California Notebook

California is home to three exceptional trees and a couple of extreme shrubs. Trees are big and they live a long time. Shrubs generally aren’t so big, but they can live a long time too. The two largest species of trees and three very long lived plants (one tree, two shrubs) all call the Golden State home.

Starting with “big”, California has two species of redwood trees. One is the tallest and the other is the largest tree in the world. (There may be larger underground complexes of mushrooms.) The tall one is Sequoia sempervirens and lives in Northern California coastal forests. “Hyperion”, a coastal redwood, is over 380 feet tall. The large one is Sequoiadendron giganteum and lives in the High Sierra. “General Sherman”, the largest sequoia, is 35 feet in diameter at the ground, and the largest in volume. The coastal tree goes by “redwood”, and the inland tree “sequoia”, and the local parks are named that way.

Unlike most California residents, trees are dependent on local conditions for water. The inland sequoia get water from the high Sierra snow, and the coastal redwood from the fog that blankets the northern coast.

Further inland, yet, a smaller and older tree is also dependent on the local water conditions. The bristlecone pine (Pineaus longeva) thrives in places because if the scarcity of water. Found in Inyo County’s White Mountains (among a few other places) the pine lives on north-facing dolomite slopes, where it doesn’t have competition with other trees. These are some of the oldest living things in existence; a tree in the White Mountains is approaching 5000 years old.

Not so tied to local microclimates, there’s something even older. The creosote bush (Larrea Tridentata) with its yellow flowers is a common sight in the Great Basin deserts of the southwest. Creosote bushes reproduce by growing and splitting into separate plants. As this continues every 30 to 90 years, a single plant will slowly change into a ring-shaped colony of identical clones of the original. There is a ring of bushes in the Lucerne Valley with an estimated age of almost 12,000 years – it’s been alive since the last ice age.

Finally, and I’d never heard of this until reading up on the creosote, there’s the “Jurupa Oak”, a clonal colony of Palmer’s oak (Quercus palmeri) in Riverside County. Palmer’s oak is a shrub, although it can grow up into a small tree. It sometimes forms a clonal colony, and the colony in Jurupa has been estimated to be around 13,000 years old. An article states it’s the subject of discussion between local Native Americans, city government, and a developer that has its eye on the site.

I’ve seen both the redwood trees and the bristlecone pine many times. I knew of the creosote rings but wasn’t aware of the location of the “King Clone” until I wrote this. Normally, finding out about the creosote and the oaks close enough to me to visit them both in a day’s drive my wife and I would be on the road to see them this morning. But with the stay at home orders in effect, that will have to wait for another day. They’ve been around for thousands of years, and if the developer keeps its word to protect the oak, they’ll be there when we’re all free to go visit California again.

When I was learning to fly, part of learning to navigate was reading an aeronautical chart. Today you can download them for free to your phone, and if you use the right software you can even have a little plane icon on the chart to show you where you are.

Air traffic controllers direct planes to and from “fixes”, points marked on the chart. A fix is named with a five letter word that often doesn’t have enough vowels in it, like IKEA furniture. They’re assigned by a division in the FAA, according to a dry sounding procedure, FAA Order JO 7400.2H.

Looking at a chart on a trip to Cleveland a couple years ago (I wasn’t flying – I was on an airliner), I saw an intersection named LEBRN. LEBRN makes sense for Cleveland – or at least it did at the time. But it didn’t occur to me to check fix names here in California until now.

The HLYWD ONE arrival to LAX contains the fixes GABBL, CHPLN, NWMAN, ESTWD, MCQWN, MDLER, FNNDA and MNROE. The ANJLL FOUR arrival has HAKMN, CGNEY, SLLRS, SHTNR, FLOJO, GLESN, OTOOL, BCALL, LEMMN and CAANN. The BOGET TWO arrival adds SNTRA, but also WNCHL, GLAZD, CREME, COWWS and CHKNZ. Also in LA there’s a HUULL. Going from BIKNG to RUNNN takes you to IRNMN. There’s a LAAVA next to LAAMP, and a UCANN next to DOUIT. You can arrive in San Diego via LUCKI LYNDI.

San Francisco arrivals from the wine country may pass through MRRLO, MLBEC, MSCAT or CORKK. You might arrive on SERFR, NRRLI, WWAVS and EPICK. You’ll find RAIDR near San Rafael, and SNUPY near Santa Rosa. A Deadhead could fly TYDYE TRUKN GRTFL DEDHD COSMC while a venture capitalist flies SILCN VLLEY APLLE GGUGL The last two I found at aerosavvy.com, along with this note: there were apparently some fixes near Palm Beach named DNNLD, TRMMP and UFIRD, but the rumor is the FAA renamed them after pilots refused to fly them or the IVNKA arrival.

It seems LeBron’s waypoint is gone now, too. I guess navigation fix fame isn’t as permanent or as visible as a star along Hollywood Boulevard, but no one will attack your monument with a jackhammer or let their dog poop on it.

National Burrito Day is this week. It’s the first Thursday in April and in 2020 that makes it April 2nd.

It’s appropriate to discuss burritos during the current “safer at home” order since I’d argue the burrito is an almost perfect take out food. You can get it with almost anything in it, especially in California. You can hold it in one hand. If you forgo pouring salsa on before each bite you can eat it as you drive, as long as you are aware of the possibility of the flour tortilla at the bottom bursting and splashing onto your shirt and your seatbelt. That is known between my wife and I as a “burrito failure”, and it’s caused a trip back home before work for me at least once.

If your car is parked while you eat you can always rest the cup of hot salsa on the dashboard between bites. Especially if you drive a Prius. That car is all dashboard. The desk in my office is smaller.

There’s plenty of burrito history on Wikipedia’s burrito page; I won’t summarize it here. What I’d like to note is that my wife and I had burritos at several of the “…to’s” places in San Diego, which were all good, and also Santana, where we became devotees of the “California burrito”. Today this seems to be any burrito with French fries in it.

There is something especially good about a burrito with potatoes in it; I’ve had mashed potatoes on a breakfast burrito and it’s worth getting up for. Come to think of it, potatoes are good with a lot of things. This extends to sandwiches. For decades, Primanti’s in Pittsburgh has put coleslaw and French fries on sandwiches. It’s pretty rare that I get there, but I get sardine sandwiches that way. It’s awesome. I remember reading they did that for the long haul truckers who would buy a sandwich to eat while they drove. They apparently didn’t want to have to juggle fries and slaw. I approve. I think the truck drivers would be okay with burritos.

I’ve had an “Arizona burrito” in Tucson which was indistinguishable from a California burrito except for longitude. I don’t know if this phenomenon has happened elsewhere.

For all three of you who are reading this, try to have a burrito on Thursday while keeping responsibly socially distant.

It’s the end of the first week of serious social distance, and it’s been about like one would expect. The company I work for sent out an email on Monday instructing everyone who could work from home to do that. So I set my laptop up in the room my wife and I have always called “the office”. Working from home is a bit more difficult than being on site, but I’m certainly not going to complain. I’m still employed.

The reason I bring this up is that on the shelf above my computer monitor is Kevin Starr’s eight book Americans and the California Dream series. I’ve started the first book a half dozen times or so and never finished it. But with the time I’m likely to have for the next several weeks I have no excuse to not actually be reading them instead of looking at them on the shelf. Not during working hours, of course.

Add to that California, The Great Exception by Cary McWiliams and rereading Joan Didion’s Where I Was From and Mike Davis’ City of Quartz. For extra credit, Obi Kaufman’s California Field Atlas and The State of Water and there’s no way I get through it all before we’re all back to our usual anti-social society. At least I hope so.

On an associated note, I’ve noticed some good and not so good things in my fellow Californians this week. It seems most of us are actually staying home; I went by the office to get some things I needed on Tuesday and at 9am the 405 was 70 mph both ways. The traffic (as shown by the local news helicopters and the web) is a small fraction of normal. On the other hand, half a dozen people on the 405 used the light traffic to drive even dumber than usual. Saturday’s news had footage of a bunch of people out on the beach (who the governor called out that evening by telling them to grow up). I’ve had people on bicycles startle me from behind on the sidewalk obviously closer than six feet, and pedestrians shoot me the stink-eye when I walk into the empty street to avoid them.

I’ve been reading a couple books about the 1918 pandemic, and if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that this outbreak is serious beyond description. I’m guessing there are less than five people who read this blog and whoever you are I don’t want to lose any of you. So stay home, read (from my list or your own), binge watch California’s Gold, and stay six feet away from everyone when you go out to look for toilet paper (since you haven’t been able to buy any for the last week).

Fog is pretty simple in concept. It’s a cloud that’s really close to the ground. Fog forms when the surface temperature and dew point are close together – around 5° F or so.

California has a few different types of fog; there’s Tule fog, endemic to the Central Valley. There’s the coastal fog of San Francisco, which has a name and a Twitter account (@KarlTheFog) – this is also the fog that waters the coastal redwoods. There’s also “June gloom”, a Southern California phenomenon helped along by the Catalina eddy, occurring in the late spring and early summer.

Of these, I think the northern coastal fog is the most famous – “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”, which is usually misattributed to Mark Twain. However, the Tule fog is the most notorious – it’s responsible for the occasional hundred-car pileup along I-5, and is California’s leading cause of weather related traffic accidents.

Tule fog happens when the ground cools through a clear sky at night, causing a temperature inversion, which is the state when lower air is cooler than higher air. The fog is kind of self-sustaining as it keeps the sunlight from warming the ground, which cannot warm the air, which doesn’t lower the humidity and dissipate the fog. Further, since the Valley is surrounded by mountains, the fog can be trapped and persist for days. There’s a good explanation in the Los Angeles Times (and explanation of the effects of climate change) here.

My wife and I live near a freeway (as many people in Southern California do) and I think I can hear more freeway noise when it’s foggy. Of course Wikipedia has an explanation for that. It could also be due to the fact that the wind is generally calmer then, too.

Fog is not what people from out of state think about when they think of California but it is one thing that California means to me. It keeps things warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. It waters the coastal redwoods and the Central Valley crops. Fog is a break from the continual sunshine (and the seemingly more frequent heat) of Southern California. An occasional gray day makes the bright days seem brighter. Even if I hear more traffic noise.