The Rigors of the Routine Life: Why I Might Be a Little Bit Homesick

A Friday cat blog, a day late...

I remember a sequence in the movie "The Truman Show" when the assembled cast was trying to convince Truman that he really didn't want to leave his home island; there were posters in the travel agency describing the horrors of terrorism or something, and there were no flights to Fiji for a month, the bus out of town broke down, and when he took a car, a nuclear power plant blew up and blocked the highway. Even as a child, he said he wanted to be an explorer, like the great Magellan. His teacher responded by saying "Oh, you're too late! There's nothing left to explore!"

There's a person I know. He was married for many years, decades actually, to a fine woman. They raised several sons, and he worked every day at a bank. He was a vice-president back in the day when in relatively small banks, vice-presidents were not quite the greedy captains of industry and finance that they are today. Every day he would commute by bus or train into the city, do his work, come home to a meal that was ready as he walked into the back door. There was television, or on Fridays, card games with the sons and their families, and that was the way it was for years. His wife worked every day to make sure his routine was not interrupted. They seemed, when I knew them, to be happy enough with their lives.

Sad events intervened. His wife became seriously ill, and after several hard months, passed away. By then he was retired, and now he was alone. What was to happen now? Disruptive events in life have many outcomes, some good, some not so good.  And some people surprise you. He loved his wife and never has forgotten her. But to say he broke out of a routine is an understatement. He was curious about the world, and decided to see more of it. He made trips to Europe and Russia. He traveled back to the towns he had grown up in during the Great Depression and World War II. He looked up friends and acquaintances from decades past (and he did it the hard way, by telephone book and road maps; Facebook wasn't invented yet!). In his nineties, he is certainly slowing down, but he found a richness in his new life that was quite different than what came before. I respect him in so many ways for that.

So this is a post about the rigors of the routine life. Routine gives our lives structure and stability. We work very hard sometimes to maintain it. We work, we eat, we sleep, we start over again, and there is a certain comfort, a big comfort really, in knowing what is coming next. I certainly have a particular routine in life. It was a different life from the person I spoke of above; I had chanced into a career that I loved, and it was career in which traveling and discovering the world was occasionally part of my job responsibility. I just had to be sure I was bringing students along with me! I'm just a few days away from leaving on a long journey through the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rocky Mountains and I am looking forward to it in so many ways.

But a funny thing happened earlier this year. Actually not a funny thing at all, not in that sense. We've always had to struggle with tight budgets at my college; it's a fact of life that we must not waste taxpayers money, and yet offer the best possible education to our students that we can. But this year was different: the cuts were far deeper and whole programs were terminated. No one knew whose programs were on the chopping block, and it is an ugly feeling knowing that one could possibly lose a job after decades. And too many of my colleagues did lose their jobs. It's a story familiar to untold millions in our country during this depression (and that is what it is; the bankers may have their trillions, satisfying the economists that things are better, but I am surrounded by unemployed friends and foreclosed homes). It has been a scary year.

So I've been puttering about the yard this week, getting things weeded and trimmed so we can leave it for a couple of weeks. And I noticed a lot of beauty and color in the yard that had become so familiar over the years. We hardly landscaped this year; all the flowers that popped up were winter survivors or seedlings left over from last year. But they sprouted, and the porch is kind of a nice place right now in the early evening. And even before we've left on our journey, I realize I am going to miss my home a bit. We came uncomfortably close to losing it, and there is no certainty that the horrific situation at work won't be repeated next year.

And of course I always miss my sweet (really!) cat, and wonderful dog.

So tonight is a paean to the home life and routine and appreciating the blessings of the little things, like flowers in the yard that survive my disastrous efforts at home-based agriculture. Later this week comes a brand new journey to new places and high adventure. And there are wonderful things about both. Routine can be a bad thing, a limiting thing, but it can be a source of comfort as well. We just should just avoid being trapped in it.

So, quoting our good friend Truman, "Good morning, and in case I don't see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!" Blogging may be a bit light or non-existent while we are on the road, but you can be sure that there will be many stories to be told in a few weeks when we return.

By the way, happy Easter. The Easter lilies by the air conditioner bloomed today, so it's Easter, right?

A Day in the Field...Day Backwards On Fun Having, Part Two

Continuing our previous blog entry about exploring part of the California Mother Lode, we reach the summit of Table Mountain, near New Melones Reservoir. We had made our way across some grassy meadows and oak woodlands, and then climbed up a steep talus slope through brushy thickets to reach the edge of the summit. We walked into a strange forbidding landscape. The summit of Table Mountain at first looked barren and practically lifeless, but it took only a moment to realize it was full of life, especially on this particularly strange day of rain and storms.

I walked quickly over to the other side of the ridge and looked down on Highway 108 and the Jamestown area, including the mothballed Harvard Gold Mine. The ridge is long (miles long) and winding, and flat. But it is only a few hundred feet wide in most places. Boulders of lava were scattered all across the surface. The 'backwards' theme of these post has the most to do with the strange location of the lava flow at the top of the ridge. I'm going to fully explain that in the next post, but first I wanted to mention something outside my expertise: the biology...

As I wandered across the summit plateau, I realized that something was missing: fields of waving grass. It was striking. In the meadows below, exotic grasses were growing profusely everywhere. Up on top, grass was present, but as can be seen below, it is dominated by other plants; especially small flowers and mosses. Clearly the soils were very thin due to the nature of the lava, but these non-grass plant species were doing just fine, from the looks of things.

From what I could understand from some of the environmental studies of the volcanic tablelands, the exotic grasses have never really established themselves on the plateau the way they have in the pasture lands and meadows below. It's too tough of an environment. Apparently, most of the plants up here are natives.

It is a mostly dry and hot environment for much of the year, but for a few weeks or months, rain fills a number of low areas called vernal swales, which provide a unique growing environment for endemic species. Invasive exotic species cannot tolerate the extreme conditions. The vernal swales are broadly similar to the vernal pools found on the floor of the Central Valley (in the few undeveloped areas), but are more rocky with less clay. I saw quite a few unfamiliar flower species.

As I got closer (to the ground, that is), more and more species of plants appeared. I had to step carefully, ponds were everywhere! Most of the flowers were very small, reminding me of the toy flowers a child might use to decorate the outside of dollhouse. A garden of miniatures....

The colors were vivid, despite the grayness of the skies. Actually, as I looked around the skies were not just gray, but threatening. Rain was falling all around us, and a bitter cold wind was sweeping across the summit plateau. I wasn't quite ready to retreat just yet.

I got on my hands and knees and realized I was looking at an entire ecosystem on the surface of a single boulder (below). It was an incredibly colorful palette of living things, and a wonderful confluence of geology and biology.

I generally don't make a practice of quoting long passages of someone else's work if I can do a decent job of paraphrasing. but I'm not much of a biologist, and I have a feeling some of my biology-loving readers might want some of this info. It was buried deep in an environmental impact report by the Bureau of Reclamation about the Table Mountain flora and vernal swales (found here, starting at page 4-29):

"Vernal pools are an ephemeral wetland vegetative community with predominantly low-growing, ephemeral herbs. Germination and early growth occur in winter and early spring, often while plants are submerged, and pools dry out by summer. Flowering is often in bands at the margins of the pools. This community type occurs in shallow depressions, ranging from a few meters to tens of meters in diameter. Characteristic plant species found in vernal pools are Pacific foxtail (Alopecurus saccatus), common blennosperma (Blennosperma nanum), Cleveland’s shooting star (Dodecatheon clevelandii var. patulum), toothed downingia (Downingia cuspidata), spinysepaled button-celery (Eryngium spinosepalum), hedge-hyssop (Gratiola ebracteata), Fremont’s goldfields (Lasthenia fremontii), Douglas’ meadowfoam (Limnanthus douglasii var. rosea), white-headed navarretia (Navarretia leucocephala ssp. leucocephala), adobe popcorn flower(Plagiobothrys acanthocarpus), miniature popcorn flower (Plagiobothrys stipitatus var. micranthus), Sacramento pogogyne (Pogogyne zizyphoroides), Delta woolly marbles(Psilocarphus brivissimus var. multiflorus), greater duckmeat (Spirodela polyrrhiza), and Wildenov’s clover (Trifolium willdenovii) (Stone et al. 1993 in Reclamation 1995). Special status plant species that may grow in the planning area vernal pools include Sacramento orcutt grass (Orcuttia viscida), slender orcutt grass (Orcuttia tenuis), Bogg’s Lake hedge-hyssop(Gratiola hetersepala), and legenere (Legenere limosa).

Within the planning area, intermittently-formed pools appear after rainfall or snowmelt on top of Table Mountain between 1,200 feet in elevation in the south and 2,600 feet in the north. Although these pools share some of the characteristics of some vernal pools in the Central Valley, they are not true vernal pools in that they do not have a clay underlayer that prevents percolation. Instead, they form in swales in the rocky surface of Table Mountain. The soil is poorly drained and the parent material on Table Mountain is a Pliocene lava flow (andesite). Intermittent pools occur on Table Mountain in seasonally wet to saturated rocky meadows that have slight soil development (Evens et al. 2004). They are interspersed within the annual grassland (Reclamation 2006b). Intermittent pools at Table Mountain do not support the range of species found in vernal pools in the Central Valley, possibly due to differences in substrate(primarily shallow, rocky substrate versus clay substrate in valley vernal pools). Although vernal pool habitats are very delicate and easily disturbed in general, this is even more pronounced on Table Mountain where soils are poor, shallow, and loose.

To date, vernal pools have resisted invasion by exotic plant species, probably due to their ephemeral nature (USACE 1997). However, the scientific community is concerned that exotic plants may colonize vernal pool communities, possibly displacing the highly specialized native vernal pool species (USACE 1997). Despite these concerns, there is no supporting evidence that this change is occurring in vernal swales found on Table Mountain (USACE 1997).

So much of the time I am showing people a place that is new to them. It is always fun to show someone the treasures that exist practically in their own backyards. On this hike, I got that experience of seeing a place for the first time. I loved every moment!

In the final post of this mini-series, I will take a look at Table Mountain from a slightly different point of view...

A Day in the Field...Day Backwards On Fun Having, Part One

Another day in the field...today it was our Geology Club. It's not enough that I make my students work hard in the classroom and lab, and drag them on field trip courses. The club members raised the funds to go out on their own and see something new and different. Once again the students led the teacher; I even rode in the back of the van! Yup, backwards day it was, in many different senses.

Strange as it may seem, I had, after twenty-two years in this region, never been to the top of what may arguably be the most famous geologic feature in our immediate vicinity. I've flown over it (a near-future blogpost), driven beneath it countless times, driven over it through a couple of erosional breaches, but I have never stood on top of it. So today I got to check off one more item on my life list: climbing the Stanislaus Table Mountain.

Things were backwards in a number of ways. We found the sweet spot between two powerful storms that are battering California this weekend. Yesterday there was so much snow that Highway 80 had a 45-car chain reaction accident and got closed in both directions. Right now the winds outside are gusting to frightening levels. But for four hours this morning the rain in the foothills let up, and we had a pleasant hike, aside from a bitter cold wind at the top. But instead of a normally hot and arid landscape, we had a muddy trail, rivulets of water everywhere, and waterfalls where waterfalls pretty much never happen (see above).

The trail to the summit starts at the end of Shell Road off of Rawhide Flat Road near the gold rush town of Columbia. "Summit" is not the best term though because Table Mountain is not a single peak at all. It is a flat-topped ridge that winds for many miles through the Sierra foothills. It is composed of a basalt-like volcanic rock called latite, and the lava flow displays some interesting columnar jointing in places (below). The flow is 9 or 10 million years old. How did it get to the top of the ridge? That question will be dealt with at a later time.

The trail crosses gently sloping meadows and oak woodlands for a mile, and then turns and climbs steeply for a half mile to the summit ridge. The ecosystem changes drastically as the trail climbs the north-facing slope. The path is shaded by numerous trees and shrubs, with some unexpected species for a region that regularly reaches 100 degrees in the summertime.

It's a thicket, really, and I'm glad we had a trail to follow instead of bushwacking. The poison oak would have been a real problem! In the picture below one can see the edge of the barren summit ridge.

We passed a glen full of ferns opening up for the first time among the brown husks of last year's crop.

The slope we were climbing was composed of large fallen boulders from the lava flow, a feature called a talus slope. The openings between the boulders can extend hundreds of feet into the slope, and cool moist air will seep out of the slopes all year long. Mosses cover the boulders.

I hope my flower-loving friends will identify the flower for me...I haven't noticed this species before (mind you, I'm a geologist, and flowers are as much a mystery to me as minerals are to botanists). It was fairly common and obvious on the shaded slopes.

We were nearly to the top, and had a close up view of yet another series of small ephemeral waterfalls. A few more switchbacks and we would reach the summit, the "top" of Table Mountain. Our backwards story will continue in the next post!

Dispatches from the Road: Scenes from Kona

If I seem to have been missing in action, well, no, I was missing in inaction. After the lava adventures at Kilauea a few days ago, I went north and west on the Big Island seeking serenity and peace, and the green flash. Catching the green flash is not the pathway to serenity though, because something will go inevitably wrong, and there will be curses flung.

The green flash is an optical phenomena that occurs when the sun sets on a clear horizon, and light gets bent through the atmosphere. The last split second sometimes reveals a moment of green light that can be hard to catch. I seemed all set to catch it with these shots, but then the autofocus went out of focus at just the moment the green flash would have happened, except I was looking at an out of focus screen instead of the horizon. But so what? I'm still in paradise and the sunset was gorgeous anyway. If you want to see what a green flash actually looks like, I posted an example taken by a friend a little while back...

It is beautiful out here. I will have a few pictures up soon; my internet access has been spotty (well, no, not really, I was just ignoring it...). Here is a gratuitous flower shot from a tropical woodland called the Cloud Forest. There is a road that shoots straight up Hualalai volcano from Kona, climbing from sea level to 5,000 feet in a really short distance (better appreciated when trying to drive back down without burning out the brakes). The temperature went from 83 degrees to 57 degrees on the climb.

Kind of reminds me of a Georgia O'Keefe painting. Nature is a great artist...

Flowers For a Friday at Hetch Hetchy

One thing I did not see a lot of in Yosemite Valley this last week was flowers, aside from the very pretty Dogwood blossoms. The valley floor is covered for the most part by thick forest and at this point flowers were either not blossoming yet, or they were shaded out by the forest canopy. Yosemite was once renowned for having more than 700 acres of meadows, but now there are fewer than 70 as fire prevention has allowed young trees to encroach.

The situation was quite different at Hetch Hetchy. The forest is sparse, and the area receives a lot more sunshine, so the flowers were quite showy. Indian Paintbrush and Lupine were quite common, including the Harlequin's Lupine (first photo), that I had not noticed before in my travels.

I know this is primarily a geology blog, but I couldn't resist posting a few flower pics, but the observant reader will notice that rocks play a prominent part in the framing of the plants!

We also ran across something else on our trip: a Yellowstone-style traffic jam at Crane Flats. Yellowstone tourists are renowned for causing traffic jams wherever an elk or bison is encountered. We had a similar jam at Crane Flats. I knew that twenty cars and a ranger would never stop for a deer or squirrel, so we stopped too (contributing to the jam, I know), and saw a very nice little bear doing bear things in the meadow by the highway. It was good to see the bear totally ignoring the crowd, and concentrating on eating a natural food source instead of somebody's potato chips (ripped out of a car)!