What to Find at Point Reyes, CA

"The sea, autumn mildness, islands bathed in light, fine rain spreading a diaphanous veil over the immortal nakedness of Greece. Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean Sea." from Zorba the Greek




A crisp team of clouds had quickly risen up above the surrounding cliff lines of Tomales Bay at Point Reyes. I had opened the door of the fishing shack only a moment ago while it had still been

unnaturally sunny, and the gulls had circled around the bespeckled water as if keepers of treasure.  I could see old man, who they simply called "Old Man" standing with his back to the bar over an open coals cooking telling a story to two other men sitting at stools wearing fishing caps.  I did not want to interrupt just yet so sat-in at the other side.  The first tinking splatters of rain began to sound at the roof.  "You see, there was the old days, before anybody took record, when the chinook were so thick

moving up the Sacramento River and as far north as here at Reyes that I used to leap off of one side of the bank and jump across the massive backs as large as rocks!  I tell you, along the way across I would merely have to scoop one up in my arms, no pole!" He finished this last part with a deep guttural laughter with his right hand, holding a cooking tongs, swirling about in the air." Now those were the days for the fisherman. Now it takes me four days to bring in a hundred pounds. I care for them as my own.  You will not find the Chinook here on the menu every night.  They come from ocean to your plate."  The two other men looked to have no visible reason to argue.  The old man's fishing exploits were legendary, and what had brought me here in the first place.  He took to ocean nothing more than a simple oaring boat for days at a time, challenging virtually every known warning to avoid in these volatile waters.  There had been one stretch that he had gone missing for seventeen days, no communication, and the Coast Guard could not find him at sea.  He had provisions for no

more than five days, but returned, on the eighteenth day without a rail for a seat but instead three hundred pounds of the great Chinook still flopping to such a degree that his boat listed at every knee high wave.  It was reported but never verified that the old Man had been shoved by 90 mile an hour winds as far northward as the Columbia River in Oregon where he said, famously, 'I had struck a line of silver a mile long, tied my line to the lead, and followed it into the great unknown river.'  The shack had begun to smell like the purest of elements: the fish, the sea, the rain, the lemon that he had continued to squeeze over his precious catch.  "Now, let me tell you how I make my miso!"

Bird Journal

May 19


Simply sitting out on the back deck the sky this time of year looks something like a sunny aviary airport.  Researchers now know that birds navigate not by any one sixth sense but by a very complex unified combination of sensory mechanisms.  Birds have tremendous sight and as they fly from nest to feeding zones they take visual snap shots of the various landmarks in landscape.  Take a precocious migratory bird from nest several miles away and they will find home by utilizing those burned images.  Birds can smell their particular region as well; various regions contain various flora and fauna and birds can follow those senses as well.  Also built into the main frame of the bird is an ability to detect thermal transitions and flows of the earth and wind patterns so that we could easily imagine a bird, high above in a flock, literally feeling the surrounding area getting warmer as it makes its great journey from Canada to the Midwest, for example.  The backyard aviary airport, then, indicates that birds find good foliage here, good housing sites, and most importantly they think its warm enough to safely start flitting about with nest morsels.  Besides the hawks, warblers, vireos, orioles, robins, two mallards, the cardinal and the hummingbird, it was the case of the elusive Eastern Bluebird that was most interesting in the backyard stage presentation as what looked much the golden breasted but blueish winged bluebirds landed on the top gutter of the house and looked down on us as though we were the intruders.  We binoculared and still the colors matched to what we thought was that of the bluebird yet, as it took off its wing pattern seemed longer and more prongy at the tail.  We matched the online birdcall with what we were listening to.  No such luck.  The common barn swallow, although quite dramatic in its own right, had been swooping aggressively across the

backyard skyline swaying off any foreign intruders like people...much in the same way the red-winged blackbird likes to harass the crows back up into their bluffside trees.  It is said of the barn swallow that they have become one of the most common users of manmade nesting sites of all the birds, very rarely seen any longer finding homes in trees or bushes.  The bluebird, by contrast, is very particular about their homes, needing a certain height, space and slight opening in the field or grassland.  Their old nemesis, the common swallow, likes the same thing and they often have to fight it out.

"I first met him in Piraeus. I wanted to take the boat for Crete and had gone down to the port. It was almost daybreak and raining. A strong sirocco was blowing the spray from the waves as far as the little cafe, whose glass doors were shut.  The cafe reeked of brewing sage and human beings whose breath steamed the windows because the cold outside." – Nikos Kazantzakis from Zorba the Greek





The sun shone down from the sky above Point Reyes so bright that he said he could not believe just yesterday the fog was so thick that when he tossed a tennis ball up twenty feet he lost it, it blew a foot to the left, and it bounced off the cliffside and somewhere into the jagged shore.  There was only one real fishing shack at Nick's Cove, and it had turned, many years ago, according to the old man, into a mostly unknown tavern for the last of the straggling fisherman past the fishing hour along the north coast.  It took three minutes to walk from the shore over the dock and to the shack, which stood on what

seemed thin stilts, albeit a protected bay.  A few fisherman, and one fisherwoman, stood out on the deck before front door smoking pipe and cigar, as anybody would imagine.  The cliffs to either side of Nicks Cove were like solemn yet elegant guard against virtually everything imaginable out beyond its influence.  Waves here churned like mad; wind gusts could burst to 130 miles per hour at its peak, and trawlers could notoriously get caught inside the treacherous admixture of wind and fog that would leave them tipping like silly tops against the rocks at the head of any cove or shore.  What did I know of such things?  The sea, of course, was chaos compared to the barely lolling waves of lakes or even

most rivers.  Three more men opened the driftwood door with tall cans in their fists.  Their ruddy faces matched the roughness of the ocean only yards out from the reach of the backside of the shack itself.  I first met him as the fourth man out, the old man who lived here, and who had, for so many years, travelled this top end of the western coast as though as if it were the globe, finding deserts in the beaches, mountainous terrain in the sea cliffs, rivers in the meandering estuaries, and any foreign sky you could conceive at the touch of the finger above.  "When is the last time you've paddled along a sea lion?" he asked, picking me out as I approached, knowing, I am now sure, that I was there to observe

and knowing, at the same time, that I likely had never done such a thing. "You see, along these waters out there, not everybody knows, that if you are caught paddling next to a sea lion, you are bait twice."

Garden Journal

May 14

It's not as pleasant a task to deadhead tulips at forty degrees as it would be otherwise, but with limited amount of time at the lawn that is a garden, it is something that has to be done.  Getting down on hands and knees onto clumped, cold, and wet bark, digging in to shovel the unfriendly weeds or sheering old wood stalks is the kind of work, my gardener agrees, is not usually the stuff that inspires children to "get into nature." Yet, as we both agreed, to see for oneself every last inch of plantings, from tulips to roses to hyacinth and fern, is like assessing the layout of any interior room inside a house, with all of its attendant nuts, bolts, screws, lighting fixtures, missing tongues and grooves, etc., etc., but that the difference is that the tulip and rose are living and ever-changing.  To secure their

future is something like taking care of hardy yet cute children, the very thought process, I suspect, that ties all those who participate in the cultivation of nature shares.  And so I was told to deadhead my bloomed tulips out front; clip them all down close to the origin of the stem, which allows for the teamwork of energy between sun, soil and seed to dedicate its time to germination under the surface, not at the head where the stem had just dropped.  So far, in this small little yard garden of ours, I have combed, yanked, raked and torn out some twelve bags of fallen or dead debris.  It keeps coming, and that is its beauty.

What to Find at Point Reyes, CA

May 17


Spring and summer won't be the months to spot the once famous Marin County Coho Salmon making their way from open ocean to estuary and finally up the creek at Point Reyes – they are most likely to be seen in December and January – but what a show they must have once been.  Before widespread

commercial fishing and agriculture, the west coast used to virtually teem with these very dynamically critical 'anadromous' fish whose life cycle primarily consists of swimming and feeding in the open ocean, but that make their way back to freshwater annually to give birth.  "As they make their way upstream to spawn, females take on a bronze cast while male salmon turn dark red and develop an enlarged, hook-shaped upper jaw....Salmon reproduce only once in their lifetime; after salmon spawn, they die. Some live only 24 hours in freshwater; at most, they spawn 21 days after entering the stream."  This near mythical life affirming ritual by the fish would have been highly anticipated

by all and everything surrounding its arrival.  Grizzly bears, at a time in the past when they still lived here, certainly would have eyed the stark pink streaks swimming seemingly directly toward their own habitat; the Miwok Indians native to the coast here would have depended heavily on the fish stock; not to mention that once these fish predictably die at the end of their route, they serve as heavy natural fertilizer and sources of nitrogen for plants.  The story of the Coho, however, is primarily described in the past tense: nearly 94 percent of the Coho population has declined since the 1940's due to a variety of reasons.  The most verifiable problem for the Coho – and that which has turned its numbers to a threatened species – is the sharing of the shallow coastal waters with the needs of agriculture and its residual runoff and damming.  Naturally occurring southerly currents have also moved through a cycle of waning intensity and changed the dynamics of water levels at Point Reyes Seashore.  The visitor can still see the occasional Coho in the months mentioned above, especially Olema Creek

thanks to a newly determined rehabilitation project headed by the national parks service, some habitat restoration is being constructed and monitored. As the volunteers of such projects would point out, the first step to habitat restoration is first an understanding of the history of the species, a visitation would help, and a desire to curb practices of other resource users.

Nature Journal

May 15



The question often comes up...where to hike or walk or bike...and a similar answer usually comes in response, especially in early spring, bird season...why not along the Brices Prairie trail above the back waters of Black River, where, at any given moment, the visual landscape could fill Bluejay, Cardinal, Geese, Crane, Heron, Eagle.  The brightest little star, so often seen along the Midway banks of the naturally occurring (sometimes burned) prairie, where the brush and grasses have grown at just the right height and offer just the right, ready to peck and eat, seedbeds for little dashing American Goldfinch.

Goldfinch, male and female

Like any little superstar, these little ones shine beyond any course thicket that they may peck and hide behind, flitting about the sedge grass and swampy basswoods, seeking their seeds, flashing across the gravel trail like streaks so fast that the binoculars have a difficult time apprehending. Even as the surrounding bushes are still seeking full foliage, the Goldfinch, shining by the noon spring sunshine, is an invitation, we tend to hope, to the season to come.

On the Yahara A-Z

G.


One of the more fascinating parts of now living on the bottom side of a city bridge at Rutledge street is that we get to see who has most popular pizza delivery cars in town, as they continuously buzz by the house.  The little rooftop advertisement on the car signs give it away on this part of town – Glass Nickel Pizza, down a few blocks on

Atwood (a block or two from Gail Ambrosius Chocolates) is most certainly the place not only to get delivery from but as we see in pictures and passing by, also to walk to and hang out inside.

Glass Nickel is an old-school pizzeria, a place that was founded by a couple of guys who loved the neighborhood and loved making pizzas for the neighbors.  The area of the building at Atwood is one of the oldest in the city, not far from the old, and then famous, Hess Cooperage at nearby Schenks Corners.  The name of the pizzeria is a bit more elusive – not having anything to do with any significant symbolic feature of the east side of Madison, but instead Glass and Nickel are partial spellings of each of the owners last names.