Wild Bunnies and Stone Bears

This afternoon I cut through a little used corner of the UCSD campus.  It was after 5 pm in the last week of summer school, and there were only a few people along the way.  Jasmine scented the air.  I chose the path lined with magnolias and azaleas, just so I could smell the delicate, subtle sweet scents of my childhood in Louisiana—so familiar that the first time I almost missed them.  Then I passed through a glass doorway in a shallow hall that connects buildings, and along a sidewalk alongside the back of the building.  Shrubs blocked my view as I circled a small rise for about 10 feet, and then I came to a grassy knoll.  Three brown bunnies formed a perfect triangle on the grass, nibbling away, until I startled them.  They sat up, ears alert for my movements.  Their backs have an orangish-colored fur; their ears are tall and white on the inside.  I told them I bring love and peace, but one bolted for a far bush anyway.  The others started eating again, and I quietly walked on.

That’s one of the best surprises about my new life.  I see wild bunnies almost every day.  They graze on the hills around the college, and I usually see them every morning walking to the office and most evenings too.  But I had never seen them on this hill before, and it was so quiet and secluded, and they were so wide out in the open that it was startling.  On the hills where I usually see them, they stay close to the shrubbery and are camouflaged by the grass and bushes.  I have to look for them.  This time, I couldn’t miss them.

I was returning from spending time at one of the sculptures on campus—a huge stone teddy bear, placed right in a triangle of grass between the engineering buildings—all glass and metal and high-tech new buildings that exude wealth and science.  Huge granite boulders—8 of them—piled on one another to look just like a giant cuddly teddy bear.  Makes you want to hug it—or be hugged by it—and definitely climb all over it—and run around it and play peek-a-boo.  Students have been known to hang a flower lei on it and a tie.  I asked how they got up there, and one of my colleagues shrugged and said, “They’re engineering students.”  A tribe of Native Americans in the area—the Pala—donated their sacred stones for the sculpture.  The stones are beautiful.  Just to be around them feels good.  Certain angles where the rocks meet one another reminded me of Elephant Rocks in Missouri and Enchanted Rock in Texas.  It’s like a miniature, man-made version of a wonder of nature.  And it’s a bear.

UCSD is not a cuddly campus.  It’s huge and sprawling and disconnected, with no real center, no architectural cohesion, no clear flow, and lots of little isolated worlds.  But it has stone teddy bears and wild bunnies, magnolias and azaleas, and the air smells sweet all the time.

Pelican Play

This evening as my friend Trish and I watched from a bench on the bluffs overlooking the ocean

A lone surfer bobbed on the waves and caught a few short, sweet rides

A line of brown pelicans flew south over our heads like flowing silk

Dogs sniffed our feet as they passed by

A small blind dog licked Trish’s hand

And then out of the south, the curving line of pelicans swooped back north, turned out to the ocean, dipped down, flying as close to the water as they could, like they were surfing, and followed the line of the waves as far as the eye could see

PS

I forgot to mention the pelicans; ravens; sandpipers; the cherry red of the bougainvilla bushes; succulent vines running all along the ground with fuschia, white, and yellow flowers; and the superfine, soft-as-silk sand sparkling with gold flecks.

I moved to San Diego in January.  Now instead of stepping out into midtown Manhattan every time I leave the apartment and having a stellar view of the Empire State Building from every window in my home, I step out into jasmine- and orange-blossom-scented air, palm trees, pine trees, eucalyptus trees, and birds singing.  Instead of walking up and down 3rd Avenue and all over the city and riding the subway, taking the bus, hailing cabs, I hop into my Fiat 500 Pop with a sunroof and drive down the Pacific Coast Highway for a few minutes, park, and go into my office with a view of the ocean. 

 

These are the steps I take to get down to the beach most days. I walk a short block, then along a ridge, down a short path, over a railroad track, down a longer, steeper path, and then I'm here. Most of the way the path is lined with purple flowers. The air is sweet and salty and fresh. The waves are beautiful. The surf and surfers are too. Life is a dream.

I live in Del Mar, a block from the ocean.  I'm telling you this because I still can't believe it's real.   Until now I've been too stunned to write.  Stay tuned for tales from the beach and Southern California!

 

New York City Roars

There’s a constant roar in New York City. I step out on the balcony at 5:30 in the morning, and it’s there. Walking in the evening in Tudor City, or Riverside Park, or up high on Central Park West, or deep in the West Village—wherever I go, it’s there. It’s a machine-sound, not specifically traffic, or any one isolated sound, but an overall and underall roar, like a huge fan that never stops.

On top of it are layered the distinct, easily named sounds:
• the deep rumble, clatter, and bang of the dump trucks from hell as they bounce over metal plates in the road
• sirens
• horns
• traffic
• helicopters taking off or landing
• loud, inescapable cell phone conversations
• scaffolding being put up or torn down
• buses pulling to a stop and accelerating away, doors opening and closing, wheelchair lifts descending and ascending
• young people who’ve been drinking, laughing and talking loudly on the streets
• homeless men belching and yelling curses at strangers
• parents calling out to their young children as they bolt down the sidewalk
• couples talking, flirting, arguing, deciding where to go, what to do
• dogs scuffling and their people pulling them back with sharp “no’s” and yanks
• even the occasional bird peeping, tweeting, cawing

Then come the lulls, which are never, ever silent, but are filled with the roar of a river of sound that never sleeps.

The only places I’ve ever heard silence in New York City are indoors: wealthy homes with sound-deadening windows, churches with thick stone walls, apartments with back rooms facing other back rooms—these are actually rarely silent because of construction, people blowing horns, kids playing outdoors, and so on, but every now and then, all of this activity ceases at the same time, and there is a moment of blissful silence.

In his book This Is Your Brain on Music, Daniel J. Levitin explains that pitch is directly mapped onto the brain: “If I put electrodes in your auditory cortex and play a pure tone in your ears at 440 Hz, there are neurons in your auditory cortex that will fire at precisely that frequency, causing the electrode to emit electrical activity at 440 Hz—for pitch, what goes into the ear comes out of the brain!” (p. 29).

I wonder what living in the constant roar of New York City is doing to my brain.

When I went to the mountains of Colorado this summer, there was no constant roar, just the occasional car passing by below the hill and lots of birds and bugs making their calls and cheeps and creaks. I heard the silence, but I also heard a constant internal roar in my ears. Now that I’m back, I notice the roar in my ears is there all the time, and I wonder if it was always this way, or if it’s only been this way since I’ve lived in the city, and if so, when did it start? And if this is the case for me, what is the case for others? What do others hear?

Bonding with Nature: Part 7—Fierce Mothers


I was out in the country, visiting a friend’s home in the woods outside of Woodstock, NY. It was night time, and we stepped out on her deck to look at the view. The sky was a beautiful blue-black, and we saw stars and the ground sweeping away down below us into the valley filled with trees and mountains out in the distance. The air was chilly, and we turned to look back at the warm indoors, the lights glowing through the sliding glass doors. Then something moved.  We heard a rustling and then saw jerky, erratic, fast dark wings flying hurling at the doors. What was it? A bat? No, a bird. Throwing herself at the door, over and over. Weird, death throe movements. Was she poisoned and having a nervous system meltdown? We huddled as far from the door as possible, not sure what to do. We didn’t want to watch the dark body flinging itself in grotesque contortions at the glass, but it was hard to turn away, and we had to get back in through that door. All the other doors were locked, and no one was inside, and it was cold. Was this a mother trying to protect her young? But where was the nest, and it looked more like she was trying to kill herself, and why wasn’t she flying at us if she was trying to scare us away, and wouldn’t it be nice if we could just tell her to let us go through the door, and we’d leave her alone? She paused in her bombing of the door. We ran to it, opened it slightly, and squeezed through as fast as we could. She didn’t appear again. The next day, my friend found her nest close to the door.

Here’s to fierce mothers who protect their young even at the cost of their own lives in any way that they know how, even if it doesn’t always make sense to those on the outside, and sometimes not even to those on the inside.

Bonding with Nature: Part 6—New York City

When I returned to New York from my summer travels, I went for a morning walk in Riverside Park along the Hudson River.  As I walked along, I looked down and saw a round fat fluorescent yellow fuzzy caterpillar undulating her way south while I was striding north. We passed, me careful not to step on her, and her apparently oblivious to me and minding her own business, but we were both on the same path.