The California Files

Electrical Glitch

Glitch is a good word, isn't it? It denotes "problem." That's what I had.

I went out yesterday evening as we were setting the table outside for dinner to turn on the stereo system in the garage. Nothing. OK, the iPod needed to be charged. Still nothing. Uh-oh.

My first thought was that my ancient El Cheapo receiver finally had died. Would not have surprised me.

But I just now went out into the garage to brave the dust and spiders and cubic stuff stacked everywhere to see what's what.

A glitch, is what. The connections between the receiver and the speakers were grotty (another great word). So were the connections between the receiver and the CD player, and between it and the iPod. All connex renewed, music returns to the garage and back yard. Those little JBL speakers once again are loud enough to annoy the neighbors. And there will be music for dinner tonight. But not loud enough to annoy the neighbors. Really!

Perfect. I love it when glitches are solved without spending a dime. Now all I have to do is find relief from the dust, spiders and cubic stuff.

-JFT

The Lord of the Flies, Part II

There comes a moment when you get into something far more deeply than you ever intended. The wise ones advise, "When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."

Well, hell. When was I ever wise?

As I have previously recounted, the Greek Goddess gave me a gorgeous fly rod and reel for Christmas, the better with which to go fishing in my now abundant spare time. She included a nice fly box and a selection of flies.

So I took a casting clinic and signed up for a trip with the local casting club.

That done, I went online to see which flies were catching fish in the Eastern Sierra, where we will go. I made some notes, then ordered the ones I seemed to need.

The next day comes an e-mail from the coach of our group of first-timers advising some of the same flies I'd just ordered, plus some others. So I ordered those, too.

So the first lightly-populated fly box, seen in in this photo, has become partner to a second one. Both of them and their current contents are seen below, in the second photo. That first one, on the left in the second photo, now holds wet flies, little bitty things. The second one, which for some reason I've had for a while, holds a burgeoning collection of dry flies.

The thing is, they're all different, and they're in different sizes. Some of them are so tiny I can hardly grasp them with my big, clumsy fingers. How I'm going to manage them with cold, wet hands I have no idea. Drop and lose many of them, is my best guess.

No, I haven't any idea which is which, or which ones to use to actually, like, you know, catch trout. Which means that it is time for me to stop digging.

I guess we shall see. Going to be a very interesting trip. I also bought a net. I'll probably be punished by the gods of fishing for my hubris.

-JFT

The Life of a Cat

(After much observation, I'm pretty sure this is the way this works with our two cats, Rio and Vivian:)

Rio, opening one eye during his daylong nap: Hey, I'm hungry. Are you hungry?

Vivian, yawning: Well, Dad just fed us. But yeah, I could eat.

R: Good. Let's go bug Dad.

V: Good idea. Let's go bug Dad.

(They come to where ever I am and, shoulder to shoulder, stare at me accusingly, as if they are weak from starvation and about to collapse any second. I stop whatever it is I'm doing and feed them, either the one variety of Fancy Feast they will eat or the dry treats they seem to love.)

Rio, taking a desultory sniff: Hey, this isn't what I was hoping he'd give us. Let's go back to sleep.

V, who always follows R's lead: Good idea. Let's go back to sleep. We can try again later.

R: Yeah, good idea! Let's go back to sleep. Maybe Dad will give us something decent next time we pester him. After all, it's his job.

(And so goes the cycle at our house.) 

-JFT

California's Flood Risk

Well, the risk is for the Central Valley, really, not California in its totality. But the resulting crisis will affect the entire state, and beyond.

I've been reading a good bit about California and its crazy wet/dry cycles lately, most recently in a book titled, "The West Without Water," by B. Lynn Ingram and Frances Malamud-Roam.

The premise is simple, really. The record in geology, tree rings and many other sources shows that every 100 to 200 years, the Central Valley gets an amount of rain that brings a huge flood.

There have been many smaller floods, but the last really big one was in 1862. Downtown Sacramento was under water that stood 20 feet deep. Eventually, the entire Central Valley was flooded by up to 50 feet of water.

It's why the street level in old town Sacramento is now 15 to 20 feet above the Sacramento River. All those old guys hauled in enough dirt to raise the floor of that part of the city.

These floods happen because of what's called an "atmospheric river," also known as the "pineapple express." They are a series of very wet storms out of the south and central Pacific that carry huge amounts of moisture into the state to be wrung out when those storms hit the Sierras.

These "atmospheric rivers" occur when strong El Niño conditions occur in the Pacific Ocean. Meteorologists say one appears to be forming now.

It may continue to form, it may not. There's no way to know. But they appear to follow very dry years. So next winter could be very wet. It might not be. Again, no way to know; we can barely predict the weather out 10 days in advance. We sure can't predict what might happen months from now. But when, not if, floods do come, the low-lying areas will be the first to be under water. Imagine the whole Central Valley flooded. A huge inland lake.

Flooding of residential areas - Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto and much more - will be a huge problem, but that won't be the only problem. The Valley, about 50 miles wide and about 300 miles long, supplies a huge proportion of the food eaten in America. Any flood will destroy agriculture in the Valley for a long time.

Now, this isn't just me being a crackpot. At least no more than usual. It is a very real scenario.

None of this may happen for years. I hope that's the case. But these unknowns are worth paying attention to, every bit as much, I think, as the earthquake risk is worth paying attention to.

-JFT 

Jackpot in a Brave New World!

About 18 years ago, not long after I resigned as senior editor at Cycle World magazine to try my hand as a freelancer, I was presented with a proposal to write another book. My first two did very well indeed so I said, "Sure, why not?"

This one bombed. Absolutely bombed. It had gorgeous photography and pretty decent writing, if I do say so myself, covering the tangled history of Ducati, the motorcycle manufacturer, in the U.S.  But the publisher botched promotion of the thing. At least in my view.

Ah, but today, all these years later, a silver lining arrived in the post. I received notification that the book, titled "Ducati" and now long out of print, has been converted to an e-book. This notification informed me that my first royalty check from this relatively new form of publishing will soon be on its way to me.

Grand total? $1.49 for three e-books sold. I am of course overjoyed and am trying to figure out how to spend these riches. A pack of gum, maybe?

Like I said, a brave new world.

-JFT

Necessity meets Invention

The box you see here is a butter churn with a special and interesting history.

A number of years - well, decades - ago we visited Jersey, important to us for a number of reasons, not least because Laura's father was a leading breeder and milker of registered Jersey cattle. (We also were trying to escape from France, but that's another story.)

While on the island, which is about 45 square miles in size, we visited John LeFleur, a Jersey dairyman who was a friend of Laura's pop. This photo shows he and Laura inspecting one of his cows. As always, you can click on it to make it larger.

LeFleur, now long gone, was old enough to remember the German occupation of the Channel Islands during World War II. Sitting with us in the living room, or "lounge," of his traditional old stone home, he talked a good bit about the hardship the occupation brought. One of the things he mentioned was that the German army stripped away nearly everything of value, right down to the farmers' butter churns.

Now, a main characteristic of the milk Jersey cows produce is that it is high in butterfat. So it makes wonderful butter. But you have to have a churn.

What the farmers did, LeFleur told us, was cut up their maple table tops and with the pieces, build new churns.

The day after our visit, we cruised an antique shop on the island, which is several hours by car ferry away from France, and found this example of one of those home-made churns. Yep, it's maple and clearly was made from a table top. Naturally, we had to bring it home. That silver item atop it is a replica of the milk jugs the farmers on Jersey traditionally used. We pretty much had to have that, too, along with a real, fullsized one.

We think this unlikely churn is a wonderful reminder of Jersey cows, the island of Jersey, and its interesting history.

-JFT

Tectonic Crash

"I'd better invest in some beachfront Nevada property." So went a couple of posts I saw yesterday following the earthquake we experienced here in the Los Angeles area.

A joke, I know - nobody in their right mind actually believes that part of the state could separate from the mainland, do they?

Here's what geologists are saying actually is happening: The Channel Islands ride the Pacific plate, which continues its collision course with the North American plate. They get closer to the California coastline at a rate of an inch or so a year, or so one reads.

At that rate, it will be just a few million, or maybe billion, years before they crash into the California coastline. They will become part of the mainland.

When that happens, California will gain area and its shape will change. And at least some California beachfront property no longer will be beachfront. Apparently this is a continuing process that has happened previously.

Of course, by the time it happens again, humans may well have been banished from planet Earth by climate change and other developments.

But hey, who really cares? I certainly don't. I find it difficult to escape the notion that once we're gone, Earth will be a better place, given all we continue to do to screw it up. Even if California looks funny.

-JFT

Tectonic Crash

"I'd better invest in some beachfront Nevada property." So went a couple of posts I saw yesterday following the earthquake we experienced here in the Los Angeles area.

A joke, I know - nobody in their right mind actually believes that part of the state could separate from the mainland, do they?

Here's what geologists are saying actually is happening: The Channel Islands ride the Pacific plate, which continues its collision course with the North American plate. They get closer to the California coastline at a rate of an inch or so a year, or so one reads.

At that rate, it will be just a few million, or maybe billion, years before they crash into the California coastline. They will become part of the mainland.

When that happens, California will gain area and its shape will change. And at least some California beachfront property no longer will be beachfront. Apparently this is a continuing process that has happened previously.

Of course, by the time it happens again, humans may well have been banished from planet Earth by climate change and other developments.

But hey, who really cares? I certainly don't. I find it difficult to escape the notion that once we're gone, Earth will be a better place, given all we continue to do to screw it up. Even if California looks funny.

-JFT

Going Barbless

I'm on the countdown to my first fishing trip using fly-casting gear.

I've gotten, sort of, the rudiments of fly casting from a three-session, nine-hour casting clinic provided by the Pasadena Casting Club - and very well done it was, too. Believe me, this is not as easy as it looks, not if you're going to do it right - getting the right-sized (small loop) in the line, not hooking yourself in the ear, or worse, and setting the fly down lightly where you wish to set it down.

There are lots of ways to cast badly. Naturally, I am proficient in all of them. But it's coming. To help myself a little, I'm doing an additional casting class with a local fishing store, if only to get a different perspective on the process. And also because more practice can only help.

And then, the PCC's angling stalwarts will take a bunch of beginners (at my age, it's hard to imagine being a beginner at anything, but there it is) up to the Eastern Sierra, probably lower Owens River, for a go at the wily trout.

But I learned something interesting yesterday. Many of the areas in the Eastern Sierra offer only catch-and-release fishing. What the rangers are doing, I was told, is going through fly boxes to make certain that the barbs are removed from the hooks on the flies those boxes contain. This is simple to do, though the flies are tiny, especially with my fumblefingers - see the photo, which you can enlarge by clicking on it, and in which scale is provided by a 25-cent piece: You just pinch the barb against the hook's shaft with a pair of needle-nose pliers and the barb breaks off.

The rangers check by pushing the hook through the material on a shirt sleeve. If the hook slides right back out, you're good. If it doesn't, you're busted and an expensive citation is the result. (It occurs to me that being barbless will also be helpful when one hooks oneself through a nostril, or similar....)

Now, I don't own the hundreds of flies that experienced fisher people own. I've got just a very few. But I don't need no stinking citations, expensive or otherwise. So my chore this coming week will be to sit at the table out in the back garden making sure that all my small collection of flies pass muster. If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it right.

-JFT

Intoxication

Back when the world was still real, most of the San Fernando Valley was covered by citrus groves and my grandparents, Frank and Esther Dunnington, lived in Van Nuys.

Driving from the ranch in the Mojave Desert to Van Nuys, we'd use Highway 14 and Sepulveda Boulevard. For miles, Sepulveda ran through those groves. In the spring, the perfume of the blossoms was intoxicating.

Today, the Valley is a textbook example of blight comprised of strip malls and slums, an example of how completely screwed up Los Angeles is. But we have several citrus trees in our back yard, including an ancient grapefruit tree that is now blossoming. I spend most afternoons sitting out there with a book.

The perfume is absolutely delicious. Reminds me so what of what the Valley used to smell like. The only thing better, I think, is Laura's Arpège.

-JFT