Half Moon Bay Memories & El Granada Observer

Fern, assistant to an eccentric midwife, is “just gone” when she hears the heartbeat of an unborn baby; she is “just gone” when she walks through the forest, letting in all the natural sounds and smells, sensualsations that transport her somewhere we’d all like to be. You’d think from my description of Fern, the main character of Graham Joyce’s latest book, “The Limits of Enchantment’, that she was smoking something, but although the book is set in the 1960s– and will bring any of you who lived through and enjoyed that magical era back to front center–Fern is not a hippie. She’s an original character, one we can learn much from.

This is the first Graham Joyce book I’ve ever read, the first time I’ve read this style of storytelling, and it’s been pure joy. Joyce’s book was also longlisted for this year’s coveted Man Booker Prize.

I’m almost finished with Patricia Cornwell’s latest book, "Predator," and, I know, I know I complained about the work in an earlier post. But after I got through that rough spot the book turned into a real page-turner, a gory page-turner, you just can’t take that stuff seriously. I don’t let the gory stuff penetrate…I must have missed one of her earlier books because her niece, Lucy, and former cop-now "co-worker", Marino, sure have gone through some serious personality changes. Cornwell also has former FBI man Benton bitterly complain about how the effect of the Patriot Act on personal privacy.

Do you remember when President Clinton was defending himself from yet another womanizing charge–I forget her name, she was doing volunteer work, fundraising, her husband had committed suicide because he was bankrupt, and she said she told Clinton and he touched her improperly. Remember? She even went on 60 minutes with her charges.

In the heat of all this embarrassment Clinton said something like: go ask Patricia Cornwell, down in Virginia ask her what people think (of this woman who was bringing charges against the President).

In Cornwell’s new book, one evil character wears a hood, and that could be what put me off.

I remember a frightening incident, the first time such a thing had happened to me, oh, in the early 1980s. I was working for a little over-the-hill newspaper, free-lancing, and I was assigned to do a story on a few bars with character, historic. I took a girlfriend with me. As I recall there was a cowboy bar on Canada Road in Woodside and another on Skyline.

And then around 10 p.m. we headed over Highway 92, back home to the Coastside. I was driving and I intended to drop my friend off at her home in Half Moon Bay when I looked in the rear view mirror and told her: "I think we’re being followed."

I wasn’t sure; I’d never been followed before.

"That car’s still there. I’m not taking you home."

I decided to drive to El Granada; I was looking for police.

My friend said, "Why don’t you go to the ‘quick stop’. There’s a phone there."

The ‘quick stop’, that’s what we called it, was open ’til midnight and all lit up and outside there was a phone booth (an almost extinct species now).

It was dark driving along the road paralleling Highway 1, and nobody else was around, and when I looked in the rearview mirror, the car was still there, not sitting on my bumper, back back a few car-lengths. But now instead of it just being a car and not being able to see anything but the car, there was a frightening change—the man, it must have been a man, had turned the interior light on and had covered his head with a hood!

I don’t remember if I screamed but I knew I was close to the "quick-stop" and the lights and the phone and that gave me confidence. The man in the car behind us must not have known. Had he followed us from one of the bars we visited? He must have!

Seconds later I saw the lights, we were safe (and the car that had followed us vanished back into the darkness). I ran to the phone and called the police and they came right away and they followed my car as I took my friend home and they followed me home and said they would be checking my house all night long. Which the police did, shining a search light on my house every so many minutes. 

The Singularity is one of those mind-boggling things. I understand it but I can’t explain it clearly. It’s like you’re standing at the Apple Store counter, the clerk just took your money for the most up-to-date, latest IPOD and the new, latest up-to-date IPOD appears right then at that very moment. It’s like change is….

Am I getting that right? Close?

There’s nothing but change. Change takes on a whole new meaning, there’s no time in beween change. My example was a technological one-but what if EVERYTHING is changing as it’s changing.

Whew! Please.

I can’t remember where I first read about “the singularity” but there is a new book out by Ray Kurzweil called “The Singularity is Near”. I believe Kurzweil invented a reading machine for the legally blind, it enlarges (really big) book and magazine and newspaper print. Pretty cool.

If you want to see how conventionally we Californians dress, and if you are looking for crazy wild creativity in clothes, check this book out, it’s a knockout, even if it’s mostly kids wearing them. So much fun to flip through the pages. Put some color, and maybe a pair of zonky socks in your life! You could always wear them around the house.

To take a break from wars, hurricanes, and the generally scary environment we live in at the moment, I looked for escape via book entertainment and picked up Patricia Cornwell’s latest horror mystery. Reading violent crime novels kind of fits in with the times, you know what I mean?

I enjoyed her early work but recently her material has been so bad as to be unbelievable, at times so “pc”– and, frankly, poorly written for an author who sells that many books– that she turned me off.

But I got sucked in again and read about 79 pages of Predator before I closed the book forever, I thought. I love animals and I hate it when something vicious happens to them and that’s what was the tipping point for me…..

Then I had a change of heart. One of Cornwell’s regular characters, Marino, is missing and I do wonder what happened to him plus I am a bit intrigued by Hog, one of the creepy characters in the book. I’m give it another try–just for entertainment–I still think Patricia Cornwell has lost her way and wish she’d find the path back to the quality of her earlier books.

I’m halfway through Simon Winchester’s new book, “A Crack In The Edge of The World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906″.

Since we live with the SAF (San Andreas Fault) this is good reading:

Winchester has written an enjoyable synthesis of California history, northern California history–but having much earlier read John McPhee’s “Assembling California”, I find echoes of that great author’s work.

I’m not a geologist and I don’t pretend to understand all of what I’m reading.

Although I’m not done with Winchester’s book, I’ve become aware of one of the main points. Since 1906 most experts believed the quake’s epicenter (the point where the quake started) was in the town of Olema in northern California. That’s because there was so much visible movement of fences and roads there. The Olemans are proud to be at the epicenter–but it turns out the truth is Olema is not the epicenter. Mussel Rock in Daly City is! Well, Mussel Rock is very much within driving distance of El Granada. You can reach it by driving through Pacifica and it’s a beautiful, jagged cliffy beach (forget about the dump that’s nearby) where people hangglide.

Unlike Olema, which is really not the epicenter but the proud pretender, Daly City is the epicenter but Daly City doesn’t want anyone to know.

Experts say Mussel Rock, and not Olema, was the epicenter of the 1906 quake but locals don’t want the blame or fame.

If you look at earthquake maps, the land west of the famous San Andreas Fault is on what is called the Pacific Plate–this is the “coast” of California where there sure isn’t a lot of land there compared to what’s on the other side, the east side of the San Andreas Fault which is located on what is called the North American Plate. And the rest of the US is sits on the North American Plate. Are you with me?

In El Granada we are living on the Pacific Plate.

That’s just part of the story. The San Andreas Fault has three parts–briefly, the northern and southern parts are locked in to the North American Plate but there is a 125 mile stretch in the center (at Parkview, California) that is not “locked in” and is always nervously fidgeting, caushing, if you think about it, immense stresses on the northern and southern parts. Pushing and pulling to free itself from the north and south. That’s the way I understand it.

Did I get it right?