Beach reading roundup

Neal Stephenson, Seveneves. Stephenson's Snow Crash and The Diamond Age explode with energy, creativity, vivid characters, and dark humor. Both are great reads from beginning to end. Seveneves lacks every single redeeming feature of those books. It is derivative, tedious, humorless, and endless. I gave up long after I should have... several hundred pages into this deep pile of crap.

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend. Recommended by my colleague MK... along with everyone else. It is a fine novel: wonderful storytelling, psychologically astute... and the translation is exceptional.

John LeCarre, A Call for the Dead. His first, introducing George Smiley. I've read it a couple times, and though it was not my first Smiley novel (nor my favorite*), it would be the best place to start. It is a perfect suspense novel, and more.

Attica Locke, The Cutting Season. A whodunit featuring a charismatic single mom protagonist and an atmospheric mis-en-scène on a restored Louisiana sugar plantation. I picked it up from the hotel bookshelf for the flight home from Kauai. There are times when our hero Caren Gray makes decisions that are not as smart as she is, and the villains are a bit one-dimensional, but overall it is a fine escape with a deftly handled element of American racial history that doesn't insult your intelligence or standards.

* That would be Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Kauai

Yes, it is paradise. I have some photos below, but there's no way to capture the lush beauty of the place, especially the north shore. There are tourists, for sure—the GDP must be well over half tourism—but in spite of it Kauai has managed to maintain a rural, local vibe.

You don't usually have to drive far down a side road to encounter a little fruit stand offering a few mangos or avocados, often operating on the honor system. The day we arrived I swerved off the main road to buy a jar of homemade dill pickles from a young guy selling them from the back of his pickup truck, his sign painted on an old surfboard, of course. One or two scruffy, leathered old surfer dudes will inevitably be on the beach with you if there's a hint of a wave to catch. While fixing my latte, the young woman behind the counter at the gift shop/ cafe at Hanalei Colony Resort, where we stayed, told me about getting lost on the unmarked hunters' tracks she has hiked through the other-worldly thick jungle of the Alakai Swamp. A large percentage of the work force seems to be earning just enough in the tourist trade to support the island lifestyle. Could you thrive on a diet of ramen noodles and cheap beer, live in a buggy, rustic cottage, all in order to maximize the hours per week you could spend trekking in that crazy beautiful jungle, or snorkeling those abundant reefs, or riding those choppy breakers to a backdrop of Bali Hai? If you think the answer is obviously no, maybe you haven't been there.

The only mild down side for a nature-lover like me is contemplating the tenuous grip on survival that so many of Kauai's native species have. Several million years isolated by thousands of miles of open ocean have left the flora and fauna that evolved there unique, but vulnerable. The adventurous, industrious Polynesians, with their pigs, rats, and invasive though useful foreign plants, played a big part in the island's biological fall from grace. Western settlers brought more invasives, and even very recently some popular landscaping plants, such as the beautiful octopus tree (Schefflera actinophylla), are devastating Kauai's remaining native forests. Kauai's birds may also be suffering from mosquito-born diseases. Talk about the Fall: even the mosquitoes only came with the humans.

The Pihea Trail is the most direct way to the aforementioned Alakai Swamp. It starts down a ridge overlooking the spectacular Kalalau Valley... when, of course, the clouds part. Somewhere behind that fluffy white stuff. Did I mention 400 inches of rain annually?

A great place to learn about Kauai's native and introduced flora, and the uses to which the native Hawaiians put them, is the Limahuli Garden in Haena. It is spectacular.




Hibiscus is all over the place. Some varieties are endemic to the island. Not this one, I think...





The Pihea and Alakai Trails feature miles of old boardwalks, which keep your feet out of the mud... partly.

For a Californian coming off several years of drought, the amount of moisture on Kauai is... well... obscene? It clots the very air you breathe.

Your FSA/OWI Photo of the Day

Miscellaneous lot of photographs by Barbara Wright. New Mexico. Clayton, New Mexico. American Legion hall. Barbara Wright, c. 1941.

In New Mexico, it appears that Ms. Wright couldn't resist riffing on Ansel Adams's Taos Pueblo pictures.

Your FSA/OWI Photo of the Day

Redwood trees and stumps on redwood highway. An active mill town of the Pacific Lumber Company is located at Scotia. California, Humboldt County. Dorothea Lange, 1939.

Game of Thrones betting market

The markets predict that insufferable dragon lady as the winner by a substantial margin. God I hope not. In the moral universe of television, one rule that should always be observed is that the winner is a halfway decent actor. If I were a betting man, I'd go with Cersei Lannister, not only because she is my favorite character, but also because she seems invincible. On the other hand, if Bran Stark triumphs, just shoot me... no worries, I will already have been bored to death...

The Golden Compass

I recently re-read the first installment of Philip Pullman's marvelous fantasy trilogy, mostly while I was shivering next to the campfire in Yosemite. It was almost as good as I remember it. Still, it really is fiction for young folks, not old cynics like me, and I perceived a few shortcomings that I might have missed the first time, when the breathless plot carried me right along. In particular, the narrative rushes toward the end, when a reader might prefer that Pullman take his time and reveal more about some of the main characters—not their back stories, but their character. And things are sometimes a little too easy for Lyra: her clever plans work out better than one could reasonably expect. This reflects the tension in the story between destiny and agency. My taste leans toward more agency, but I acknowledge that others may differ. One thing we can probably all agree on is that together, this girl and her daemon make a hero for all time.

Sort-outs

That's farmers' market-speak for mushy or broken tomatoes (etc.) sold at a steep discount. Today's were 75 cents a pound, just fine to eat sliced today. Mine are suffering a different fate...

Yosemite visit

The peak of summer tourist season is not the ideal time to visit Yosemite, but if you head to the "less popular" (that's a relative term) upper part of the park, manage to find a campsite, and then hit the trail... well... it's Yosemite! I lucked into the last open site in the rustic and secluded Porcupine Flat campground. Tioga Road (Rte 120) was a traffic jam at times. But what still astonishes me is that you need only hike for an hour from the road and not see another human soul.

Bad news first. The drive between Groveland and Crane Flat (many miles) was depressing. The pines that haven't been taken out by wildfires are succumbing to pine bark beetles in large numbers. Within a decade the lower Sierras will look more like chaparral than forest. But let's just ignore all that and head up to high country.

Hike #1 was the short chug up Lembert Dome in Tuolumne Meadows... a good way to get acclimated to the thinner air. Great views. If you haven't yet... just do it!

Next day, Hike #2: Gaylor and Granite Lakes, a trail that takes off from Tioga Pass at the east end of the park. One of my favorites—I have done it many times. Most people seem to stop at the first (Middle) Gaylor Lake. It's lovely, but the best lies beyond.

Bumblebees love ranger buttons (Sphenosciadium capitellum).

A mellow stroll from Middle Gaylor brings you to Upper Gaylor Lake. And from there, it's a short trudge uphill to the "Great Sierra Mine." The miners, in search of fortunes of silver, were unsuccessful, but they built a fine stone cabin at the crest with a southward view that rivals any I know of. Then again, pretty chilly winters up there!

Thanks to Jeffrey Schaffer I know that you can bushwhack past the mine to a scenic nearby pond and then over a ridge to the Granite Lakes. The view from atop the ridge is a classic:

Hike #4: Mono and Parker Passes. (I deal with Hike #3 below.) This is one of the top day hikes in Yosemite. 12 miles round trip in high-elevation air, so be prepared!

First, up to Mono Pass. Many good views, and an interesting set of pioneer cabins at the pass. Beautiful weathered logs...

Then head south to Parker Pass. The climb is gradual, and the open-country scenery is spectacular all the way.

Parker Pass, at 11,000 feet, is essentially the top of a long, broad, windswept meadow. It is a dramatic setting.

Just south of the pass is a moraine (I think), hiding chilly, sapphire Parker Pass Lake. I scrambled down to it for lunch.

The rocks here are the typical eastern Sierra metamorphic melange. The green stuff (serpentine?) seems to attract the hardy lichens in this inhospitable environment...

From Parker Pass Lake it's an easy cross-country stroll down crazy-beautiful meadows to shallow Spillway Lake. There I met a couple of friendly Park Service limnologists taking their lunch break after collecting and analyzing some water samples... well, they weren't really limnologists, but physical chemists, but I like the word limnologist.

Oh yeah... Hike #3? Short jaunt up Panum Crater, just south of Mono Lake. This is a rhyolitic lava dome of very recent vintage... 600-700 years old. The dome is a kind of fun-house of volcanic rock, including huge blobs of obsidian. At that age, it has to be considered active, and standing there you do wonder when it might get a hankering to blow again...

This rock exhibits what is known as breadcrust texture, caused by cooling and cracking of the lava.

Yosemite has critters too. Like Belding's ground squirrel. At Gaylor Lake, they have only a few short months to eat up and go to bed before the snows come again. Cute?