Almost spring again! Renewal

We lost our beloved Rebecca to lymphoma in October of 2010. She was still with us at Pumpkin Festival time, but by Hallowe'en she was a spirit. We miss her so very much, but in our hearts she'll always be galloping up the beach toward us...

... or lying in the sun by a Sierra lake...

Sweet sweet thing, was Rebecca the Duchess of Mountain and Sea. Almost to the last she was prancing beside us along forest trails and by the sea, and we're thankful for that.

And we were so glad that she was here to move with us in August to our new little snug harbor south of Half Moon Bay. We can see and smell and hear the ocean, and we can walk to the beach in five minutes--a walk Rebecca loved immediately.  

The house name we've carried around for almost 25 years is at home on our garden gate: Strega del Mare... Sea Witch. 

Sea Witch

Years ago I carved the name into a piece of driftwood and hung it on our cottage in Miramar, and we've carted that sign around with us ever since. Strega del Mare, at home by the sea. 

Sun setting into the sea, looking past the bottlebrush tree

The world turns and turns, and around Thanksgiving Rebecca's spirit nudged a new love toward us... Kayak, a white german shepherd who needed rescuing. His family in the Sierra had fallen on hard times and he needed to find his "forever home" (as the rescue sob-sisters call it... sappy, but apropos).

There he was, there we were, it was love at first sight, and he joined us at Strega del Mare for his first sight of the ocean.

Kayak gazes toward Hilo



A fine young pup, and angelic... most of the time.





Ah, spring! prune blossoms

The prune blossoms arrived, and spring is in my heart.

I grew up in the pre-silicon Santa Clara Valley, where the California prune industry began. In 1856 a Frenchman named Louis Pellier failed at gold mining and started a nursery in Santa Clara. He introduced prunes to the United States by grafting a variety of French prune plum to the root stock of the native Santa Clara Valley wild plum. The result was a plum that would dry without fermenting around the pit.

The poor prune in this country has long been something of a joke, and subject to clever advertisements: "Today the pits, tomorrow the wrinkles!" intoned a stentorian baritone voice in an early television ad. A later ad labeled it "The funny fruit." Now prunes tend to be labeled "Dried Plums" to the amusement of prune growers. All prunes are plums, but not all plums are prunes.

The 1933 edition of the Sunset All-Western Cookbook takes up the issue, quoting Jeannette Cramer of Sunset Magazine:

When is a plum a prune, if ever? That question has been debated for a good many years. The impression seems to exist in some places that a plum becomes a prune after it has been cured, somewhat after the fashion of a tadpole which becomes a frog after it has passed through a series of finishing processes, and even the lexicographer agrees in that.

I, however, prefer to stand on the side of the practical fruit man who gives the prune credit for separate existence even while on the tree. We go so far as to refer to prune trees and prune blossoms, than which there is no more delightful snowy sight in all the spring-time display. A drive through a prune-growing region on the annual blossom day is one of the favorite joys of all who dwell in or near prune-growing communities.

As Dad once put it with a grin and a wink, "prunes is prunes."

The prune orchard was the focus of our lives when I was growing up, and it gave us our living. In the spring came the buds all over the trees—then the blossoms, sweet and profuse, perfuming all of Santa Clara Valley. The blossoms set and, barring killing frosts, turned into little green prunelets.

As summer went on, the prunes turned deep purple. The fruit became fat and heavy, and Dad put props under the drooping tree limbs to support them and keep them from breaking. The early prunes began to fall from the trees. Their smooth dusky skins were thick and sour, their pulp golden and sweet.

Then the harvest! Out we went with our tin buckets and began to pick prunes. On our knees around each tree we went, picking up the purple fruits and chucking them into our buckets as fast as we could. Fill a bucket, dump it into a box, pick some more.

Never did we say we were “picking plums” as we scrabbled around the hot dusty orchard on our knees, picking up the deep purple fruits.

We were Picking Prunes.

Devil's Slide and the really big cul-de-sac

Devil's Slide is a rocky promontory high above the Pacific Ocean between Pacifica and Half Moon Bay. When you drive over Devil's Slide you're driving through a slice cut into Montara Mountain. Montara and San Pedro Mountains are the northern part of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the range that divides the San Francisco Peninsula -- the bayside region along San Francisco Bay, and the coastside region along the Pacific Ocean. Moss Beach and Montara are the last little coastside towns you visit before starting north over Devil's Slide toward Pacifica.

To see the Devil's Slide area from a satellite, click here.

Devil's Slide was closed today so that the California Department of Transportation could  remove boulders from above the road before they come crashing down. With the closure our little world became one big cul-de-sac... one big dead-end with nowhere to go. We rather like it that way, actually. Inconvenient, but peaceful and nearly traffic-free. When Devil's Slide is out we can stroll across the highway to visit our favorite tacqueria without fear of death by vehicular misadventure, for one thing.

So, what's the story of Devil's Slide? In the early 1900s the Ocean Shore Railroad blasted a roadbed through the Devil's Slide ridge and laid down railroad tracks. For a few years steam engines chuffed along the precarious stretch, carrying passengers from San Francisco south -- "Reaches the Beaches" was the Ocean Shore Railroad tag line. The railroad never fully succeeded. For one thing, soaking rains repeatedly caused the shale and sandstone above the roadbed to slide down onto the tracks. The Ocean Shore Railroad ceased operation in the 1920s, never having achieved its goal of a rail line all the way down the coast to Santa Cruz.

Barbara VanderWerf tells us, in her wonderful book Montara Mountain:

Originally Devil's Slide meant only the promontory and its inland ridge. In the 1880s, travellers in horse-drawn wagons on the Half Moon Bay-Colma Road, which ran along the top of the ocean bluffs, paused to note the chute-like ridge ending in the massive rock dome. They thought it looked fit for a Devil's Slide and named it so.

In the 1930s, the State of California acquired the railroad right of way and built Highway One on it. The mountain continued to slip and slide toward the ocean, hammering the road with boulders and causing parts of the road to drop away, resulting in periodic closures. In 1995, Highway One at Devil's Slide was closed for over five months. In 2006, it was closed for four months.

Here's what the highway sign near Pillar Point harbor looked like during the 2006 closure:
Driving to San Francisco usually takes about 30 minutes over Devil's Slide from Moss Beach and Montara. When the road's closed it can take up to three hours. Everyone north of Half Moon Bay must travel south along two-lane Highway One and join the southerly coastsiders to squeeze onto two-lane Highway 92 for the trip over the hill to where big freeways zip north and south on the bay side of the peninsula, and east and west across bay bridges.

Our little world will soon become more reliably accessible, though. The tunnel is coming. In the mid-1990s a bunch of us coastsiders branded ourselves tunnelistas and banded together to mount a campaign for a tunnel through Montara Mountain, to provide a safe and reliable way around Devil's Slide. We sported bright yellow Think Tunnel bumper stickers and buttons and t-shirts, and rallied the entire county to put a tunnel initiative on the ballot. It passed overwhelmingly.

The impetus for the tunnel effort wasn't so much to avoid road closures, but to stop a huge freeway bypass over the mountain. Here are some photos, including an artist's rendition of what the freeway would have looked like: Saving Montara Mountain.

The cuts and fills to create that proposed freeway would have devastated a beautiful, pristine area, and resulted in a very steep road over an extremely foggy mountain. When you drive Devil's Slide on a foggy day you drive through a kind of fog tunnel, with the fog rolling up the bluffs and on up the mountain, leaving the roadway clear. At the elevation of the proposed freeway, visibility can be near zero on foggy days. Hike up Montara Mountain on one of those foggy days and you'll know what I mean! Can't see a thing.

There's a lot of story to Devil's Slide...

Mavericks! Everybody's gone surfin'

The Mavericks surf contest was called for 13 February, and big-wave surfers from around the world converged on the coastside. For weeks, locals have been second-guessing the contest organizers about when the contest would take place... the surf rising topic mentions the buzz, and gives a little history of the spot.

Early on the morning of the 13th, Wm and I made our way out to the Moss Beach bluffs, which are just north of the Mavericks surf spot. The waves were rolling in at a good 35 feet and destined to get up to around 50 feet by contest's end.

What makes this surf break so huge? The entire Pacific Ocean is roaring in to shore, then whoop! suddenly trips over the underwater reef and over it goes, tumbling over itself in a spectacular way.

An early-morning wave, about a half-mile southwest from our bluff-top perch:

A  few of our fellow spectators in the early morning; the crowd doubled by mid-day:

 

Pelicans cruising overhead, looking prehistoric.



Here's what it's all about--surfer Zach Wormhoudt (photo by Don Montgomery):

 Amazing.










You can see the whole photo gallery at the Mavericks site: http://www.maverickssurf.com/buzz/photos28.php

Storm signs, wolf moon, flowers

The January storms got wilder and wilder. Rain sloshed down in torrents, wind tore trees loose, waves pummeled the coastline.

This sign on Mirada Road at Miramar took a beating:

Getting to the post office in Granada was a drenching experience:

29 January brought us the wolf moon -- the first full moon of the new year. It was spectacular. When a full moon occurs during the perigee (the closest the moon gets in its orbit to the Earth), the moon looks its biggest and brightest. It was a cloudy, blustery night, but the heavens opened to give us this glowing glimpse:

Then the rains paused and the sun shone on the oxalis that dances in neon yellow across coastal hillsides.

We called oxalis sour grass when we were kids... sucking on the stems gives you a definite pucker.

And of course you can play in the fields of oxalis when you want to, even when you grow up.

Surf rising

The little waves that ruffled to shore in my beach haiku are gone, replaced by good-sized waves that curl in with spray steaming back off their tops.

As the winter waves get bigger, the coastside buzzes with speculation about the big-surf contest held in our front yard.

"Have they called Mavericks?" asked a woman at the gym.

"I bet they'll call Mavericks on Wednesday" said the greengrocer at the farm stand.

"Surf's comin' up, swell's right," commented a laconic cop at the taqueria, "can't call Mavericks 'til the wind's right, though."

Mavericks, the big-wave spot off Pillar Point, was named for a white-haired German shepherd dog with an adventurous spirit. The spot didn't gain fame until the early '90s, and gained notoriety in 1994 when Mark Foo, a Hawai'ian big-surf legend, wiped out and disappeared on an 18-foot wave. The first surf competition was held out there in 1999. In the early days when Mavericks was called, hand-lettered cardboard signs saying Mavericks today! were tacked up on telephone poles, letting us know that we needed to skip work and stick around.

I grew up during the surfing craze of the '60s, woodies and Surfin' Safari and all, and I never got over it. I body-surfed Santa Cruz waters but never graduated to the longboard elite. Wasn't ever a gidget-type surfer girl either, good grief. Meanwhile, three hundred miles to the south, Wm was one of the longboard elite, surfing Zuma and Trestles and Malibu. We have salt water in our veins, we dream of breathing underwater, and the waves call.

You can learn all about Mavericks, check the contest status, and watch the competition live when it's on at http://www.maverickssurf.com/.

The silver lining for 2010

On the last day of 2009, Wm and I walked on the beach at sunset and we saw the silver lining for 2010! A flash of silver beneath the clouds, where the sky met the sea...


"...the little silver flash...follows the setting of the sun, making a brief crescent of light no thicker than the crescent of a fingernail along the horizon line" says the story of Umai, a girl of the Yurok tribe who yearned to know what the crescent of light was.

Umai took her canoe to the edge of the world:

"She sat at the world's edge, watching quietly. She saw that the sky does not rest solidly on the ocean, but that it lifts and dips and lifts and dips in an even rhythm...and she saw that it is this dipping sky that causes the waves...

 "The sun went down behind the edge of the world and was followed by the familiar silver flash. But from so much closer up, Umai saw that it was not at all a narrow crescent, but a waving, moving something with a center of living brightness..."*

May 2010 be filled with good health, and a center of living brightness for us all.

* This story is told in The Inland Whale: Nine Stories Retold from California Indian Legends by Theodora Kroeber, published in 1959.

Beach haiku

Today we walked on the beach on a very low tide and watched the sanderlings and willets scurry along as the small waves met the shore at Miramar. Out beyond Pillar Point is where the huge waves of the renowned Mavericks surf spot build, but the waves on this day were small and peaceful. I waxed poetic in the sand.

little waves ruffling to shore
on a low low tide
small shorebirds jitterbugging

Here is a small bird jitterbugging near the ruffling waves:

Rebecca goes camping

Today I borrow from Wm's web site, where he says:

We just got back from a camping trip, and we are pleased to report that Rebecca is back to being Rebecca. I have to admit that I never thought we would all be hiking and camping together after last month's prognosis; we were thinking in terms of days.

Rebecca has gained all of her weight back and was chasing the raccoons and critters away from our campsite like she always has. We still take it one day at a time but this last camping trip was really special with her; Ellen and I have had dogs all of our lives but we have never seen a dog with so much spirit and true grit. She made us totally forget about the situation and it was a well-needed emotional rest and a slip back into normalcy.

Somehow, it reminds me of getting a second chance like in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life...even if the outcome suddenly changes we will always remember this little miracle and be grateful for the extra quality time we are getting with Rebecca.

 A few photos, of course:


Our campsite over looking Sunset Beach between Santa Cruz and Monterey

Rebecca guarding the food


Yo!...let's go hiking!


Check out the surfer dudes (Rebecca always finds the action)




Rebecca loves the sunset...means dinner, critter chasing, and a campfire.


After the campfire wears down, it is time for the warm innards of Goldie, our home away from home. You can see the snow clouds forming behind...it snowed the following day in the Santa Cruz Mountains.


Goldie is our all-original 1971 Dodge factory-conversion van which sleeps two adults and two small children (or two adults and one large dog), dining area, wet bar, kitchen sink, fridge, and stove, along with lots of drawers and closet space. We just hit 70K original miles on this last trip.



"Hey Dad...stop your yapping...my burger is ready..."

Rebecca's back!

Rebecca, Duchess of Mountain and Sea, does indeed have the heart of a champion. I'm so happy to say that she's begun a course of treatment for her lymphoma and is beginning to spring back. Her prance is back in her step, and she often laughs.

Here's Rebecca on the trail, either laughing or yawning.

During the week or so when she just wasn't eating we coaxed her with chicken breast and barley or rice, mooshed about with homemade chicken broth. We were afraid we'd created a gourmet monster, but as her appetite returns she's turning to her regular food with some enthusiasm. Still, of course, she gives us the stare-down for her treat that contains her medication.

Rebecca's treatment will continue for some months, with the vet gauging her progress and adjusting as we go along. Although we hope for remission, the treatment will at least give her her quality of life back. Thankfully she doesn't seem to be in any pain.

As life returns to normal, our trips to the Half Moon Bay farmer's market have resumed. The Pomegranate Man sings his wares, and the greens, persimmons, and squashes make a happy presentation.

And on days when the weather is fine, we'll once again feel like setting out for a drive in the Chili Pepper, the red-hot Miata... as on this pre-diagnosis Sunday drive.

Chili's bug-eyes look down a eucalyptus lane near Pescadero.

On Highway 1, the misty clifs wind northward.

Blessing Rebecca

Our beautiful Rebecca, Duchess of Mountain and Sea, has been diagnosed with lymphoma and our hearts are so heavy. We don't yet have the full diagnosis and prognosis; the lab work went to the cytologyist on Friday, and we'll know on Tuesday.

Rebecca came to us 9 years ago. We had recently lost our dear pal Kelsey and were strolling in Placerville, a town in California's Sierra Nevada foothills. There, on the sidewalk next to an SPCA table filled with brochures and doggy treats, sat a beautiful creature wearing a blue jacket that said "I'm adoptable!" on it.

We stopped and looked into those golden eyes and she looked back. She wagged. We wagged. She put her foot on Wm's foot, looked up at him, and said Take me home! And we did.

On the drive back up to the cabin she gazed interestedly around from the Outback's way-back. When we arrived she leapt out, ran up the stairs, and sat at the door waiting for us. Once inside, she headed straight for Kelsey's regular spot, turned around three times, and plopped down. She was home.

Here's Rebecca, smiling on the bank of the American River.

Rebecca was already three years old when she came to us, and we had no idea what we were getting.

What we were getting was the gentlest, most intelligent dog either of us has ever met. She barks when there's a reason to, and otherwise keeps her council. She speaks Italian, Spanish, French, and Russian in addition to English. At least, she understands the words for walk, eat, go, she, her, beach, Madame, and Duchess in those languages...and who knows what else that she doesn't let us know about? All attempts at talking around her have failed, because she learns the words quickly and knows just what's up.

Here's Rebecca galloping on Miramar beach.

The vet says Rebecca has the heart of a champion, and we hope that her lymphoma is treatable. We have to wait until Tuesday to find out, but in the meanwhile we decided that the thing to do was get her blessed at the local church's Blessing of the Pets ceremony yesterday, in honor of St. Francis. She donned her yellow lei and off we went in the thin November sunlight.

Here's Pastor Larry, who married Wm and me, blessing Rebecca:

Blessed Rebecca.

Ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties...

...and things that go bump in the night! It's that time of year. Pumpkins everywhere, our neighbors' black cats on the prowl, skeletons dangling from porches... and the Christmas displays going up in the big-box stores. I, along with apparently everyone else, detest the earlier and earlier start to the annual force-feeding of consumerism that has become Christmas. Somebody's got to be buying the stuff, though, nurturing the greed that perpetuates the earlier and earlier force-feeding... 

But enough of that. Happily, we're relatively immune to it in our little community. We're immersed in things autumnal -- Hallowe'en, Dia de los Muertos, sunny beaches after the summer fog...

.. and of course the Brussels sprout harvest. The sprouts grow along the plant's stem, the bulging little balls poking out all the way down almost to the ground.

The sprout fields are a sea of fluffy leaves, stretching across our fertile bench of land between mountain and ocean.

 To harvest the sprouts, the farmers strip the leaves away, then cut the stems and strip the sprouts off.

A new trend is to sell the whole sprout stalk. That can be a lot of sprouts.

You know how sprouts smell when they're cooking, kind of... pungent? Well, they smell a little that way when they're growing, too. When we were kids passing a sprout field, the cool joke in the car was "who farted?!"



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A few days ago I looked through my collection of New Yorker covers (yes, this proud native Californian has taken the New Yorker since the '70s) and found a couple of classic Hallowe'en covers by the inimitable Charles Addams.

This one appeared on the October 31, 1988 cover... a month after Charles Addams' passing on September 29, 1988. I think he must have loved that.

Pumpkin madness

It's October on the central California coast, and pumpkins are everywhere. I mean, everywhere. These are in a hilly field near our home in Moss Beach... the view is looking east, with the Santa Cruz mountain range in the distance. When Wm. took this photo, we could hear the Pacific Ocean pounding heavily behind us to the west. A storm was out at sea, moving in.
















October on the Coastside means the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival. Thousands and thousands of people come for the parade, which features the giant pumpkin. The monster in this photo topped 1600 pounds. Really, shouldn't the winning pumpkin be orange? I think that should be one of the rules......

I'm thinking about pumpkin pasta, with all this pumpkin-ness. Not pasta stuffed with pumpkin, but with pumpkin right in the dough, along with the flour and eggs. I use 2 eggs, a half-cup of pureed pumpkin (sugar pie variety) or squash (try kabocha) and enough flour for a 3-egg pasta... 3 cups or so, depending. Maybe a grinding or two of pepper in the dough.

And how about a nice walnut sauce to top that beautiful golden pasta?

Nice Walnut Sauce for Pasta

2 cups walnuts
boiling water
pinch salt
a clove of garlic
a few leaves marjoram
1 cup Parmigiano-Reggiano, grated

1. Soak the walnuts in the boiling water for half an hour or so.
2. Drain the walnuts and zing them in a food processor with a little salt, the clove of garlic, and the marjoram; make a smooth paste.
3. Add the grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and zing some more. Right! It's pesto we're doing here. (Pestare means to pound, and the right way is to pound it all in a mortar; zinging in the processor is easier, though, no?)
4. Thin with hot pasta-cooking water before serving, to make the sauce creamy and smooth.