Creek Running North

Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/16 at 07:33 AM

In the “I’m not at all sure how I feel about this but however it is it’s strongly” department, it looks as if UC Davis Picnic Day, an annual open house kinda dealio with hundreds of exhibits from different departments and organizations, has, while my back was turned, dropped the Cole Facility’s fistulated cow from the schedule of events.

A fistulated cow is a cow into whose rumen a plastic window — a fistula — has been installled so that cowometrists can conduct close observation of the animal’s digestive system.

An anonymous pro-fistulated-cow GeoCities page says that the exhibit was dropped “due to political pressure.” I assume this means pressure from animal rights activists: I can’t imagine the GOP taking a stand on cow fistulation, unless it was to insist that Halliburton get the oil rights.

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Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/14 at 11:42 AM

Everyone other than Lauren should look below the fold.

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Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/13 at 05:29 PM

Among other things, this last trip was a journey of fire. On day two I drove past a staggeringly large field of burned Joshua trees in Joshua Tree National Park, which looked very recently destroyed. I found out later that the fire had taken place just a few days before.  It rekindled, or a new one was kindled, not far away, and that one is still burning.

Also still burning, across the 29 Palms-Yucca Valley Corridor, is an even larger fire that has destroyed the rustic-twee settlement Pioneertown. One of the losses, apparently, is Pappy and Harriet’s, a legendary biker bar where once I had a beer with Sharon. The farther uphill settlement of Rimrock, where Becky and Zeke and I spent Valentine’s Weekend 2001, and where I first watched a ladderback woodpecker drilling into a joshua tree fruit for the yucca moth larva within, was evacuated last I heard, and I fear for the adjacent Pipes Canyon Preserve.

I crawled on my hands and knees through burned tamarisk thickets with the Border Patrol in 114-degree heat along the Colorado. Tamarisk burns readily. Sometimes the coyotes light fires to distract the authorities. Sometimes the migrants’ cigarettes fall in the wrong place, or monsoon lightning strikes.

On my drive back home I stopped to mourn the westernmost grove of Joshua trees in the world, almost astride Interstate 5 in the Tehachapi Range near Gorman. Some miles distant from their nearest kin, some have speculated that the grove was once part of a population in the Antelope Valley, on the other side of the mountains, and that it slid into its current location along the San Andreas Fault over thousands of years. It was another chapter of my book, this grove, and it was 99 percent burned. I took some photos.

A few miles north, a huge chunk of the mountainside smouldered near Frazier Park. Wisps of smoke filtered back down to the freeway.

I stopped for lunch near Buttonwillow, and drove a few more hours. A plume of smoke above Mount Hamilton beckoned for an hour, and my suspicions were correct: It was at the head of Del Puerto Canyon. That fire is still burning.

Let me pause here to allow Mr. Cash to render in song the thoughts that filled my head:

It was not over. Outside Tracy, the Interstate starts to curl westward and over the windmill-festooned Altamont Pass, marking the beginning of home to Bay Area drivers, but my way seemed blocked. A staggering drift of smoke lay across the roadway, obviously driven by the stiff wind from a fire uphill. That wind had battered my truck for the past hour, sending me onto the shoulder more than once, and it now obscured the visibility on the road ahead.

Or so I thought. as I neared the smoke, I saw that while some of it was indeed being blown from a burn uphill, much of it was in fact rising from both sides of the road. The fire had jumped the interstate. Both sides and the median were burning, and as I slowed at the front it looked as though the pavement was on fire as well. I had entertained thoughts of driving through. If the fire was twenty feet across, or twenty yards, the truck would likely make it through unsinged. But I could not see the other side.

There were no police there, no firefighters to tell us what to do, the only authority in evidence a lone, distant helicopter slowly swinging a bucket toward the Aqueduct. We sat transfixed for a while, five semi drivers and three other pickups, seemingly hypnotized by the flames, and a few of the pickups turned and crossed the median to head south. It occurred to me that the roadcut we sat in, steep-sided and lined with tall dead grass, could with a slight windshift become a blowtorch. And there was a tanker truck pulling slowly up behind me. What chance was there that it held milk? I crossed the median as well, adding an hour to my trip, but still a good choice as the cops soon closed the freeway for several more hours after that.

And all the while I smiled, content. The westernmost grove of Joshua trees — whose loss I mourned remotely these last three years — that grove lives still. Beneath each clump of dead and blackened trees, beneath each wizened white-fibered corpse, new trees arise.

This may not hold to the east, where Joshua trees have not evolved in the presence of regular wildfire, but the western trees still sprout after a burn. With luck, they will slide along the fault to prosper on an altithermal future coast.

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Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/13 at 09:45 AM

The magazine I edit, Earth Island Journal, is holding an online auction of quite a few interesting and occasionally delicious items to raise a little bit of cash. You can check it out here.

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Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/12 at 04:34 PM

Elayne Riggs, who is very perceptive, criticized my rather slapdash parody of Prufrock a couple weeks back for being too much “inside baseball.”

And she was right. It was a grudge piece, written to target rabies-con blogger Jeff Goldstein. I had had about enough of his consistent and clumsy attempts to insult friends and people I admire, the victim in the particular post that spurred the satire being Amanda Marcotte. It was the last straw, and I resorted to the most fearsome weapon in my rhetorical arsenal, and let’s ignore for now the fact that the most fearsome weapon in my rhetorical arsenal is satirizing a poem that generations of high school students have already mocked.

People said some very flattering things about the piece, including some of Goldstein’s friends and admirers, and I’m grateful for that, and then I went out to the desert and had five minutes of net access at a time every other day for a week. And then I come back and find out that somehow the right has decided Jeff Goldstein is a martyr.

I beg the indulgence of those of you who agreed with Elayne about the in-group humor, the sniping at obscure and worthless targets. I wrote the poem because a friend had been slandered one too many times and I got pissed off. I knew at the time that I could have spent my time more productively, and you’ll see a self-mocking aside in the URL of the Prufrock satire.

Ordinarily I’d agree that the guy’s not worth my effort. True, Goldstein is certainly in the top quintile of repulsive net personalities. Aside from his relentless fixation with Amanda’s social life and body parts, he’s published scatological sexual fantasies about Lindsay Beyerstein, joked about raping Jill from Feministe, outed anonymous bloggers Thersites and NYMary, published Roxanne Cooper’s contact information in retaliation for a satire she produced, and the list goes on. His fans are a mixed bag, from the vile to the merely misguided, and at least one of them followed a less-than-flattering link from Goldstein’s blog to CRN, and proceeded to make a bizarre and off-topic death threat against Zeke.

But still: there are dozens like him, perhaps hundreds, and I was fully prepared to just take my shot and let things rest there. But apparently I’m now an accessory to threatening child molestation and to denial of service attacks.

It turns out that a sadly deluded, unconstructive idiot named Deb Frisch decided to take Goldstein on in comments at his blog, and rather than choosing the path I took — attempting to outshine him by aspiring to erudition far in excess of that I can honestly claim — she instead decided to roll around in the dirt with him. Frisch made some comments about sexual assault of Goldstein’s son and other repugnant statements. I would point out that from what I have seen, the comments were not substantially different in tone or content from those Goldstein routinely allows to remain on his site: just aimed at Goldstein’s family.

This was followed by what is being described as a denial of service attack on Goldstein’s blog by persons unknown.

How am I involved in this? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, I’m not. But The Commissar, at his blog “Politburo Diktat" claims that I — along with a number of other bloggers I admire, and some I’ve never read — am complicit in Frisch’s attack and the as yet unresolved DDOS because each of us criticized Goldstein. My Prufrock satire, you see, was part of a mob attack that aided and gave comfort to Frisch, enabling her to make some spectacularly stupid and offensive comments on a blog, which turns out, while I was out of range, to have become the cause celebre flavor of the month among neocon bloggers, who are now holding up Goldstein as some sort of martyr to decorum.

And I’d ignore that, too, had I my druthers, because it’s just so predictably whiny and stupid. Just like I basically ignored the stupid death threat made against Zeke, a course Goldstein would have been well advised to take. But I have been called out as complicit in threatening Goldstein Jr., who is innocent of his father’s sins, so I feel obliged to say something for the record. This is my response, and I hope it’ll be the last thing I say on this particular topic.

I don’t know what’s up with the denial of service attack, who’s behind it, or whether it is actually taking place. I hate denial of service attacks. I fully support Goldstein’s right to freely and publicly espouse the filth and garbage he spews, excepting those actionable, libelous or harassing occasions for which someone is going to haul his sorry ass before a civil court one of these days, in which event I fully support Goldstein’s right to counsel.

Frisch’s actions were offensive and stupid. They were apparently designed to upset Goldstein’s family in addition to Goldstein himself. They are every bit as reprehensible as the hundreds of similar comments made by Goldstein and his regular readers that sink to the same level. They are perhaps somewhat less reprehensible than some comments at Goldstein’s blog that explicitly call for violence to be done against political opponents, or than Goldstein’s outing of anonymous bloggers, which not only served to bring the dispute to bloggers’ homes but enabled his more unstable readers to contact Goldstein’s opponents, thus using his flying monkeys as a force multiplier.

But for the benefit of those people, The Commissar apparently among them, who confuse ranking evils on a scale running from “bad” to “really bad” with actually endorsing the evils gauged as slightly lesser, let me say this straight out to dispell any misconceptions:

I am appalled by Deb Frisch’s crude, offensive, and arguably threatening statements. I condemn them.

I’m also appalled by the burning of the Reichstag, and I condemn it in no uncertain terms. And all those chickens: I condemn each and every feather on their backs as they come home to roost. And I further and summarily disavow all of the fruits of the seeds Goldstein may or may not have sown, though I fully support his right to reap them as he sees fit.

And if any of Jeff Goldstein’s future and inevitable reprehensible comments rise above his usual irrelevance horizon, I will likely condemn them too, as I did with the post that so bothered The Commissar, for which I have neither apologies nor regrets. 

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Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/10 at 10:30 PM

This morning as I sat conspicuously long-haired and bearded in the Wellton Border Patrol office lobby waiting for my appointment to begin, the agents brought in one of two big trucks they’d intercepted out in the desert. The drivers had run off, consigning their cargo — about a ton and a half of fine Mexican sinsemilla — to the tender mercies of federal law enforcement.

I went out with the gang to look at the first truck they brought in, still loaded with bud. One after another, about half the agents took me aside to joke meaningfully about their college days. Wanna know what three quarters of a ton of pot looks like? It looks like a bunch of plastic-wrapped bales of something tied with packing tape. The second truck was mired and it would apparently take them a while to tow it out of the desert, whereupon the local representatives of the Drug Enforcement Agency would haul all the pot away for burning, and not in that nice way the agents recollected from their undergraduate days .

I went off to watch a couple Power Point presentations before my trip to the field, then Agent Mike Crelia, my tour guide for the day, gassed up a Border Patrol truck for us. We hopped in and headed west on Interstate 8 over the Gila Mountains to look at a few popular border crossing spots.

At the base of the freeway grade on the Gilas’ east side we passed an Arizona DOT “Adopt-A-Highway” sign: “In Memory of Jerry Garcia, 1942-1995.”

Atop the pass a mile or so onward, two large shiny pickup trucks with familiar-looking bales in their beds were pulled over on each shoulder of Interstate 8. The DEA guys had failed to secure their loads. One of the bales had tumbled out into traffic, rolled to the left shoulder and burst. Mike Crelia said “this isn’t good,” pulled us over onto the shoulder, put on his flashing lights. We stood and watched, chuckling, as the discomfited DEA agents picked through the weeds and gravel and broken glass at roadside putting several hundred spilled buds into plastic evidence bags— enough to supply a good-sized dormitory for a month.

Rest in peace, Jerry.

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