At Liberty (Fires in the Sky)

Three of us took off a bit before sundown to have a little dinner and enjoy some harbor sights and maybe catch a fireworks show we had heard rumors about.

The guy above declined to come with us. He was busy reviewing operations at the dock.

Mischa and Jenna

One of them cleverly brought coffee.

An old favorite bridge. We steamed out under it. This is near my home.

Ever wonder what happens to all that metal you recycle? At some point it probably ends up in a pile like this, waiting to be transported overseas.

For many satellite orbits, you can get the satellite into place with less rocket fuel if you launch near the equator. For this reason, Boeing and some other folks partnered up to form Sea Launch, which launches rockets from the Pacific Ocean. Most of the time it has worked fine. Sea Launch’s home port is in Long Beach.

The control ship is nearest to us in this picture. The floating launch platform is next to it. In the video linked above, you see the platform as it looks on duty, when it’s mostly submerged. (Believe it or not, damage to the floating platform in that incident was minimal.)

Our fire boat escort to the Queen Mary. Behind it, over the Palos Verdes Peninsula, you see what some people would call a blimp. It’s not a blimp in this case; it’s a dirigible. And it’s not just any dirigible, as it turns out: It’s a Zeppelin, made by the same folks who ran into a glitch in 1937 when landing in Lakehurst, New Jersey. That event made for some interesting album covers, but it set back the commercial development of passenger airships by a few decades.

Fortunately, today you can once again take a pleasure ride in one of these behemoths. This one is normally stationed at Moffett Field in Northern California, last home base of the airship Macon, which met its own untimely end in 1935, a couple of years after the loss of her sister ship, the Akron. (The Macon was christened by the wife of Mr. Moffett himself.)

This particular airship came to Southern California for the weekend, and after it finished checking out the sunset, it came back over us and hung around for the fireworks show.

The moon is illuminated here by the setting sun. Technically the sun isn’t burning; it’s undergoing a process of thermonuclear fusion, with plasma running all over and much turmoil. One way or another, it throws out a lot of lumens.

By sundown we were at anchor adjacent to the Queen Mary.

All the fire we saw in the sky was deliberate and safe. No disasters were reported.

Not Fade Away

Most pictures I take are of reflected light.

Now and then I take a few of the light source itself.

If you know the right spot to stand, every summer solstice . . .

. . . you can watch the sun set exactly . . .

. . . behind . . .

. . . the Gerald . . .

. . . Desmond . . .

. . . Bridge.

It’s our local Stonehenge.

More’s the shame, legislators in this broke state are talking about tearing down our solstice bridge and putting up something else, no doubt with a less perfect shape for the sun to frame.

Everything goes away eventually.

Rendezvous at the River (a fragment)

Turns out Facebook’s tools for video upload let me use a larger frame size. Sorry, Blogger.

Shasta from Klamath Falls

Whenever I get around Mount Shasta, my shutter finger gets itchy. I always come away with more fresh shots than I know what to do with. The mountain so dominates the landscape for hundreds of miles around that every turn in the road seems to bring a new angle worth capturing.

On this trip I was headed south from Klamath Falls, Oregon, not my usual route. So all these angles were new to me, and on top of that, the weather was perfect for clear pictures of the whole volcano, an unusual treat for a mountain that normally wears clouds around its crown.

At one of my stops to take pictures, I picked up a hitchhiker.

It’s always a treat to get back to the City by the Bay.

The rest of my trip was less well lit.

Columbia River and I-97

Mount Hood and Mount Jefferson dominated the horizon today as I drove south. Normally I see them on my left as I drive south through Oregon, but today I was winding down a route through the heart of the state, so they were off on the right, between me and the coast. As clouds rolled in around their feet, I have a feeling by sundown only inland travelers could see them.

This vista is from Stonehenge, Washington, just east of the I-97 bridge over the Columbia River. Stonehenge is a replica of the layout of the original Stonehenge, but instead of being made of great dark monoliths, it's built tidily of lighter stones and mortar.

Mount Hood

Mount Jefferson

Better with cows.

Across Washington

A lot of travelers never see more of Washington State than Seattle and the Puget Sound area. Eastern Washington has lots of farmland that feels more like the Great Plains than the Olympic Peninsula.

Spokane, WA

The cousins are always excited to see each other.

Spokane has a clean, rain-washed feel, and a lovely riverfront park, with a carousel, public art, a fountain for kids to play in, and toys too large to keep in the garage at home.

Plenty of cities have rivers, but Spokane lucked out with a very handsome set of falls that run right through the middle of downtown.

I had been in Spokane once before, many years ago. Some new stuff has been added. A few old features are still around.

The central event of the trip was a high-school graduation.

Got the diploma! Now, as Diana noted, she’s a freshman again.

The boys appreciate art.

Hang On, St. Christopher

I was not raised Catholic. But my grandmother—my mother’s mother—converted to Catholicism in college, along with her sister.

Grandmother and her sister were raised in Laramie, Wyoming, a town with an Episcopal cathedral, but they were sent off to college at an all-girls school, St. Mary’s in Indiana. The story goes that they were so impressed by the beauty of the church and its ceremonies that they converted.

Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus was canonized right around the time Grandmother was at St. Mary’s. These medals are a set that belonged to Grandmother; Mom brought them home after Grandmother died. My sister has them now, along with a rosary that was Grandmother’s.

Mom jotted a note that she kept with these medals, referring to Grandmother’s “blue medal,” noting that Grandmother had mentioned it in a diary. Mom’s note mentions seeing her cousin’s similar “blue medal” once, which her cousin had inherited from Mom’s aunt: Grandmother’s sister.

As near as I can tell—and I’m no Catholic, so don’t count on me to get it right—the “blue medal” is the St. Christopher’s medal pictured above. I do not know why St. Christopher’s medals are so often colored blue, but they seem to be.

From her note, I think Mom understood the “blue medal” to be the whole set, or maybe the cloth badge. Mom may have understood it more clearly than I.

St. Catherine Labouré was canonized in 1947. I don’t know anything about Grandmother’s faith or how she came to have these particular icons.

I believe the small blue medallion next to St. Catherine’s medal is tied into Catherine’s story. I will let you go look up the longer version of what it all means.

I am pleased to see the automobile on the back of one of Grandmother’s St. Christopher’s medals, since it had something to do with why Grandmother and her sister ended up at St. Mary’s instead of at the University of Wyoming.

Mom always said the two young girls were sent to St. Mary’s because just then all the young soldiers from World War I were coming home, and Grandmother’s parents didn’t want the girls exposed to the Spanish flu.

True, the Spanish flu epidemic was a real concern, and it ended up taking more lives worldwide than all the warcraft of World War I had.

But Mom’s cousin told a different story. The story she had heard from her mother—Mom’s aunt—also involved two young girls, and a lot of soldiers returning home, and an automobile. And yes, the soldiers were all being housed at the University of Wyoming. But in Mom’s cousin’s story, the event that got the girls sent to St. Mary’s didn’t involve the flu.

Grandmother’s father was the first Ford dealer in the state of Wyoming, so his daughters had access to cars. I have heard other stories of their adventures on the road. The stories sound as if the two sisters knew how to have a pretty good time.

Often decisions are made for more than one reason.

One way or another, Grandmother ended up at St. Mary’s, and if she hadn’t, she probably wouldn’t have owned the St. Christopher’s medals.

On the medals, St. Christopher is usually depicted carrying a child across a river on his back. (Everyone knows “christopher” means “Christ-bearer,” right?) I guess the reason he’s the patron saint of travelers is that he got Christ there safely.

He is also the patron saint of surfers.

In Miniature

Going through Mom’s house, most of the time when we open a drawer or a box or a closet, it’s stuffed with the ordinary accumulation of a life: towels, bank statements, maps, socks.

Every now and then, we get to crack the lid on a more exotic collection that leaves us feeling like Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon on the steps leading down to Tut’s tomb, or like the smallholder and his gardening assistants when they found the first line of rivets in the sand as they were excavating Sutton Hoo.

In this exquisitely carved camphor chest (from China), we found mostly air. But in the bottom was a scattering of serving pieces that probably came from the travels of my father’s mother.

Above is a bowl that could have held sugar cubes, or olives.

Here are the delicately wrought claws of the tongs in the bowl, which you could use to pick up whatever was inside it.

Here is a tiny serving spoon.

And with it is a tiny Viking ship to hold whatever you’re serving: a spice, maybe, or a strong sauce like horseradish or chutney.

This horn looks like a salt shaker, or maybe it was made to hold shots of aqvavit.

And here’s the smallest pitcher in the world. For scale, compare it to the hinge below.

Works, Doesn’t It?

I guess the moral of the story is that when your company’s name is Glasswerks, you have to be careful how you hang your signs.

McTeague Hike

Our small family business has been negotiating a long-term deal with another company for about six months. (I’m not allowed to say more about it because of confidentiality clauses.) We had reached a point where we were ready to sign a preliminary term sheet.

We took a walk with their negotiating team today, after meeting them last night for dinner and staying up much too late discussing nuances of the deal without changing (or intending to change) a word of the document.

Our goals were twofold: to cement a bond of understanding and to educate them a little about an area that may have an effect on their end of the deal.

Some say native peoples made these rings of stones thousands of years ago. Others say glaciers left them tens of thousands of years ago as they retreated at the end of the latest ice age. Either way, they’re a fascination and a puzzlement.

We started early at the China Ranch Date Farm, south of Tecopa, California. After a drive through the date farm to inspect the trees, we parked near the store, which was not yet open.

Gambel’s quail was calling out as we arrived, with a distinctive whooping cry. Several were running around on the ground.

As we set off, it was clear where the river was and where the desert began.

Not all the foliage was in bloom, but much was. At several points, we heard the roar of bees swarming out of sight in the underbrush.

At the start of the trail, we were reminded that not everyone makes it to the end of some hikes. Confident in our ability, we left the shovel in the truck.

Here’s a game: It’s called “Can you guess where the spring is?”

The folks who were there the night before had quite a party.

The signs say the ranch was started by a guy from China who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, back around the turn of the last century. We took a look around his house.

Much of our hike followed the grade of the old Tidewater & Tonopah railroad, which went defunct decades ago. It used to carry ore from mines as far north as Goldfield, Nevada, down to Ludlow.

We took a detour up a short tributary to a slot canyon, visible at the end of this wash.

Look closely and you will see fish. The water in this river is intermittent at best. Certain pools, fed by springs, can last year-round, but they may be isolated from each other. As a result, the fish in each pool (and other species) may well be unique to that particular spot on the river. This is a fragile habitat, living on the edge of death by dehydration.

In the desert, a casual glance can leave the impression that spring never touches this place, that it’s dry and dead all year round. A closer look reveals many flowers on all kinds of plants.

This is about as late in the year as we wanted to take this hike. Much later in the season, and the heat would really start beating down. We started around sunup—something like 6:30 a.m.—and finished before noon. Even with that, it was more than warm enough by the time we reached the trail’s end.

Going into the slot.

Two of us scaled this rock and headed toward the light. The rest of us hung around in the shade at the bottom, waiting to help them back down the rock when they returned.

This is the “key” that was removed from the slot canyon, ready to be reinserted if it should be needed.

About 99% of the time, this camera is frustrating, slow, and cranky, refusing to cooperate with me to grab pictures as they flash past. This time, it nailed the shot almost before I was ready. The butterfly is about as big as the nail on your pinky finger.

This little fellow stays busy, scuttling along at a high rate of speed. I couldn’t tell exactly what his business was, but he kept right at it.

An unexplored slot.

Desert trumpet.

Another of these bugs. They seem completely harmless, just busy.

As you can see, this beer is natural. So the can belongs here. (Yes, I retrieved it, along with its mate about a quarter-mile away, plus a can of beans, unopened, that had been sitting there who knows how long. By and large, since this trail gets very little use, we saw almost no litter anywhere, which made me even more happy to cart out the few bits that did disturb the view.)

In shadier nooks down by the water, the foliage got a degree more lush.

At long last, we saw our driver, who had come around to meet us. We were back to civilization, even if it would be hours before we could raise a cell tower to check messages on our phones.

We had a grand old hike, and to celebrate we went up to Shoshone and had us a lunch that could not be beat, then spent the afternoon driving home, restoring vital bodily fluids, electrolytes, phytochemicals, and nacho cheese equilibrium.