So It Goes

I'm looking out the window and it's pouring down rain. Out on the bay surfers are lined up waiting for turns to ride the stormy waves. The pelicans have returned. Schools of something silvery must be running just below the surface in that world we can't see. Out of this sea, dolphins surface. One after the other. I watch them. Even the surfers give up riding the waves to sit on their boards and watch them. The dolphins are rising up and diving down again just before the break.

I grab the camera, but have already learned that there is no way to anticipate where a dolphin will come up out of the water. I don't even try to get a still shot, instead I turn on the little video function and shoot at the waves for ten seconds. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Well okay then. I turn the camera off and go back to whatever it was that I was doing before the rain and dolphins caught my eye.

Later in the day a hawk scares a few birds quickly out of the trees. Then, it flies straight onto fence railing in the yard. Wow, what a great shot, I think. It sits there for a second, then another. I grab the camera, zoom in and try to focus. It won't focus. Oh damn. The camera is still set for video.

So it goes.

Wordless Wednesday: Light in Storm

4:28 pm

5:21 pm

5:26 pm

5:31 pm

Storm

Before the rain started, the wind came on fast and strong. Gulls, sometimes in flocks of twenty or more, sailed the currents silently past our window. Their grace belied the wind's fierce buffeting.
Soon the rain began pelting the windows, making clear shots impossible, washing out almost every bit of color, and rendering the morning a stark view in black and white.

The storm finally arrived.

**************

Can I admit something, just among the few who stop by here to say hello:

I don't understand Facebook. I don't know what function it serves. Is it a public conversation? With everyone? What are the gifts we send there? What does it mean to poke someone?

I'm not completely happy with Obama. In your heart of hearts do you believe he is working to serve our interests or theirs? We watched Bill Moyers interview Simon Johnson, and it doesn't look good for those of us interested in representative democracy.

We are temporarily living in a family home on a cliff above the bay. It is more than a million dollar view, it is a multi-million dollar view. It bores us to tears. We feel like misfits in the leisure class. We don't understand the concept of escapist second homes. The cliff has eighteen homes; they are empty most of the time, visited only by gardeners and housekeepers.

We dug up a small piece of the yard and planted carrots, beets, onions, shallots, kale, and spinach. It feels like defiance against conceptually polite flower arrangements and fountains.

We are too old to be this unsettled.

It feels like a storm.

Walking on the Wild Side

It's always in the back of our minds when we walk along this beach, which is only accessible at a minus tide under the fossil-rich cliffs of Capitola, that huge pieces of this cliff crash occasionally and unpredictably down on to the beach. We've read in the local paper of people who have been killed here by the huge rocks, trees, and crushing earth. We're always careful; we walk as far out to the water's edge as we can, without getting our shoes soaked. We have always assumed that we'd be safe there. How far could those rocks fall in the crack of an instant?
Well, it turns out that very quickly rocks bigger than me and Roger fall all the way into the bay. That's fifty feet from the base of the cliffs to the lowest tide mark. Yikes. This pile of earth, trees, and cliff-face came crashing down last week (if you click on the pic you'll see a bit of fossil bed on the rocks to the right of Roger-- opposite to the direction he's pointing in). Lucky for us we were not on the beach that day, but that's only happenstance. This is our favorite minus tide walk, and we'll definitely be climbing and clambering over these newly fallen rocks at the next one. But I suspect we'll be a little more circumspect about the real dangers when we do this. It won't stop us, but it does have a sobering effect.

Time and Space Are Funny Things

Wake up in California....drive... drive... go to sleep in Washington. A touch of spring there in the fragrance of narcissus and calla lily buds, a touch of winter here in bare branches and only local birds at the feeder.

We adjust. Sleep in our own bed. Window wide open and temps in the 30s.
Put on layers and layers of clothing, head down to the mouth of Chimacum Creek. The eagles are exactly where we expect them to be. We know which trees belong to them. Watch a river otter take its bounty back to its den. We slow down and check out all the scat and tracks in the hardened mud. Clues. Reminders.

Hear a coyote the second night home.

Rainbow photo taken at sunset Friday Feb 22nd in Capitola, California. River otter photo taken Friday Feb 29th at Fort Townsend, Wa.

memories

this is our dining table, and the capitola wharf beyond.

i'm awash in memories here in capitola, from several eras of my life. this is the house in which i spent many summers when i was young. right out there is the beach where i played in the waves and the wharf from which i caught untold numbers of perch. i lived here briefly in 1970 with my first-born daughter when she was a baby. i remodeled a big chunk of the house in 1985. robin and i lived upstairs from 1989 to 1994. i rebuilt the garage in 1991.

it's fun and interesting to be here where we found each other. we're in the same two upstairs rooms we lived in for 5 years, about 370 square feet. through a BIG earthquake. we take the same walks we did back then. shop at the same stores. listen to the breaking waves at night lulling us asleep, as we did back then. we dined in the same restaurant, at the same table, where we dined on one of our first real dates, where we first professed our love for each other. of course, the restaurant has changed quite a bit in 18 years, but the food and service are still excellent, as is our love.

we drove up the coast to san francisco last weekend to see my youngest daughter and her boyfriend. i've spent time on almost every beach on that stretch of coastline. half moon bay is, well was back then, a 20 minute drive from where i lived in san mateo during high school. i spent many afternoons surf fishing and many nights drinking beer on those beaches.

robin has written about our tradition of remembering her father by throwing roses, this year rose petals, from the wharf where her family consigned his ashes to the sea. i always dedicate one rose, or petal, to my own father. his ashes, some anyway, were put into the ocean on his favorite island of maui. i figure it's all one ocean. this year as we were out there with our rose petals from port townsend i looked back down along the wharf and saw a collage of my own history. from a 6 year old me buying squid for bait and fishing thru the cracks in the planks to the stormy night robin and her sister, brothers, and mother scattered the ashes onto the water from the landing float which was pitching up and down at least 5 feet in the heavy surf.

the wharf has gone through many phases in my lifetime, as has the village of capitola. when i was young the wharf was a place for fishermen (fisherpeople?) and capitola was a slightly seedy vacation town. both the wharf and the village got seedier and more ragged around the edges in the late fifties and early sixties. now the wharf is a tourist attraction with mooring buoys where sailboats tie up in the summer and a wanna be chi chi restaurant. the village and surrounding bluffs are filling up with large, high-end mcmansions. the skiball and penny arcades of my youth are now tony restaurants and curio shops.

below is a picture of the house from outside on the same morning as the picture above, which looks out from the upstairs windows.

Old Footsteps, New Footsteps

There was almost a minus tide on Wednesday. It was a 0.3, so we headed out to take the old walk we used to take when we lived here years and years ago. It occurred to us that we never checked the tide tables when we walked back then, we just ventured out and were met by the tide of the day. We are older and perhaps wiser now, so we plan ahead. Why leave to fate what can be construed by the sun and moon? You know why we came? It was to see if the old fossil beds were visible and not covered by old storms and higher tides.
But first we found some new birds. Who could this little black and white be, we wondered. Fortunately my brother and SIL let us borrow their Sibley's for our stay, so we could ID this beauty: a Black Phoebe, sitting on a little shore rock. What a fine way to start our walk.
Then we saw what might be a Willet. A beautiful lithe and winsome bird hunting along the shore. When we looked at the photograph after we had gotten home, we saw that it was standing by another little shore bird that might be a Western Sandpiper.
Then, we took the longer view. Here is what the shoreline looks like.
Roger walked over to some rocks and called me to come and take a look.
Oh yes. There was a beautiful fossil, and one we had not seen before.

As we walked on though, we could see that there had been considerable erosion and much of the best fossil beds were under huge fallen pieces of the cliffside.

We talked about long geologic time, global climate change, earthquakes. We were wondering what cataclysmic combination it would take to bring back the fossil beds. Rising waters, thrusting plates. When will the old be new again?

Check here for a bit of info about the fossils, or Google Capitola fossil. The seawall has not been built.

What We Are Seeing These Days

The fog blew in and never left. It's a hot summer weather pattern, or maybe it's a marine layer inversion. I think I heard the weather guy say that on the local weather report. Whatever it is, it's like living where there is no horizon line, sky and earth blend into each other. A gauzy, light gray sameness. Still we venture out into the chill everyday just to see.
There are birds here we haven't seen in Washington. That makes looking around very exciting. Tuesday was a grand day for glimpsing things new to us, like this Western Scrub jay. Look at that blue. If we miss the sky, we find it here in feather and wing.
We headed down to the wharf and discovered this lone Western Grebe (at least that's what we think it is). The Cornell Bird website says that Western Grebes live in the middle of the country on lakes, but winter along the Pacific Coast. We certainly understand that migration. Our journey took us to the same place.
But it's this hawk that has really gotten our attention. We live in the middle of its territory. I see him on the roof of the house below ours towards the bay. It has even come and landed on our deck railing.
It spends a good deal of time on the roof of the house next door. We have no idea what kind of hawk this is, but are intrigued by the mottled markings on its back. If anyone out there has a clue about this bird's identity, we'd love to hear it.
I just had to include this photo because there is something about seeing a hawk with waves crashing behind it that tells us we're not back home in Washington.

First Morning, Second Morning

We drove 900 miles in two days. We've been busy, non-stop since the moment we walked in the door. So much to do to make a space feel like home. This sunrise on the first morning pulled me out of bed and had me running, looking for my clothes and the camera. Back home in Washington, I could head outside wearing nothing but a tee-shirt, but here that kind of behavior is frowned upon.
We're so busy making this house a home, it's hard to remember to take short breaks and head down the little public trail right out the front door, down to the train trestle to take a peek up and down the creek.
We forgot to bring the Sibley's Bird Guide with us (that and a bunch of other important things like the telephone, the modem, the cat's kibble), so the new birds we are seeing in the creek are unknown to us. It's like the good old days, when we just looked and couldn't identify anything.
The second morning was a bit moodier and grayer than the first. There was a hint that the sun would spill out into that blue sky, but the fog and clouds overtook it before that happened. That's not a metaphor or anything, just the way some days begin.