Time to move on -- part two

I took a vacation a few weeks ago, back to where I was born (SF Bay Area). While it was good to see some of my old haunts as a kid (San Francisquito Creek, Perry Lane) it made me think: Damn, when did I get old?

My wife and daughter had never seen where I grew up, and my wife had to go to the Bay Area to attend the GDC (Game Developers Conference), so I figured -- what the hell. I hadn't been back to the Bay Area since I left for Arizona shortly after the 1989 World Series earthquake.

I was born in Palo Alto in the early 1950s, and my mother was a confirmed Bay Area inhabitant. As a kid I got to see many of the things that my mom valued as a kid. For me the most important things were the San Francisco Zoo and Steinhart Aquarium (I subsequently worked at Steinhart for years on and off, including and after the summer of 1970, mainly with the herps -- that's reptiles and amphibians for Ann Coulter Official Chat members, and others who just can't make it past STDs).

Anyhow, Dr. Earl S. Herald ran Steinhart Aquarium in the 50s and 60s, and also was the host of a show called Science in Action, which I never missed. While Dr. Herald was an ichthyologist (that's a scientist who studies fish, for ACOC members) he regularly had herps on the show too. I believe that the first time I had ever heard of an Elephant's Trunk Snake (Acrochordus javanicus) was when Dr. Herald was hauling one around on stage. I started a correspondence with him when I was eight, telling him how much I enjoyed his program and asking him questions about various creatures (usually reptiles), and he ALWAYS wrote back. These days a busy man like that would just funnel letters from some kid off to his secretary so that she could shoot off some form letter, but not Dr. Herald. Anyhow, I kept writing to Steinhart through high school, and then my dad arranged for me to get a summer job with a friend of his in the San Francisco Bay Area, salary, room and board included. One weekend I went up to San Francisco, and dropped in at Steinhart just to see if I could volunteer. Karl Switak, the supervising herpetologist at the aquarium who had also responded to my letters for years, knew who I was immediately, and I was set up as a volunteer on the spot. And what an experience it was.

While volunteers aren't supposed to have anything to do with venomous reptiles, I was tossed a set of keys which allowed me to have the run of Steinhart Aquarium, and told "If you get bitten, I don't know anything about it!" At the age of 17, I got to work with things I had only read about since I was a kid: bushmasters, Gila monsters, mambas, big constrictors, Old World vipers, rattlers of every species including the largest: the Eastern diamondback -- I remember one they had in a box in the holding room had a head that was about as wide across as a human hand. That's a big snake. Also in that room was a full-sized adult indigo snake (Drymarchon corais) -- the largest species of non-venomous snake in the US. It remains the only one I have ever handled. And that was just in the holding room, which had more stuff in it than most zoos had for a display collection. Additionally, there were about six or so species of cobras at Steinhart when I was there, including a king cobra measuring about twelve feet or so. At Steinhart I got to experience the feeling of king cobra intelligence -- these were ancient displays, and working behind the reptile panel I would occasionally glance at the big door at the end of the panel. It had a round porthole in it through which you could keep an eye on the king, and invariably, while I was working, it was keeping its eye on me. I would often find it looking at me through the porthole as I worked, and its expression definitely showed something like intelligence...I'm not the only snake person to say this, either. The king cobra's diet consists primarily of snakes (hence its generic name, Ophiophagus -- that's Latin, for ACOC members -- meaning snake eater) and so one of my jobs when I wasn't at the aquarium was to cruise the roads looking for roadkilled snakes to toss into the freezer at Steinhart to thaw later for meals. And remember I'm talking about antiquated exhibits here -- modern exhibits for cobras such as this have a remote door that you can raise up to allow the snake to access a darkened hide box. You pull on a cable, the snake notices the door, and naturally wants to go into the dark to be away from the public. Once the snake's in there, you drop the door to keep the snake in there, and then you can safely service the display. Not at Steinhart -- to feed the king cobra you would look through the porthole to make sure it wasn't right at the door, yank the door open, fling a thawed snake into the cage and hopefully slam it before the snake got out into the hallway with you. Usually it would snag its dinner in mid-air, and you were off the hook, but I've gotta tell you that this feeding method wouldn't be allowed at today's zoos.

Anyhow, the old Steinhart Aquarium was a wonderland for me -- a teenager whose whole life's desire was to someday be a famous herpetologist. With its neoclassical structure, built after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 (in 1923, I believe), Steinhart Aquarium was a magnificent building, with columns, a whale fountain in front, and a huge swamp area with alligators, crocodiles, and alligator snapping turtles right in front of you when you walked in the door. I got to climb around in the swamp, feed the gators, occasionally capture an alligator snapper to haul to the Aquarium roof for some sun to kill fungus on its shell, and I remember donning a yellow rain slicker so that I could haul a young harbor seal up to the roof for the same reason. I was trusted and felt valued by the staff. At the age of seventeen I was living a dream, and working at Steinhart Aquarium remains the highlight of my life.

After the 1989 earthquake damaged the Aquarium, rather than repair it, they decided to rip the entire thing down, and in the place of its magnificence we have a modern thing that looks like an Erector Set gone mad -- Renzo Piano the architect notwithstanding, it's just one more concrete and steel building, but at least it has this really neat plant-covered roof. There is almost no reptile collection. The current thing in zoos and aquariums is multi-species exhibits to illustrate relationships between organisms, and that's what's at the California Academy of Sciences now (Steinhart was always THE main part of the Academy, but how they can continue to call it Steinhart Aquarium astonishes me). You be the judge -- here's the old Steinhart:



and here's the "new" one:



The whale fountain's gone, the columns are gone (except for replicas inside the building, which are just heartbreaking), and it made me realize that, yes indeed, forty years have really passed by since my seventeenth summer. That summer I got to see the musical "Hair," and the movie "Easy Rider." I had my first experience riding on commuter trains alone to a big city, and learning how to successfully make it across the city on public transit. My boss took me around Alcatraz in a sailboat, and I watched the Indians, who that summer were occupying the island, hanging their laundry in cell windows. And that summer I got to work in what once was possibly the greatest public aquarium in the US -- certainly on the West Coast at least -- and I was trusted to work with venomous snakes that could kill you easily and fairly quickly. I haven't even really talked about the fish collection, mainly because herps were my primary interest, but when I wasn't working with herps, I was crawling over shark tanks on a catwalk, or feeding a huge sea bass or alligator gars, or maybe just spending a few minutes with Butterball the manatee, scrubbing his back with a deck brush. Steinhart Aquarium was an amazing place, and now, green roof notwithstanding, the soul has been removed. I'm not at all sure that Ignatz and Sigmund Steinhart, the original source of funds for the building of the aquarium, would be very pleased at the place now.

There's an old saying, which I am sure you probably have heard: You can't go home again. Perhaps it's true...I'll never visit the Academy of Sciences again and sort of wish I hadn't seen what they turned it into. My old house on Perry Lane, where I grew up across from Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and prominent druggie) is still there. If you've ever read Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test you're somewhat familiar with my neighborhood in my era. My grandfather built that house, which once had a HUGE Victorian-style greenhouse full of orchids in the backyard. The house, surprisingly, looks much the same, although it was once behind a hedge which hid most of it:



but the huge oak tree that was once in the middle of the street is gone now -- my mom proudly told me that her first date ran into that tree -- dead of disease, and a new little one has been planted to replace it:



with a little plaque commemorating it -- when I was a kid it was Perry LANE, not Avenue:



I went to other places from my youth, too, and they had changed -- an example is the Pulgas Water Temple. The Pulgas (Spanish for "fleas") Water Temple is a structure that was built at the end of the aqueduct that channels water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in the Yosemite Valley to the Bay Area.



After the great earthquake and fire of 1906, the residents of San Francisco decided that they needed more water so that they wouldn't have to watch their entire city burn down again, and so Yosemite was screwed up by damming off a valley to make a reservoir. While this would NEVER happen in today's ultra-sensitive enviro-society -- the most they do these days is screw up pristine desert by building acres of windmills -- the Water Temple was another spot from my youth that's been changed irreparably. When I was REALLY young, the inside of the temple was an open hole, where kids could watch the staggering amount of water swirl and gush inside the temple as it reached its final destination all the way from Yosemite. Then, in the 70s, I suppose, they put a screen over the top, probably after some druggie jumped in the hole or something, but the water still flowed. Not too long ago they decided to stop the water flow to the temple so that the water could be treated somewhere else before it went to Crystal Springs Reservoir. Now why they couldn't treat the water AFTER it left the temple is a mystery to me, but I'm just one of the uneducated masses. So now what you have is a really ornate structure with a screened-over hole inside. At least they haven't torn the quote with the Biblical plaque off yet, but who knows -- they might switch it out for a plaque commemorating Obama's election. That would make as much sense.



I suppose this kind of change, often for the sake of change alone, is always to be expected, but it makes me wonder: rather than "you can't go home again," perhaps it should really be: you shouldn't go home again. Old memories are sometimes best left as they are, without any updating. However, as the title of this post notes -- perhaps it was just, again, time to move on.

At least San Francisquito Creek, where I scrounged for lizards and three-spined stickleback (a type of fish, again for ACOC members) as a kid looked about the same:



So not everything was different. But, I've gotta say, while I showed my wife and Katie my old neighborhood, and wanted them to see it, and while not all of it changed -- I think that will about do it for memory lane. Getting old, folks.

Happy birthday, Mr. Lincoln!

Today Abraham Lincoln would be 201 years old. I view him, and many of the historians consistently do also, as the greatest president in the history of the United States. He grew up in the middle of nowhere (at least it was the middle of nowhere in the early 1800s), had no more than a fourth-grade education (and not much of that), and pretty much taught himself how to read, write and speak effectively.

People back then, when Lincoln was president, were no kinder to him than they are to presidents in modern times. He was called a "nigger lover," "the perfect baboon" (this by his very own, and useless General McClellan), and constantly threatened with assassination. He was in the habit of staying at the Soldiers' Home outside of Washington, rather than the White House during the hotter months, and on one of his solo rides to the house had his top hat shot through and knocked off his head (henceforth he was accompanied by a military escort). His wife, Mary, did her very best to drive him mad with her irrational behavior, but he took it all in stride and continued to work for the good of America, not wanting to be the president under which the Union would dissolve. Under his watch, the United States of America was reunited and slavery was ended in the country for all time.

There are probably more books in existence about Abraham Lincoln than about any other person on the planet (unless you want to tally up JFK conspiracy-theory books). Many praise him and/or simply chronicle his life. But then there are those revisionist historians who, having apparently nothing better to do, make up disgusting theories about how Lincoln was supposedly a homosexual based on the fact that sometimes lawyers shared beds while riding the Eighth Judicial Circuit in the backwoods of Illinois, there being few establishments where one could obtain a room while making the rounds of various courtrooms. There are the rabid Lincoln-haters who blame him for any number of ills inflicted upon the US economy, or for federalizing the government, or tramping on the Constitution (his suspension of the writ of habeus corpus is commonly brought up, ignoring the fact that subsequently he was found to be justified in doing this by the Supreme Court, being thrust into an emergency situation that called for emergency actions).

I find Abraham Lincoln to be, in my opinion, the greatest American, the greatest statesman, and the greatest president in our history. There are those who, possibly because they will never be thought of as great at all, feel that it is necessary to spit on his memory in an attempt to feel more important. It pains me to see that the only American who has his birthday honored these days is Martin Luther King, Jr., which was accomplished by combining Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays into a single amorphous "Presidents Day" and thus avoiding increasing the number of federal holidays. It apparently was more important to pander to blacks by doing this, even though King might possibly have not been famous (or free, for that matter) had Abraham Lincoln not been born; in fact, I believe that MLK would object to this being done to Lincoln's birthday if he had any way to comment on it.

President Lincoln died at the hands of a southern sympathizer and racist fanatic named John Wilkes Booth, and the world was poorer for it. He never was able to do things like travel to California or to Jerusalem (as he once stated he would like to have done once he was through being President). The nation was deprived of his gentle and humorous wisdom and his absolute belief that the USA was, and would continue to be, the greatest nation in the world's history. Often people play the game: "If I could spend an evening talking and having dinner with a historical figure it would be..."; many people choose Jesus as this person, possibly because they think they're supposed to think that way. The way I look at it, I'll be spending eternity in Jesus' company. Whether or not it makes me look bad to nix an evening with Jesus in favor of one with Mr. Lincoln, I've often wished I could spend a day in the company of Abraham Lincoln, just to hear his stories, jokes, and anecdotes, and to experience his personality in real life. However, while Lincoln never chose a particular church or denomination, I trust that he's waiting for us now, and perhaps I'll get to spend some time with him after all.

If you want to read some good books about Mr. Lincoln, I'd recommend these:
Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin -- great on Lincoln's presidency and his cabinet
Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald -- excellent overall biography unsurpassed except by the next one:
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, by Michael Burlingame -- the newest biography with access to heretofore unknown material -- two huge volumes that I couldn't stop reading until I was done.

About the assassination of Abraham Lincoln I recommend:
Blood on the Moon, by Edward Steers
American Brutus, by Michael Kauffman
Manhunt, by James L. Swanson

One good book that I wholeheartedly recommend on the mindset of Lincoln's wife, Mary, is:

The Madness of Mary Lincoln, by Jason Emerson -- just an excellent work by a very meticulous researcher.

I hope that you will give some thought to Abraham Lincoln today on his birthday, and that, if you are only basically familiar with the life and death of our 16th president, you will be inspired to learn more about this great man.

God bless his memory.

Herp

Time to move on

After my father died, and a little soul-searching, I decided to take a little time off from the work world, finish up some classes that needed finishing up, and do some things that I always wanted to do. Hence the new motorcycle -- I know, I know, it's one of those things old guys do in a vain attempt to recapture their youth. However, since I COULD do it, I did it, and I'm glad to say that, other than a slowing of reflexes requiring me to look a little farther ahead than I used to, I don't seem to have lost the ability to ride.

It's been about twenty years since I rode my last Beemer, and not wanting to own any other brand, and BMWs being so costly, I had just about written them off. But I bit the bullet in October, and now I'm getting my skills back, slowly but surely. In fact, I may be riding to California to have a custom seat made this month, and I'll see if I can navigate the freeways there. Ain't looking forward to that, but I'll deal with it.

Things have changed on BMW motorcycles since I first started riding in the 70s, some for the good and some for the, well, not-so-good, but the good outweighs the bad. More horsepower, more bells and whistles (anti-lock brakes and automatic suspension adjustment on a motorcycle!). Missing is the hand work that used to be apparent in the pinstriping, etc. But all in all, I can't complain.

The one thing that has changed in the twenty years I took off from motorcycling is -- assholes with cellphones. Twenty years ago there were no cell phones, or at least not like we know them now. It was bad enough that people twenty years ago could look at you and just not have it register that you were actually driving a motor vehicle. But that was only SOME people. Now it seems that the majority of people driving the roads spend half of any drive with a phone jammed on their ear, talking about very important things like Buffy's coming-out party or "wow, I think that guy in Biology class is cute," etc. I find I spend a lot more time making absolutely sure that the drivers around me aren't semi-comatose and actually do notice me.

The good thing, and luckily I've been quick enough, is that with the massive amount of horsepower vs. the small amount of weight involved in a motorcycle means that, given a couple seconds of warning I can rocket the hell out of the way of cars careening into my path. I do have to say, however, that the time has come for law enforcement officers to be authorized to shoot to kill cell phone-using drivers. We'll see about that.

So, I'm semi-retired, I guess. Next month we're heading to the Bay Area to revisit my home where I grew up, and I have a tour arranged where I used to work at the biggest public aquarium on the west coast. I'm sort of excited about seeing things that I saw when I was a kid, although the aquarium has been completely overhauled. I hope they saved some of the old structure. And San Francisco Zoo (Fleishhacker's Zoo when I was a kid) should largely be the same -- old-time structures for Pachyderms, Lions, etc.

Lots of things happening, and there isn't an internet flamer that can bother me anymore, so life's looking pretty good about now.

Love,