End of the Line...

Small change for those who regularly read the blog...I am moving all of my future blogposts to my Tumblr account.  For those who aren't aware, I currently write five blogs, in five different voices, it seems.  I'm hoping to consolidate all to one voice, at one location.

It should probably also be noted that my online presence will start to be more streamlined, too, at least for the holiday season (and I'm hoping beyond).  At present I post all over the map, constantly trying to catch up, constantly trying to remind others that I'm still there and still listening.  My life has turned into more of what "it looks like" than "what it is."  Moving forward, most of my postings will be on Tumblr, and even those will be limited.

I'm still here, reading everyone else.  Believe it or don't.  I'm also out finding life.  The mentality that I might "miss something on the 'net if I don't tune in" has moved to "I might miss life if I don't limit my internet time."

Thanks for reading.  Onward.

Heat on the Half-Shell

On Friday, September 28th, my brother, sis-in-love, and I ventured out for the evening to the Carlsbad Aquafarm for a tour/wine-tasting/mussel-tasting.  My brother is a member of the Agua Hedionda Lagoon Foundation, and he RSVPed to the event the previous week for the three of us.  We arrived at the farm just after 5:30, believing that with all of the Homeland Security criteria we would be turned away for being late, but the volunteer greeters and other members were friendly and eager for us to be there, so we gladly walked the short trek from parking at the NRG hydro-power plant to the farm on the lagoon.

If you’ve never explored a lagoon before, the scenery can change with a simple circling of the shore.  On our residential side of the lagoon the water is littered with juiced-up powerboats, stand-up paddleboarders, Jetskis, and all sorts of gasoline- and sunscreen-powered flotsam.  On the aquafarm side of the lagoon you cannot see any recreational watercraft: just mussel-floats, pelicans, and, if you turn your back on the lagoon, the Great Highway.  We arrived at the farm on foot and I tried my level best to tune out the traffic.  I didn’t succeed, but that didn’t stop me from trying.

When we first entered the tiny man-made shoreline we were greeted by a table from a local group eager to sponsor wildlife conservation through reptiles--in one cage, a lizard with scary spikes that no amount of cajoling would get me to pet or pick up, and in another glass case a small silver snake, indigenous to the desert of San Diego.  The snake was two pencil-lengths, silver, and soft to the touch.  I was encouraged to pick him up as well, and weirdly fell in love with him, his body wrapped around my hands like a baby’s fist and his small, forked tongue sniffing me out.  I was asked to shield him from the setting sun, a proposal I had no trouble sympathizing with--I hate the never-ending sunlight here as well, so I pivoted to provide him shade.  He cooled off and thought about making a cave of my shirt cuffs, me turning my hands to keep him visible.  I was constantly afraid of dropping him--neurologically I can be a bit clumsy--but he was insistent, and the greater challenge was letting him go, both emotionally and physically.

Something up my sleeve...

After making friends with the snake, we made our way to the wine, all Napa Valley.  What, no Temecula? I thought too readily, but didn’t share the snarky comment--more and more I’m trying to understand some of the completely un-understandable reasoning behind actions in this part of the world.  Besides, the wine was rich and delicious, and free in the wild.  I took the cup and savored my sips.  

Since another batch of mussels was mid-steam, we were encouraged to tour the farm with one of the marine biologists who manages it, a man whom I will call Jack because a) that sounds like his name, and b) that’s the best that I can remember his name.  As the sun set on the other side of the Great Highway, he gave us a tour of abalone pools, storage tanks for oysters awaiting orders, and manufactured algae beds.  He patiently and passionately answered the questions of a group of twenty or so people: “Can you farm the oysters to have a certain flavor?” (No...unless you can limit their environment to Tabasco water or something, but we don’t do that.) “How long do you hold the product awaiting shipment?” (Shellfish can stay fresh in holding for up to three weeks; they don’t eat much.)  “Do you have seasons?” (Not really.)

My questions and interest were more environmental.  According to our guide, the only thing that isn’t really natural about the farm is its proximity to the Great Highway, but the Great Highway put a strain on the lagoon before the farm was even a twinkle in the founders’ eyes.  When it came to addressing the issue of “seasons” for the shellfish, the biologist stated that the Department of Fish and Game is pretty diligent in showing up periodically and testing the shellfish for bacteria, pollutants, etc (so my brother’s idea that the mussels and oysters that we would sample would be dodgy due to ptomaine poisoning were debunked right then and there).  My brother asked if there was a way that you could tell, fresh from the water, if the oyster was a bad idea to eat, and the guide helpfully handed him one to hold.  “Feel how that’s weighted and feels like there’s something swimming inside?” he asked my brother.  My brother nodded.  “That means it’s probably good.  If it feels light, you’re in trouble.”  My brother handed the oyster back, happy to be armed with the knowledge.

According to Jack, the farm is in contact with other farms in the state for comparison product growth, and the northern shellfish from similar farms in the Bay Area, etc, have a longer growing time, with diminished results, because the water stays colder in the northern climates.  I asked him if our “unusually hot” summer here in San Diego County meant less time to grow HUGE shellfish this year, and he shook his head.  “It’s a matter of optimal water temperature,” he answered.  “They need a constant temp around 65 degrees Fahrenheit.”  “So what of the extended hot weather?” I asked. “We find it creates higher levels of mortality,” he answered.

Oh.

I’m leery of aquafarms--particularly when there was discussion later in the tour about bringing in shellfish from Asia and other parts of the world--because it seems like cloning or breeding or hot-house flower-growing.  I’m concerned that aquafarms not only create an inferior product versus their “wild” counterparts, but that they could be introducing particles into the environment that in years to come may do something like kill all of the mullets or sea lions or something.  (You may snicker about that last one, but when fur traders from Europe finally made it to what is now Southern California and stripped the coastline of a good measure of sea lions and seals, the shellfish population boomed, and only “recently” has started to recede back to "normal" levels due to consumers having gone from wearing seal to eating raw oysters.)  My opinion of the “manufactured natural setting” softened somewhat, however, when I learned of the heat killing the shellfish (curse you, global warming) and that the only thing that had to be maintained in the environment was manually cleaning out the aqua-duct under the Great Highway (if the highway wasn’t there, and if I-5 wasn’t there, the lagoon would be in its original setting).  It wasn’t the farm changing things.  It was transportation, tourism, and fossil fuels.  I failed at ignoring the Great Highway over my shoulder again.

When it became too dark to see much, my family and I walked back to the steamed mussels and oyster-shucking station.  I did not partake (I prefer mussels in dishes, and oysters with sauces and such, the lightweight that I am), but my brother and sis-in-love each had two oysters.  They remarked on how salty they were, how almost brine-y.  Then we walked, escorted, back to our parking lot, the tower of the power plant shedding the only light in the world.

Let...the Sun Shine...Let...the Sun Shine In

Just a question of curiosity:

I can understand San Francisco not blanketing the city with solar power, since fog is so prevalent there.

But here in San Diego County there are few trees and constant, belligerent sun.  Utility bills are through the roof.  We're constantly getting FlexAlerts and still milking hydro-electric...in a DESERT.

Why not cover these buildings with solar panels?  Where's the solar industry down here?

I would accept hiking under that great burning ball of fire every day if we were using it.

Tacky

Learned something new this weekend, finally, this many years next to the big body of water...

See this guy in the white sailboat?

Sorry...the white one on the right.

Looks like he's going to hit the photographer.  The one making a swift cut across the path of every boat going the other way.  (Note:  the other white sailboats are going the other way.  Yep, I'm still getting the hang of maritime physics myself.)

I spent about ten minutes watching him thinking, "Why is he being so obstinate?  Just sail straight, silly."

I'm the silly one.  Turns out he couldn't.  He's "tacking," which means he's trying to get home.  And the wind's blowing the other way.

Godspeed, fella.

It Should Probably Be Mentioned...

I get the question a lot--sometimes from people I know, sometimes from strangers--"what are your fitness goals?"

(Or, from the guy at the beach last Saturday, "You work out, don't you?  'Cause it looks like you work out.")

I, um...

The answer is pretty dark and pretty hopeful.

I'm a survivor (to date) of hypothyroidism, Crohn's, and high cholesterol who can't afford her prescriptions.  Any food I eat will cause me to gain weight, regardless of whether it's cheesecake or spinach, and I am tired enough to sleep like a brick for twenty hours a day.

My fitness goals?  To see the ocean five days a week by my own power.  To not succumb to a sleep for more hours than I am awake.  (Balance, balance...)  To not lose my lunch.  To not have a heart attack.

Or, more succinctly:  My fitness goal is to stay alive.

I'm still here.  There's still this:

Which I see five days a week, despite fatigue, more and more swarming bees, and motorists on their cell phones on the roads with no sidewalks that I have to take to get to see what you see above.

My fitness goal is to stay alive.

So far, so good.  :)

Once More to the Ocean

Four days a week, provided there’s no typhoon, I take a morning walk to the ocean.  Complications have robbed me of the benefits of running, so I have increased the walking distance instead, and am starting to include core work and swimming to regain and maintain upper body strength.  For now, my strength all lies from the waist down, like a built-in, self-reenforcing set of steel-banded stilts that I have regained for free.  The end goal is still to be caught on the flying trapeze--I’ve flown on my own up there, but I wasn’t strong enough at the time (physically and mentally) to be caught.  To work on both physical and mental aspects, I walk to the ocean.

The author, ready for the ocean on steel-banded stilts...

Living in San Francisco, I was lucky enough to walk through Golden Gate Park the three and a half miles to the ocean.  I would take 9th Avenue north to the Park and follow it around as it turned into Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and guided me to Ocean Beach.  The path was all sidewalk right up to the sand, and rollingly flat.

The to the ocean in Carlsbad, from the Cove, is a slightly shorter walk to the sand--about two and a half miles--and offers no N Judah light rail to ride back on, hence making the trip longer.  There is also little sidewalk time until one gets to the most boring leg of the trip (see my previous post on this point) and markedly more extreme hills that the San Francisco trip.  The trail looks somewhat like what is to follow...

Taking Park from the Cove, walking north, I walk until Adams is reached and turn left.  I walk up Adams on the wrong side of the road; Adams is a sidewalk-free thoroughfare with blind turns, so unless I want a Stephen King experience, I stay to the most visible side.  

Entrance to Adams, not on the blind side...

Adams climbs a hill with vistas on the Agua Hedionda Lagoon, the road curving to the south and then correcting back to the north to take me to the summit.  There the view has enough height  to include the lagoon and the ocean beyond I5 (or, if you prefer the southern California terminology, “The 5”) before the road takes me back downhill to the nestle of houses behind the freeway entrance.

Agua Hedionda Lagoon, from Adams...

Agua Hedionda in the foreground, "The 5," and the Pacific Ocean behind in a thin blue line...

At Chinquapin I take another left and cross the street, making my way west.  I cross the interstate via an overpass, a case of grounded flight, until I reach Jefferson.  There I am thick in residential plots three times the size of those in San Francisco, and houses half again as large.  I cross Jefferson and turn right on it, flatly walking north again until I get to Tamarack, where I correct my path west again for the last time before the destination.

Carlsbad Cove Mansion, and surrounding gardens...

That last leg on Tamarack is bland, visually uneventful until the beach is sighted again.  I use that expanse of dull to digest and determine what I will write about and how to measure my breath in meditation.  I try not to let my mind rest on resentments, and sometimes, with concentration, I succeed.  If I don’t succeed I don’t resent that failure--I give myself space to see what I’m doing without the exterior feedback, self-defeating, that shrugs and says, “You always go there; we expected that from you, Jo.”  I’m starting not to expect it from myself, starting to believe that there will be a day when it doesn’t happen, and the solidity and blandness of that length of Tamarack gives me that solitude, that forgivingly blank canvas.  Every day, in that space, I’m starting out forgiven.

The long road of Tamarack.

At the end of Tamarack like the Pacific Ocean, guarded by surfers and joggers on point along the sand and in the fringed, frothy lace of the breakers.  Rarely I’m approached.  Most beachcombers like me are looking for some answer along the horizon or north and/or south along the sand.  Those that do strike up a conversation seem to have either found all of their answers or have given up searching for them westward and try instead to search for them in strangers.

One older man and his wife joined me at the fence and began speaking to me despite my iPod earbuds in place.  I paused the playlist--the selection Beyonce, I think--and turned to him to inquire what he’d said.  “Do you ever get tired of it?” he asked again.

“No,” I answered.  “Never.”

It’s truth.  How can that stretch of Tamarack be so dull and meditative and this never-ending supply of water be so entertaining?  Yet, there it lies, the shifting blue picture, and I could stay there all day.  And stay there I would if I didn’t set myself the boundary of breakfast waiting and a limit of three songs on the iPod beachside.  If I didn’t set these constraints I would start overloading a backpack to camp down there, spread out my papers, and...daydream for hours with no writing.  If I deprive myself of nourishment and blank pages, then I have a reason to go back, and I need that reason.  This great body of water is a medicinal distraction, but too long at it and I get drunk on it and the healthful purpose vaporizes.

"Ocean in sight, o joy!"

Reluctantly, I turn from the safety net and climb back home, back up the ladder, back to the trapeze that is my writing and my life in the Cove.

A Walk in the Park

Balboa Park means something different to every resident of a City who has a Balboa Park, which appears to start with a list of all of the major California cities.  If you are missing one, don’t visit one locally; they aren’t a chain, for heaven’s sake.

But if you are missing say, Central Park, or Golden Gate Park, and you find yourself in San Diego, then your pain might be eased a little at Balboa Park.

Keep in mind that I am not replacing or debating sizes of parks here.  We’ll save that for posts that tote city pride.  Instead, think of your traveling soul coated with dust and looking for an oasis, even if it’s only a single palm and a birdbath.  When it comes to size, think of Hamlet and his nutshell of infinite space, for only an afternoon.

Saturday last, Yorrick, that nutshell is where I found myself, in the company of family and strangers.  We had traveled there for Scottish Tartan Day, an even to celebrate Scottish heritage at the International Cottages in Balboa Park in San Diego.  The cottages are just that, cottages, with flags and placards of various countries hanging outside respective doors.  Normally the cottages hold trinkets from their countries, but on this day the Scottish cottage was sporting a bake sale, with some items Scottish, some items English, and some items that you would find in a Midwest American church basement after services on Sunday.  Each cottage is small--holding about three people comfortably--so we glimpsed the food and circled back out into the sunshine.

The Scotland cottage sits at the pinnacle of a teardrop-shaped lawn, framed by other cottages.  In the lawn were a series of booths celebrating the heritage of certain Tartans, with patterns, costumes, and instruments--musical and otherwise.  At one booth you could look for your tartan, or choose from a selection of universal tartans in a book of them.  My companions and I all had distinctly non-Scottish/British surnames (Japanese/German), my brother and I tried my mother’s maiden name; she had what she called a Heinz 57 ancestry and could have claimed to English or French.  We had no luck finding her tartan either, however, and we looked at the universal models, feeling like bowling alley patrons at shoe rental.  My favorite of the universals was a purple and green pattern, but my companions didn’t select one.

I’m one of those band nerds who grew up to love nearly all kinds of instruments (save for that horn apparatus blown at the 2010 World Cup), so when the bagpipes and drums  began their hum and crack I was smiling.  The music was the main reason for our journey there, and we had hoped to try haggis as well, but the culinary selection didn’t include it.  (We could purchase burgers, meat pies, or one of the aforementioned baked goods.  Shortbread cookies were free at every booth.)  The music was enough.  Some took to dancing in their kilts on the stage and in the lawn, and between numbers members of the group who had organized the event spoke a few words.  Being a huge Sean Connery fan, I love hearing someone speak in the same manner.  As by homage; one man quoted a few lines of a Robert Burns poem and then instructed us to “look the rest up on Google” before retiring from the the mic.  I could have done just that had I been able to remove the lyrical speaker from his respectable verse.

Given the minuteness of the event, we had the place memorized in ninety minutes and decided to move on to other places outside of the festival but still within the park.  We worked our way around Spreckles Organ Pavillion, where the organ was humming and calling out tunes of its own, to the Japanese Friendship Garden, where two women presented us with a soothing and mindful tea ceremony and we inspected bonzai.  I have never experienced a sunnier Japanese garden, personally, and could have stopped my exploration of the Park that day right there, sitting zazen, but group travel didn’t afford that, so on we went.  The History Center, down a series of Spanish-style corridors, gave us a rest, and then on to the Botanical Building for shade and cool green subjects.

The Botanical Building strikes me as the best combination of the deYoung Museum and the Golden Gate Park Conservatory buildings in terms of architecture; the shape and size are comparable to the Conservatory, but where the Conservatory is white with glass, the Botanical Building is rustic copper with oxidation, like the exterior of the deYoung.  The building boasts mostly lilies, orchids, and tropical greens, with a few carnivorous plants at the entrance to wow children visiting.  At one point we found a hummingbird nest in the rafters; a matte-gray ball about the size of a golf ball suspended by what looked like abandoned chain that you might hang a lamp from.  Without the bird’s comings and goings we might have missed the nest entirely.  Hummingbirds should avoid buzzing the tower if they want to go unnoticed; I’m tempted to name all of them Maverick or Goose.

After the Botanical Building the decision was made to have lunch on the waterfront, so we saved more of the Park for another day.  I’m eager for that day, hopefully as sunny as this one, where I see the museums, sit in meditation, or take a performance at the Globe.  My cup runneth over, Horatio.