Like Old Friends

 

Baying at the Moon (California Bay, that is)
(click images to view larger)

One of the best things about getting to Mt. Tam early in the morning is hearing coyotes baying at the moon, and whatever else they like to bay and howl at. At one point I was concentrating on a close-up scene on the forest floor when a surprisingly nearby coyote began to howl, raising the hair on the back of my neck. Such an eerie, plaintive, and primal sound.

I drove up again today instead of riding my bike because I wanted to poke around on the mountain with my Nikon. Doing so was like hanging out with old friends. I got my knees muddy shooting close-ups and felt the bite of a frosty morning. I enjoyed watching the birds come to life in the bright, warm sunshine. I closed my eyes and inhaled the signature scent of a redwood forest.

I was surprised that our recent rainfall has still failed to fill the creek beds. I'd been confident that I'd get to hear the season-opening song of water running down Cataract Creek, but I guess the forest has been drinking up all the rain. Well, at least we're getting some other signs of change: the moss is greening up; the madrone berries are ripening; and the first LBMs (little brown mushrooms) are sprouting. 

California Towhee

Spotted Towhee in Coyote Brush

Towhee Appears to Yell at a Squirrel

Doug Fir and Sinking Moon

Acorn Woodpecker

Frosty Swirl

Cold & Prickly

Warm & Soft

Madrone & Moss

Just the Moss

Dyer's Polypore

LBMs with Moss & Lichen

Robins and band-tailed pigeons were feeding high in the madrone, causing a steady rain of berry pieces. I wondered how they extracted the seeds with just their beaks as a tool, but then it struck me: tongues.

Bay Laurel Nuts Breaking Out of Their Jackets

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Rain Remnants

 

Rain Gone By

Thunder Heading East

Blue Horizons

Island View

Hang Gliders

Beaks to the Wind

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City by the Bay

 

Shrine in the Park
(red toyon berries in the background)

With rain in the forecast for the next few days I felt a little more urgency to enjoy the sunny day than I might have otherwise. I thought about going for a walk, but decided to finally take a ride down to the waterfront to check out all the new stuff that's going on down there, something I've been meaning to do for a long time. 

I was surprised to feel some nostalgia as I pedaled along my old going-to-work route down the Panhandle and The Wiggle and Market Street, where I finally turned toward the coast at Second Street to emerge at the southern end of Pac Bell, er, Oracle Park. 

I continued south without knowing how far I could go, and was stoked to find a bike route  (part of the San Francisco Bay Trail) all the way to Heron's Head Park. From there, I turned around to explore the bayfront all the way to Torpedo Wharf. Along the way I snapped a few pix with my smartphone, feeling like a tourist who just gained a renewed appreciation for his luck in actually living here.

This is just south of Oracle Park, which you can see in the background. These new buildings are on what used to be the ballpark's Lot A. The little mini-ballpark for kids was gone, but I imagine something good will take its place when this construction is done. A little farther south I saw that half of Lot A was still there.

I was disappointed to find this closure sign when I reached Heron's Head Park but soon realized people were going back in there anyway. The shrine at the top of this post is out near the beak of the heron's head.

The Heron's Head Beak
(Heron's Head is named for the shape of the park, but it's also a popular birding area.)

The Bay Natives/Heron's Head Nursery was right across the street. The goats were in a fenced enclosure, but the chickens were on the loose.

I wouldn't be surprised if that wrecked BMW from my last post ends up in this auto wrecking yard at some point.

I turned down this street and felt like I was back in Jamestown, New York, a semi-industrial town that has seen better days in the past, and hopefully has better days ahead as well.

Picturesque Urban Decay

Looking forward to seeing this neck o' the woods when it's all built out.

This little cove has an actual beach, although only wading is allowed. No swimming due to the presence of weird and dangerous submerged objects. How hard could it be to remove said dangerous objects and make this a really nice swimming hole?

South Beach Yacht Harbor

Thankfully, not everything is new. Red's Java House is still kickin' (unlike Louis' Restaurant above Sutro Baths which closed during the pandemic after serving food there for 83 years).

Fire Department Station 35 has gotten quite the facelift since I was last down this way. Gone are the rickety pier structures and the floating planter-box garden.

Rincon Park is still sporting "Cupid's Span", but with some new building faces in the background.

I was surprised when I passed the Ferry Building to see that the next-door Starbucks was gone. I'm not a big coffee person and have never been a fan, but I'd have thought such a popular place could have survived the pandemic. Guess not. Anyway, speaking of the pandemic, there were two cruise ships in port. :)

I lived on an aircraft carrier for four years, but I am still impressed by the size of this cruise ship. I couldn't back up far enough to get the whole thing, bow to stern, in the frame.

You never know what you'll run into when you're out and about on a weekend in San Francisco. In this case it was a street closure for an early Veteran's Day Parade along Fisherman's Wharf .

I always love this view over Fort Mason, with the Marin Headlands and Mt. Tamalpais in the distance.

A noisy flock of elegant terns resting in Crissy Lagoon.

One last view of the Golden Gate Bridge before heading back across the Presidio toward home.

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New Season

 

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.

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.

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.

A couple of foxes following the mostly dry creekbed before the first rain of the season.

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.

Tam Cam Clips

* * *

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.

Scott & Mofo (Photo Editor at Thrasher)

1983

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