Monarch butterflies are over-wintering down by the bay, the first time in memory that they have been spotted here. Butterfly logic is a little-understood science, but the heavy rains we had last year may have been a factor in their decision to locate in this particular area of the California coast. If you didn’t know where to look you would walk right by and never notice them hanging like clusters of grapes hidden up in the branches of the eucalyptus trees. You look at what appears to be a shadowy mass among the leaves, and then realize it’s made up of hundreds of butterflies. When a few of them spread their brilliant orange wings and begin fluttering around the grove, it’s magical.

There’s something exhilarating about the start of a new year. It must be the psychological construct of a blank slate, but the effect is no less tangible for stemming from an abstract idea. Here’s to new beginnings! It’s a presidential election year, which means we should be in for an entertaining ride. This year, in particular, American culture is due for a major league reckoning. Things could get interesting, quite quickly.

For the “Occupy” movement to keep growing and not lose the goodwill that has been generated so far, a few things deserve a much broader discussion than I have heard to date:

1) The motivations and tactics of anarchists are not the same as those of non-violent civil disobedience practitioners;

2) Political leaders call the shots on physical force being used against civilian populations, and the buck ultimately stops with them. This is true whether it’s military forces overseas or the local police. The current situation in Oakland has brought a long-simmering dysfunction in City Hall to a head;

3) Instances of police brutality certainly exist, and they need to be thoroughly investigated and prosecuted whenever and wherever they occur. But the police in general are not alien storm troopers out of a science fiction film. The corporate media that profits off such two-dimensional, sensationalist stereotypes is part of the problem, not the solution (although, capitalism being essentially amoral, it will hopefully prove itself capable of evolving…)

Item:

“Orinda has some of the Bay Area’s worst roads, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, but how to repair them—and the storm drains beneath—has proved elusive.

“The city has spent $15.5 million on roads since 2000, enough to repave arterial and collector streets but not residential roads. Bond measures in 2006 and 2007, for $59.1 million and $58.6 million, respectively, fell short of voter approval…

“…Roads are rated from 0 to 100 on what is known as the “pavement condition index,” or PCI. A rating above 80 qualifies a street as “excellent.” Less than 50 is “at risk.” Less than 30 is “failed.”

“Orinda’s overall PCI is 49.”

– West County Times, 10/25/11

Having grown up in Orinda, this doesn’t surprise me at all. Orinda’s residential roads snake for miles over and around so many hills and through such a tumble of enchanted glades that the greater surprise would be if civilization had indeed succeeded in taming them all. Two roads on the route from the Village up to the Tilden Park stables, which I became acquainted with during my first few years of driving, fell to nature years ago. One connects El Toyonal, the main thoroughfare, to Wildcat Canyon Road, and is probably fenced off for safety reasons to reduce wear and tear. From outward appearance it’s not in too bad shape, and I expect it could be opened in case emergency exit routes from the densely packed neighborhood were needed.

The other road, last time I was up there, looked straight out of a Disney cartoon, the sort of setting where dark branches loom overhead, spooky eyes wink open and shut from the shadows, and a motley assortment of signs warns TURN BACK! or DANGER! or BRIDGE OUT—ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK! It used to be an innocuous little arc of a shortcut that shaved about five minutes’ driving time off El Toyonal’s sinuous loops, but somewhere along the way the Orindans failed to maintain it, and the elements took over. Now both ends are blocked off with ROAD OUT notices posted, and tree roots creep around broken chunks of what used to be pavement.

Back during the housing boom in the 1960s, some developer got the idea to build a bypass route from Highway 24 out to Moraga, in the open space between the Caldecott Tunnel and the Orinda exit that backs up to Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve in the Oakland hills. The theory was that an alternate route would ease the commute bottleneck on Moraga Road’s two lanes, but the tradeoff was that yet another housing development would sprawl over the rolling hills through which the new road would run. The project was to be a “gateway” out to the Moraga/Rheem area, and, amidst much fanfare, freeway on-ramps and off-ramps for the proposed “Gateway Boulevard” through what was to be “Gateway Valley” were constructed. Then the development plans hit a snag, and the Gateway Boulevard exits sat for decades as roads to nowhere—except for the use of the exit in one direction as a quick detour around freeway traffic. If cars were backed up going west on Highway 24 after the Orinda exit, those in the know would exit at Gateway Blvd., take a left at the stop sign, and then merge right back into the traffic just before the tunnel entrance, thereby avoiding about a ten-minute delay (a practice that continues to this day).

Things began to pick up after Orinda incorporated in the mid 1980s. A few years later, Berkeley Shakespeare Festival pulled up its roots from John Hinkel Park, renamed itself the California Shakespeare Festival, and built a new outdoor theater in the valley across the freeway from Gateway Valley. The formerly unnamed location was dubbed “Siesta Valley,” and the Gateway Blvd. signs on that side of the freeway were renamed “Shakespeare Theater Way.”

In 2004, after years of litigation hard-fought by a group of longtime Orindans led by a feisty, 70-something environmentalist, development in Gateway Valley finally started up again. Under a settlement agreement that the Golden Gate Audubon Society and the Sierra Club signed onto, 80% of the lavish proposed designs, which included a golf course and conference center, were ditched in favor of a scaled-back development that would cede the majority of the open space to the East Bay Regional Parks District and East Bay MUD in perpetuity. It was the best arrangement that could be hoped for, under the circumstances.

Now, amidst the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, as mass protests about economic injustice sweep the land, homes are being pitched to young professionals with prices starting at a baseline of $1.5 million. A polished marketing campaign promotes the idea that the right price will unlock a gateway to having it all—a safe, old-fashioned, small town community, country club amenities nearby, close access to unspoiled nature AND the freeway, and state-of-the art luxury homes. In the sort of cosmic joke that makes it difficult for honest, hard-working satirists to earn a living, the development has been named “Wilder.” The former Gateway Blvd. signs have been upgraded to read “Wilder Road.”

I suppose there’s a poetic justice, of sorts, in the idea that at least some of the proportionally higher property taxes the people buying into the “Wilder” brand will pay will go towards subsidizing repair of some wilder areas of old Orinda. At the end of a long, winding, cracked and pothole-strewn road into some interior canyon, under an oak canopy where California laurel scents the air and the locals know to tread lightly, I imagine the dryads and other folk of the woodland realm are enjoying a good laugh.

Two recent articles present opposite polarities on who might win the Republican nomination for president. Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times a few days ago that Mitt Romney is the inevitable nominee, and what happens between now and his coronation is essentially just a circus:

“…when you have eliminated the impossible, as Sherlock Holmes told Watson, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. This rule holds for presidential contests as well as for whodunits: Romney is improbable, but his rivals are impossible, and so he will be the nominee.”

Sounds logical to me. But therein may lie the rub. Logic and reason aren’t exactly at the height of fashion these days. For the opposite view, Walter Shapiro writes in The New Republic that this just might be the year when a Herman Cain can pull it off:

“Aiding Cain—and potentially defying past election cycles—is the fact that Republican voters are highly skeptical of the media: 72 percent of conservative Republicans and 62 percent of all Republicans believe that there is “a lot” of bias in news coverage, according to a national survey by the Pew Research Center. Anger at elected officials is the new normal. It is stunning that seven out of eight voters disapprove of the way that Congress is doing its job. Adding to this mixture is the fact that Republican voters—judging from every poll in this political season—would prefer not to nominate Mitt Romney. But the Anybody But Romney forces keep struggling with that ancient rule of politics and boxing: You can’t beat somebody with nobody.”

Let the games begin!

“I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.”—No! There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

No wonder Elizabeth Warren has the Republican Party running scared. Honest, intelligent plain-speak is coming back into fashion.

I heard the news of terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC on the clock radio as I was waking up the morning of September 11, 2001. I lay in bed for a few minutes trying to take it in, and then got up to check the Internet. I couldn’t get a connection, so I went into my teenaged son’s bedroom and turned on the television. He woke up to the image of the burning towers and my jumbled explanation of what had happened. A few minutes later, we watched the first tower crumple to the ground.

“There were people in that building,” I said. There wasn’t much else to do but go fix breakfast and try to gain some sense of normalcy to the day.

It has been an extraordinarily busy ten years for me ever since, and I honestly haven’t spent much time reflecting on the events of what is now known as 9/11. But major anniversaries are a good time for reflection. George W. Bush, whose presidency was floundering, found his calling that day, and his puppet-masters behind the scenes found the cover they needed to go on offense with half-baked, ideological dreams of grandeur. Seven horrendously destructive years later, the country radically shifted gears and elected the first African-American president, a long-held liberal dream. I like Obama a lot and believe he has done an extraordinary job under impossibly stressful circumstances these past three years, but his relative inexperience wielding power has caused problems that perhaps weren’t inevitable. Still, he’s a smart, honorable man, and the best leader we’ve got to help us muddle through the current mess.

Ten years on from 9/11, old systems and institutions around the globe are in a state of turbulence, and life sometimes seems more chaotic than ever. But I’m continually struck by how much strength, resilience and good will there is down on the ground in ordinary life. I have faith that we will get through this and emerge stronger than ever. There are times, though, when I wish it was easier to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

My computer crash a couple of weeks ago called into play the imperative of organizing information content while putting the brakes on continuing to amass it in unfettered fashion. This includes my out of control photo library, which contains many treasures. Here’s the path I’m following in to the project:

I didn’t watch the Republican debate last night because I have a low threshold of tolerance for watching wack jobs be treated as if they were rational, functional members of society. I’m glad to see that the race appears to be quickly narrowing down to a contest between Mitt Romney, representing the party’s sane adult wing, and Rick Perry, representing the whoop-de-do crowd (and proud of it). I would like to believe a majority of the country’s voters wouldn’t be so dumb as to get fooled again by another loudmouthed, swaggering Texan with a sketchy relationship to fact and reason, but, as H. L. Mencken once said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” Sigh… This would be more enjoyable to watch if I had more faith that the better angels of our nature would ultimately prevail.

Gorgeous weather today. The dogs and I went for a romp down by the bay, and a good time was had by all. Even the ducks didn’t get too riled up when the dogs ran down to splash in the water – they just took flight and relocated a bit further out from the shore.

I’m no expert on birds, but I think the vulture-like creature standing sentry on a post may be a Great Blue Heron with its long neck tucked into its chest. It was magnificent even from a distance. This one may be young, but at adult size it probably would have a wing span wider than I am tall.