Last week: A Week with No Internet!
I
went up with a friend to her family’s cabin at Fallen Leaf Lake. For
her birthday, we went out on the lake in a motorboat and looked at the
mountains on one side, the high pine-covered glacial moraine on the
other and the fancy houses along the shore. Then we ate a yummy lunch at
the store/cafe on a balcony looking out at the lake. Her cabin is up
away from the lake, with a view from the deck up to the granite lower
ridge of Glen Alpine Basin and down to the little creek running past.
The next day we hiked up to two smaller lakes; the one with
famous-lemonade-since-1917 had boulders on the far side with kids
jumping off them into the water. The two of us drank a pitcher for four,
which you have to so as not to get dehydrated. The day after that we
walked along the creek to the falls where the water goes over giant rock
steps.
But
the most memorable sight of the week was much smaller. I’d seen a mouse
streaking around the floors a couple of times, so when I heard rustling
right by my bed in the night I knew what it was. I turned on the light,
looked around, and then down into the wastebasket and there was a
lovely little brown speckled mouse with cleverly folded ears sitting
perfectly still and looking up at me with its big dark eyes. I could see
that Beatrix Potter didn’t have to do a thing to make mice cute; this
real one was cuter than any of hers. I picked up the basket, thinking to
put the creature outside, but it jumped right out and scurried into its
corner. I put the basket in the other room, so it could rustle out
there if it wanted to. “little itchy mousies/with scuttling/eyes rustle
and run and/hidehidehide”—e.e. cummings.
While I’m here I’m continuing to enjoy A Crack in The Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906.
The
author (Simon Winchester) says that the 1906 earthquake was the first
natural disaster to be captured on moving picture film. I went to a
showing in Berkeley maybe ten years ago of some of this film and it
brought home to me, in a way still photographs never had, some sense of
what my mother saw. I remember particularly seeing a shot of a man
walking past smoking rubble and thinking The world my mother knew, suddenly this is what it looked like. And she was only five and a half. Now
I am remembering being surprised when a friend told me how afraid she’d
been that there would be an air raid, when she was a child during World
War II in Kansas.
I lived on the coast, where that might have been more likely, and I
don’t remember being afraid. I wonder if our parents’ demeanor was
different. So I wonder if my grandparents’ going about the practical
steps to recover from the quake was comforting to their kids; their
house was unlivable but Malvina told me her parents took bolts of cloth
and treadle machines from their tailor shop out to Golden Gate Park and
proceeded to sew up a tent to stay in. It sounds like they did not get
hysterical. Actually, Winchester makes the point that by 1906 science
had progressed to the point where most people attributed earthquakes to
forces of nature that could some day be figured out rather than to the
unpredictable wrath of God, and there was less hysteria than there had
been in previous quakes. He also notes that, though hardly anybody
noticed at the time, a whole new age of science had just begun. In 1905,
Albert Einstein, then an unknown clerk, wrote the equation that was to
usher in the Atomic Age: E=mc2.
We are still reeling from that one. I looked in the index for Hotaling
and sure enough, in a footnote Winchester quotes an anonymous rhymster
of 1906:
If, as some say, God spanked the town
For being frisky,
Why did he burn the churches down
And save Hotaling’s Whiskey?
Sunday:
Time
to go home now, both because this is the day we planned to leave and
because the rain started in the middle of last night after five days of
near-perfect weather. Luckily, it stopped in time for us to load the
car.
Friday:
Now
I’m back at home and practicing for a little gig tomorrow for a Bernal
Heights History Day in the cafeteria at St. Anthony's School at 299
Precita Avenue in SF. I lived on Bernal Heights in San Francisco from
1965-74 and I'll tell some anecdotes and sing some of my mother's songs
about the Bay Area from that period. And one or two of mine from
later--I didn’t start writing songs till 1975. Doors open at 11 a.m.,
I'm on when enough people get there or 11:45, whichever comes first.
Refreshments.
Also
catching up on email. One about the desert tortoise removal planned in
order to expand a military base in Southern California. Shouldn’t move
those guys anyway, they don’t take to it, and for a military base of all
things. My dad loved the desert and we visited it often when I was a
kid. Write a letter.
And next Wednesday I’ll be going to a MoveOn vigil for health care reform at 8pm at the top of Solano Avenue. See ya. Or check the MoveOn site for one near you.
©2009 by Nancy Schimmel
Fallen
Leaf Lake, just south of Lake Tahoe but higher. Where we stayed we
could see those far mountains covered with snow in this winter photo but
bare granite when we were there
Friday, August 28, 2009
FALLEN LEAF LAKE AND BACK TO GIGS & ACTIONS
