Category: essays

California is home to three exceptional trees and a couple of extreme shrubs. Trees are big and they live a long time. Shrubs generally aren’t so big, but they can live a long time too. The two largest species of trees and three very long lived plants (one tree, two shrubs) all call the Golden State home.

Starting with “big”, California has two species of redwood trees. One is the tallest and the other is the largest tree in the world. (There may be larger underground complexes of mushrooms.) The tall one is Sequoia sempervirens and lives in Northern California coastal forests. “Hyperion”, a coastal redwood, is over 380 feet tall. The large one is Sequoiadendron giganteum and lives in the High Sierra. “General Sherman”, the largest sequoia, is 35 feet in diameter at the ground, and the largest in volume. The coastal tree goes by “redwood”, and the inland tree “sequoia”, and the local parks are named that way.

Unlike most California residents, trees are dependent on local conditions for water. The inland sequoia get water from the high Sierra snow, and the coastal redwood from the fog that blankets the northern coast.

Further inland, yet, a smaller and older tree is also dependent on the local water conditions. The bristlecone pine (Pineaus longeva) thrives in places because if the scarcity of water. Found in Inyo County’s White Mountains (among a few other places) the pine lives on north-facing dolomite slopes, where it doesn’t have competition with other trees. These are some of the oldest living things in existence; a tree in the White Mountains is approaching 5000 years old.

Not so tied to local microclimates, there’s something even older. The creosote bush (Larrea Tridentata) with its yellow flowers is a common sight in the Great Basin deserts of the southwest. Creosote bushes reproduce by growing and splitting into separate plants. As this continues every 30 to 90 years, a single plant will slowly change into a ring-shaped colony of identical clones of the original. There is a ring of bushes in the Lucerne Valley with an estimated age of almost 12,000 years – it’s been alive since the last ice age.

Finally, and I’d never heard of this until reading up on the creosote, there’s the “Jurupa Oak”, a clonal colony of Palmer’s oak (Quercus palmeri) in Riverside County. Palmer’s oak is a shrub, although it can grow up into a small tree. It sometimes forms a clonal colony, and the colony in Jurupa has been estimated to be around 13,000 years old. An article states it’s the subject of discussion between local Native Americans, city government, and a developer that has its eye on the site.

I’ve seen both the redwood trees and the bristlecone pine many times. I knew of the creosote rings but wasn’t aware of the location of the “King Clone” until I wrote this. Normally, finding out about the creosote and the oaks close enough to me to visit them both in a day’s drive my wife and I would be on the road to see them this morning. But with the stay at home orders in effect, that will have to wait for another day. They’ve been around for thousands of years, and if the developer keeps its word to protect the oak, they’ll be there when we’re all free to go visit California again.

When I was learning to fly, part of learning to navigate was reading an aeronautical chart. Today you can download them for free to your phone, and if you use the right software you can even have a little plane icon on the chart to show you where you are.

Air traffic controllers direct planes to and from “fixes”, points marked on the chart. A fix is named with a five letter word that often doesn’t have enough vowels in it, like IKEA furniture. They’re assigned by a division in the FAA, according to a dry sounding procedure, FAA Order JO 7400.2H.

Looking at a chart on a trip to Cleveland a couple years ago (I wasn’t flying – I was on an airliner), I saw an intersection named LEBRN. LEBRN makes sense for Cleveland – or at least it did at the time. But it didn’t occur to me to check fix names here in California until now.

The HLYWD ONE arrival to LAX contains the fixes GABBL, CHPLN, NWMAN, ESTWD, MCQWN, MDLER, FNNDA and MNROE. The ANJLL FOUR arrival has HAKMN, CGNEY, SLLRS, SHTNR, FLOJO, GLESN, OTOOL, BCALL, LEMMN and CAANN. The BOGET TWO arrival adds SNTRA, but also WNCHL, GLAZD, CREME, COWWS and CHKNZ. Also in LA there’s a HUULL. Going from BIKNG to RUNNN takes you to IRNMN. There’s a LAAVA next to LAAMP, and a UCANN next to DOUIT. You can arrive in San Diego via LUCKI LYNDI.

San Francisco arrivals from the wine country may pass through MRRLO, MLBEC, MSCAT or CORKK. You might arrive on SERFR, NRRLI, WWAVS and EPICK. You’ll find RAIDR near San Rafael, and SNUPY near Santa Rosa. A Deadhead could fly TYDYE TRUKN GRTFL DEDHD COSMC while a venture capitalist flies SILCN VLLEY APLLE GGUGL The last two I found at aerosavvy.com, along with this note: there were apparently some fixes near Palm Beach named DNNLD, TRMMP and UFIRD, but the rumor is the FAA renamed them after pilots refused to fly them or the IVNKA arrival.

It seems LeBron’s waypoint is gone now, too. I guess navigation fix fame isn’t as permanent or as visible as a star along Hollywood Boulevard, but no one will attack your monument with a jackhammer or let their dog poop on it.

National Burrito Day is this week. It’s the first Thursday in April and in 2020 that makes it April 2nd.

It’s appropriate to discuss burritos during the current “safer at home” order since I’d argue the burrito is an almost perfect take out food. You can get it with almost anything in it, especially in California. You can hold it in one hand. If you forgo pouring salsa on before each bite you can eat it as you drive, as long as you are aware of the possibility of the flour tortilla at the bottom bursting and splashing onto your shirt and your seatbelt. That is known between my wife and I as a “burrito failure”, and it’s caused a trip back home before work for me at least once.

If your car is parked while you eat you can always rest the cup of hot salsa on the dashboard between bites. Especially if you drive a Prius. That car is all dashboard. The desk in my office is smaller.

There’s plenty of burrito history on Wikipedia’s burrito page; I won’t summarize it here. What I’d like to note is that my wife and I had burritos at several of the “…to’s” places in San Diego, which were all good, and also Santana, where we became devotees of the “California burrito”. Today this seems to be any burrito with French fries in it.

There is something especially good about a burrito with potatoes in it; I’ve had mashed potatoes on a breakfast burrito and it’s worth getting up for. Come to think of it, potatoes are good with a lot of things. This extends to sandwiches. For decades, Primanti’s in Pittsburgh has put coleslaw and French fries on sandwiches. It’s pretty rare that I get there, but I get sardine sandwiches that way. It’s awesome. I remember reading they did that for the long haul truckers who would buy a sandwich to eat while they drove. They apparently didn’t want to have to juggle fries and slaw. I approve. I think the truck drivers would be okay with burritos.

I’ve had an “Arizona burrito” in Tucson which was indistinguishable from a California burrito except for longitude. I don’t know if this phenomenon has happened elsewhere.

For all three of you who are reading this, try to have a burrito on Thursday while keeping responsibly socially distant.

It’s the end of the first week of serious social distance, and it’s been about like one would expect. The company I work for sent out an email on Monday instructing everyone who could work from home to do that. So I set my laptop up in the room my wife and I have always called “the office”. Working from home is a bit more difficult than being on site, but I’m certainly not going to complain. I’m still employed.

The reason I bring this up is that on the shelf above my computer monitor is Kevin Starr’s eight book Americans and the California Dream series. I’ve started the first book a half dozen times or so and never finished it. But with the time I’m likely to have for the next several weeks I have no excuse to not actually be reading them instead of looking at them on the shelf. Not during working hours, of course.

Add to that California, The Great Exception by Cary McWiliams and rereading Joan Didion’s Where I Was From and Mike Davis’ City of Quartz. For extra credit, Obi Kaufman’s California Field Atlas and The State of Water and there’s no way I get through it all before we’re all back to our usual anti-social society. At least I hope so.

On an associated note, I’ve noticed some good and not so good things in my fellow Californians this week. It seems most of us are actually staying home; I went by the office to get some things I needed on Tuesday and at 9am the 405 was 70 mph both ways. The traffic (as shown by the local news helicopters and the web) is a small fraction of normal. On the other hand, half a dozen people on the 405 used the light traffic to drive even dumber than usual. Saturday’s news had footage of a bunch of people out on the beach (who the governor called out that evening by telling them to grow up). I’ve had people on bicycles startle me from behind on the sidewalk obviously closer than six feet, and pedestrians shoot me the stink-eye when I walk into the empty street to avoid them.

I’ve been reading a couple books about the 1918 pandemic, and if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that this outbreak is serious beyond description. I’m guessing there are less than five people who read this blog and whoever you are I don’t want to lose any of you. So stay home, read (from my list or your own), binge watch California’s Gold, and stay six feet away from everyone when you go out to look for toilet paper (since you haven’t been able to buy any for the last week).

Fog is pretty simple in concept. It’s a cloud that’s really close to the ground. Fog forms when the surface temperature and dew point are close together – around 5° F or so.

California has a few different types of fog; there’s Tule fog, endemic to the Central Valley. There’s the coastal fog of San Francisco, which has a name and a Twitter account (@KarlTheFog) – this is also the fog that waters the coastal redwoods. There’s also “June gloom”, a Southern California phenomenon helped along by the Catalina eddy, occurring in the late spring and early summer.

Of these, I think the northern coastal fog is the most famous – “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”, which is usually misattributed to Mark Twain. However, the Tule fog is the most notorious – it’s responsible for the occasional hundred-car pileup along I-5, and is California’s leading cause of weather related traffic accidents.

Tule fog happens when the ground cools through a clear sky at night, causing a temperature inversion, which is the state when lower air is cooler than higher air. The fog is kind of self-sustaining as it keeps the sunlight from warming the ground, which cannot warm the air, which doesn’t lower the humidity and dissipate the fog. Further, since the Valley is surrounded by mountains, the fog can be trapped and persist for days. There’s a good explanation in the Los Angeles Times (and explanation of the effects of climate change) here.

My wife and I live near a freeway (as many people in Southern California do) and I think I can hear more freeway noise when it’s foggy. Of course Wikipedia has an explanation for that. It could also be due to the fact that the wind is generally calmer then, too.

Fog is not what people from out of state think about when they think of California but it is one thing that California means to me. It keeps things warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. It waters the coastal redwoods and the Central Valley crops. Fog is a break from the continual sunshine (and the seemingly more frequent heat) of Southern California. An occasional gray day makes the bright days seem brighter. Even if I hear more traffic noise.

I read a number of blogs about water. One I read with more frequency than others is On the Public Record (OtPR). I’ve been reading it since I saw it in an article in the Los Angeles Times. The writer is credible, smart, thorough, and possesses a style that makes for entertaining reading. At least for me.

One item mentioned in the LAT article was The California Water Atlas. OtPR mentions it in response to a reader looking for background material on California water. “All the cool kids have one. Don’t know if it has information you couldn’t find online these days, but having one in your office is part of the secret handshake.” I decided I wanted one but it took me a couple years (and seeing a citation of it in an Edward Tufte book) to get around to buying one on eBay. I think I paid $80 for it. But it cost $39.86 (plus $2.39 in sales tax for California residents) in 1980. That works out to about $130 today, according to the first inflation calculator I found online. So I guess I got a deal.

However, you don’t have to spend anything for a virtual copy. It’s available as a .pdf from the David Rumsey Map Collection and it’s worth downloading the big version (180MB). I don’t know how much of the material is still current, but it’s worth having for a couple reasons. One is that it’s impressive that a state agency would undertake a publication like this, and for another it’s probably the best example of graphic literacy in a book that I’ve ever seen. In an article in the Jan/Feb 1980 Sierra by Marc Reisner (which I found tucked into my copy of the atlas) he said, “Some of the graphics convey at a careful glance what whole books do not teach.” If people built their presentations this way PowerPoint wouldn’t have such a bad reputation.

The book itself needs a pretty large coffee table to be a coffee table book. It’s almost 19″ tall and over 32″ wide when open. That only makes the content more impressive, though. And if having a larger table and a deeper shelf is all I need to be one of the “cool kids”, that’s something that I can do.

I guess we’ll start with the title. I never heard “the” used in front of a number of a highway before my wife and I came here. It’s used for all flavors of highway – “the 1”, “the 101”, “the 5”. Interstate 405 has another name as well – “the San Diego Freeway”. I would guess other names people use for it aren’t appropriate here.

The 405 is a bypass that leaves the 5 freeway northbound near El Toro in Orange County. It runs west of the 5 until meeting up again near San Fernando 72 miles later in the “Valley”. You can tell it’s a loop from the 5 from the route number – three digits starting with an even number (meaning bypass – an odd number means a spur) and ends in “05” (the 5 is the parent freeway). Since the 405 has only one route between its two intersections with the 5, it’s a bypass. If there was another branch to the east of the 5, the 405 would be a beltway.

I’ve been driving my stretch of this freeway about a quarter of its lifetime, and in that 15 or so years I’ve seen a number of changes. The replacement of one Goodyear blimp with another after an accident and the new blimp’s inflatable hangar (which is usually not inflated). The proliferation of large digital billboards vying for your attention while you’re driving in the pitch black before work. Auto dealers with sports cars displayed so you can compare them to the car you’re stuck going 4 mph in. This is only outdone in the irritation department by the “experience center” built by a well known sports car maker where a golf course used to be – now you can see people thrashing sports cars around a closed track while you sit in traffic anticipating the day they carve another carpool lane out of the highway and charge a toll so that the rest of us can go even slower.

The last paragraph has a bitter tone, but the 405 isn’t all bad. So let me close by observing that there are a lot worse places to be stuck in traffic than between the Valley and Orange County. The weather is usually good enough to put your windows down. The drivers on the 405 are as good in general as anywhere else (how would you measure that?) Occasionally you get to see the blimp making a landing. Los Angeles has two NPR stations to listen to, so when one has a pledge drive, you can always switch to the other (after donating, of course). And without the 405, my commute would be even worse.

Trona is an unusual place. I first visited – well, I didn’t actually stop. Let’s say I first experienced it when I drove through it on my way to Death Valley, and that was 30 or so years ago.

Trona is a company town. The core of Trona is a mining operation and chemical plant on the “shore” of Searles Dry Lake, a vast expanse of potash and boron. In the ‘50s Trona’s workers lived in company-owned housing and were paid in company scrip. Trona had its own money (take that, San Francisco). Not all was Mid-century modern, though. The town was the setting for several strikes during the 60s through the ‘80s, one of which is memorialized in the book Trona, Bloody Trona, which is worth a read. But today, economic forces and increasing automation have turned Trona into a miniature version of the post-industrial Midwest, complete with decaying housing and apparent drug problems.

The historical marker along the road states that “half the natural elements” are found in Searles Dry Lake. It goes on to say that that the lake itself was discovered by John and Dennis Searles in 1862 and they mined it until 1897. Also noted is that the lake is the “world’s largest chemical storehouse” without defining what “large” is in this context, or for that matter what “storehouse” means.

However, the lake is rich enough to support the Searles Valley Gem and Mineral Society’s “Gem-O-Rama”. I haven’t been to one yet, but the website is here. I’m sure it’s serious work for geologists and fun for rock hounds, but to me it looks like a 12 year old boy’s dream weekend of high explosives, heavy equipment, and mud. However, the point is the minerals. The most popular is pink halite which is sodium chloride – plain table salt – colored by bacteria living in the water which the salt is deposited out of after drying. Note – use brine (available for purchase) to wash the mud off. With fresh water the pink crystal dissolves with the mud.

The Trona Pinnacles are nearby. They are not to be confused with Pinnacles National Park, 220 miles to the west-northwest, mentioned in last week’s article. Trona’s pinnacles are on a much smaller scale but are probably more famous, having appeared in a Star Trek movie.

I’m not sure why Trona occupies such a large place in my head. The fiction I’ve written (I’ve taken writing classes – not that you can tell) seems to gravitate toward there. I’m always excited to talk to anyone who has been there. I’ve watched a couple movies set in Trona. But I’ve probably not spent two hours in town in my entire life. I never had enough courage to have a beer at the “Searles Lake Yacht Club” before it burned down, and I didn’t see any need to look up any of the dozen or so churches on the “Welcome to…” sign.

It can be pretty and ugly at the same time – it’s at the foot of the Sierra and just south of Death Valley with sharp high desert air and long colorful views, but has a distinct chemical smell and miles of strangely shaped pipes and huge piles of various ores and earths. I’m sure there are plenty of friendly people there – it seems like the Gem-O-Rama is a great party. At the same time the impression you get driving through on 178 is that you’re trespassing in a factory that someone would rather you not be anywhere nearby.

I guess a lot of human experience is like that.

There’s something about condors. They’re kind of hard to look at closely until you get used to them. They look like vultures, but even more so. Neither species has a look that humans immediately appreciate. They don’t have the regal bearing of an eagle, or the mystical countenance of an owl, or the calm demeanor of a Mourning Dove. They’re ugly when you first look at them. And it’s a shocking kind of ugly. An orange head that wouldn’t look out of place on a clown. A ruffled collar that looks like it belongs on a 1930s movie villain’s coat. There is a point in those fashion choices, though. The reason that’s commonly given for the naked heads of condors (and vultures) is to keep the nasty organisms they encounter while sticking their heads into carrion from sticking to them. But I guess I don’t completely understand this. Bald Eagles are to an extent carrion feeders too, and not only are their heads covered with feathers, their head feathers are white. Go figure.

Whatever the reason is that they look the way they do, once you get past the surface appearance the condor is a spectacular creature. Besides the fact that they’re huge, they can fly hundreds of miles a day on thermals with the grace of… well, nothing else I can think of. You might think they’re looking for carrion, but they’re really searching for vultures. Vultures have a better sense of smell, so the condors depend on them to locate dinner. When the condors see the vultures on a carcass, they show up and drive the vultures off. Not to beat up on Bald Eagles again, but I’ve seen them do essentially the same thing. Thirty eagles watching the tailwater of a dam will mob the one who actually catches a fish. (This is not intended as political commentary.)

As of this writing, there are over 300 California Condors in the wild and over 200 in captivity. But they’re still on the precipice of non-existence. And they’re only doing as well as they are through intense assistance from humans. Every California Condor alive in the late ‘80s (22 or 24, depending on who you ask) was captured and the population was rebuilt through an extensive captive breeding program. Since reintroduction in 1991, the new wild population has been growing and in the last couple years has produced more condors born in the wild than die over the same period. But due to the hazards of lead fragments in parts of game animals formerly left in the field (the complete ban on all lead ammunition for all hunting in California took place in July 2019) and plastics ingested by young birds, condors are still certain to depend on human help for the foreseeable future.

If you’ve seen a condor in flight, you know that it’s worth the effort to keep them around. My wife and I saw six of them at Pinnacles National Monument a year or so ago, and didn’t mind the drive to get there from where we were staying at Morro Bay. It was late in the afternoon when we saw them. There were vultures soaring in the updrafts near the monument’s rock formations when in came three huge birds with white under their wings. A California Condor can weigh upwards of 20 pounds and can have a nine foot wingspan. Vultures are big birds (and graceful, effortless fliers) and the condors were in another class on both counts. We saw three more over a nearby peak. They’re at least as beautiful in flight as they are “ugly” up close.

California has a state bird that isn’t the condor. It’s the California Quail, a cute little busybody that has a question mark on its head. They’re a lot easier to find than condors (although neither is as common as a California Gull or a California Scrub-Jay). But when it came time to put something on the back of the statehood quarter with John Muir and Half Dome, it was the condor that got the nod.

Fortunately, on the quarter the condor’s head is too small to see what it really looks like.

Editor’s Note: I was certainly not on a first name basis with the subject of this article. I didn’t know him. However, there is only one person who this single word title could refer to.

I kind of assumed I wouldn’t get far in this project before coming to this topic. I’ll start off by stating directly that Huell Howser is a substantial inspiration for what I’m doing here. There is no way for me to consider doing a random collection of pieces loosely connected to California without recognizing the influence of watching countless hours of California’s Gold. I‘m a huge fan of the program and I likely ended up with a similar vision of the California reflected in it.

There are articles online and work in print that covers Huell’s biographical details so I won’t do that here. If you don’t already know that the collection of California’s Gold and the rest of his work is available online from Chapman University, here’s a link to it.

California’s Gold consists largely of very long duration takes shot by a cameraman with a handheld chasing Huell around somewhere obscure. And it all seems totally spontaneous. Huell had a talent for getting someone to respond as naturally as if the camera wasn’t there. Part of that was probably due to his enthusiasm for discovering something for the first time and being really interested in what his subjects were doing and saying. He was often a bit over the top – a friend of mine told me that if we had a game where we took a drink every time Huell said “That’s amazing!”, we wouldn’t be able to drive after the first evening and we’d be ready for detox in a week.

What really had (and still has) an effect on me, though, is the idea that viewed the right way there are fascinating and important stories everywhere. Everyone has at least one. And if you approach and present them honestly, people will be interested and will listen to and appreciate what you’re trying to do. Huell seemed to be comfortable in his own skin and knew he was doing the work that he was good at.

I only saw Huell in person once. Typically he was following someone around asking questions with a cameraman in tow. Even if I’d wanted to there’d be no way to stop him to talk. But if I had the opportunity to talk to him now, there’s no question what I’d say:

That was amazing.