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To understand this story, you must understand Capitola. The little town has an interesting history, but I'm not going to go into detail on that: suffice that its name comes from the fact that the people who founded it hoped that it would become the capitol of the new state because it was in the middle of the coast and had a bitty little harbor capability. (They claimed it was the exact middle, but that's not accurate) There were the usual corrupt shenanigans about the capitol choosing, but in the long run, of course, Sacramento was chosen for good, bad, and ugly reasons, and continues to be the capitol of the state to good, bad, and ugly effect. For a long time, the only excuse for the existence of Capitola was as a summer retreat for religious revivalists from the Valley, and if you walk around the central village of Capitola now, and gaze upon its funny little houses, you can see -- once you know about it -- that many of them are built on what used to be permanent platforms for temporary seasonal tent-cabins.
What you need to understand, though, is that nowadays, despite the quaintness of the buildings in the core village and the cute little beach replete with fossil-laden cliffs and a nice little winter-storm vulnerable esplanade, the town is thoroughly stripmalled and urban/suburban, and girt about with walls of freeways and four-lane thoroughfares. If you want to build a big box store, for a long time the only logical place to do it was Forty-First Avenue, which Capitola annexed explicitly for the purpose of allowing ridiculous commercial growth (and by ridiculous I mean with little to no traffic planning or car-smog abatement or thought for nearby housing, sevices, or the fate of local wildlife or the truck farms which used to fill that section of the county). What we have in the way of a "mall" in the modern meaning of large roofed shopping center is on Forty-First Avenue. And "Capitola Village," the tourist-oriented heart of the town, is built out, with no room for infill.
Okay. Now we get to the story. Which is a young mountain lion (cougar, puma, catamount), found dead right in town. From the description I believe it was found under the trestle that carries the railroad tracks over the street that dives down to the esplanade. It's unclear whether the seven-year-old they quote is the first finder or just the only person besides the rangers who saw it well enough to be interviewed. If I understand the spot rightly, if you walked upbhill away from the beach from there, you would first pass the luxury restaurant Shadowbrook (which has a steep location planted with elegant gardens featuring many different types of fibrous begonias and a tram to take you down to the bar and restaurant if you don't want to walk) and about a kilometer and a half further you'd be in the region of ridiculous commercial development, having passed through mostly the kind of feverish cheaply built ranch house and apartment complex suburban development that goes for highly inflated prices here because Valley yuppies buy them up as second "homes," their only virtue as luxury being their proximity to the beach and Mr. Toots' bar.
If I were James Thurber I'd now go on to an alarmist but humorous rant about how fragile human civilization is and the doom that awaits us because the wild animals of the more dangerous persuasion are asserting themselves in the center of our towns. But I won't do that, because that's bullshit. But I will note that when I first moved to Santa Cruz County, it was news that any mountain lions survived at all in our area, and now they're a common enough presence that you can see signs like this in our public parks and on the University campus:
Not to mention bears in downtown Salinas.
What you need to understand, though, is that nowadays, despite the quaintness of the buildings in the core village and the cute little beach replete with fossil-laden cliffs and a nice little winter-storm vulnerable esplanade, the town is thoroughly stripmalled and urban/suburban, and girt about with walls of freeways and four-lane thoroughfares. If you want to build a big box store, for a long time the only logical place to do it was Forty-First Avenue, which Capitola annexed explicitly for the purpose of allowing ridiculous commercial growth (and by ridiculous I mean with little to no traffic planning or car-smog abatement or thought for nearby housing, sevices, or the fate of local wildlife or the truck farms which used to fill that section of the county). What we have in the way of a "mall" in the modern meaning of large roofed shopping center is on Forty-First Avenue. And "Capitola Village," the tourist-oriented heart of the town, is built out, with no room for infill.
Okay. Now we get to the story. Which is a young mountain lion (cougar, puma, catamount), found dead right in town. From the description I believe it was found under the trestle that carries the railroad tracks over the street that dives down to the esplanade. It's unclear whether the seven-year-old they quote is the first finder or just the only person besides the rangers who saw it well enough to be interviewed. If I understand the spot rightly, if you walked upbhill away from the beach from there, you would first pass the luxury restaurant Shadowbrook (which has a steep location planted with elegant gardens featuring many different types of fibrous begonias and a tram to take you down to the bar and restaurant if you don't want to walk) and about a kilometer and a half further you'd be in the region of ridiculous commercial development, having passed through mostly the kind of feverish cheaply built ranch house and apartment complex suburban development that goes for highly inflated prices here because Valley yuppies buy them up as second "homes," their only virtue as luxury being their proximity to the beach and Mr. Toots' bar.
If I were James Thurber I'd now go on to an alarmist but humorous rant about how fragile human civilization is and the doom that awaits us because the wild animals of the more dangerous persuasion are asserting themselves in the center of our towns. But I won't do that, because that's bullshit. But I will note that when I first moved to Santa Cruz County, it was news that any mountain lions survived at all in our area, and now they're a common enough presence that you can see signs like this in our public parks and on the University campus:
 |
mountain lion warning So you known the drill, right? Don't run away. Look big, Throw something. |
Not to mention bears in downtown Salinas.
no subject
Over the hill, we had the mountain lion in Palo Alto a while back, which caused a certain amount of uproar. (Mostly because they shot it dead, which shooting I personally thought was reasonably justified, given that it had the bad luck to pick a tree overlooking the local school-yard to take a nap in during the school day.)
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They shoot about one mountain lion a year in the area of (wait for it) Los Gatos, usually when the lion's been taking dogs out and the neighbors call in a lot of complaints.
I'd forgotten about that Palo Alto one. They need to get better at the whole tranquilize-capture-release thing before they can stop shooting mountain lions. It's just too bad.
I wonder if they're still considered endangered?
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