Peeking into the rock

So I already noted that salmon season opened on April 1, which is not an unusual day. The discussion still rages as to how long the season ought to be, and the local paper (the Santa Cruz County Sentinel, frequently referred to as the Senile for good reason) has been munching the story as badly as they can: I do believe that at least unconsciously they're trying to magnify the antagonism between fish conservationists and sport and commercial fishermen. They keep portraying the salmon season closure issue as one of "blaming the fishermen" for the problems of the Klamath River population, which it most definitely is not: the issues are, will a shorter fishing season help the Klamath River population hang in there until the Klamath River is allowed to become healthy again? Is there any point in trying to save the Klamath River population? These issues don't interest the newspaper, though, at least not as much as the prospect of angry salmon fishermen feeling oppressed by the people who are working to preserve the fish they depend on.

On another front, there's a couple in Live Oak who are possibly going to be charged with a crime because they picked a baby harbor seal up off Main Beach and took it home. Main Beach is kind of in the middle of town -- it's where the Boardwalk is and where the San Lorenzo River ends up. It's also a minor nursery spot for harbor seals, which fact is potentially a weapon in dealing with the Boardwalk's appetite for expansion. The baby seal is dead, of course: they're really quite fragile and need to be treated exactly as mommy would treat them, which does in fact include being left on the beach for periods of time while the mommy goes and gets food. What is really galling is that the people tried to keep the volunteer rescuer from finding the baby seal which they had deposited in a crate in their back yard. If they had been idiots who had just picked up the seal pup because they thought it had been abandoned, don't you think they would have welcomed somebody who knew something about keeping the thing alive? And even though they hadn't had it much longer than it takes to drive from Main Beach to their house just out of town, the seal was already visibly faltering when the rescuer picked it up and took it to the Marine Mammal Center. This is pone of those things coastal people should just know.

One last marine life bit: I think I mentioned that amazing numbers of sea otters have been sheltering in Elkhorn Slough during the storms. This is not because the sea otter population is growing, it's because they like to go in the slough and eat fat innkeepers and clams. Fat innkeepers are a kind of inverterbate whose burrows are inhabited by a lot of other species, but I couldn't resist writing "eat fat innkeepers" up there. Now the Coast Guard is investigating an incident where a guy drove his motorboat right through a raft of otters and was caught on video by the Friends of the Sea Otters. No otters seem to have been harmed, though they were visibly alarmed.

On May Day, there's going to be another "Day Without Mexicans." This is kind of an ethnically-defined general strike, which has been done before when the state legislature failed to reinstate drivers' licenses for undocumented residents. The ironic thing about that whole drivers' license thing is that before the Davis administration there were no restrictions on documented status, and the identification requirements to get a license were negligible. The thing that got the Republicans up in arms was a new law that required identification of some sort from the applicant's original country -- that is, a tightening of earlier law, though it was portrayed as a loosening of law. Anyway, the upcoming strike is going to be about the immigration "reform" discussion going on.

If you've seen Time magazine (last week?) you'll have seen the cover blurb: "Who gets to be an American?" But that's not the question at all. There are several questions. One of them is what does globalization mean? NAFTA threw millions of Mexicans off the land as it removed maize protection rules and ConAgra and Archer Daniels Midland and so on could take over the market. Where are these people supposed to go, and what are they supposed to do? They go looking for work. At the same time, in the US, industry, agriculture, and service companies are working to dismantle the protections that US workers have had since the forties -- and a cheap, competent, and disposable workforce suits them fine. But it also suits them fine to have a scapegoat handy, and an excuse to further abrogate civil rights and liberties. The fact that there is an identifiable Mexican look is useful to -- you can unleash the wrath of racists. And you can get these workers' natural allies, who are their natural competitors as well, to see them as "other" and prevent them from noticing that steps taken to isolate and persecute undocumented workers are also steps to disenfranchise them.

However, this cheap workforce, so easily scapegoated and isolated and accustomed to bad wages and working conditions, is also a cohesive group, with fifty years of social and labor organizing experience. When they call a strike, they strike. I'm expecting this to be a really interesting May Day.

For years I've been looking for the housing bubble to burst. I have a vindictive streak and I want the real estate agents, second-home buyers, house flippers, luxury home spec developers, and investors in general to suffer a lot. They've driven housing costs up so much that the shabby little highwater bungalow across the street was put on the market for $780,000 (ours is apparently an "up-and-coming" neighborhood, more's the pity). They've priced the working class out of the county. Well -- there's something happening. Not the dramatic, disastrous crash I would like (I said I was vindictive), but a general slowing down. Asking prices for houses continue to rise but sales have slowed dramatically. Last month, 37 houses were sold in the county (comparing with a couple hundred houses for March in boom years, and I'd be more precise about that if my source was).

It didn't rain much the last couple of days and Wednesday was totally rain free (so I finally got my plants in the ground -- a tall-form rosemary, a culinary sage, and two bachelor's buttons). However what we expect for the forseeable future is more rain. Highway 152 (one of three ways out of the county) has been shut for the duration because a 25-foot chunk of it fell over. More slides on other mountain roads, but not 17, which has been lined with great cement walls on all the scary cuts.