I think this odd-shaped device has been sitting in a field at Emandal for a fair while, but in several years of visits I'd never gone over to see what it was. This year I did.
It turns out to be a Plate Boundary Observation Station -- one of over a thousand fixed points on the continental US that are repeatedly measured from a fixed position in space. Modern GPS technology is accurate to within an eighth of an inch and minute changes in distance between stations tell us how and in what direction the tectonic plates that make up this part of the globe are moving.
As a handy notice board pinned to the side of the station tells you, the station's a part of the National Science Foundation-supported EarthScope project, which aims to help us better understand the geological structure of the North American continent.
You can get updates on what the observatories are telling us at the Plate Boundary Observatory homepage. One of the things it has enabled is the wonderfully-named SNARF, which stands for Stable North American Reference Frame. It's a common framework that researchers can use to more accurately combine data from projects on different parts of the continental plates.
A few of my favorites from this year's trip:
There's something about the stones at Emandal that resonates deeply with me. Last year I was struck by their monumentality. This year I noticed what I can only describe as the Zen beauty of this huge natural menhir standing at the Eel River's edge.
It's wonderfully weather-burnished, and yet still home to plenty of mosses and lichens.
I'd not been there since April, so it was good to see the progress of the living roof at the California Academy of Sciences.
It's now looking well grown in, browned by dry, end-of-summer seedheads, but dotted still with wild strawberries, spikes of grass and flowers like this dudleya,
daisies,
and yarrow. If only we all could live beneath such botanical abundance!
One of my projects this summer was to keep writing poetry. I didn't get to it as much as I'd hoped, but here's one poem that I've been working on. I can't call it finished, but it's at a point where I'm going to let it alone for a while.
In the Teeth of it
(at the Mary Rose Museum, 2009)
Short of a compliant wind to
Blow their adversaries
Into combat, Tudor naval gunners
Would carve them linstocks
Some half-yard long in wood,
The dragon a favorite trope
Each beast intricately set to bite
A rope that,
Lit,
Would burn the fuse set though
The cannon’s sheath until
It caught the powder packed behind the ball.
And here are three
Raised sodden from the Solent’s silt,
The great ship that bore them sunk
In battle when,
If you believe the French,
Deckfulls of hardheld matchcords
Set a single
Splintering broadside
Devastating
Devastating
Even to its deliverers.
In what panic were
These fancy tapers set to work,
I wonder now,
Or fear, or desperate resolution, and
Decorated in what
Repose?
And in what spirit did their unsung makers
Turn to art when contemplating
Hurt?
Like the gunstock lined in pearl,
The knight’s helm extravagantly worked,
The jaunty pin-up by the bombardier’s perch
Were these fire dogs
Born of shiftless
Ostentation
Intimidation,
Idleness,
Of irony,
Or of a wish
To make a fetish
Of a murdering tool?
Or were they, perhaps, a semaphore
To all survivors of their fatal craft
That these were machines
Worked by men with
Better things to do,
Good men pressed by brutes
Makers first,
Who, in the calm before
The drowning fight
Found their best selves
And spoke a half millennium across to ours.
At the Cal. Ave. Farmers Market this AM. Glorious.
it's a little embarrassing. You can sense that when you visit Donner Memorial State Park on Donner Lake in Truckee, CA. The park is named for the Donner party, the emigrant group for whom the passage across the Sierras went horribly, cannibalistically wrong in the winter of 1846-7.
While the Donner party gives the park its name, the museum within its grounds is pointedly the 'Emigrant Trail Museum,' favoring the stories of the many who trekked successfully through the beautiful Truckee meadows on their way to crossing that last great granite-strewn pass before their descent into their promised land. And, of course, when you see how they were traveling and what they were surmounting, even the stories of the ones who made it through unscathed are harrowing enough.
The Donner Party does get mentioned here, but the tone is uncertain -- appropriate perhaps because they both endured the most spectacularly awful hardships of all, and yet didn't come through them in the approved way.
The ambiguity extends to the massive Pioneer Monument outside the museum which is pointedly not of any Donner party members. And yet its plinth is set at 22 ft high, the height of the snow in that spot in the winter of 1846-7, so it is about them too.
The memorial's inscription is also ambiguous, weighted with the discomfort of the knowing what this land did to the most famous of its emigrants, the ones who died, and in some cases were eaten, pretty much right where the memorial stands today.
It's pretty shocking that today -- only a few generations later, really -- you can simply drive up the road beyond the lake for eight or so minutes and park exactly on the divide that marks the beginning of the end of the emigrant trail.
Here's the view looking back down to Donner Lake, at the far end of which the Donner Party were stuck for that terrible winter. In the summer the area is now full of people climbing the rocks for fun. And even in the deepest winter, the point at which the pioneers finally crossed the Sierra divide is an 'athletic-oriented boarding school' -- the Sugar Bowl Academy -- where parents voluntarily send their children to live.
Spotted by the children this weekend in Truckee:
Stella's Mountain Jay
Red Tailed Hawk
Sierra White Tailed Jack Rabbit
Tahoe Chipmunk
Sierra Least Weasel
American Robin
Grey Squirrel
Douglas Squirrel
Mule Deer
misc. crickets, bees, ants
and one Cantankerous Meadow Mouse (well, it could have been any of the other twenty or so species of mouse known to live in the Sierras, but it was near a marsh (where said mouse is known to hang out) and it's the one I'd most like to see. Given the mouse, though, I suppose that feeling wouldn't be reciprocal).
Mostly because they arrive in mid-summer, when the California garden is looking so hot, dry and tired. Often, you've forgotten where they were planted because the leaves died back with the last rains in May. Then out they nakedly shoot and the garden is suddenly full of blousy, two-foot high pink trumpets.
I also love Amaryllis belladonna because 'Bare Naked Lady' was Ada's first compound word. And because they make the bumble bees happy.
The scent, though, is ordinary, a bit like liquid soap. And they are a huge pain to plan around. The leaves are vigorous, crowding out everything within a foot of the bulb. Then when they are gone, you have a bare patch that's not easy to fill so late in the growing year. One of the best bets for pairing, I've found, is the Santa Barbara daisy (Erigeron karvinskianu). It also needs little water and you can cut it back as the Amaryllis leaves sprout in the late fall. Then it will grow to cover the bare patch in the summer. When the bare naked stalks shoot out of the daisies they are tall enough to still make quite a show.