David tested positive for Covid this morning, and as he turned in to bed tonight he had a 103° temperature. He says it needs to get to 104° before it's time to seek medical help. I hope he sleeps well, and that the fever begins to come down—or better, breaks. In the meantime, I feel like I'm living on borrowed time: will I succumb too? If so, when?
Sadly, this illness meant he couldn't participate in our town's No Kings demonstration, which was really well attended—they figure there were four or five thousand people. Lots of signs and applause and honking, crowds lining both sides of Del Monte Boulevard. I ran into various friends—David's oncology nurse, whom I know from wilderness rangering; my town's former mayor; another Del Rey Oaks neighbor; whale-watching captain Kate and her partner; and finally I found the people I was hoping to find, more wilderness rangers, and we hung out. It was inspiring. It felt like we were doing something. Though I know it won't have any immediate or real effect, the solidarity of so many voices was uplifting. Meanwhile, Trump apparently dozed off at his big expensive military parade. What a jerk.
Here are a few photos from all over the country (thanks to the NYTand WaPo), with perhaps up to 11 million people showing up for our nation and our people:
Philadelphia: 100,000 strong!
Glendale, CA
Austin, TX
Atlanta
Houston
San Francisco
Midtown Manhattan
Sierra right here in Monterey
P.S. As of June 17, I have a cold—a stuffy nose; the scratchy throat from yesterday seems to have gone away. That's been my experience of Covid the only time(s) I've had it: cold symptoms. I'll take it.
Some photos from my Flickr archive—which, as I've explained elsewhere, I stopped adding to years ago. I always say I should start posting there again, but do I? Anyway, here are a few photos from June 13s long past.
2008, St. Croix River, Minnesota Every evening, I have to chase this rascal off my bird feeder. Well, "have to": I do, but to no avail— in the morning the feeder is pretty much cleaned out. It's our little "game." Ha ha. He invariably wins. This evening I decided to catch him in the act. The glowing red eyes seem pretty darn appropriate.
2009, SAR training Only about seven of us showed up, but that was enough to rerig the litters and respool the cable. The latter involved hauling my 4Runner around the parking lot (as a load). Very challenging. We also talked maps and compass. Sort of an impromptu training, because the original plan (to rappel off the local REI) fell through at the last minute.
2009, SAR training June 13: Training this morning. Setting up a belay is about the only thing I do know how to do, thanks to all the practice in the snow this winter... but I became clearer on rigging the litter, both at Thursday's body recovery and again this morning. It's the old "use it or lose it" thing...
2010 Spent a little time with my Search & Rescue team in Pine Valley this weekend, celebrating birthdays and enjoying some hiking. I got flown in in one of our helicopters—which is always a huge treat. That meant the only hiking I did was uphill—on the way out— but the wildflowers were so spectacular I hardly noticed. And despite the fire damage from the big burns a couple of years ago, the land is lush and full of color. So beautiful!
2007 The bank across the river from our campsite. Beautiful form and texture—and sound too: the river was high and running strong.
2011 Working at my dining room table this morning, I can look out and see my poppies and the birds at the feeders—house finches, chickadees, and, my favorites, oak tits, like this guy.
Most every morning, I start the day by doing the Wordle (today, got it in four: risky, crave, hoard, board), and eventually during the day I check in on Facebook and a little group I belong to, Today's Wordle, where we share our results. The practice is for someone to kick things off with a quotation—a snatch of a song or poem, usually. I enjoy looking up the phrase to find the fuller context. Today, it was this:
The Last Thing
by Ada Limón
First there was the blue wing of a scraggly loud jay tucked into the shrubs. Then the bluish- black moth drunkenly tripping from blade to blade. Then the quiet that came roaring in like the R. J. Corman over Broadway near the RV shop. These are the last three things that happened. Not in the universe, but here, in the basin of my mind, where I’m always making a list for you, recording the day’s minor urchins: silvery dust mote, pistachio shell, the dog eating a sugar snap pea. It’s going to rain soon, close clouds bloated above us, the air like a net about to release all the caught fishes, a storm siren in the distance. I know you don’t always understand, but let me point to the first wet drops landing on the stones, the noise like fingers drumming the skin. I can’t help it. I will never get over making everything such a big deal.
P.S. And once again I have to wonder why I continue numbering these, since I fell out of any "habit" of posting daily weeks ago. Maybe it's just to reach a goal, any goal. One hundred, here I come! Slowly but surely!
12. Elizabeth O'Connor, Whale Fall (2024) (6/4/25)
This is a quiet gem of a book, set in the last few months of 1938 on a small (three miles long) island off the coast of Wales, inhabited by twelve families—fifteen men, twenty women, twelve children. They make their livelihoods from fishing, raise what they need otherwise. The mainland is a five-hour row, on a fair day, so these people do not just "pop down to the village" to provision up. Young people have begun leaving the island, to find a life with more opportunity. Our protagonist, Manod, is eighteen, and she, too, is eyeing the mainland with curiosity.
The book begins (I've abbreviated):
Here is an island year. First the sun, and first the spring growing fat with birds. They leave the island to its grey winter and return when shoots appear in the ground. Auks come as dark shapes under the water. Kittiwakes and gannets fall from the skies. We not notice them at first. . . . In summer, the women of the island repaint the houses white. They go into the limestone cave at the west of the island and chip the rock into powder. . . . After summer, the cold circles, the drops like a stone. The birds disappear one by one. They leave their nests on the cliffs with eggs still inside. In autumn, the sea boils like a bot on the fire. The birds pass and the summer is gone. Winter: we stay near the hearth, sleep in the same bed. The sea sidles up to the door, laps at the edge of the island. . . . At Christmas we cook a catch of fish, then butcher a sheep, and throw it into the water. The waves push it back onto the beach again by spring, and the birds arrive to devour it. The sheep are rotated around the island, after they've grazed their field to nothing.
So we have the circle of life. The next chapter begins, "The whale became stranded in the shallows of the island overnight, appearing from the water like a cat slinking under a door." And thus the overarching metaphor of the book arrives: the whale, which fascinates the locals as it dies, disappears into the water, then reappears on the other side of the island and slowly decomposes, but not before, eventually, it is salvaged—oil and blubber for fuel, skin and organs for dog meat and fertilizer. It also draws a pair of outsiders, university students, Edward and Joan—English—who wish to study the islanders. Manod, who has taught herself English, is hired on to help, writing and translating.
The book is written in short segments, some narrative about Manod's life in Rose Cottage with her father and younger sister (the mother is a ghostly thread in the telling); some ethnographic—Joan or Edward's diary entries, or collected folk tales or songs. The evocation of nature is splendid, and of the hard life that the islanders live.
Edward and Joan, of course, have their own take on what they encounter, both romanticized and intellectualized. A conversation between Joan and Manon exemplifies this:
The clouds at the edge of the water had begun to turn a dark grey. The boats were on the main stretch of water below the cliffs, coming in. 'I think there is a storm coming,' I said. 'We should head back.' She looked out. 'How do you know? The water is still.' I heard a curlew wheel in the grass behind us. 'Some of the older generations believe the curlews cry when a storm is coming. It's an omen that someone will die at sea.' Joan studied the grass. 'Probably a change in air pressure makes them call. A change in their territory. Wouldn't you say?' I didn't reply. Often my conversations with Joan went that way: me telling her something she did not know before, her arguing with it.
The book ends with a festival, Mari Lwyd, which involves horse-head skeletons—and as things turn out, that whale's head as well. Joan and Edward leave before the event—though Manod had, naively, understood that she would be going with them, to the mainland, to university to study. Even though they abandon her, their visit has, we believe, changed her life.
When I typed in simply "whale fall," looking for an image of the book cover, I came up instead with articles on "the process where a dead whale sinks to the deep-sea floor, providing a concentrated food source and creating a unique ecosystem for years." Also part of the book's metaphor—because eventually that ecosystem becomes played out, just as this island seems to be losing its ability to provide. In an appendix, O'Connor mentions four islands, off of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, that she in part based her fictional island on, all of which have, "over the last two centuries, seen declining populations, increasingly harsh weather, the sale of land to private owners, and younger generations moving to the mainland." It reminded me of a community in the far north of Norway that we visited two years ago, which was evacuated by the government some decades ago. Too harsh, too expensive to maintain services. It makes "sense," but imagine all the broken hearts.
P.S. Two days after I finished this book, we were walking near a big field that's the staging area for the Big Sur Marathon and other events, and it was full of studio trucks and trailers. We asked one fellow what they were working on. "A feature named Whale Fall" came the response. What?!? It must be the same story—it's such an unusual title. It will be interesting to see how they transform central California into a windswept Welsh island. They're shooting the whale scene on Monday at a local beach. We might just have to go for an early dog walk on Monday, see what we see. I love coincidences like this!
P.P.S. Ha ha ha, the joke was on me! Yes, they are shooting a movie called Whalefall (one word), but no, it's not about an isolated fishing community as war approaches. Starring Elisabeth Shue and Josh Brolin, it "follows a scuba diver who, while looking for his father's remains, is swallowed by an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale and has just one hour to get out before his oxygen runs out." We might have to go check it out anyway. Just for the fun of it.
Another FB find, a glass artist, Dan Friday/Kwul Kwul Tw, whose beautiful sculptures evoke his heritage as a member of the Lummi Nation (Washington State). Here, before I share a sampling of his work, is a brief video made by the Seattle Aquarium about Dan:
Here are some of his pieces:
An sxwo'le reefnet anchor
Two hands cedar braiding vase
Glass feather
Salmon
Bear necklace
Basket vase
Amber owl
Another sxwo'le anchor
Dan is represented at the Corning Museum of Glass, and a number of years ago he did a demonstration as he created a woven basket:
And finally, he does bears—beautiful glass bears. Here is a sampling:
When I find artists like him, I wish I were filthy rich; I would love to have a collection of his art. But at several thousand dollars a pop, I'll have to rest content just seeing his work online (including Instagram).
My sister-in-law recommended this book. She listened to it, and said the narration (by the author) is beautiful. Maybe I should have listened to it, because for some reason reading it didn't captivate me. Indeed, one thing that positively irritated me was the author's tendency to repeat things—"key" facts that you'd better not miss! Sometimes mere paragraphs apart. The way I listen to books, my attention tends to fade in and out. Maybe I would have appreciated the repetition, if I managed to listen right past one of those key facts at first mention. I did not appreciate it while reading, though. This story could, I kept thinking,have been a long-form short story, or a novella anyway—so much shorter than 384 pages...
The basic premise is this: it is 1908, Manchuria, the final, turbulent days of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty, and a huijing, or fox woman, named Yuki (meaning "Snow") sets off to exact revenge on the man who two years earlier killed her child (human child? fox child? both?). Meanwhile, in alternating chapters, we learn the story of Bao, a detective who is investigating the murder of a young woman, possibly linked to foxes, whose path takes him on a collision course with Yuki. The story is complex, with many characters: well-off Chinese patriarchs whose sons are attending university in Japan (and may be involved in revolutionary activities); the old woman, once the head of a Chinese medicine house, who becomes Yuki's employer; photographers; and two beguiling men, Shiro and Kuro ("White" and "Black"), who befriend the sons and who know Yuki from way back. Yet despite the complexity, it seemed plodding, never really picking up steam, the characters flat, the scenes nondescript, too many dreams, not enough reason for the historical setting, too little passion.
I did like Bao, who had a special gift: when people tell lies, his head starts to buzz. That could be a handy skill in life.
I flagged one paragraph, involving a conversation between Bao and a young woman who is in love with Shiro, in a greasy-spoon noodle restaurant:
She recovers her composure. What a strange, furtive conversation they've had, almost like old friends meeting up except all she's done is talk about this mysterious Shirakawa [Shiro]. It's like one of those dreams where you meet peculiar people and talk in a dark space, steam rising around them from the giant bamboo steamers filled with dumplings and steamed buns. The emptiness of the restaurant, the sticky floor. The sensation of being displaced from the normal flow of time and circumstances, discussing the secrets of an unknown world that lies parallel to theirs. She hasn't lied, though there are slanted omissions. Especially the last bit, about disappearing people.
I did like that "sensation of being displaced," one that seems to crop up fairly often in this book. But maybe that's to be expected, when humans are foxes—or are they?
I'm reading a book partially set in Japan at the start of the twentieth century featuring foxes—as in, magical beings (kitsune in Japanese; hui jing in Chinese). The Japanese concept of rokuyōwas mentioned: a calendar for determining lucky days (or days when you should just stay in bed). It was introduced from China in the fourteenth century.
Today, May 28, for example, is an unlucky day (except at noontime, 11 a.m.–1 p.m.), 赤口 (shakkō, meaning literally "red mouth"). Fortunately—or maybe not—there are only six rokuyō days, and they just rotate merrily along. Unfortunately, all but one involve at least some unluck. Yesterday was a lucky day all day long: 大安 (taian, meaning "great ease")! Too bad I didn't realize it, otherwise I might have taken advantage! Tomorrow is good luck in the morning, bad in the afternoon; the next day, good luck all day, except at noon. You get the drift. The day before Taian is a bad-luck-all-day day, 仏滅 (butsumetsu, meaning "Buddha death"). It must get tedious, to suffer so much bad luck... Though even Butsumetsu has a bright spot: since it's an inauspicious day for a wedding, wedding halls offer a discount. It may be a good way to test your luck—assuming you're not superstitious.
The website I've linked above also has loads of information on Japanese superstitions—about death; animals; health, wealth, and happiness; parts of the body; numbers. For example, whistling at night will summon snakes, and so should be avoided. Or, you might put irises on the roof to repel evil spirits. Or, eel and pickled plums are a bad pairing (said because salty plums can be used to disguise rotten eel—but normally, they make a very tasty summertime pairing). Or, you should hide your thumb if you see a hearse, lest the spirit of the deceased enter you through your thumbnail. Or, it's bad luck to dry laundry at night—said because it reminds people of the old custom of washing the kimonos of the dead and hanging them out to dry at night to ward off evil spirits. That said, if you leave your laundry overnight at a laundromat (which are very, very common in the cities of Japan), watch out: it might get nicked—bad luck!
There are loads of others, and various websites devoted to superstitions, such as here, here, here, here, and here. I may have to have a superstitious person (maybe just jokingly, to have fun with the children) in the book I'm writing.
I have remarked in the past that I could see leaving this country if things get really bad.
And they are pretty bad right now. The government (so called) is dismantling our society—our educational institutions, our scientific endeavors, our social welfare, our trust.
It continues to astonish me how fast annihilation can happen.
But when I think of leaving, I also think (a) I'm too old and (b) I'm really fine, right here. Our house will be paid off in September. This is a wonderful place to live. And do I really want to deal with all the bureaucratic bullshit that moving anywhere else would require?
No.
Plus, with David getting his cancer miracle treatment right here, we're not going anywhere anytime soon.
And yet.
Until lately, I've always considered myself "just a person." Not restricted by birthright or whatever. Now, though, I recognize that I'm "an American," whether I like it or not. Yes, yes, I could move to France or wherever—but then, I'd always be an outsider. Would that bother me? Maybe not. It's something I need to consider.
Because yeah, if in 2026 the elections just bolster this bullshit "Republican" (aka MAGA) party, I may very well be seeking an exit strategy. After David dies.
But with any luck, 2026 will bring us some hope. I am hoping bigtime for hope.
I'm also even more strongly hoping that David doesn't die anytime soon. That's my biggest wish. My lifeline.
There's a whole lot of hope—or do I mean wishful thinking?—spinning throughout my present reality.
I know I started doing this daily (well, that was a pipe dream!) blogging thing so I'd stay engaged, keep looking around, paying attention, and find something, anything, to say something wise about each day. But I'm finding I don't have much energy for that. Today, for example, I could post some photos I took and tell about an excursion a few of us made this morning to Santa Cruz to do a "puzzle adventure"—which ended up a bust because the server wouldn't/couldn't connect. So we ended up taking a walk down to the end of the pier, and checked out the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary visitor center—and it was nice to sort of be tourists in our own backyard, just wandering around, following our inclinations. We ended up with sandwiches in the downtown area, outside in the sunshine. So pleasant! Okay, here's a photo—a plastic wolf eel in a plastic kelp forest, from said visitor center:
I took a bunch of photos of letters while we were walking around—
—which I may one day cobble into an alphabet collage,
as I do; though I was with people, so I wasn't fastidious about hunting
down every single letter, and may have to pick up the last few
separately. But then, it occurs to me that I have a Costa Rican alphabet
and a Copenhagen alphabet, still unassembled. I've gotten too lazy—or something (I'm not really lazy)—to do the last step.
Back home come afternoon, David and I took the dog for a walk, and I shot this picture, of cactus blooms (a favorite subject: this particular cactus has gotten enormous, and it makes the most beautiful flowers):
We saw a turkey on a roof, squawking, looking for its pals (no photo), and a chestnut-brown squirrel bounding across the dogless dog park, tail in the air (no photo, but it would have made an amusing video).
I've been considering devoting a post to the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado (he died Friday at age 81), whose work I've long loved, but I keep seeing other testimonials to him online and I figure, why bother? It's all already out there.
You might call it depression. Certainly, overwhelm.
Everything, lately, feels like too much: too much bad news, too much chaos, too much uncertainty, too many people, too many opinions, too much anonymity, too many cars (too many fast cars running red lights; or, too many cars slowing Highway 1 down to a 20 mph crawl), too high of prices, too much me-me-me, too much name-calling, too much are-we-great-yet (or rather, from my perspective, are-we-totally-screwed-yet)?
And then the Howlers meet up to discuss a poem ("we have questions!"), and Sherilyn mentions a short piece on CBS News Sunday Morning about a forgotten cartoonist, and things fall into place again. What matters.
Sebastião Salgado definitely matters (seeing his work a couple of years ago was so moving), but I will wait a bit until all the other posts have faded away, so I can make my own reckoning of him.
And here's the poem we Howlers read today. Once again, talking about it helped, though it still feels rather elusive; very personal.
We Love in the Only Ways We Can
by Carl Phillips
What's the point, now, of crying, when you've cried already, he said, as if he'd never thought, or been told— and perhaps he hadn't— Write down something that doesn't have to matter, that still matters, to you. Though I didn't know it then, those indeed were the days. Random corners, around one of which on that particular day, a colony of bees, bound by instinct, swarmed low to the ground, so as not to abandon the wounded queen, trying to rise, not rising, from the strip of dirt where nothing had ever thrived, really, except in clumps the grass here and there that we used to call cowboy grass, I guess for its toughness: stubborn, almost, steadfast, though that's a word I learned early, each time the hard way, not to use too easily.
Right now, David is cooking Swiss chard to accompany chicken sausages (spicy mango with jalapeño and artichoke & garlic), the little white kitty is sound asleep on the back of the couch (there's a music festival on at the fairgrounds—loud—and we think she's exhausted by it: she doesn't like loud anything...), and the girls nextdoor, Bella and Daniela, are raising a happy ruckus. It's the little things that matter.
I also know I don't "need" to write tomes on this blog. (I don't "need" to write anything.) And lately, I'm finding that it's the small moments that are satisfying—to me. Whether they are something other people care about, I don't know. But I guess I hope that finding those moments and pausing to savor them will be something that anyone actually reading this far doesalso care about.
A month ago, I wrote about my day. It's nothing special, nothing earth-shaking—my day. But it's something I think it's worthwhile chronicling. Because the details are important. What we pay attention to. What we get outraged by. What stimulates us. What makes us glad to be alive.
This morning I slept in! All the way to 8:15! (I've been waking up at 5, 6, 6:40 lately, so this was a treat.) I had some coffee, an end-slice of toasted homemade sourdough bread topped with truffle cheese. Then it was time to meet my Oaxacan friend (whom I mentioned last month). We started re-reading the practice book we finished last week. We started re-reading because, yes, we could have gone straight into book 2, but every week when we meet, and we read a new passage involving the adventures (and sorry love life) of Bob the bicycle mechanic, she invariably says she understands "a little." I want her to understand. So yeah: let's just start over. Keep it easy. Today, she seemed more engaged with the language. She paid attention to every word.
Then I worked for a few hours: an "edit" of a beautiful translation from the French of a Martiniquan writer, about a West Indian woman in the 1960s in France. I put "edit" in quotes because there's virtually nothing to do: occasionally I change a comma to a semicolon (in long run-on sentences), or query a term for an explanatory footnote, or wonder about a word choice. It's a dream job! (This after the book about tubers that I mentioned here last month, which was fine—I sent it out for author's review yesterday—but probably only interesting if you're a historical geographer/ethnographer focused on potatoes, yams, and cassava. Which I'm not.)
At 2 I met my friend Nina at a coffeehouse in Monterey, Captain + Stoker, a big room with rustic seating and lots of light; a good crowd, including several under-two-year-olds (separately) who were huge-smiling and exploring and looking winsomely adorable. They have no idea what they've gotten into... Nina and I did, yes, go on a bit about just what that is—the deep shit that is this supposed government. That's what we do. It doesn't solve, or even help, a thing, but I suppose it's somehow useful to rant. To know we're not alone in hating what's going on. Worrying about what those sweet little kids will encounter in another twenty years, when we'll no doubt be dead and gone.
On our afternoon dog walk, we watched a couple of black phoebes swooping from fencepost to fencepost, chatting. Yesterday, there were six turkeys.
I made a Provençal fish stew for dinner—Provençal because of capers, olives, and anchovies, plus there was shrimp and squid, and tomato paste, garbanzo beans, and spinach! It tasted pretty good.
And for the evening: The Last Detective on Britbox—an amusing-enough police show, British so no shooting; and then a couple of new series for us: The Rehearsal and The Righteous Gemstones. Both of which had me cringing. I know the Gemstones is meant to make us cringe—the arrogant and hypocritical entitlement of the evangelists. I'm not entirely sure what to make of The Rehearsal, but after a while all I could think of was the money they put into pulling off that elaborate ruse. Yes, I like entertainment. And yes, entertainment costs bundles. But we don't like it when the thing itself calls attention to those bundles.
To make fun of Christian evangelism is one thing (and I sincerely hope that the finale of this series has all these fat smug "Christian" people seriously contemplating an uplifting reason for being on this planet), but day after day we are seeing this country getting scorched. And half the country is cheering! Half the Congress yells, oorah! Or, more to the point, does absolutely nothing for this country. For the people of this country. Isn't that supposedly their job?
It's all so bewildering.
But just now, as I get settled for bed, the blue-eyed white kitty came to say hello. She stretched out on the floor, luxuriating in her isness. Reminding me: this moment. Breathe. Just breathe.
When I'm stuck for something to post (which I have been for a few days now—where does the time go?), I go into my Flickr archives to find photos I posted on whatever today's date is. For May 21, I get four hits (and again, because I no longer use Flickr, these go back a long ways):
May 21, 2008: Made it! Project 365 accomplished! And on Monday I'll be pulling onto Highway One, starting a five-week journey to and in Minnesota— so this "one" is fraught with meaning. (It's also a little fuzzy, but oh well. That's probably symbolic too : )
May 21, 2009: My father raised chrysanthemums. He would nip off two buds of three, to make the third, central one into a huge blossom. I loved the huge blossoms that he made, they were magnificent and beautiful; and nowadays I'm not especially interested in the little flowers that flower sellers sell, on stalks with multiple blooms, because I know what a chrysanthemum can do. If it's trained.
May 21, 2010: Got into Edinburgh by noon, took a much-needed nap, then set out to explore. My first excursion took me up to the castle— but I didn't want to visit it again (especially not for £13), so I decided to find some geocaches instead—down toward the botanical garden. One of them, a multistage that I neglected to jot down one important component of, got me to this spot. Beautiful view, and the little kid was SO happy to be feeding the swans
May 21, 2011: Steve and I flew to Ridgecrest today to attend the trimesterly regional MRA meeting (China Lake Mountain Rescue Group being the hosts this time). The operative word here is "flew." One and a half hours versus six and a half or seven by car. And we got to ogle California from above into the bargain. I could become a fan of MRA meetings if this were a regular perk. Which it seems to be. Our pilot, Ken Petersen, offered his services anytime. Yay Ken!
And somehow, this collage of photos (by other Flickr photographers) that I faved during 2008 also showed up when I searched for May 21; the links to the original posts can be found here:
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