ritaxis: (Default)
ritaxis ([personal profile] ritaxis) wrote2008-06-12 07:44 am
Entry tags:

more fire on the ridge

A fire started near Martin Road in Bonny Doon yesterday around three in the afternoon. By four, they had begun evacuating the residents (1400 or so of them: this is an area often referred to as "rural Bonny Doon," though its social characteristics are rather more suburban).

This is not to mention the fire down at Hunter-Ligget military reservation, which is at the southern end of Monterey County. The thing is, within Santa Cruz County we don't usually get as much fire as the rest of the less-urban parts of the state, a fact I attribute to fog and redwood trees (which is sort of a tautology). The rain year was not that dry, but the spring was dryer than dry: it's the second dryish year: and there's a lot of tinder in those mountains, partly because of the many wet years we had before that, meaning a lot of growth and few little fires to control it, and also because there are a lot of dead trees standing around because of sudden oak death disease and pine pitch canker the last few years.

So you get a bad fire year.

On another front, I have successfully printed lovely little magnets with pictures of babies, for father's day presents. On still another front, the pilot batch of dried apricot wafers is transcendently beautiful and tasty.

[identity profile] katiekin.livejournal.com 2008-06-12 03:54 pm (UTC)(link)
Thanks for the fire report, I've been worrying.

What about Ben Lomand? my friend Mark is there.

The apricot thins sound just lovely and yummy.

[identity profile] ritaxis.livejournal.com 2008-06-13 02:33 am (UTC)(link)
hink the fire is exclusivdely in Bonny Doon. Cal Fire (http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/incidents_details_info?incident_id=273) doesn't mention anything farther than Pine Flat and Empire Grade. Mostly it's Martin Road, Pine Flat Road, Ice Cream Grade, and Smith Grade, which is almost all there is of Bonny Doon but not anything else.

Which Mark? Did I ever know him? Not the Mark of Porter College a couple years older than us with the uncertain and complicated and exploratory sexuality who courted Sharon Farber but slept with almost everybody he knew except her?

[identity profile] katiekin.livejournal.com 2008-06-13 12:37 pm (UTC)(link)
Called Mark and he said "It's on the other side of the mountain." I woke him from a dead sleep unwittingly.

This is the Mark of Cowell College, who I met originally when, with Nobby Brown, he was UG teacher of course on Mary Renault's greek histories. He was an editor of Bateson's work and today is an editor of Carlyle.

Indeed he has had many sexual escapades, pretty much all gay as far as I know. He is a person of great thoughts and funny letters to the NYRB and the LRB. He once sent me a fabulous book on punctuation for a BD gift....

[identity profile] mjlayman.livejournal.com 2008-06-13 12:56 am (UTC)(link)
Oh, picture magnets and apricot wafers! Such good things!

Janet Kagan had a story in Mirabile about how a fire showed which trees were fire-resistant and your story reminds me of that. I was thinking about it already because it's my favorite book and I was going to give a copy to a graduate, but even a used paperback is $35, which is a bit much.

[identity profile] ritaxis.livejournal.com 2008-06-13 02:35 am (UTC)(link)

Janet Kagan wrote wonderful things. I should remember her as a model.