April Sunrise

When I opened the curtain at 5:45 there was already a blue-gray glow in the western sky. We’re a third of the way to the solstice. I wont wake up in the dark anymore till August.

I sit in the green plastic Adirondack chair with the big camera beside me waiting for the sunrise over Cuesta Ridge. I’ve come back to it after noticing that the older plant photos on my screensaver have much more depth and brilliance than the ones I’ve taken recently with the point-and-shoot, even though it has higher resolution. It’s the lens stupid.

My perch is a new seat in the garden, three quarters of the way up the bank above the grape arbor at a switchback in the south trail. I decided to carve it out of the adobe clay on Saturday while sprucing up the yard to prepare for our big party this weekend.

Two rock doves clean up spilled seeds under the bird feeder, a hummingbird visits the hummingbird sage, a bee sips at the holly-leaf cherry flowers.

Week 4 of classes, Spring mind bursting with things to say and write and plan and execute.

I’ll be returning to this spot nestled between a Channel Island Ironwood and a Sugarbush.

A temperate dawn soothed by a wisp of breeze, disturbed by the barking dog next door and the hubbub of traffic.

Now the sun paints the east face of Caballo Peak, and now touches the grapevine and the belly of the goldfinch in the pine branch overhead. Now it casts shadows on the path. Now it’s 7:00 o’clock and time to get to work.

But first just a few more pictures.

Two Boys at Spooner's Cove

Ian's last day of Spring Break from Junior Kindergarten was the end of a taxing two weeks for me. April 1 was Flora!, the Sierra Club Fundraiser I'd been planning and worrying about since January. The day after, I returned to teaching after a nine-months' recess. The day after that I launched a challenging new course on Argumentation about Sustainability focussing on Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth. Last weekend was the Focus the Nation organizing conference in Las Vegas and the day after a press to write up my report on it followed by nine more hours of lecturing on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The tough slog of grading the first set of English papers was on my schedule Friday. But the sky was bright blue and the hills were still green. Besides, I had required my Ecolit class to listen the poets' invitation to "Rise Up and Come Away," so I too was obliged to obey.

We drove along Foothill Blvd. through the threatened ranchland between Bishops Peak and San Luis Mountain thick with cows and calves trimming the pastures into glittering lawn. The open, black-soiled fields along Los Osos Valley Road seemed hungry for seed or ready to sprout. I asked Ian to repeat the name of the road. At first he struggled and then it rolled off his tongue. The mountains on both sides--Morros and Irish Hills--make this a Valley where the dirt rolls down and turns to soil that grows the crops, I explained. He recognized the rows of Snow Peas with their white polka dots that will turn into the sweet morsels we pick from the planter beside our deck. Los Osos means the bears in Spanish I told him, the name of the town at the end of the road. Watch for bears on either side. By the time we reached the turnoff to Montana De Oro, he'd counted 14--on signs, a mural, woodcarvings and the cast bronze sculpture by the bridge.

"Gwampa, wet's wace to the mountain," he called back to me from the beach. "I cant run with this backpack," I answered. I boosted him on to the ledge sloping up the outcrop, where he passed the time making sand waterfalls, while I struggled to find handholds in the strata to pull myself over the first hump.

After several clumsy efforts I realized I wouldnt make it, and he'd have to come down. I wondered if the cause was the soft rock's weathering since I'd been here last, or other sorts of weathering closer to home.

But there was no shortage of alternatives, and I remembered that last year several Cal Poly students had been swept into the water from this promontory by rogue waves, one to his death.

We noticed an alluring cave carved in the vegetation-covered cliff bordering the north side of the beach. Ian said, "that's a dinosaur cave." The creek that flowed to the sea at the foot of the cliff was low enough to hop with dry shoes. Ian led the way up another sloping ledge into what turned out to be a tunnel rather than a cave, with a perfectly formed arched opening to the sky. We passed through slowly and came around the back to perch on a ledge that looked straight down into the surf, which pounded with a force that carved these rocks like cheese. I kept a tight grip on the rolled-up waistband of his sweatshirt. In the wind-pruned scrub above the cove behind the tunnel, a flourescent red-throated finch burbled above the waters' roar.

On the way back through the tunnel, we found another tunnel at the base of its lower, landward, wall, this one squat and deep. Through it one could see foamy water flowing in and out of the shadowed cove below the finch's perch. One could easily slide down there, but with no way of return.

Back outside, we saw a possible route upward: vertical footholds in the rock leading to an oval opening in the brush that looked like the start of a trail into the dunes. This might be the dinosaur's exit. Ian led the ascent and I followed him through the green tube.

It daylighted at a wooden railing marking a sand trail bordered by blooming bush poppies and silver lupine. A fork of the trail covered with delicate lizard tracks led toward the water and traversed the dune.

Up steep switchbacks and down muddy seeps, we made our way to tidepools and blowholes. Across the expanse of Spooner's Cove, we saw groups of walkers on the popular cliff trail, but here there was no one.





I looked at my watch: 11:30. I had an appointment at the Social Security Office to apply for Medicare. Ian was getting hungry. Off the rocks and up the sand we rambled. On the warm trail that circled back to Reddy in the parking lot, over and over we sang "Dinah wontcha blow."

Easter in Las Vegas

A Personal Report on the Focus the Nation Organizing Conference April 6-8 2007

Introduction

I took the bait for Focus the Nation while attending the first national conference of AASHE, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education in October 2006. That conference attracted 800 faculty and administration activists and featured a panoply of environmentalist superstars. In welcoming remarks, the President of Arizona State University declared that ASU henceforth would stand for Arizona Sustainable University and announced the formation of a Sustainability Institute endowed with a five million dollar grant from the Wrigley family.

The conference’s show of strength raised the confidence of every beleaguered soul who attended, but the only action item I came away with was to set up a chapter of Focus the Nation at my home campus. Dreamed up by Eban Goodstein, an economics professor at Lewis and Clark College, Focus the Nation’s objective suited the immense scope of the climate crisis, yet was defined, immediate and feasible: a nationwide teach-in on Global Warming solutions at a thousand colleges and universities on January 31 2008, just before the primary elections.

Professor of Business, Kate Lancaster, with whom I had worked on several campus sustainability projects, agreed. We tried to recruit Tylor Middlestadt, Cal Poly’s legendary student leader, but he would be graduating before the event, so he put us in touch with two fellow engineering students, Chad Worth and Matt Hutton, who joined our core organizing committee. We met regularly during Fall and Winter quarters, discovered lots of support for the idea on campus, expanded the committee to include three more faculty members, and set to work getting endorsements from the Associated Students, the Faculty Senate and the University Administration. After Eban scheduled an organizing conference for the national group in Las Vegas over Easter weekend and we found a one hundred dollar round trip flight from San Luis Obispo, we all decided to go, whether or not we got funding.

In the sleepy Santa Maria airport, we boarded a huge Alliant Airline jet for the one hour flight. It was packed with a jolly crowd—multigenerational families, golfers, gang bangers, farmworkers, a bachelorette party—all eager to spend their wealth in America’s fastest growing city.Read more »

Ecolit class April 5 2007

Peterson Ranch, above the pole house, looking east. Breathing hard after a brisk walk. French horns and snare drum of the freight train laboring up the grade in the background, twittering of sparrows and finches in a dense grove of sycamore, bay and oak down below, the scream of a young redtail circling overhead, two rooks shouting and sparring in a tree top. Twenty five people spread out out on the hillside silently listening and recording.


A wisp of breeze stirs the stagnant air, cools the sweat on the back of my neck. Flat light, not the Vergillian golden radiance and lengthening shadows of former years. But the overcast makes the new growth flouresce with a dozen versions of green.

The usual April torrent of the creek is down to an October trickle. Not thirty but eight inches of rain this year. Yet around us on the serpentine bloom lupine and tidy tips, blue dicks and blue-eyed grass, monkey flower and johnny jump-ups.

The dell explodes with a rude ecstatic trill. Wings wildly flapping, a small bird darts our way, then glides and swoops into the willows up the hill.

It’s a shame to disrupt this performance and its rapt audience, but I’ve assigned homework and prepared a discussion, and ink and paper has been consumed to print the readings. On the first day of class we read Ovid’s description of the Golden Age, when innocent humanity was sustained by honey and acorns, and also the biblical account of Nature’s creation as a harmonious artwork designed to provide for all the needs of his naked children by a generous parent-God. Today the ancient texts are Vergil’s Georgics—a praise of the farmer’s life acknowledging the immense difficulty of mere survival—and God’s speech from the whirlwind in the Book of Job, where He mocks the good man’s futile search for intelligibility and proclaims the cruel and awesome wildness of His universe.

Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars,
and spreads its wings toward the south?
Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up
and makes its nest on high?
It lives on the rock and makes its home
in the fastness of the rocky crag.
From there it spies the prey;
its eyes see it from far away.
Its young ones suck up blood;
and where the slain are, there it is."

I read the fierce verses and they echo the screams, the croaks and the trills we’ve just heard. They answer Thoreau’s question, the motto of this course:

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him ...whose words were so true, and fresh, and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library... .