
Although I'd known creative musicians before, Scott was the first truly creative visual artist I'd ever met, and I would be amazed by the inspired ideas he'd come up with for our class assignments at Brooks Institute of Photography. His creativity fit perfectly with his interests in flying disc freestyle play (excellent tribute here), snowboarding (creating art for Barfoot Snowboards), and skateboarding (another tribute in Thrasher Magazine). He was even a businessman, creator of the wacky Tail Devil ("Made in Hell") for skateboards.
Even after I left Santa Barbara to attend Humboldt State (now Cal Poly Humboldt), I would sometimes drive down to drop in on Scott unannounced. This continued after graduation, and one time I drove down from Davis, where I was working at the time, and he wasn't home. His roommate or his neighbor (I've forgotten the detail) said he was down at Zuma Beach where he had a gig as an extra in a volleyball movie, so I drove down there and somehow found him, and he got me in as an extra as well. Later on, I was traveling around the country and was visiting my parents in Florida when he came out on a Thrasher assignment to shoot skaters at a huge new ramp. I still have the two-page spread he shot, since I am standing in the frame atop the ramp.
I kind of lost touch with Scott after he developed a severe case of Meniere's disease that came out of nowhere and was often incapacitating. Looking everywhere and anywhere to find a cure, he seemed to go down a weird internet rabbit hole. A few years ago he tried to convince me the Earth was flat, even pointing me to web sites that prove it, and it was hard to believe he wasn't kidding, especially when I reminded him of how he used to help me with trigonometry homework at Brooks! Evidently he continued over the years to spiral even deeper into the most surreal parts of the internet, where the most cockamamie stuff somehow finds fertile soil even in creative and intelligent minds like Scott's.
It's hard and frankly f*cked up to believe someone so full of life and creative energy could be induced to leave this beautiful world, in full or in part, by the fantasies of religious kooks waiting for the Rapture. Joseph Campbell wrote that, "Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology." That is, stories are taken literally instead of symbolically, and misunderstood as referring to outward events instead of inner, spiritual insights.
Anyway, it's a new season for Scott, and if he's hanging out with the angels now, one thing's for sure: he's doing things with those wings that none of those other suckers ever saw before.
Aloha, Scott.
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| Scott & Mofo (Photo Editor at Thrasher) |
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| 1983 |
