emerson

Desolation wilderness

By Dale Conour

The winds came to Desolation Wilderness with the evening.

My wife Kendra and I had backpacked 6 miles up to Fontanillis Lake from Bayview Campground, perched above Lake Tahoe’s Emerald Bay, occasionally feeling the effects of the 8,000-foot elevation as we labored up switchbacks. But despite a late start (surprise, Bayview’s a dry campground!), we made camp early enough to be done with dinner before dark. Which turned out to be a very good thing.

The lake is special for my wife. It was a regular family getaway, the place the ashes of her grandmother are buried (don’t tell the forest service), and we sat for a while in her childhood escape: hidden by a giant boulder, a flat rock juts low over the water. It’s just the right size for a young girl to sit back and read her book, in a world all her own. Or two adults to sit side by side and share the memories, keeping all her life alive.

When the sun left the lake, brushing the peaks with orange, and the evening star blinked on, the wind stopped settling for an occasional puff and began to blow in earnest. It bowed the trees, it sent ripples down the lake, creating patterns like giant feathers.

The wind soon chased us into our new tent, chosen for its large mesh doors and generous rainfly vestibules, not for its potential protection from windstorms. We spent a night besieged. “It’s like there’s a demon out there,” my wife offered from under the Capilene top on her face, worn like a shroud to protect against the dust billowing in from under the rainfly. And it was like something malevolent had found us in our little site above the lake, howling and shaking our tent in its fury.

But during the night, I peeked out to the stars above, burning brightly in the dark mountain sky, and felt the wind blow hard across my face.

And I lay back down, vibrating,
understanding why John Muir climbed a tree to witness a storm,
feeling the fierceness of it all,
the pure determination of the life in my heart,
and realizing how, together, unified,
everything rails against the darkness.

Let’s stay in touch.

Life will find a way

By Dale Conour

Wired has an interesting piece on the Berkeley Pit Lake in Butte, Montana, and how the toxic Superfund site, one of the worst in the country (120 miles from Butte to Missoula—nice, money trumps common sense yet again) and assumed completely devoid of life, has spawned microbes, unique to this area, from which scientists are producing cancer-battling extracts.

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Technorati Tags: Wired, Superfund, cancer, life

San Francisco Bay, now and then

Bay Light, Peter Kaminski

By Kendra Smith
I’ve been thinking a lot about San Francisco Bay. Most recently, it was when we scattered my great aunt’s ashes from aboard the Neptune Society’s Naiad, near a place called Yellow Bluff. Admiring the pelicans beating their wings just above the waves, my father turned from the rail, his thinning hair wild in the wind, and said what has been on my mind for months: “I’d like to have seen the Bay before we did anything to it.”

This thought occurs to me every week as I pedal to the office on a paved path supported by the landfill that rings the bay. You probably have to look back to some time between the Gold Rush, when Clay and Grant streets were just 250 yards from the beach, and the 1906 earthquake to find a waterway unaltered by dredging and filling. Since then, we’ve had greater effects: water warmed by the effluent from the power plants that run our homes and businesses, poison runoff from washing our cars in the street and using chemicals on our lawns, even microscopic invasive creatures that eat the local underwater life, brought here in the ballasts of ships that bring us consumer goods from far-off places.

Once upon a time, though, the Bay was a lifeline for its residents, who fished its waters for mussels and abalone and hunted ducks and other waterfowl from its shores. Of course, in some ways, it still is: San Francisco Bay is home to countless tour boat operations and the only good-sized commercial herring fishery in the continental U.S., and the buildings of biotech giants like Genentech and Gilead rest on its fill.

Like those buildings, my office strands me on a peninsula of crushed rock on the east side of the highway that runs along San Francisco Bay. But it does give me close proximity to the Bay Trail,  that heroic, as-yet-unfinished multi-organization effort to create a smooth way to circumnavigate the bay on foot or by pedal power. When I ride to work in the morning I’m amazed at how many different creatures take advantage of it: the chubby man in a white t-shirt who watches his collie roll in the grass from the trailside bench; the cross middle-aged woman who frowns at me on her morning power walk; the crusty waterman who once strolled from boat to marina shower stall in his skivvies as I sped by.

When the fog sinks and I reach the apex of one of the marinas, as far out as its possible to go in the Bay without a bridge or a boat, I can barely hear the construction that bangs in the office-plexes near by. I can’t even see the planes at the airport, and there is a moment, between takeoffs, when I can almost imagine the Bay before. Ducks skim the water; tiny bush birds with bright wings flit across the path.

I know I’m blessed to ride the Bay Trail, which wouldn’t be possible without fill, and I know that its existence wouldn’t be assured if those buildings of biotech and their charitable donations didn’t exist. But in that moment I wonder if there is a way to bridge the gap, so to speak, between today’s uses and the Bay of long ago. Will we ever complete the Bay Trail?

“The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.” —Eden Phillpotts

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Livin’, lovin’

By Dale Conour

From the train today, I watched a older couple, probably in their mid to late 60s, kissing and kissing goodbye. The usual snarky "Geez, get a room," was the first thought in my head. But then I watched the woman, sporting one of those large Racer X-style black eyeglass shields, continue to stand and watch her man get on the train, and then watch him take his seat, and then watch him pull away. And I was touched by how much she loved him, how precious he was to her.

We may love because we’re hardwired to do so, because life has one mission, more life. But that doesn’t mean it always comes easy to us. To open yourself up, to make yourself vulnerable: It takes courage to love, doesn’t it? It certainly takes fear to hate.

So who could be braver than the person who loves everyone?

Let’s stay in touch.

Principles: a child’s primer

By Dale Conour

Sometimes you might hear adults talk about principles. What are principles? Principles are ideas we have about what are right things to do and what are wrong things to do. Having principles makes us feel like we’re different, better even, than animals, who don’t think about how they live, they just want to live.

Where do we keep principles? Sometimes they live in our brains in our heads, helping us decide if what we’re doing or not doing, or someone else is doing or not doing, is right or wrong, but they’re too heavy to carry around all the time, so we keep them in different places.

We put principles in religious figures such as Jesus and Buddha and Muhammad, who are so big that there’s plenty of room for all of us to store whatever principles we want to have in them.

We put principles in historical figures like Paul Revere, and Ben Franklin, and John F. Kennedy Jr., who are dead, so it’s easy to use them however we want.

And we entrust them to our young people in the Armed Services, who sometimes die trying to carry those principles while fighting with people who we think don’t have the same principles as us. And sometimes these young people come back thinking they must have lost the principles somewhere along the way.

Principles are very important to us, but they are not the most important thing. People often think that money is more important than principles, for example, although different people have different ideas about how much money is more important. (Some people like to say that it’s not really a principle of yours until it costs you money to keep it.)

Sometimes when we’re scared, like right now in our country, feeling safe is more important than principles, so we let our leaders hide our country’s principles away somewhere

and, some day,
we think,
they’ll bring them back out.

And then we’ll be better than the animals again.

Let’s stay in touch.

Adam Gault’s Lanternfish

By Dale Conour

Under the category of making the appreciation of nature cool, file Adam Gault’s "Lanternfish." As he explains to Motionographer, he went from finding this illustration in an antique store:

To creating this:

While Gault concedes his animations of these fish may not be scientifically accurate, his work, along with illustrator Stefanie Augustine and composers Chris Villepigue and Shelly Bajorek, still captures something true about how we perceive them and their world.

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Bagging the earth

By Dale Conour

If you haven’t switched to reusable shopping bags yet, Katherine Mieszkkowski’s Salon piece on the evils of the ubiquitous plastic bag should do the trick:

The plastic bag is an icon of convenience culture, by some estimates the single most ubiquitous consumer item on Earth, numbering in the trillions. They're made from petroleum or natural gas with all the attendant environmental impacts of harvesting fossil fuels. One recent study found that the inks and colorants used on some bags contain lead, a toxin. Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they've been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It's equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.

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Q&A: "Solar" film has flair

By Dale Conour
Another great new discovery from Motionographer: the animated short film, Solar, by Ian Wharton and Edward Shires, two recent grads of Cumbria Institute of the Arts. It’s a whole new take on energy. Check it out at their nicely rendered website,  read the Q&A (conducted by email, [slightly edited]) below, and then say hi to the gentlemen themselves at their new blog.

emerson: What was the "seed" for Solar; the idea/concept/visual that started it all?

[Ian:] We really wanted to tell a unique tale that elaborated on an every-day [occurrence.] The story needed something that maintained a certain amount of fantasy but could also easily be related to. The moon and sun have been used to tell stories for centuries and we all have an innate fascination with their mystery as it were. It felt like [it was] a perfect scenario to build an animation around.

 

Prior to story writing we also read classic books such as Roald Dhal’s The BFG. We don’t think stories are told with the same exuberance these days so went back to the good oldies stores we read when we were kids.

 

emerson: How would you hope Solar affects viewers?

[Ian:] Obviously the most important thing for us is for people to enjoy the film and understand it at its most basic level - a story of cause and effect. If it makes people smile, that’s enough for us. Knowing we evoke some kind of emotion from what started out as doodles on a napkin in a cocktail bar is enough for us.

 

I suppose the best thing would be for Solar to act as a catalyst for people letting their imagination run away, even if only briefly. We glaze over a lot of things these days - perhaps the sun and moon’s interaction with us for example. It would be great if someone watched Solar, then went off to think how something else might work under different circumstances.

 

emerson: Do today’s digital media tools allow creatives to portray, or visually explore, the physical world, in ways different than in the past?

[Ian:] Technology without doubt opens new possibilities to representing the physical world. Whether it is intrinsically better than medieval tapestries, poems or paintings is down to the individual. Digital media [definitely] allows a combination of real and make-believe that would have been much more difficult to achieve with pen and paper or Shakespearean theatre. Visual effects and CGI is [definitely] blurring distinctions between showing what is real and what isn’t. It all depends on how far you look back. Does digital media help creatives explore the physical world more easily? - Yes. Does it produce a better outcome? - Not necessarily.

emerson: Is it only ironic to think that creating more "life-like," or at least tangible, environments can inspire viewers to engage with the "real world" more? Or in a different way?

[Ian:] Not at all. What we see these days on the cinema screen is what every person is capable of when exerting their imaginations - they are merely carried out in greater depth (ie the visual effects and filmography). Whether it is CG or real-life it is essentially the same process of realising dreams and thought and they only come from [engaging] with the "real-world".

Let’s stay in touch.

CalTrain and steerage

By Dale Conour

Left work today on my bike, pant leg tucked in my sock, bulging bag slung across my back. Rolled along the San Francisquito Creek greenbelt that separates Menlo Park from Palo Alto, enjoying the quiet of the street, bird songs in the trees. It had been another warm day, another, as a friend's mother once proclaimed after moving here from NY, "goddamned perfect day."

I arrived at the Palo Alto CalTrain station early, and was treated to about 10 minutes worth of ranting by a guy clearly mad mentally challenged who managed to link the lord, bleeding heart liberals, Time Warner, and Camille Paglia, apparently all  part of some complex conspiracy worthy of the Rothschild Dynasty. (Conspiracy folks, I’m being a smart ass, don’t write me.)

Two moms and their respective broods were waiting with bikes, several other bike commuters stood beside

Bikes on CalTrain, from Paul Dorn’s bicycle commuting tips

me, and when the train arrived, we all dealt with the task of getting our bikes into the two cars designated for bicycles. They were already at least three-quarters full, and the challenge is to bungee your bike to a rack hosting bikes bound for the same destination as yours, or further (people use tags with their two stops written on them).

The more crowded the car, the more awkward the situation, with bikes getting stuck on other bikes, people bumping each other with their bikes, people trying to make sure new arrivals ignorant of the system weren’t blocking their bikes. (Once, in a crowded car, I had to un-bungee and move aside two bikes to get to mine, with my stop only a couple of minutes away. Fortunately a helping hand always seems to materialize in the bike car.)

Within a couple of stops, my car practically shouted "Steerage"—standing room only with bicyclists and their rides filling every nook of the car and spilled out into the vestibule. You half expected to see folks holding cages of chickens, and goats on leashes. Everyone was cramped, but everyone was more or less civil. I’d bet the moms are going to think twice before an outing like that again, though, at least during commute hours. And I think I’d rather just ride the 13 miles back home than deal.

But all the veteran bike commuters will be back on the train tomorrow, I’m sure: After all, they’ve gotten used to this kind of treatment.

Let’s stay in touch.

Attack of the not-giant, but ornery-as-hell, squid

By Dale Conour

On a week-long whale-watching cruise in Baja a couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of listening to sea tales late in the evening from one of the tour’s resident naturalists, Carlos Navarro, a biochemical engineer specializing in marine biology who has lived on the shores of the Sea of Cortez for some 20 years.

New Zealand fisherman's "colossal" haul, BBC

You can’t tell sea stories without bringing up monsters of the deep, of course, and after discussing the "colossal squid" (which is much bigger than the giant squid; an intact teenage male had been caught by New Zealand fisherman not long before our trip), Carlos talked about the Humboldt Squid—much smaller than either the giant or the colossal, growing "only" to 2 metres or so, but making up for it in attitude.  

His friend Scott Cassel, a diver and underwater filmmaker out of Escondido, California, had been attempting to film a flotilla of the creatures in Baja after hearing about them from the local fishermen, when they attacked and began dragging him down to the depths. He managed to escape, albeit with a dislocated shoulder. That might turn the typical person off from hanging out with this particular species, but Carlos said it created an obsession with Cassell, who’s now filmed a handful of documentaries about the creatures which rotate in and out of the nature channels.

Navarro, himself a verteran diver, told of a night outing with Cassell in which he decided to head off on his own while his friend was filming and just let himself sink down into the sea. He turned off his light, and just relaxed, floating in the deep dark. Soon, a funny feeling made him flick his light back on, and rearing back right in front of him was a Humboldt squid, which retreated into the surrounding gloom.

Navarro said his friend told him later that the squid often send out a scout while the rest hang back. If he hadn’t turned his light back on when he did, it’s likely he would have been attacked and shredded like carnitas.

Now it’s been reported that the Humboldt is widening its territory, taking advantage of fewer predators (tuna

Nor Cal fishermen hauling in Humboldt squid, AP

and sharks) and preying on local fish stocks. The story gives a nice sense of just how scary these octopi are, quoting Bruce Robison, a marine biologist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute:

"They have more than a thousand barbed suckers to catch their prey and can swim at 43 kilometres per hour.

"They'll eat anything they can catch," Robison says—including each other. "When one member of a group is injured they become lunch for the others."
 

The link I’ve included above, from Nature (subscription required), has a great video of Humboldts shot from a submersible; toward the end you’ll see one of the reasons Mexican fisherman refer to it as diablo rojo. If you're not up for subscribing, some youtubin' might satisfy your curiousity...

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