Ah, winter. It is generally more useful to reckon it as the time from the winter solstice to the spring equinox since the weather tends to lag a bit behind the shortening of the days. I put it down to the land and water, a mass that takes a good long time to get charged up with the energy of long summer days, and another while to let it go again when the days grow short. Here, it might be better reckoned by the quarter of the year with the shortest days. Those short days just get worse when going north. The day length changes so quickly when it is perfect and even. It changes slowly when it is long or short, just settling down into it for a long wallow.
Short days leave long nights. When I live by the sun, that morning takes a long time to come. I even tend to have blundered into the dark before feeling ready to have the evening supper, but once it is dark, that's what time it is. The day's activities just generally are best with light. So cooking happens. Cleaning happens. (Hopefully before too much cold sets in.) There is a grand bit of brushing of the teeth while looking at the stars. (When those summer days get too long, they might not even be out yet. Looking at the stars is a most wonderful way of brushing teeth.) Then it is sleep.
Then, sometime in the middle of the night, for me about 6 hours later, it isn't sleep. I would prefer to have a bit more, but it won't be coming and it's 2AM and there's still a lot of hours until the dawn light breaks. That is the time to get out the books. For me, in these modern times, that's most easily just pulling out the tiny tablet we call "cell phone" and reading an e-book, tucked entirely under the covers. It's cold out there! It lights itself, so there are no lamps to worry about. It's not too much to give it the room it needs under the covers. It's perfect, and after a few hours of reading, I can snooze my way through that little bit more sleep I'd like to the morning light.
So what have I been reading? Science fiction, of course! But something else I've been reading, particularly since I went and tried to put together a guide to hiking one small bit of the California Coastal Trail, is California Coastal Trails, an account by J. Smeaton Chase of his own travels on such a trail in 1911, long before it was a plan. He passed by bits of the coast you won't see today. He didn't quite do it all. He skipped Santa Monica, essentially because it is a circus. (He's not exactly wrong.) He rode from El Monte out to the coast and south one season, then started again in El Monte out to the south and north a few months later.
The Ventana Wilderness Alliance has the most beautiful electronic version of the book on their site here. That is a not in a format that is particularly amenable to dropping in my e-reader for those low reliability signal places, unfortunately. I have cleaned up an EPUB version from a couple copies at the Internet Archive that can be downloaded here. (This is a first effort, so I'm not sure what I'm doing. It looks really good on my e-reader. Am I supposed to send the improved version back to them?)
There's more to be found by J. Smeaton Chase:
Yosemite Trails can be found at Yosemite Online as HTML or in a few e-book formats. (Also a good source for many other authors, like Muir, as long as they were writing about Yosemite.) There's also a pretty good version on the Internet Archive. (The EPUB takes a surprisingly long wait from click to download. Other formats preserve the original pagination.)
California Desert Trails can be found at the Internet Archive. In OCRed form, these all have trouble with the large collection of fonts used in the front matter, but settle down for the text. The photo plate captions get a bit odd.
Our Abby: Palm Springs can be found at the Internet Archive.
The Penance of Magdalena: and Other Tales of the California Missions can be found at the Internet Archive.
The California Padres and Their Missions can be found at the Internet Archive.
Cone-bearing Trees of the California Mountains can be found at the Internet Archive. This may not be usable in an OCR format. The format at the Biodiversity Library may be far more useful.
Comments
Post a Comment