Rolling On One

Two towns south of Mill Valley, if you count Marin City which I do, is Sausalito. It’s partly an expensive residential community and partly a tourist place, the first stop off the Golden Gate bridge. The hills rise up off San Francisco Bay, with houses clinging to them along roads you couldn’t have in New England because you’d fall off the edge at the first snowfall. When I was in high school I went to a friend’s house there, entered at street level, and looked out the other side of the house from the third floor on that side — the hillside is that steep.

Anyway, between the campus tour and the big reunion dinner Arlene and I drove to Sausalito and walked around. It was chilly! We got ourselves sweatshirts, which we were glad of later in the trip as well as that afternoon.

San Francisco from the main street, right along the bay. The Transamerica Tower and the Bay Bridge are easy to spot:

Some crabs on the rocks down there (maybe you have to look hard):

A boatyard, with fog coming over the southern ridge of Mount Tamalpais in the background. We were amazed at the number of big sailboats at the marina in Sausalito. That’s a lot of people with a lot of money!

Our motel in Mill Valley was on the service road (but they call it something else in California, I forget right now) along highway 101. There was no view out the front of the motel except cars and trucks speeding past, towards or from the Golden Gate Bridge, but our room was in the back overlooking the very end of Richardson Bay. There was a little path along the edge of the parking lot and behind the car showrooms (were they really Maserati and the like? In Marin County, that’s plausible, so that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) down the street along the bay. We saw herons, egrets, and lots of shorebirds on a short walk.

We drove down the street where my mother lived from about ’63 to ’68. Here’s the house at her old address. The man who lives across the street told us that her old house had been torn down and replaced, but this looks very similar in size so I’m not convinced. The roof that I put on that house in the summer of ’64 is long gone, at any rate. Somewhere there’s an old picture of me dressed in khaki work clothes giving neighborhood kids a ride in a wheelbarrow when I was taking a break from working on the roof.

One of the activities of the reunion was a campus tour. Tamalpais High School has a campus more like a small college than what I think of as a high school. It never snows there, and rarely gets even as cold as 35 F. There’s no problem walking outside from class to class. Here are some pictures —

The band box. Unlike Lexington High, where band was an extracurricular activity that met a couple of times a week, at Tam band was a regular class that we had every day up here in the band box. Our baritone horn player was George Duke, who’s now a prominent jazz musician. I remember one day when he was fooling around on a string bass and the band director, Robert Greenwood, said to him, “George, you’re too good to waste your time fooling around. You should pick one instrument and really master it.”

Behind the band box (that’s the back of it at the top of the picture) is Mead Theatre, where school assemblys and the graduation ceremony were held. When I was there there was a stage in front of the ampitheatre, but it was falling apart and was torn down some years ago. The alums would like to see it rebuilt. The school had no lunchroom as such. Different groups of kids would eat at different places on campus — there was the front parking lot crowd, the back parking lot crowd, and the Mead Theatre group. I was in the latter, so I spent more time here than most people.

The big reunion dinner was at a restaurant called the Cantina, which hadn’t been there when I lived there (after all! how many businesses are still going 45 years later?) Someone put pictures from it up on his Flicker site. Bonus points for anyone who can find me or Arlene in any of them. We are in some.

We stayed overnight at Hank and Ernie’s house in Livermore. Hank cooked omelets for everyone for breakfast. He makes them thin, maybe just one egg each, in a big pan with lots of filling. I need to modify my omelet technique, because that works better than what I’ve done.

They took us for a walk in a park along an arroyo, past the museum where Ernie is a docent. We saw a couple of dozen wild turkeys in several different groups. It’s a place where you have to be a little bit aware that there could be mountain lions, because the park is on the edge of a big area of undeveloped land.

We ate lunch downtown at a Mexican place. Hank knows the owner, maybe from tutoring him in literacy.

Here we are, mugging for the camera on Ernestine’s Mac. L to R, Arlene, Dean, Hank, Ernestine.

In the afternoon, trying unsuccessfully to beat rush hour, we drove to Marin via I-580 and 880 and the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. It’s a bizarre bridge. When it was built they called it the world’s only camelback bridge. It has two decks, eastbound on the bottom and westbound on top, three lanes each, and goes up and down and up and down again. The link I gave you goes to a pretty interesting wikipedia articla about it. The summer after my junior year in college, when I was working as a day camp counselor and redoing the roof of my mom’s house (see the post for Aug 26), I used to drive across it pretty often to go folk dancing in Berkeley.

In the evening my classmates were going to Saylor’s Landing, a restaurant near the waterfront in Sausalito, not as an official part of the reunion. We had phoned the place to sort of make reservations, which mostly meant to alert them as to how many class members there would be. Several people looked familiar, somewhat to my surprise!

We’re at my mom’s house in Pocatello, Idaho.

I’m writing from her computer running an old Netscape under Windows 98, where the editing looks unfamiliar and clunky, and my style is definitely cramped!
We flew out to San Francisco for my 45th high school reunion.
We stayed overnight with my college roommate in Livermore.
The day after the reunion we drove out to the Point Reyes National Seashore, where we did a lot of pretty strenuous walking.
From there we drove up to coast to look at a tide pool near Fort Bragg.
I drove through a redwood tree near Leggett.
We cut across the Central Valley in the coolest weather I’ve ever experienced there, took a quick loop around the Colusa National Wildlife Refuge, and walked on a half-mile trail at the rest area at Donner Summit on I-80.
We got across Nevada without dropping so much as a nickel in a slot machine, but did buy three CDs at the Western Folk Life Center in Elko.
Now we’re taking it easy in the Gate City, with massages down the street and relaxing soaks in the outdoor pools at Lava Hot Springs.

More details, and lots of pictures, to follow

I did a little more on the chair caning. I’ve started the first slow step of the process, really weaving cane through previous strands. It’s taking many times as long per hole as the earlier steps — I think six or ten times as long. I’m beginning to appreciate why getting chairs caned is expensive.

And a closer look. There are now two strands next to each other for the first six holes down the side.

Oh no! That top corner is ugly. I’ll need to push those strands closer together next time. I hope it’s not too late. I think so long as I wet them down before trying to move them it’ll be OK.

As luck would have it, right between where we parked for the balloon festival and Railroad Park was an unpreposessing door in the Bates Mill Complex renovated part of the huge mill with a sign “Fishbones” over it. It looked like a restaurant.It was!. Now, that link is a press release, so you don’t have to take it 100% seriously, but we haven’t run into that good a restaurant in our part of Maine yet. Near Boothbay / Damariscotta / Pemaquid, yes, and in Portland, yes, but Fishbones was a classy joint by our standards. The prices were at most 2/3 what you would pay in the Boston area for comparable food. Our only complaint was that it was a very noisy room. I think the brick walls and varnished wood ceiling just don’t absorb noise at all. Since it was the day after our anniversary, and we hadn’t gone out to dinner the night before because of driving to Maine, we wanted to go to a nice place. Usually we don’t get dessert in restaurants, but for our anniversary we splurged, and the desserts, a flourless chocolate cake and a pear-frangipane tart, were excellent.

We walked back to the park for a last look at the balloons. At eight o’clock there was supposed to be “moonglow”, balloons lit up from inside with the burners. It wasn’t worth writing home about, but you do get one more picture:

After we walked through the carnival area of the festival (close to the bridge back from Auburn) we thought we would look for something to eat and come back when the balloons were getting ready to take off. Oops! They were going to start getting set up in another fifteen minutes, so we went back to our car and brought back the little portable seats we had got at Reny’s but never used yet, found places along the edge of the field, and waited.

We were in plenty of time. A few balloonists’ vans pulled up on the field, but not much was happening. Eventually a couple of balloons started inflating —

How about that! We had seen the RE/Max logos with the balloon — heck, we got the place in Casco through a RE/Max agent — but we didn’t know they really were into balloons.A couple of other balloons floated past a little to the north lotof the park. Evidently there was another field where people were setting up a couple of miles away.

A big cheer went up when the first balloon went up from the park.

About that time it became obvious that we didn’t have to stay in our seats — we could walk around the field and get a closer look at what was going on.

The guy in the red shirt said, “This is the hardest part of ballooning — you have to keep smiling for all the people taking pictures.” We stopped and had a long chat with him. He didn’t think he would take off that evening. It was a little windier than he liked. I asked, “And how about landing sites? There’s lots of woodland around here.” He said that there were pleyty of fields in a couple of towns to the east and northeast, but you didn’t want to go north from Lewiston — there was a big lake to the north and a little west, and then miles and miles of woods. But conditions had been wonderful that morning and around forty balloons went up.

The RE/Max balloon got up —

— and the prettiest balloon of all started inflating.

— and so did this one —

Oh, yes. You know these are hot air balloons. Were you wondering how the air gets hot and stays hot? There was a hint in the picture with the guy leaning on his basket — that sign, “no smoking, propane.” The answer: monster propane burners.

The one we thought was prettiest got airborne —

— and went almost directly over us. This is a view I don’t think you get except at a balloon festival.

We were in LA, or really L/A, which in central Maine is Lewiston/Auburn, the twin cities of Androscoggin County, on Saturday for a balloon festival.

Hot air balloons are like fireworks. You have to be there to appreciate the scale. But of course I have pictures.

Lewiston is the second biggest city in Maine, with a population around 36000. Add Auburn and you have almost 60000, still only 3/4 as much as Newton. There are some huge old mill buildings which used to run on water power from the falls of the Androscoggin River. The mills look too big for a city of that size, so I bet there were more people living there 80 years ago.

The balloon festival grounds, Railroad Park, along the river, looked like most fairgrounds, with lots of tents. Businesses were displaying lawn tractors and hawking waterless cookware sets.

When you get a balloon as a souvenier at a balloon festival, it’s a miniature model of a balloon with a basket:

There were musical performances all day. We heard a group of Metis, mixed ancestry Native American and French Canadians, singing and drumming. To my untutored ears it sounded just like the powwow last weekend, and there was a whiff of the same sage smudge too.

We walked around the grounds, across the river on a footbridge, and back on a riverside path on the Auburn side of the river. On that side a band was playing at a festival plaza where there was a lovely fountain with sheets of water that seemed to be inspired by the waterfalls of the Androscoggin. Arlene enjoyed standing in the spray.

We walked across another bridge back to the Lewiston side. An osprey was hunting near the falls. I didn’t get a picture of it, but it’s a good sign for the recovery of both the formerly endangered ospreys and the formerly terribly polluted Androscoggin. The helicopter was doing sightseeing rides as part of the festival.

— balloon pictures proper will be in another post

There was a meeting of the Small Woodlot Owners Association of Maine in Otisfield, the next town over. Off Powhatan road, near the Otisfield school. It sounded as though it was too close for people who are in charge of ten or eleven acres of Maine woodland not to check out. It turned out to be about three miles from here, almost just around the block as it were.

There was nobody in sight when we got there, everyone having gone on a tour of the host’s woodlot. We took a couple of handouts from the table, walked around the outside of the farmhouse, looked around the garden (from a respectful distance outside the electric anti-deer fence), and walked back to out car. Just as we got to our car we heard people talking in the distance. When we walked back to check, two people walking up the hill said hello. A woman about our age or older said that she realized that nobody was back at the house in case someone else showed up late, like us. By then the tours were returning. One of the groups came in sight down the hill, riding on a hay wagon behind a tractor. Soon the other group walked up. Leading the group, holding a big long staff as a walking stick (“Where did you get that?” “Found it in the woods!”) was someone from the state forest service, a lot like a county extension service agent. It turns out that he will come to people’s woodlots and give them advice on managing them. One key aspect is marking your boundaries; I don’t know what else we should be doing to keep our woods healthy, but we’ll try to get him over — and actually he belongs in Androscoggin county, and will send the guy responsible for Cumberland county, but will come along, because the Cumberland guy is new at the job — some time in the fall. So it turned out to be a constructive trip.

Here’s the state of Matt’s sweater as of Aug 11. By now I’ve done another inch of navy and a few rows of a simple fair isle band above that.