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| Bolinas Ridge view with sprinkle of fiddleneck and young cobwebby thistle. |
It's been a while since I last had such a restless night that I woke up to a world of blah. I rolled out of bed feeling so unrefreshed that I skipped my morning exercises and cut straight to the oatmeal and coffee, then booted up the computer to browse the usual news outlets, only to realize I couldn't have cared less about any of it. On the bright side, it allowed me to roll out of the house and into a beautiful morning about an hour earlier than I otherwise would have.
The out-of-sorts funkiness followed me during the beginning of my ride up to Mt. Tam, but it was easy enough to brush it off. I recently downloaded The Iliad from the library and took Homer's cue of blaming the gods for any mischief I encountered. Beneath the little sprinkles of mischief, the day itself was superb: sunny and cool, with very little wind.
As I was about to turn off Arguello Boulevard into the Presidio I passed a memorial for Ethan Boyes, the competitive cyclist who was killed by an out-of-control motorist on April 4. My wife told me she read a Nextdoor post by someone who said they were an eye-witness, and that the vehicle crossed into the oncoming lane and ran head-on into Boyes. I stopped to photograph the memorial as I passed it again on my way home and let the horror of it sink in. Not only did the car cross the center line, it completely crossed the opposite lane and gouged tire tracks into the embankment on the far side of the bike path. [UPDATE 9/14/23 here.] [UPDATE 3/18/24 here: 81-year-old driver pleads guilty to misdemeanors; sentencing scheduled for July 15.] [UPDATE 7/15/24 here: driver sentenced to a year of home confinement, a year of probation, and a $25,000 fine....]
That grim and poignant reminder of what's at stake when we share the road with each other stayed with me as I continued my ride, but I also didn't ignore all the uplifting reminders of the world that I also encountered, like a great blue heron perched on a rooftop, or a large ship sailing through a sunlit tableau of calm bay waters, rolling green hills, and peaceful shoreline, with a little irony thrown in (it was an oil and chemical tanker with "Protect the Environment" emblazoned in green below the bridge, in slightly smaller type than the red "No Smoking" reminder). Up on Bolinas Ridge I spotted a coyote with a limp who was hunting as best he could, his motley fur coat halfway between winter and summer.
This is prime time to see spring patches of purple sky lupine on the steep green hillsides, but I didn't see a single good patch of them on Thursday. Earlier in the week David Muir on ABC News aired a feature on wildflowers that included Mt. Tamalpais, but they recorded the segment before they had much to show. I'll hold out hope there's more to come since I've seen impressive blooms in the past as late as April 30. Meanwhile, patches of fragrant chert-loving lupines were just coming into bloom along West Ridgecrest Road, and a low-growing fiddleneck created a few small patches of golden yellow. Calpyso orchids are still going strong.
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| Urban Heron |
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| The Overseas Boston oil/chemical tanker steams out of San Francisco Bay |
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| An Injured Coyote on the Hunt |
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| Coyote and Poison Oak |
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| Chert-Loving Lupine |
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| A young buck feeding his growing antlers. |
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| It's a superbloom! :) |
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| Smoke on Panoramic Highway |
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| Crews were doing controlled burns of brush piles above Muir Woods. |
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| Ethan Boyes Memorial |
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