between two worlds

Back in the day, alienation was the thing to think about and talk about. The alienation of labor, the alienation of youth. All kinds of alienation. Today I heard a heartrending story of alienation. It has a comical moment in it.

Today was First Flush for Capitola. I don't expect you to remember what that is. Every year, during the first hours of the first measurable rain storm of the season, we go out and get samples of the water that comes through selected storm drains. This is really early. We hadn't even had our trainings, and we didn't have our teams set up or our phone tree. But we had a false alarm a few days ago so we were actually kind of ready. Fortunately we only got measurable rain in Capitola, and not in Santa Cruz, because we had only a minimal group to go out and we would not have been able to cover Santa Cruz as well. It does mean we're going to go out again sometime probably in the next month, when we get enough rain in Santa Cruz.

I was really fortunate. I was assigned to my favorite spot on Soquel Creek. It's not the most beautiful. It's pretty nice, but all summer during Urban Watch it was dry as a bone because of the fancy cachements that have been built in the parking lot of the shopping center that used to drain into the creek there. Along the bank of the creek, they're doing a renaturalizing project with native plants (some of which seem dubious for that exact spot, but what do I know?).

The exciting thing is the beehive. This is the one I have been talking about for the last two summers, first because it was such a beautiful thing, and so strange: the hive started in a birdhouse and grew out of it in undulating formations like Gaudi's tiled benches or like the growth patterns of certain shelf fungus. D'Arcy Thompson all over again. Last year it appeared to be a healthy hive, golden, buzzing, growing: it seemed like you could smell the honey and wax from the group. And it was a good five meters or more above the ground. This year it's silent, bleached and stained, though it does look like there is a bee or bee-like organism living there. So I like the spot.

I was fortunate, too, in the people I went out with. I've never gone out with these two before, but they were amiable and fun to go with. One was the well-known "Steve from Capitola Public Works" who gets out data reports and intercedes for us when somebody locks a gate that keeps us out of areas we need to go to. The other one was another middle-aged grad student. Apparently there is a growing cohort of mostly women who weren't science students when they were young but are science students now. This one, Nancy, told me about Astro the unfortunately bonded steller sea lion. This sweetie bonded so thoroughly to people that when he was released to the wild he kept coming back again. He joined a children's walk-a-thon, for example. And he swam back to land when they tried releasing him at Ano Nuevo where he came from, or at Farallones, he just swam back. So now he has to go live as a demonstration animal.

This is the alienation I was thinking about thiis evening, but I'm serioualy falling asleep so I have to explore the implications later.

Also, today I held an impromptu party for the relatives. And finally, the nice fellow and I met up with Zac and his mother and we saw (and danced to) Yuri Yunankov and his band.

This is what 30 pounds less and a tailored diet does: I never gasped for my breath and when I started sweating I didn't get clammy. I only stopped because the nice fellow was falling asleep and I began to worry about various tendons and nerve. I bought two records.