Geocaching day out! Gilroy

We took the afternoon off (I could well get used to this newly retired husband who's all, "Let's play!") in order to fulfill a Geocaching HQ "challenge." These challenges usually involve something simple, like finding a cache on a particular day—the anniversary of the first geocache (May 3, 2000), say, or the last or first day of the year. The reward being, a virtual "souvenir." 

The current challenge, called Reach the Peak, is a bit more complicated: it involves finding a number of caches of various sorts, with arbitrarily assigned points for each type (ranging from 325, for a regular cache, to 750, for a cache with 10+ favorite points or an Earthcache, a puzzle cache or a multi), which must add up, month by month, to the heights (in meters) of the tallest mountains on all the continents: starting last August with Puncak Jaya in Oceania, and culminating with Everest in March. Yeah. How silly is that? But today, indeed, we succeeded in summiting Mt. Elbrus, the highest mountain in Europe! And it only involved a half-hour drive and a few hours of wandering around! So much easier than actually plodding up an 18,510-foot (5,642 m) peak!

Our destination was Gilroy in southern Santa Clara County, a town we drive past all the time on our way to the Bay Area, but one we've never stopped in. Turns out, it has a lovely downtown area with some nice old buildings. And there's plenty of surrounding farmland. Gilroy calls itself the Garlic Capital of the World: over 50 percent of the garlic grown in the US is grown right there, mostly by Christopher Ranch, established in 1890 by Danish immigrants. 

Here are some pictures I took:

The old city hall, built in 1905;
now a restaurant

One of the first caches of the day: you press on
the perch, and the cache (the white circle is the
bottom of the container) flies out!

We spotted numerous lovely murals

One cache brought us to this amazing
Tiny Library in downtown

This cache is called Hang 'Em High

Here it is lowered

We enjoyed a meandering drive through ag fields

Walnut trees behind

Corn across the road—and purple mountains
(not Mt. Elbrus) in the distance

It was fun. Next up: Kilimanjaro (19,341 feet; 5,895 meters). I'm inspecting my ropes and crampons. We've got all of November to complete the climb.

2022 reading project

Usually, for my annual reading project, I set myself a goal of a specific number of books for the upcoming year. This year, for example, it's 66: the number of years I'd lived when I set that goal. At this moment, I've got 13 books to go before the end of the year, and three of those on my stack are picture books—one of them in Portuguese, so it might take me a little longer than 15 minutes. But still. This is doable.

This next coming year, though, I was thinking about all the big books I haven't read—because of that goal: five books a month doesn't really allow for big books. And so I thought, what about changing things up: make next year a leisurely big-book year? One book a month.

I will not be reading À la recherche du temps perdu, at some 3,000 pages (and that is only the thirteenth-longest novel out there, the longest, written in Tamil, being 22,400 pages). I'm thinking more along the lines of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste (496 pages) and The Warmth of Other Suns (640 pages), both of which I've wanted to read, but I've felt I needed the luxury of time. There's Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which I've owned for decades, but... it's so long! (My preferred length is less than 300 pages; this one is 896.) And Richard Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest (720 pages), about the Vietnam War, also one I've wanted to read forever. At least, I think I want to read it. I might also allow the luxury of the veto in this next challenge—given that I will be spending weeks with these books. If, one hundred pages in, it hasn't grabbed my attention—on to the next big book.

In fiction, there's John Le Carré's A Perfect Spy (624 pages) or Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman (464 pages). Or War and Peace (1,350 pages), which I have already promised a friend I would read—so I guess that's on the list. Perhaps a Stephen King volume or two (I have already read The Stand [1,200 pages]—it opened my eyes to the very possibility of big books being... possible). I'm sure I'll find others.

Plus, I seem to have stumbled on the Greek classics (a report on The Iliad will be coming in a few weeks), so there's always The Odyssey—in two translations, because that's how the venerable Professor McCall, my online Stanford instructor, recommends we read these—since we can't read (or hear) the original Greek. I'm thinking Lattimore and Lombardo. That should take me a month, easy.

So many good long books out there. I will, hopefully, also be able to intersperse short reads—or at least picture books—in amongst the longer ones. But I'm happy to have a goal for 2022: twelve long reads. Huzzah!

P.S. I'd forgotten, but I wrote about just such a goal a while ago. I think now is the time.

Book Report: The Vanishing Lake

53. Paddy Donnelly, The Vanishing Lake (2021) (10/23/21)

Because I'm falling a little behind in my reading project (13 books to go in just over 2 months), I treated myself to a few award-winning picture books to fill in the gaps. The Vanishing Lake (gold medal in the Independent Book Publisher, or IPPY, Awards) is about just that: a lake in the mountains of Northern Ireland that occasionally, mysteriously, empties out, and then, with the next rains, fills up again. 

Young Meara's grandfather lives on the lake with his pet otter, Cara. Whenever the water disappears, Meara asks him why—and he has a host of whimsical explanations. Thirsty sheep. Narwhals that punch holes in the lake bottom. A giant who, when it gets very cold and the water freezes through, uses the lake as a giant ice cube. She, however, is skeptical. Finally, her granddad says, "Follow me," and he leads her  high into the surrounding mountains where they have a good view over the lake. And there, finally, she is able to see what happens—something so amazing that she can barely believe her eyes. (I will not spoil the surprise. It's a good one.)

In an author's note, Donnelly explains that the mysterious lake in the book actually does exist. It is called Loughareema. "Scientists believe that the lake disappears and reappears because of its leaky chalk bed, loose soil, and plentiful holes at the bottom of the lake." When the lake fills up again, the water pressure unclogs the holes, and it drains out, only to be refilled with rainfall. Over and over. "With a wonder like this on our doorstep growing up, it was easy to take it for granted, however these magical spots in nature are all around us if you look closely. The combination of scientific discovery and a little imagination can help you discover extraordinary stories everywhere."

Here are a few spreads from the book. Donnelly creates his illustrations digitally, and this is the first book this prolific picture-book illustrator has authored.

Book Report: North

52. Brad Kessler, North (2021) (10/14/21)

The other day I mentioned that I'd just purchased a book in Kindle format—an experiment. My experience with Kindle has always been mixed: I tell myself that I find it harder to concentrate, to stay engaged. Well, I guess it depends on the book, because this book I plowed right through. It helped that I removed my iPad from its cumbersome keyboard case, making the device lighter and easier to hold. I found that I enjoyed being told just how many hours of reading I had left, and what percentage of the book I'd finished—perhaps simply because I was making such good progress. Yay forward momentum!

But in the end, it was the book itself that mattered, and the medium felt more or less beside the point. 

North is very much about story—or in Somali, sheeko. One of the main characters is a young Somali woman, Sahro, who, her parents, and later a beloved cousin, having been killed, flees her homeland to find safety in the United States, where she has family in Ohio. In the course of the narrative, we learn about her life in Somalia, already as a girl a migrant there between south and north and back again, and about her trip at age 19 through the Americas to the U.S.-Mexico border, followed by 18 months of detention outside New York City and, ultimately, monitored custody in a home with a sponsor. When she learns that her asylum hearing will be led by a "two-percent judge"—with just that much chance of succeeding—she decides her only choice is to try to make it to Canada. An accident occurs, however, as the car she's being driven in swerves to avoid a moose, and she winds up at Blue Mountain Monastery in Vermont. There she is given shelter by Abbot Christopher, whose story we also learn, from his start as a painting student to his quest for a spiritual home—for sanctuary of a different sort. A third character, Teddy, the monastery's groundskeeper and an injured Afghan war veteran, also figures in.

It's a rich story, beautifully told, weaving between present and past, among loves and yearnings and disappointments and joys. Place plays an important role—always a favorite for me. Kessler's use of metaphor—a few recurring themes—and his descriptions are very satisfying.

Here are a couple of quotes:

"Diaspora" was the English word for the Somali qurba joog: the scattering over the earth, a dispersal of people. Sahro had looked up the word in an English dictionary in detention. "Diaspora" meant "exile" but it also referred to a mineral, a greenish rock called diaspore, whose elements, when heated, vaporized into air. Wasn't that happening to all of them? Wasn't it happening to Sahro this very moment? A little heat, a little pressure. A small uptick in the earth's temperature, and they were all vaporizing into air, becoming ghosts?

Or here, in Rome, where young Christopher meets the man who would become his spiritual father:

One evening in late November he watched a cloud of starlings over the Aventine. The birds had been in the city for weeks but he hadn't noticed their habits before. The starlings arrived in fall from the surrounding countryside to roost in the city at night, and that evening on the Aventine he stood in the Orangery and watched with dozens of others the flocks begin their crepuscular flights. One by one the birds lifted into the twilight; then a massive wave rose into the sky. The murmuration moved like liquid, fluid, unconfined, forming in dark creases and folds above the city, a shape that kept shifting, as if erasing any idea of fixity or permanence, their collective body becoming one.
     Everyone around Christopher watched, commenting in many languages, staring into the sky over the Tiber as if at a son-et-lumière show. Then the birds gathered above the Orangery in a darkening pool and dropped into the orange trees and pines, encasing branches in cloaks of iridescence and creaking beaks, a million miniature umbrellas flapping open and closed. The noise was so great, Christopher couldn’t hear his neighbor speak, a small man in a cream-colored tunic and a thatch of wiry black hair—a monk. Then a white rain began to fall around them. A rain of starling shit. People screamed, pulled jackets overhead. There was no escaping the baptism; the sky seemed to be squirting milk. People ran in one direction or another. Christopher and the monk, for some reason, were laughing, deliriously, wiping crap off their sleeves. Then they were sprinting out of the Orangery and up the road, the small monk shouting the whole time, “Hurry! Hurry!” a look of uncontained glee on his face.

(Another advantage of Kindle: you can cut and paste text, rather than having to type it in. Though I like typing it in; it allows me to savor the words all over again.)

At the end of the book Kessler writes a bit about the dangers of appropriation: 

Novels are always attempts to cross borders, the border between one consciousness and another, the writer's and the readers', mine and yours. The question always is: who gets to cross whose borders? Who has the passport and why? Power is always at play, and White American writers have historically owned the passports, the visas, the point of views (the whole real estate). I wrote this book in—and against—the White settler literary tradition in which I was raised, knowing I could never see enough, know enough, experience enough, beyond my own blind spots and ignorance. Beyond my own body. My aim was not to extract from, but allow with. To give an offering, an accompaniment. I'm not sure I succeeded. Perhaps just failed a little less.

Kessler also provides a very thorough bibliography of works that informed various aspects of this book—Somali life, the asylum seeker's experience, Islamic constellations, post–war injury rehabilitation, monastic practices, Renaissance landscape art, Northern Spy apples and Bicknell's thrushes, and much more—as well as a reading list of Somali writers and poets. Kessler's respect for his material is palpable.

Bonus essay: White Men, Land, and Literature: The Making (and Unmaking) of an American Pastoral—Brad Kessler on Settler Narratives and the Violence That Haunts American Land and Literature

(A final note on Kindle, a con: I can't add the book to my gratifyingly growing pile of books that I have actually read. I enjoy viewing the richness, and it reinforces my pleasure in the activity of reading.)

Book Report: This Is Your Mind on Plants

51. Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants (2021) (10/12/21)

Although I have several of Michael Pollan's books, going back to the 1991 Second Nature, this is the first I've read all the way through. I believe it was recommended by one of Ezra Klein's guests, but I am failing to find that episode. It doesn't matter. What matters is, this was a fascinating, if slightly disjointed, read. Disjointed simply because the three parts—on the opium poppy, on caffeine-producing plants (coffee and tea chiefly), and on peyote and Wachuma, cactuses containing mescaline—seem rather stand-alone, and have different emphases. Which did not detract from their enjoyability. Indeed, it felt like I was reading three long and in-depth magazine pieces. All, however, related by chemistry, and by human experience with them.

In fact, the first section was originally an in-depth magazine piece, published in Harper's in 1997. It's memoirish, focused on Pollan's interest in growing opium poppies and possibly experimenting with the mind-altering chemical substance. In this venture he encounters a teacher of sorts, who becomes a subject of the piece. And finally, Pollan comes smack up against the DEA and the War on Drugs, which provide fascinating, and rather chilling, context, regarding both the status of opium poppies (they are illegal only if you know that they contain opium; if you think you're just planting a pretty flower—and they are a lovely flower—they're perfectly legal) and the publishing history of the article in question (a section of it was excised lest the authorities come down on Pollan and anyone associated with him; that section is included in the current book, since the War on Drugs has weakened, overshadowed now by the War on Terror).

The second section (which originally appeared in 2020 in somewhat different form as an Audible audio book) goes deeply into the history of the importation of first coffee and then tea into Western Europe, from East Africa and China, respectively, and then into the spread of said plants worldwide as caffeine became increasingly important in society. Coffeehouses as crucial to the rise of Enlightenment philosophy and the twentieth-century origin of the coffee break figure in. While writing this chapter, Pollan abstained from his daily cup of coffee, and shares his experience of becoming just a tad... dulled. 

The third section explores the role of peyote in the Native American Church, which formed in the 1880s (in parallel with but separate from the Ghost Dance) to draw Indians together in response to the existential crisis facing Indian culture in the face of white colonialism. Pollan also references Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception as he tries to gain access to mescaline, either in plant form or as synthetic mescaline—ultimately with partial success. His experiences with the latter and with the Peruvian Wachuma, a cactus that is relatively easy to procure (in contrast to peyote, which is increasingly rare, very slow growing, and highly protected by its Native American consumers), round out the chapter.

I enjoy the combination of memoir/first-person involvement in the story, on the one hand, and science and history on the other, and Pollan balances these gracefully. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Here he is describing his first cup of coffee after three months without:

My special [a double-shot espresso drink made with steamed milk] was unbelievably good, a ringing reminder of what a poor counterfeit decaf is; here were whole dimensions and depths of flavor that I had completely forgotten about! I could almost feel the tiny molecules of caffeine spreading through my body, fanning out along the arterial pathways, sliding effortlessly through the walls of my cells, slipping across the blood-brain barrier to take up stations in my adenosine receptors. "Well-being" was the term that best described the first feeling I registered, and this built and spread and coalesced until I decided "euphoria" was warranted. And yet there was none of the perceptual distortion that I associate with most other psychoactive drugs; my consciousness felt perfectly transparent, as if I were intoxicated on sobriety.
     But this was not the familiar caffeine feeling [of habitual use]—the happy (and grateful) return to baseline, as the first cup disperses the gathering fogs of withdrawal. No, this was something well up from baseline, almost as if my cup had been spiked with something stronger, something like cocaine or speed. Wow—this stuff is legal?

I was going to quote from each section, but really, that gives an idea of the style. It's very engaging, very readable, and I learned a lot.

Karl Blossfeldt, photographer

Michael Pollan, in his new book, This Is Your Mind on Plants, mentions in passing Karl Blossfeldt, an "early-twentieth-century German photographer whose portraits of stems and buds and flowers make them look like they'd been cast in iron." This, I had to see. 

Blossfeldt taught sculpture at the Royal School of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin from 1892 to 1932, focusing on plant forms. He published two books of photographs, Urformen der Kunst (Archetypal forms of art, 1929) and Wundergarten der Natur (The wondergarden of nature, 1932). He was well known in his day, and received the support of critics such as Walter Benjamin as well as artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New realism) and the Paris surrealists. 

Here are some of his images, starting with the plant I am currently reading about:

Papaver orientalis
(oriental poppy)

Acer rucinerve
(red-vein maple)

Chrysanthemum parthenium
(feverfew)

Acanthus mollis
(bear's breeches; bracteoles with flowers removed)

Adiantum pedatum
(northern maidenhair fern)

Eryngium bourgatii
(Mediterranean sea holly)

Abutilon sp.
(mallow)

Anemone blanda
(windflower)

And on a completely unrelated note—except insofar as the second section of Pollan's book is on caffeine, and the third on mescaline—I leave you with this amusing and interesting article on the effects of various drugs on the weavings of spiders. Can you guess, in the following illustration, which one caffeine is responsible for? Or mescaline?

Answers: #s 5 and 6, respectively. The other drugs represented are marijuana (#2), chloral hydrate, a heavy sedative (#3), and benzedrine (#4), while #1 is the web of a happy and well-adjusted spider. Or at least one that hasn't been fed any chemicals lately...

Book Report: Sky Burial

50. Xinran, Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet (2004) (10/8/21)

This book, by the Chinese-British author Xinran, is billed as fiction, though it is apparently based on a true story. I believe it is called fiction because so many of the details of daily life and of conversation rely on research or imagination, but the bare bones of the story—those, I guess, actually happened. But... maybe not. Maybe the introductory note is also fiction. It's impossible to say.

Here's the intro:

In 1994 I was working as a journalist in Nanjing. During the week, I presented a nightly radio program that discussed various aspects of Chinese women's lives. One of my listeners called me from Suzhou to say that he had met a strange woman in the street. They had both been buying rice soup from a street vendor and started talking. The woman had just come back from Tibet. He thought that I might find it interesting to interview her. She was called Shu Wen. He gave me the name of the small hotel where she was staying.
     My curiosity awakened, I made the four-hour bus journey from Nanjing to the busy town of Suzhou, which despite modern redevelopment still retains its beauty—its canals, its pretty courtyard houses with their moon gates and decorated eaves, its water gardens, and its ancient tradition of silk making. There, in a teahouse belonging to the small hotel next door, I found an old woman dressed in Tibetan clothing, smelling strongly of old leather, rancid milk, and animal dung. Her gray hair hung in two untidy plaits and her skin was lined and weather-beaten. Yet, although she seemed so Tibetan, she had the facial characteristics of a Chinese woman—a small, slightly snub nose, an "apricot mouth." When she began to speak, her accent immediately confirmed to me that she was indeed Chinese. What, then explained her Tibetan appearance?
     For two days, I listened to her story. When I returned to Nanjing my head was reeling. I realized that I had just met one of the most exceptional women I would ever know.
     I never saw her again, but her story did not leave my mind, so finally I felt I must share it with others.

The story begins in 1956, when Shu Wen is newly—three weeks—married, she and her husband both medical doctors. Abruptly, though not unexpectedly, her husband is called to service in the army: in Tibet. Two years later, she receives word that he "died in an incident." And she resolves to go find him.

The rest of the book recounts her thirty-plus years living with a nomadic Tibetan family who rescue her and a Tibetan woman, Zhuoma, after her army unit is attacked. Zhuoma, eventually, is kidnapped, and so Wen's task becomes twofold: find both her husband and this woman who became a friend. In the meantime, we learn something about the pastoral Tibetan way of life and spirituality.

It's a spare, straightforward book, nothing especially lyric about the writing. One might even say, flat? At one point it seems to try to explore the politics of the Dalai Lama leaving Tibet, and the aggression of the Chinese on Tibet, but it felt ambivalent (aka without judgment?). The title refers to the ceremony that sends dead people on to their next stage in the reincarnation cycle. It involves vultures.

And spoiler: Wen does find Zhuoma. She also learns what happened to her husband. The last we see of her, she is eating rice soup and talking with a street vendor in Suzhou, a city completely transformed from the one she left thirty-plus years before. I found the resolution, such as it is, unsettling. I wished she would return to the grasslands of Tibet and find the family that had taken her in so many years ago, and allow herself to be reabsorbed.

Book Report: The Saturday Morning Murder

49. Batya Gur, The Saturday Morning Murder: A Psychoanalytic Case (1993) (10/6/21)

The other day a geocache took us to a Little Library in Carmel Valley. It was well stocked, especially with Faye Kellerman and this author new to me, the Israeli Batya Gur. I grabbed a short stack of Gur books, and dived into this first one in the series. 

The story concerns the murder of a psychoanalyst, a guiding light of a renowned institute in central Jerusalem. It's a very hierarchical, closed society, which makes this something of a "locked room" mystery. The investigating officer, the tall and rather saturnine Michael Ohayon, of Moroccan background and once hoping to study medieval Italian history at Cambridge (he gave up that dream to keep his small family together, ultimately without success), wanders around seeking clues, talking to suspects and witnesses, drinking coffee, not eating or sleeping enough, and applying a little police psychology of his own. Though in the end, the mystery is only solved when a second death—a suicide—occurs toward the end of the book and certain connections come to light.

Halfway through, I considered abandoning the project: the pace was slow, there were few revelations. But I kept on because, well, I'd gotten that far. In the end, the solution made sense—which very often is not the case with a standard mystery. I understand Gur's books get better and better, so I might, one of these days, try another one. No rush, though.

Snipes

This evening, after our usual TV fare (currently: Shetland, on BritBox—yep, we're keeping it for at least another month; then, oh look, there's a relatively new, and final season, of Goliath on Amazon!), we wound down, as we often do, with an episode of Cheers. Here's a bit of "The Heart Is a Lonely Snipe Hunter," in which Sam, Norm, Cliff, and a couple of other Cheers regulars have taken Frasier on a snipe hunt:

Even though I know the term "snipe hunt," all the while I'm watching this I'm thinking, but there is such a thing as a snipe! It's a bird: three genera, 26 species. Here's one of them, the Wilson's Snipe (Gallinago gallinago):

In fact, the word sniper comes from the bird—specifically, the verb "to snipe," "which originated in the 1770s among soldiers in British India in reference to shooting snipes, a wader that was considered an extremely challenging game bird for hunters due to its alertness, camouflaging color and erratic flight behavior."

So I had to look up "snipe hunt." Yes, it's a practical joke, in which more experienced people trick a rube into waiting with a canvas bag to catch the elusive "snipe"—which may be "a cross between a jackrabbit and a squirrel; a squirrel-like bird with one red and one green eye; a small, black, furry bird-like animal that only comes out during a full moon"—and so on. It's apparently a common summer camp or Boy Scouts trick.

David, who was an Eagle Scout, said he'd never been duped into a snipe hunt—or its equivalent in his scout troop, a hunt for a "left-handed smoke shifter." Or as it's also called, hunting for a "bacon stretcher" or "praying to the trio of great Indian gods Owa, and T'goo and Siam"—or in David's scout troop again, Owa, Tana, and Siam.

In fact, of course, it's a form of hazing. And I felt uncomfortable watching the Cheers episode—until Frasier revealed that he was not as gullible as they all thought. But still...

A couple of years ago on a birding tour (no, we didn't see any snipes), one of my fellow travelers got on the bus that was sitting at the curb outside our hotel and was waiting patiently for the rest of us to climb aboard. But she was on the wrong bus. I went and told her so. A British fellow in our group scolded me, said it would have been fun to see her reaction when she was surrounded by strangers. I simply do not understand such mean-spiritedness. Yes, we all need to know how to laugh at ourselves. But to be set up by people we should be able to trust? It makes no sense. 

I do not approve of hazing. It's a power play, and it preys on the unsuspecting and weak, or simply the trusting. Which I myself tend to be...

Here's an article on hunting for actual snipes. And here's another snipe, the Greater Painted (Rostratula benghalensis):

TV

We watch TV in the evening, a couple, few hours. It's one of our little rituals. We just finished up the sixth season of the British police drama Line of Duty, most of which we watched on Hulu. But the final season? BritBox only. Okay: we wanted to know what happened—who the Fourth Man was. And now we know, because we signed up for a free week of BritBox. 

But... maybe they have other good shows, and we should just go ahead and subscribe, for $6.99 a month. Not so much! The Hulu subscription was slipped to us by a friend, along with HBO (shhhh). We already had Netflix and Amazon Prime. And when Hamilton came along, we subscribed to Disney+. Also something like $6.99 a month. Not so much.

But if you only watch them once every six months? $6.99 a month—or now, $13.98 a month... never mind the Netflix and Amazon costs. It all adds up.

I hate the nickel-and-diming. Granted, we do have choices. Maybe we even have free will. (But, probably not.) 

I can cancel BritBox tomorrow, and I'll have sneaked that whole sixth season of Line of Duty out from under their grasping fingers. 

Tonight, after having finally learned who the Fourth Man might be (seriously? him???), we wandered back to Netflix. And noticed a NEW EPISODE marker. On one of my favorite shows—precisely because it isn't about who the "bad guy" is or anything about plot or fiction or angst. It's the Great British Baking Show! Season 9! Episode 1: Cakes!

I don't know why this show makes me so happy. Maybe because it's about chance and misfortune and camaraderie and inventiveness and accomplishment and personalities. It's about life. Isn't that enough?

Though granted, I suppose you could say Line of Duty is also about those very same things. Maybe the thing that's missing from GBBS is... evil?