Tuesday morning, up much too early again... I work in the hotel room for a quite a while, then patch into my 8:30 am conference call. An hour later, with that over, I throw the last few things into my bags, grab a cup of coffee on the way out the door, and head down 880 and toward San Jose.
This is the morning I thought I'd be taking care of the now postponed project, so all I really need to do instead is take a look at another project, get a sense of the land in an area where I need to make some design decisions for a stream restoration. Essentially, I need to be able to go to the engineers with a specific concept so they can put a cost on building it. As so often happens, there are conflicting values; expanding a floodplain means impacting a historical resource. I need to find a creative way around it, a way to reconcile the conflict without adding too much to the project cost.
But that won't take long. I know what needs to happen, or at least what the choices are. I just need to look at it.
On the way I pick up Iona Lynn, and initially the idea is that she can take some photos and we can talk shop after I've completed my site walk-through.
But first, a little about the site. We're at a municipal park, a very old one, dating to 1872. Once a bustling spa where visitors took the hideous sulpher-smalling waters for their alleged healing properties, it's now a basic passive recreation park, with hiking trails and picnic grounds. Old stone walls line the creek banks, arched bridges seem to be everywhere, and sad remnants of springs issue from the inside of stone grottoes.
All is calm enough at first. I pace off the distances from the stream to the stone structures, take a few photos for documentation, take some notes, formulate a fairly specific concept. I have no idea how long it takes, I'm not thinking about time. Iona is off in the cattails somewhere, stalking some elusive critter with her Rollieflex. Eventually I'm done, and we look around at some of the stone structures. As we begin to walk back out from the upper canyon, we pause at one of the grottoes.
Iona Lynn is a very experienced fine art model, and now she volunteers to get naked and pose in the grottoe. Sure, sounds great, except that this is a busy place. There's a person going past every minute or two. We just watched the ranger make his rounds and drive out again. Not to worry, she says she can just pull back to the interior of the dark grottoe, and I can block the entrance.
It worked great for a while. A guy rode by on a bike, oblivious. A runner went by, also oblivious. Now a guy walks by, believes my ruse of taking a photo of the bridge across the way, and he hurries past without looking.
The photo above is Iona Lynn messing with the (so far) unknowing guy, now 30 feet away. Until he hears a sound and turns around, and she's standing there, stark naked, five feet from cover. We both laugh hysterically as she scampers back inside and peeks around the corner.
We have some great shots already, so it's time to get dressed; the whole thing took maybe 10 minutes. The guy lingers by the next bridge for a while, circles back to get a closer look, but by now we're not paying much attention to him. We stand looking at a colorful algae-encrusted seep on a rock face, when for the second time, rocks and dirt cascade down the slope and land at our feet. Then it happens again. This time we see the squirrel scamper back to cover. Soon there are several of them, kicking and throwing small rocks down the cliff face at us. Nature is fighting back, the rodents have had enough. It's very funny to watch.
Eventually we tire of the furry little performance artists and walk back to the car, and go to get some lunch. By mid-afternoon I'm headed north, stopping back at the Santa Rosa office for a while before heading up 101 and home.
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