I’m sitting in an easy chair in an Oakland Starbucks, wireless blogging for the first time. We drove from San Luis Obispo this morning so Jan could meet a client in a retirement home across the street and go to an all-day workshop on estate planning in San Francisco tomorrow. By coincidence this place is also the residence of an old friend who’s had several strokes. We’ve planned dinner with her and her daughters tonight. When they were aged 2 and 4 in 1964, I was a graduate student and lonely lodger in their home. This is a familiar neighborhood. Half a block away is the apartment I inhabited for two months in 1989 while attending a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at Berkeley, again as a lonely lodger.

Yesterday’s Nature Explorers took us to the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal viewing area a few miles north of San Simeon and Hearst Castle. According to the Central Coast Friends of the Elephant Seals, this is the venue of “Mother Nature’s Big Show.” They dont exaggerate. Here one can witness the life force at work on a grand scale.

In a grayish-brown mass blending with the sand, thousands of bloated bodies lie packed on the mile-long beach, looking at first like the victims of a vast kill left behind by the tide. But the air is alive with shrieks, croaks and clicks emanating from what a closer look reveals as bubbling activity. With handlike flippers, fat loungers toss puffs of sand onto their backs. Glistening black babies cry for their mothers and jockey for space at teats on smooth ovoid bellies.

Mothers scream desperately to locate their offspring in the shuffling press. Young females arch skyward and howl, displaying bright pink mouths and sharp teeth. Pairs of juvenile males do push-ups with their foreflippers and face off with bobs and taunts. Mountainous old males erupt into motion, crash through the crowd, and scatter their junior rivals. Inamongst all this fierce and tender clatter gulls, jays and crows stand silently in attendance.

A couple of weeks ago in Ecolit class, I’d read aloud the creation poem from the opening chapter of Genesis. Here was day three:

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind. and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.

Despite the biblical blessing and my own reverence for biodiversity, I had second thoughts about the abundance and fertility of these creatures–their cacaphonous noise, the awful smell of their fish breath, their huge size, grotesque faces, clumsy movements, and the sheer numbers of their offspring. Not long ago, the Elephant Seal, Mirounga angustirostris was driven nearly to extinction by the market for its blubber, which supplied fuel oil from living rather than fossilized creatures. But now, as a result of the 1972 marine mammal protection act, their population has dramatically rebounded and they claim more central coast beaches amid complaints about their depleting local fishstocks.

Our group made its way to the end of the boardwalk and stopped at one place long enough to start distinguishing activities and individuals among the seething mass immediately in front of us. Near the edge of the water someone pointed out that a pup had just been born. There was the large male, the half-sized female, and in front of her the new baby still covered with remains of the amniotic sac.

We watched as, like a mother cat, she licked the prostrate infant into shape.

Suddenly a flurry of screaming seagulls surrounded the mother and child blocking them from view.

Could they be mobbing the baby, attempting to devour the new life? As they settled down, what was happening became clear. They were pulling and picking at slimey red strands of placenta that the mother had just delivered, cleaning up the beach, celebrating a birthday. Creatures of the sea and fowls of the air were brought forth on the same day.

A sign at the parking area noted that one month after giving birth on this beach, females were ready to conceive for a second time during the winter mating season.

Just below us on the boardwalk, a young silver-colored beauty with blue eye shadow posed and wiggled her tail, provoking a reaction from a nearby juvenile male.

He sidled on over, placed a companionable flipper on her hip, and with half-lidded eyes did something that caused her to laugh.

One thing led to another and soon they amiably hooked up.

Undeterred by lack of privacy, they lay together peacefully for a long time, occasionally trembling or shifting positions.

Suddenly, the male jumped off his mate as if shocked with an electric prod and shuffled speedily up the beach. From the opposite direction, a scar-chested warlord gallumpfed toward us, plowing a thick furrow in the sand. He landed heavily by an adjoining female, put his arm around her waist and pulled her close.

The new couple snuggled and quivered for several minutes before the male withdrew. Then they switched sides and blissfully embraced.

Earlier in the week, my co-instructor, Jimm Cushing, and I were lecturing on Plato’s Symposium during our class, “Love in the Ancient World.” This passage was in back of my mind:

See you not how all animals, birds, as well as beasts, in their desire of procreation, are in agony when they take the infection of love, which begins with the desire of union; whereto is added the care of offspring, on whose behalf the weakest are ready to battle against the strongest even to the uttermost, and to die for them, and will let themselves be tormented with hunger or suffer anything in order to maintain their young. ¦ why should animals have these passionate feelings? ¦ the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a new existence in the place of the old. …according to that law of succession by which all mortal things are preserved, not absolutely the same, but by substitution, the old worn-out mortality leaving another new and similar existence behind–unlike the divine, which is always the same and not another.

Watching the couplings of these animals affected me strongly. I saw in it a tenderness, grace, and immediacy that I had never witnessed outside of my own experience. A bond of intimacy had formed between me and the elephant seals, driven alike by the force that “through the green flower drives the fuse”–the power of Eros.

“What is a course of history or philosophy or poetry no matter how well selected…compared to the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen,” says Thoreau. (Walden p. 105) I tried to exercise some of that discipline this morning. Instead of going Christmas shopping I returned to the raceme of pink-flowered currant that I had looked at earlier in the week, now again illuminated by a horizon-hugging sun.

I noticed that the five petals of each blossom split into two layers, a longer outside one arching back and curling at its edges, and a shorter inside one that remained erect. The splaying outside layers gave the blossom its star shape. The inside layers combined into an open tube surrounding its golden pistil and stamens. I also noticed some changes since the last look:

seven of the blossoms were open instead of four. Five pink closed blossoms cupped a cluster of immature green buds at the raceme’s tip. As each blossom opened, it diverged from the central axis on its own outward stretching stem. The higher on the raceme, the more mature the blossom and the the more shrunken and curled the sepal which had enclosed it as a bud.

My revisited raceme seemed to be the oldest one on the shrub, its location best placed to gather the sparse sunlight and attract me with my camera. On other twigs I found younger growing tips. They revealed that flowers and leaves are originally enclosed in a single germinal container springing from the battered remnants of last year’s growth.

The subtle fragrance of Ribes sanguineum glutinosum, more leathery than sweet, occasionally wafted past but dissipated before I could satisfy my hungry nostrils. I wanted to be smaller, faster and more sensitive–like the bug that buzzed by me and dove into one of the blossoms. Then I understood that they had evolved to entice it into spreading their red and sticky seed.

I’ve often discussed with students the lines of Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned” that inspired Thoreau’s preference of Nature over Culture:

Come forth into the light of things
Let Nature be your teacher.
…
Enough of Science and of Art
Close up those barren leaves
Come forth and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

I’m still trying to figure out how to do that. Returning to the same flower after a few days and noticing some changes, spending enough time to really look at it and allow the bugs to show up, taking as long as I need to find the right words–that’s a start.

On the way to the back door to clean the mud off my shoes, I noticed a patch of sunlight on the wall of my excavation.

While digging I find the life of the seasons in the mineral as well as in the vegetable and animal. A few weeks ago, this same ground broke the tip off the steel pickaxe. Now my spade sinks into the damp earth like a scoop into ice cream.

The furious bluster of this morning’s Santa Ana wind gave way to a whisper of breeze perceptible only in the flutter of mimosa leaves on the silk tree and the shimmer in the tall palms across the street. I suck in deep breaths of the soft dry air, shaded by the hillside from the hot November sun which lights up Poly Mountain across the valley and the treetops around me. The quiet is broken by a loud, scolding, mechanical noise, like a ratchet on a gearwheel. I get up for the binoculars and then remember: hummingbird.

Since no machinery can get in here, I hired a landscape architecture student and his crew to hand-excavate a 13 by 17 foot hole in the steep bank to make room for an addition to Jan’s home office. The day they were supposed to start, he emailed me to say it was too big a job. Our contractor friend said, “that’s alot of digging, it’ll be expensive to have my guys do it.” A couple of days later I realized that it would make a good project for me in the last few weeks of my early retirement recess. I could go at my own pace and enjoy a sense of steady progress, benefit from the exercise, test my newly strengthened back, and get acquainted with the dirt and rock I live on. Last Thursday I went to Home Depot with Ian and found a plastic cart with a scoop nose perfect for hauling spoil and a small spade with a handle we sawed to a length that would reach from the ground to his nose.

After ten minutes he decided he didnt like the work, but it suits me fine, especially during this week of dealing with the vagaries of my 89 year-old mother-in-law’s move into an assisted living facility as a result of a fall.

The top ten inches of ground are composed of adobe clay soil that breaks up into light chocolate brown pea gravel that turns to dark sticky mud when wet. I uncover buried irrigation pipe and roots to cut with loppers. Then comes the yellowish-tan hardpan, a dense but penetrable layer that grabs the point of the pickaxe and doesnt want to let go. Then blue-green or wine-brown chert, in some places yielding, like the hardpan, in others brittle and shattering into rock gravel when hit, and in others hard enough to clank, send a shock up my arm and knock the tip off the pick. When I hit this stuff, I look for fracture lines and feel triumph when it breaks.

I just got off the phone with a student who asked me to supervise a senior thesis in Natural Resource Management on the restoration project planned for a steep bank in Poly Canyon. Along with the preparation I’m doing occasionally for upcoming winter classes, this reminds me of the world I’ve been away from since June and makes me glad to return. Early retirement for more than one quarter would be too much, despite the luxury of free time. No part-time project is as compelling as teaching, whose steady stresss I retreat from and desire.

The light has changed, departed from the treetops here and weaker on the mountain, where the lengthening shadows increase contrast but reduce brightness. The large black one creeping over the Buena Vista neighborhood–could it be Bishop’s Peak?

[This report was published in the October 2005 Issue of The Santa Lucian]

I just returned from the Sierra Summit that took place in San Francisco September 8 to 11. My wife Jan and I had decided to attend privately to strengthen our connection to the national organization in this dark time and to learn from a luminary lineup of scheduled speakers. When some of our chapter representatives couldn’t go, I became a delegate in return for half price on the registration fee. The delegates’ job was to bridge a gap between leadership and grassroots and to democratically select goals guiding action and budget decisions over the next five years.

We drove up on Thursday morning with Chris, who’d agreed to become a much in-demand under-30 delegate, checked into a cheap hotel in Chinatown, walked to the Moscone Convention center, and fell in with thousands of well-dressed members of the California Dental Association. Finally we found our way to “Moscone North” and what was billed as “Sierra Club’s First Ever National Environmental Convention and Expo.” http://www.sierraclub.org/sierrasummit

The prospect of a four hour priority setting session after a long drive and no lunch in a cavernous banquet hall was not enhanced by lengthy “motivational” harangues by two professional facilitators with deep southern accents. Though the leader admitted that he had no environmental involvement of his own, he assured me that he did not normally work for energy companies like Exxon, but only churches and financial institutions. Sitting at tables in groups of ten, the seven hundred delegates were put through a series of ill conceived icebreaking exercises and endless questionnaires, and asked to prioritize vague, confusing and overlappingly phrased goals.

Midway through the session, delegates started speaking up, expressing bewilderment and resentment. Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director, convinced the audience not to give up and the facilitators to talk less and listen more. By the end of the session a general consensus among delegates was reached: the first two priorities for future national action and budgeting were 1)build a clean and safe energy future with improved efficiency and renewable resources and 2)build vibrant communities assuring environmental justice and reducing sprawl.

This selection makes significant changes in sequence and wording to conclusions drawn from pre-summit surveys. It signals a shift from primary emphasis on recreation and wilderness preservation and clearly reflects the impact of Hurricane Katrina. That impact was reinforced by the surprise announcement that the Convention would be addressed at 8:30 next morning by Al Gore. He had turned down our invitation because of a previous commitment on the same day to talk about global warming to an insurance industry convention in New Orleans.

The onslaught of Katrina is an apt metaphor for the Bush administration’s onslaught on the world environment. The speeches I heard at Sierra Summit on Friday and Saturday gave evidence of an energy that might be able to resist and protect from these storms.

Gavin Newsome, the radiant mayor of SF, welcomed the Sierra Club to his “49 square miles surrounded by reality” by asserting that cities can act when federal and state governments fail to address environmental issues. San Francisco has required all retired city vehicles to be replaced by hybrids, has embarked upon an aggressive green building program, and has been the first city to adopt the Precautionary Principle as a guiding policy. http://www.sfenvironment.com/aboutus/innovative/pp/

In his introduction of Al Gore to a packed hall of about 2500 people, Carl Pope told us he had just returned from India where a hardly reported storm dropped 37 inches of rain on Bombay the day that Katrina hit New Orleans. Carl witnessed that within seven hours 15,000 Indian troops were on the streets helping survivors, within 15 hours all buses in the neighboring states were mobilizeed for rescue and evacuation, within 8 hours, everyone in Bombay had food and water, and within two days plastic packaging was banned because it was discovered that plastic waste had blocked sewers and storm drains. The contrasting fate of the Gulf Coast, said Pope, was sealed on a November day in 2000, when the Supreme Court decided the case of Bush vs. Gore.

The gravity and eloquence of Gore’s speech are impossible to convey. I urge you to read or listen to it at http://www.sierraclub.org/pressroom/gorespeech/. He put Katrina into the context of the gathering storm preceding World War II prophecied by Winston Churchill. We have tasted the first sip of the bitter cup that awaits us, he prophesied. Four years ago it was vacation time when dire warnings about the prospect of an attack by Al quaeda and identification of students at flight schools with no interest in learning to land were provided to the President. This summer there were warnings about what could happen if a large hurricane hit New Orleans. Three years ago, there were dire warnings that FEMA was being rendered helpless. He asked us to draw the line connecting the emotions we felt when we saw the images of Abu Graib and the emotionswe felt when seeing the people in the Superdome and then to draw the line connecting those responsible for both tragedies.

Gore compared the warnings about Hitler wilfully ignored by the British government and the West and the warnings about global warning wilfully denied by the American government, quoting Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” He insisted that we have the vision and know-how and technology we need to address global warming, but we lack the political will. “But political will is a renewable resource,” he concluded, and the audience came to its feet and roared.

The glimmer of hope kindled by Gore’s conclusion exploded into sunshine during the next presentation I attended, a talk by Bill McDonough, the author of Cradle to Cradle and prophet of the Second Industrial Revolution. His maxim is “how do we love all the children of all species for all time?” McDonough often works with people the Sierra Club is aligned against, such as the Ford Motor Company, for which he designed a green assembly plant in Dearborn Michigan. McDonough and his company devise products, buildings, industrial processes and cities according to standards that require zero waste and zero pollution. He showed us some of his ecotopian plans for the construction of seven new cities commissioned by the government of China which he said has adopted Cradle to Cradle as their industrial policy. Less optimistically, he alerted us to the fact that the world’s oceans are rapidly lowering in Ph, and that if the present trend continues, by the year 2100, calcium carbonate will dissolve, destroying all coral and molluscs”the bottom of the food chain. If you want to know more about McDonough, a seminal thinker on Sustainability, try http://www.mcdonough.com

While McDonough spoke to an audience of 800, six other presentations were taking place simultaneously. For the late afternoon session, I attended a small one on “engaging youth” mounted by the Sierra Student Coalition. These young people organize projects like “Victoria’s Dirty Secret” exposing the practises of the catalog industry which is destroying boreal and appalachian forests to produce the junk mail. SSC may be able to help us start a local group bringing together high school, college and university student allies.

Delegates convened again Saturday morning from 7:30 to 11:30 to prioritize means to achieve goals prioritized the day before. First place went to organizing people locally to take action. Second was creating new allies and coalitions. Others included supplying environmental expertise, getting people outdoors, public education, bringing legal action and creating media visibility. Delegates were then treated to a lengthy study by Harvard Professor Marshall Ganz on how the club could increase general effectiveness (NPLA). He concluded we need motivated well trained leaders and lots of attention to engaging new members in club activities. If interested, see http://www.clubhouse.sierraclub.org/committees/oegc/workplan/index.html

Saturday’s highlight for me was the plenary session featuring Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Security was extensive and the great hall was even more packed than for Gore. Hoarse with laryngitis, at times desperate with anger at others ecstatic with ardor, Kennedy repeatedly brought me to tears. This is a person you could follow to the barricades. Presented with the Sierra Club’s William O. Douglas award, he spoke at length about his childhood relation with Douglas and then went on to indict the present administration”headed by the worst environmental president in history who has corrupted all agencies by heading them with the bought dogs of the corporations who finance his campaigns. A former NY state assistant attorney general who spearheaded the salvation of New York’s Hudson River, Bobby’s son spoke about his three sons who suffer from asthma brought on by the unprosecuted criminal activities of corporate polluters. He talked about the subversion of the free market by the corporations that now control government. He talked about the ignorance of what’s going on caused by the corporate media’s refusal to report it. He talked about his own success at awakening and converting Red-state audiences. And finally he rhapsodized at length about Saint Francis, the Bible, religion and nature. You can find an early version of this speech at http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1120-01.htm

A quiet and lyrical coda to this Riverkeeper’s jeremiad came in a presentation by Robert Hass entitled “River of Words.” Another local as well as national hero, Hass used his position as former US poet laureate to create an organization promoting environmental education for children. As he does with his students at UC Berkeley he encourages teachers to take their students outdoors, to cultivate their senses and encourage their observations of nature, to get them to follow Aldo Leopold’s advice to “think like a mountain,” and then to have them write poems and draw pictures about their experiences. This traditional but nowadays rare approach has generated thousands of submissions from around the world which his organization makes available online and in published collections, and which in turn generate more rivers of words. Rather than reading his own lovely nature poems, Hass spent the hour showing and commenting upon exquisite examples of the childrens’ work. For more information on this project see, http://www.riverofwords.org/index.html

There was much more at this amazing conference than can fit here. The impact of what I heard and saw is still not absorbed. And though I have doubts about the effectiveness of a very abstract exercise in deliberative process, the sensation of simply being together with so many people of like mind, common loss and shared aspiration–people for whom I immediately felt affection and respect–will nourish me for a long time.

Preparing for my next quarter’s class, Ecolit: Reading and Writing the Landscape, I modified the Journal writing requirement to include a weblog option. At least twice a week students must write an entry. I must follow suit.

I’ve been going to Nature Explorers with my grandson Ian every Thursday morning. Its a program for kids up to age 8 and their parents and grandparents, part of the Coyote Road School in San Luis Obispo. The school focuses on outdoor education and nature study with an emphasis on tracking that derives from the educational philosophy of Tom Brown’s Tracker School.

We’ve been to Bishop’s Peak, Reservoir Canyon, Cuesta Park, Laguna Lake, the Sand Spit and Morro Bay Estuary, a few of the hundred wonderful natural preserves within 20 minutes of home. All the kids are enthralled with these sessions, especially Ian, and the adults seem to enjoy them with just as much enthusiasm. There’s alot of philosophy and expertise that goes into the program, but each excursion feels casual and slow paced and leaves plenty of time for adventure and pure fooling around.

Alot of what goes on is similar to what happens in my University classes, although less information is conveyed. As a student rather than a teacher, however, I find myself marvelling at the knowledge of wildlife, vegetation, and Indian lore drawn upon by Dave and Evan, the leaders, especially the kind of reading of the landscape they do with the kids by studying the inscriptions left by animals in tracks, scats, and bones.

Each session has ended with some unscripted but dramatic sighting–yesterday, the last of the quarter, it was a peregrine falcon mobbed by a merlin–the two raptors noisily squabbling overhead at the Morro Bay Marina in the estuary. The week before it was discovery of the skeletal remains of a seal or a sea lion on the Sandspit. The week before, a kestrel sitting in the sun for his portrait at Laguna Lake.

Most of the students and parents attending Coyote Road classes are being home-schooled. I remember that one of the most well informed and talented writers in my ecolit class two years ago was home-schooled in North County. A full generation below me, the Coyote Road parents and instructors seem to have resurrected or retained the spirit of the sixties and seventies whose demise I’ve mourned since returning from exile in Canada in 1979. But at Tuesday night’s general meeting of the Sierra Club, I saw more traces in the presentation about his Environmental Studies curriculum by a Paso Robles High School Teacher, Mark DeMaggio.

Fossils in rock
Footprints in sand
Paths in a chamber of cloud.

To mark the beginning of early retirement, I’ve spent the summer clearing out shelves and file cabinets at home and in my office at the university. On a table in the hallway I left dozens of books bequeathed to me by my retiring predecessor in 1989–hardcover volumes of Shakespeare criticism he longed to have someone take off his hands, only one of which I ever read. This morning I said goodbye to a multivolume German gothic print history of European art packed into their lift van by my parents when they fled Berlin in 1937 and a 75 pound 1955 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica that I asked for as a Bar Mitzvah present. Our second hand bookstore proprietor had no use for them and told me that unlike junkmail, you cant recycle books, they have to go to the landfill.

I’ve written three books. When the first one–Youth against Age–went out of print, the publisher sold me the last 40 copies for five dollars each. Thirty five are still in the closet. Yesterday I went to the local Borders to try to get them to carry the two books that are still in print. The young store manager looked at me mockingly and told me to get in touch with his assistant, who would need to see hard copies before making the decision whether or not to order one of each.

A friend died of lung cancer a few years ago. He was my digital mentor. I was delegated to clean out his office to make room for a replacement. I filled a dumpster with stuff, and saved what I could on a website called Legacies When another friend was stricken with mesothelioma and given about a year to live, I said in his situation I would spend part of the time assembling an electronic archive of my life. Six months after he died, the college secretary gave me a CD which contained his memoir, easily uploaded. I expect to maintain this site until I become part of it.

Though disposing of the past has become a preoccupation since I turned 60, passing into a new stage of the life cycle excites me about the future and prods me to produce more. I take alot of pictures, especially of my grandsons. Not having a captive audience of students for six months of the year makes me look for other listeners. Prosperity and health send me on new adventures. And the end is always nearer.

In four days my wife and I will embark on a trip we have planned for a year–our Italienreise to Florence, Venice and Siena. At first I thought I’d leave my laptop home, save photos in a portable hard drive, and write in a journal. But instead I’m trying something different.

[To view full book, scroll to bottom of this graphic and click on successive pages]

Atop the Citadel.  A perch on a flat piece of grassland 30 yards from the lone oak noticeable from all over poly canyon. Last time I was here a Yom Kippur years ago it was too windy to stay; now a gentle sea breeze in the oat grass, the last sun on my pants a weakening gold.  It will get chilly but I have a down vest, windbreaker and sleeping bag.  I’ve been snacking on cheese and gorp.

Fathers Day lunch was delicious barbeque.  I had to carry Oma up the stairs then her change her horrendously stinky diaper, but then she was fine and quietly watched the baby and ate with gusto.  Ian is the glowing center of joy for all the old and youngish folks, bringing us together in delight and concern.  Jan and I had a great Sunday morning and I phone Mary L. to discuss working on the book again.  Yesterday was graduation.  I felt (a little) honored rather than humiliated and invited to a party at the house of Bob and Sarah.  Afterwards Jan and I took a hike up a new trail in Reservoir Canyon where the flowers were splendid: yuccas, Obispo lilies, California fuschia, fairy bells, lizard tails, buckwheat and monkeyflower. Sun dropping to the horizon.

This morning I washed the windows.  I concluded that the poppy seeds are hurled as projectiles off those formerly pink launch pads.  I sat on the bench and planned to wait for the hurl.  I was thinking about sleeping out tonight when I heard a weird click, looked to my right and saw what I thought was a grasshopper leaping through the poppy patch. Click and leap.  Then I realized it was what I was waiting for: the poppy seed dispersal.  Sure enough, where the grasshopper landed, about five feet from the path, there was a split seed hull.  When Jan came home a few minutes later, I asked her to sit next to me and told her what happened.  She said, “that’s why they’re called poppies.”  Is all seed dispersal ejaculation?

9 PM  I’m awakened by the train whistle from a deep snooze.  Hollister’s top protrudes above the line of fog.

After I returned from taking Oma home from the party, a beautiful read haired woman came out on the neighbor’s new driveway and greeted me.  I said something about the weather.  She said Brian died a few days ago, under “special circumstances.” Turns out he drove up Cayucos dam road and shot himself because the rare form of liver cancer he was diagnosed with is incurable.

The train at Stenner is now very loud.  I look back at the spot by Rockslide Ridge where I watched and heard it a month ago.  The moon is a thick crescent and Venus is to the west.  I brought the star chart, but am sleepy.  No other stars.  My mission here is to get to Caballo and reshoot the central campus and Brizzolara drainage at dawn.

Students are writing.

I’d get F on my ecolit journal this last part of the quarer.  No sleepouts and no entries other than notes since the last ones were collected.  Every day I feel more strung out, like one of the students who reported being hooked on hikes.  Tailspin yesterday about not finding the formula for averaging 330 grades and did so just before the nighttime exam, entering the room and finding the wonderful 380 ecolit anthology made by Andrew and Katharine.

I’m ambivalent about Nature Steve, my nickname at Camp Moonbeam in 1960 after Freshman year, where I was supposed to be Nature Counselor, my only qualification having gone to Camp Hackmatack at ages 7 and 8.  Since then I’ve tried with varying degrees of success and failure to live up to the role.  This class, the Cal Poly Land Project, the Earth Day Program with Amory Lovins I organized in June, Sierra Club, the whole Lund experience, treework and Arbor Day in Claremont.  If the Field Guide was done, I’d feel more hopeful.

Reading: I long for it”back to Benyus and Thoreau, Muir and Austin.  And the Polyland class stretching beyond my capacities.

A sixty year old man¦are these students different from Ian?  Almost two generations away. I draw back from their world, longing for trees, sunsets, and stars. But they too long for that, as I did at their age.

Dick Simon asked if we would  retire to Lund.  I said, impossible, I’m too young.  But to read and write there¦to retreat to the observer.   But why, when there’s Sycamore Glen? I’ve developed a real history with Cal Poly Land.  Every hike and campout and new species I learn and place I name on the map leaves me richer.  But still impoverished.

Student departures tonight are warm and appreciative.  Antidote to the despair I experience when criticizing their bad writing.