Stellar

July 1st, 2009
Dennis Mammana

Dennis Mammana

I’m always amazed by how easy it is for me to ignore the universe.  Not to mention the Milky Way. Or even the solar system. Sure I’m aware of the sun, but all the rest that’s up there — the incomprehensible distances, the astounding numbers –  I somehow find easy to forget.  That’s why attending a program like the one presided over by Dennis Mammana the other day feels a bit, to me, like going to church.
 
In an area (Southern California) rich in astronomers and astronomical resources, Mammana has to rank among the most valuable. He’s worked at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and the University of Arizona. Then he served as the resident astronomer at San Diego’s Reuben  H. Fleet Science Center. Six years ago, he stepped down from that position and moved out to where the darkest skies in San Diego County most consistently can be found –  in the desert. There he seems to have created a thriving career as a freelance astronomer: delivering lectures, courses, and workshops; writing his nationally syndicated “Stargazers” column; leading astronomy tours all over the globe; capturing spectacular photographic images of the sky; and generally getting people to appreciate all that’s overhead.
 
The recent gathering was typical.  After dinner at the Borrego Springs Resort, Mammana gave a presentation that covered both the meaning of the summer solstice and the things that should be visible in that moonless night’s sky. Then we trooped out beyond the tennis courts. Conditions were perfect. The wind had died and the temperature had dropped to about 70 degrees. Several amateur astronomers from throughout the region had set up their telescopes and stood ready to explain the wonders to be seen through their eyepieces: moons of Saturn, colliding galaxies, immense celestial dust clowds, and more. For me, one of the marvels was Mammana’s enthusiasm. It doesn’t seem to wane even when he’s pointing out things he’s pointed out probably tens of thousands of times before: the North Star, constellations. I took an adult ed class in astronomy from him at San Diego State maybe 20 years ago, and he’s seems as patient and ebullient and enthralled by it all now as then.
 
He sounds particularly excited by the apparently imminent designation of Borrego Springs as an International Dark Sky Community. As such, it will be only the second city in the United States to be so recognized (by the International Dark Sky Association) and the first in California. One of the easiest ways to get updates on that and other local astronomical happenings is to sign up for Mammana’s free e-mail newsletter: http://www.dennismammana.com/skyinfo/newsletter.htm.

Organ Madness

June 27th, 2009

Hot on the heels of my post yesterday about the summer organ festival in Balboa Park comes today’s “tip of the week” on the ever-interesting San Diego Travel Tips website. It’s pretty much everything you’d ever want to know about the Spreckels Organ, including a video clip of civic organist Carol Williams playing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and a slide show of the inner workings of this remarkable mega-instrument. Recommended reading.

A Little Summer Organ Music in the Dark

June 26th, 2009

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I have a soft spot in my heart for the Organ Pavilion.  I love the stories associated with it: how John Spreckels donated the money for it to be built for the first Expo in Balboa Park on the understanding that the city would forevermore sponsor a free weekly concert there for the citizenry. How at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1915, Woodrow Wilson pressed a telegraph key in the White House that lighted up San Diego’s gigantic musical instrument (still today the largest outdoor concert organ in the world), setting off a rollicking fireworks displayed and kicking off the two-year extravaganza. I’ve heard the organ played at times during the day, but it took Valerie Scher’s excellent post closer-editedthe other day on the San Diego News Network about the opening of this year’s Summer Organ Festival to finally inspire me to get to the organ pavilion at night.

Nighttime is a much more magical way to experience the organ. Extravagantly lighted, it’s a visual feast in the dark. This summer’s festival will feature artists from as far away as Argentina and Germany, as well as a movie night (Buster Keaton’s 1929 The Cameraman on August 24). For the full schedule of this summer’s festival offerings, which start at 7:30 p.m. every Monday night through August 31, go to www.sosorgan.com.

 

Local Barley Juice

June 22nd, 2009
 

beerboard-croppedI’ve been aware of San Diego’s soaring stature among beer cognoscenti for several years. Since 1986 almost 2 dozen commercial brewers have begun making craft beers here, and their handiwork increasingly has been winning national and international awards and commanding attention in the media. An article in this month’s (June 2009) issue of Food and Wine, for example, calls the local beer scene “one of the most dynamic…in America and arguably the world,” adding that “no other place in the U.S. offers the diversity of styles, techniques and flavors that San Diego County does.”

Steve and I dabbled in home brewing back in the 90s, and while we eventually abandoned that hobby for lack of time and passion, we remain interested in beers with exceptional flavor. To glimpse what’s happening on the San Diego craft beer scene now, we went on a do-it-ourselves odyssey that filled in a lot of blanks. For anyone interested in following in our footsteps, here’s a thumbnail sketch of what we did.

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Tour of Stone Brewery

We started at Stone, the Escondido brewery and bistro that must rank as the most beautiful of all the county sudseries. To the best of my knowledge, Stone is currently the only local commercial brewery offering public tours. That may soon change, given Karl Strauss’s recent relocation of its beer-bottling operations to San Diego. (Although Karl Strauss is the oldest surviving San Diego microbrewery and its chain of local brew pubs have always produced kegs here, six-packs have been brewed and bottled back in Wisconsin.) The Karl Strauss website suggests that a brewery tour may be inaugurated soon, but it  hasn’t happened yet.

Stone, on the other hand, offers more than a dozen free public tours a week. About an hour long, they’re entertaining, educational, and deftly delivered. Better yet, at the conclusion tour-takers get substantial servings of 4 very different Stone products (ranging from a pale ale to a hefty porter). The only hitch is that the tours are limited to about 25 people, and passes are given out first-come, first-served.  While Stone recommends showing up up to 2 hours early, we arrived about 11 on a Saturday morning and bagged passes for the noon tour, the first of the day. In the interim, we strolled on a trail that wound past the facilities, but the bistro would have provided another pleasant way to pass the time.

After Stone, we fit in visits to the Lost Abbey in San Marcos, Vista’s Green Flash Brewing, and Alesmith and Ballast Point  Brewing (both off Miramar Road). We interrupted all the tasting with a quick stop at a San Marcos taco shop to absorb some of the alcohol (the only food available at any of the tastings was Stone’s glossy bistro and a communal bowl of pretzels at Ballast Point.) When we left Ballast Point, late in the afternoon, I still  had other potential destinations on my wish list, notably Lightning Brewery in Poway and Alpine Beer Company. But cramming them into one afternoon might have been not just exhausting but actively dangerous.

As it was, we’d been bombarded by flavors we’d never before associated with beer, not just smoky hops and intense hops and aggressive hops, but also tastes that included chocolate, fruit , coriander, caramel , brandy and more. The scene, too, was intriguing, particularly at the smaller breweries (such as the Lost Abbey, Alesmith, and Green Flash). All are located in industrial parks that look lifeless on a Saturday afternoon. You walk into what looks like a warehouse. But it smells like beer, and in an inner room, you find a throng of animated, convivial, mostly but not entirely young beer quaffers. It feels like you’ve penetrated some underground cabal. Or at least found a cheap date. (Although Stone offered the only free samples,  on-tap-croppedtastes elsewhere cost between 50 cents and $1.50.)

Why is this lively culture thriving in the land of terrible-tasting imported water? (The brewers have to strip it of all its unsavory elements and then re-introduce desirable minerals.) The Food and Wine article argues that all this bold creativity stems from San Diego’s lack of brewing history. With no traditions binding them, the local craftsmen have been able to take flight. A different explanation, offered in a 2006 Journal of San Diego History article, suggests that San Diego’s proximity to good Mexican beers like Tecate, Dos Equis, and others introduced local beer-drinkers to more interesting approaches to beer. When the dollar fell in the 1980s and imported beer costs sky-rocketed, those more educated tastes fostered the demand for something different created on US soil.

 

Surfdogs

June 19th, 2009

 

One of the best opportunities for taking in some of San Diego’s quirkiest beach life will occur tomorrow (Saturday, riding-tandem-edited-moreJune 20) in Imperial Beach. If the 4th annual surf dog competition (sponsored by Loews Coronado resort) is anything like the one I attended 2 years, wacky dog costumes will abound, as will amazing acts of doggy balance and fortitude, all cheered on by a crowd of boisterous beach goers.

Do the canine participants enjoy it all? I certainly saw plenty of wagging tales and didn’t observe any pooch slinking away from its handler.  Organizers are talking about an even bigger turn-out than the 60 dogs who were registered last year.

Here’s the schedule:

10 a.m. to 11 a.m. Optional practice session for registered dogs
11 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. Category One: Small Surf Dogs (40 pounds and under)
11:45 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Category Two: Large Surf Dogs (41 pounds and over)
12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. Category Three: Tandem Surfing for Surf Dogs & Humans, or Two Surf Dogs
1:45 p.m. Awards Ceremony

It all should happen just north of the IB Pier, which extends off the end of Evergreen Avenue in Imperial Beach.

Marshall South Online

June 13th, 2009

Few of us have had as flamboyantly romantic a vision as Marshal South. Around 1930, with the US sinking ever deeper inmarshallto Depression, South and his young wife Tanya packed their few possessions into their Model T Ford, drove to the desert east of San Diego, found a mountaintop that appealed to them, and decided to live on it, as simply and naturally as the native Americans who once preceded them. They called the place Ghost Mountain and within five years they’d constructed a compact adobe home that they christened Yaquitepec (after the Yaqui Indians of Sonora, Mexico.)

In the years that followed, the couple had three children who grew up naked, home-schooled by their parents and playing with lizards and packrats instead of conventional toys. Amidst the backbreaking work of trying to maintain a household in the absence of any modern conveniences (or even water), Tanya wrote poetry, and in 1939 Marshall chronicled the family’s grand experiment in the Saturday Evening Post. He later launched a series of articles in Desert Magazine that throbbed with enthusiasm for the primitive lifestyle, and he delighted the magazine’s readers with tales of the family’s ingenious adaptations to their harsh environment. But the adventures came to an end in 1946 when Tanya filed for divorce and moved the children back to the city. Two years later Marshall died of heart disease at the age of 59.

Today Ghost Mountain is a part of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and although most of Yaquitepec has melted back into the earth, traces of the family’s peculiar domicile remain in the site. It’s a popular hiking destination, and for anyone interested in learning about the man who put it on the map, a rich new resource has just become available in the form of a website, www.marshalsouth.com.

The site was created by Diana Lindsay. A co-founder of the El Cajon-based Sunbelt Publications, Lindsay has long been transfixed by the saga of the South family. She mentioned it in her 1973 history of the desert state park (published by Copley Books). Eighteen years later, I myself wrote a much more extensive account of the story for the Reader, “The Hermits of Ghost Mountain.”  But Lindsay felt there was still more to be unearthed, and in 2001 shdianabooke plunged into several years of serious sleuthing that culminated in her 2005 book, Marshal South and the Ghost Mountain Chronicles: An Experiment in Primitive Living.

Hardcore Southophiles can pay a $9.95 annual membership, available through the site, that gives them unlimited access to published and unpublished articles, novels, poems, artwork, and photographs by and pertaining to the sage of the desert. But the site also offers a lot of excellent free material, including two rare film clips of the South family, directions to and maps of the area, and extensive information about the family’s experience.

I have to chuckle at the thought of Marshal, who heaped so much scorn on the trappings of modernity, having his own little homestead in cyberpace. At the same time, I’m pretty sure he would have loved it.

 

Time Travelers

June 3rd, 2009

Alright, alright. We’ll concede that the San Diego Inside Tours Time Travel Adventure probably isn’t as… cinematic as Will Ferrell’s latest flick. But we think it’s at least as entertaining.  And it did get us a spot on one of the morning news shows this week.

A Death in the Pond Family

May 30th, 2009
Photo by Neal Matthews

Photo by Neal Matthews

The big old catfish no longer lurks in the shadows of the lily pads and lotus beds in Balboa Park’s reflecting pond. He was partial to the bed in the pond’s southeastern corner, and people who loved him say he would emerge from there to break the waters in greeting or snatch hot dogs, his favorite treat. But he died around 3 a.m. last Sunday, May 24. For a fish, he has an unusual number of mourners.

One is Debbie Johnson, a local artist who often sketches near the pond. She says she started interacting with the catfish when she noticed that he seemed to look her in the eye. Within the last few months, she’d gotten in the habit of stopping by the park at least 4 mornings a week, “just to visit him.” That’s how she met Neal Matthews, another long-time admirer of the wily old bottom feeder. Johnson and Matthews traded observations, and both recently became alarmed when other denizens of the reflecting pond started turning up mauled or missing. On May 15, the two wrote the park’s senior ranger, Casey Smith, requesting that the penalties for harming the pond’s denizens be displayed. Both were delighted when Smith told them that warning signs, which had disappeared over time, would be reinstated. But by the end of last week Johnson had other concerns. The nearly 3-foot-long catfish seemed “a little off,”"  she told me. “He was letting the koi get close to him, and he looked irritated. And when I gave him a hot dog, he just ignored it.” The next morning, she saw no sign of the creature, but when she and her boyfriend returned late Saturday afternoon, they found it floating upside down under the gaze of a small crowd of perturbed onlookers.

Johnson started crying, and even after leaving the scene, she continued fighting tears. So she and her boyfriend decided to try to determine what had caused the death. On the bridge in front of the Botanical Building, they ran into a pond-maintenance worker named Louis, who hadn’t yet heard about the news.  The three of them managed to find and extract the piscine carcass — only to realize that the fish was still moving.

Reached by phone, Smith (the chief ranger) gave permission for it to be transported to a super-oxygenated pond at Louis’s house that “has a truss for taking care of sick fish,” Johnson says. But although the transfer went okay and Louis kept vigil over the animal, it died about 3 a.m.

The next morning, “It was like a President had died or something,” says park ranger Kim Duclo. He and another ranger were assigned to retrieve the catfish (which Duclo says some park habitues had dubbed Bubba)  from Louis’s home in City Heights and investigate the death. They took it to Chollas Lake, where they knew there was a scale that would accommodate the hefty corpse (which weighed in at 22.7 pounds.) They also took several dozen photographs and found no evidence of any barbs or damage to the gills. “I’m not an ichthyologist,” Duclo says, so he couldn’t reach a clearcut conclusion about why the fish had died. But he points out that the pond was never designed to accommodate fauna. (Built for the 1915 Expo, it was inspired by Persian reflecting ponds and primarily intended to enhance the architectural effect of the Botanical Building.)

Almost all the fish living in it have been released there surreptitiously. (One exception are tiny fish introduced by the Department of Agriculture to help control mosquitoes, but Duclo believes most or all of those have been gobbled up by the bigger fish.) He says it’s technically illegal to put anything in the pond, but the park rangers lack the resources to consistently prevent that. They also aren’t able to care for the fish the way they’d be treated in an aquarium. The fish instead depend for food on the kindness of park visitors, and Matthews says he’s heard that some of the park’s resident homeless people look out for would-be illegal fishermen.

Matthews also talked to a groundskeeper who remembered having moved the big catfish from one pound to another in 1999, when it already weighed several pounds. That leads Matthews to conclude that the catfish must have been at least 10 to 12 years old. “I’m in mourning for the poor guy,” says Matthews, who bonded with the fish several years ago. He was undergoing chemotherapy and stem-cell transplants to battle Hodgkin’s disease at the time, and the catfish’s resilience inspired him. “He sustained me when I was at my worst.” Also comforting was the human response to the old animal. “If this were the South, he’d have been [caught and eaten and] gone long ago.” Instead he grew huge, and the day after his death, a cluster of memorial flowers appeared on the bridge.

100 Years of Positive Spin

May 27th, 2009

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We’re still a half-dozen years from the celebrations that will doubtless erupt in Balboa Park to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition (the influential event that, among other things, made the park what it is today). But one institution within the park is fast approaching centenarian status: the classic wood carousel located at Zoo Place and Park Boulevard. It was built in 1910 by the Herschell-Spillman company in North Tonawanda, New York, and the current owners aren’t sure what month it was completed and shipped west (to an LA amusement center called Luna Park). But I figure if that happened in the spring, then this will be the 100th summer the old merry-go-round has been giving riders a mesmerizing whirl.

Like the carousel’s exact date of construction, the record of when it made its way south to San Diego has been lost. The 1915 Expo included a carousel, but that one may have been a Dentzel that was later moved to San Francisco. (The San Diego Union-Tribune’s critic-at-large, Welton Jones, reported in a 1993 article that he’d heard this from “the national carousel grapevine.”) Virginia Long, a long-time owner of the carousel, believed that an Englishman by the name of H.D. Simpson bought it from the Luna Park operators and operated it periodically both at Coronado’s Tent City and in Balboa Park during the mid- to late-19-teens and the beginning of the 1920s, according to Jones’ story.

I find it mind-boggling to imagine anyone back in those pre-18-wheeler days moving the carousel anywhere with any regularity. Unlike the merry-go-rounds designed for today’s county fairs, the local Herschell-Spillman was never intended to be portable. It’s what’s known as a “park” carousel – meant to occupy a space on a permanent basis.  By 1922, it had settled in near the site where the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center stands today. Most of its riders then were adults, passing the time while waiting for one of the trolleys that ran through the park back then, Bill Brown recently told me. In 1968, the merry-go-round moved to its current location where Brown oversees its operation in the decagonal building that looks “like a Bavarian farm building,” in the words of the current owners.

Brown isn’t one of them, though he has participated in a big chunk of the carousel’s history. A friendly fellow now in his early 50s, he first applied for a job there on his 16th birthday, and he still seems to enjoy working the mechanisms that bring the grand old contraption to life. He loosens a hand brake than slowly positions the clutch arm to match the speed of the central wheel.  This takes about 80 seconds. Then he flips a little 3-minute egg timer that the carousel’s operators have been using since the 1940s. Once the grains have run down, it takes another 45 seconds to apply the brake and stop the rotation — making the total ride a little more than six minutes long. “I think that’s relatively long for merry-go-rounds,” Brown told me.

The Balboa Park carousel stands out in other ways. It’s one of only a handful that’s been honored with a Historic Carousel Award by the National Carousel Association. The military band organ (similar to a player piano) near its center can still be coaxed into emitting jolly carousel music, though the antique music sheets read by the device tend to jam when the weather isn’t just right. (Music CDs do the job at other times.) The Balboa Park carousel is also one of only about a dozen carousels in the world that still tantalyzes riders with a brass ring. (Snatching it successfully earns the snatcher a free ride.)

Because of the advantage conferred by their height, the ride’s giraffes tend to be favored rose-horse-edited.jpgby clever children. “But the stork’s seat is pretty high too,” Brown confided. “A lot of people don’t notice that.” He told me that the “lead horse,” decorated with roses, has been a perennial favorite of little girls, while little boys often make a dash for the lion. But the on-board menagerie (which was hand-carved by European craftsmen who were paid $2 for a 10-hour workday) includes something for every taste: 12 jumping horses, 15 standing ones, a camel, 2 dogs and 2 cats, a dragon, 2 frogs, 2 giraffes, a goat, 2 mules, 2 ostriches, 2 pigs, 2 roosters, 1 tiger, 2 zebras, 3 chariots, and the stork and lion.

The merry-go-round is still on winter hours, operating from around 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. weekends. But the summer schedule will begin June 15 and continue till September 5. Rides cost $2 each or $10 will get you 6.  

 

Border Tourists

May 20th, 2009

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The US-Mexican border is so many things to so many people, it’s easy to forget you can go right up to it and touch it.  Sort of.

It wasn’t so many centuries ago (less than one) that it was only an imaginary line in the dirt, and folks on both sides could cross at will.  Today not one but at least two daunting barricades stretch virtually the entire length between the ocean and the San Ysidro port of entry, with the most formidable construction having occurred during just the last year. Seeing what’s been done isn’t all that easy. Although Border Field State Park is situated at the westernmost section of the border, automotive access to the park is now limited to those hours (usually weekends from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.) when the state park managers deign to staff the entry gates and collect the $5 parking fee. Pedestrians, bicyclists, and horseback riders usually can get in even when the car gates are closed. But it’s a long way from the park entrance to the actual fence. harris-at-the-monument-edited.jpg

So Mike Harris’s tour company makes a lot of sense, if you’re curious about what it all looks like. Harris is an almost-native (his family moved here when he was in grade school). He grew up in Imperial Beach, went to work for the Border Patrol, and after 26 years, took an early retirement. That was two and a half years ago. Since then he’s started Edgeline Tours, guiding curious visitors on a three- to four-hour adventure on the line.

A friend and I found the outing engrossing when we ventured out with Harris one morning last week. We started at the beach, where the increased fortification that’s taken place over the last 25 years is pretty stunning. The new 15-foot-tall steel mesh fence appears to block access to the charming old border monument, but Harris pushed open a gate and we were able to walk right up to it, almost in the shadow of Tijuana’s old bullring by the sea and the lighthouse that stands next to it. When we piled back into our vehicle, Harris drove us eastward, following the line as much as possible through the rugged terrain (which the tens of millions of dollars of recent government investment has made considerably more hospitable to the Border Patrol vehicles.)

The Tijuana River estuary, which adjoins the park, is considered to be a wetlands area of international stature, so Harris’s tour also provides glimpses into that natural richness, as well as the small community of sod and vegetable formers, stable owners, and other long-time residents who live around the park. But Harris, who’s a jovial and likable cicerone, is at his strongest providing insight into life as a Border Patrol agent.

We got more of that toward the end of the tour, when we stopped for a bathroom break at the aging facility that the agency rents at the San Ysidro port of entry and visited the gate where illegal aliens are ushered back into Mexico (usually to make another immediate la-linea-east-edited.jpgattempt to cross over). The tour wrapped up with what for me was the highlight — a drive down into the nearby Tijuana River bed.  It’s a wide, concrete channel here, dry as dust at this time of year and filled with an ugly assortment of discarded beer cans, styrofoam cartons, rags, and other unidentifiable jetsam.  A wide stripe of yellow paint angling down the concrete demarcates the border on one bank of the sometime watercourse, and another one mirrors it on the other side. But in the riverbed, the border can’t be seen. We stood on the mythical line, moving back and forth between the two sovereign nations with impunity. It felt exhilerating.