Tell it to the Marine (Layer)

I woke up to a gray and dreary sky this morning. Damp air flowed into the bedroom through an open window.

Of course, I was overjoyed.

Rhumba and I live on the California coast, where cold currents and cool sea air crash up against warm air from inland in spring and summer. From that, you get fog. The local weather guys go on at length about the "marine layer," which is the cool wet air from the sea that makes the fog. It comes inland as far as it can until the air warms up, and then the cool air and fog retreat to the coast.

Or that's the story. Personally, whenever someone says "marine layer," I picture vast squadrons of spectral men in green uniforms floating on their backs in the air about two thousand feet up, humming "From the Halls of Montezuma" in unison.

Anyway, sometimes in spring and summer the warm air is so strong that it pushes the marine layer way out to sea, and we don't get fog. That means heat wave. And we just had one that laid Santa Cruz low for a couple of days. We were hurting. The temperature neared 90F every day.

Yes, I said 88 or 89F laid the town low. And yes, we are weather wimps. You poor bastards in Phoenix and San Antonio and Atlanta and Chicago and even Sacramento sneer and laugh at our pathetic complaints.

But we have our reasons. The weather in Santa Cruz is -- frankly -- very nearly perfect. Seldom too hot, seldom too cold, and sunny most days after the fog burns off. . And one of the things you don't need in a place like that is....

Air conditioning. Almost nobody has it. Most stores don't. Most restaurants don't, or have turned theirs down to save money. When the temperature hits 90, your choice for coolth is hanging out at the Safeway meat counter, catching a movie, or heading to the beach. But you can't sleep at the beach, cook dinner at the theater, or do business in the supermarket (at least, I can't).

When the heat comes, everybody lays low, stays out of the sun, and does as little as possible.

So I was overjoyed to see gray skies this morning. It meant the marine layer had broken through the front lines of the heat wave and made a grab for the Big Thermostat. I got Rhumba out of bed and we rushed right out and washed the cars, 7 a.m. Sunday morning.

You heard me. If you care too much about keeping your car looking pretty, you know you're only supposed to wash the damn things when they're out of direct sunlight (hot metal dries the soapy water too quickly, makes spots). I've been trying to wash the Green Psycho for days, but whenever I had the time the sun was floating six feet above the house.

So we were out there with buckets and hoses washing the car as the fog and cool air streamed by and I just loved every second of it. I've lived my whole life on the California coast, and I just love fog. I love the grey, I love the cool but temperate air on my skin, I love the misty look it gives to the landscape, I love the prickle of moisture on my face as I stride through it.

Among my earliest memories: laying in my bed on a Saturday morning, waking up to gray billowy skies and the lonely call of foghorns out on the bay. The big old deep-voiced foghorns that sounded like dinosaur mating calls, or what majestic dino sex talk should have sounded like.

I don't like being hot. Rhumba doesn't, either, and she's from Phoenix. We're both big people who build up a lot of heat doing everyday things. We're at our best where the temperature is moderate, where the marine layer muffles the sun and doesn't let it out until nine or ten, and hustles it out of sight again after five or six in the evening. When it's hot... well, we don't move much.

So we fell to our task with vigor. We washed the Psycho, our Prius, and then for good measure we got Rhumba's old Honda off the street and washed all the bird crap off it and and inflated a couple of tires with a hand pump. And then we drove to a breakfast place down by the yacht harbor and ate outside under the fog while the marine layer made titanic battle against the forces of high pressure. With a cup of superlative coffee in hand, the temperature was perfect. For us, anyway. And we weren't the only ones out there.

The sun won eventually, of course, and the day warmed up. But not so ferociously as the day before, or the day before that. People livened up. The bars and restaurants filled. Things got back to something approaching normal.

And at eight p.m. we walked out of a church function over in Live Oak to find gray skies and gusts of refreshing cool air waiting in the parking lot. We sped home with the windows wide open and the damp air rushing in as lowering mist and dimming light transformed Santa Cruz into a charcoal sketch of itself.

Thank you, marines.

Made

"Hi! As my project at Maker Faire, I'm asking people if they'd like to read a page of my novel while being videotaped!" He blurted it out in one seamless torrent of words.

He gestured at an unpainted wooden crate the size of a phone booth; it had a door in the side and a red light on top. "You go inside and read your part off a teleprompter while we videotape you. We'll cut together all the separate readings and put them up on YouTube!"

Pale, slender, nearly hairless, he didn't look like the type who got out much, much less accosted total strangers at a art and technology festival. But appearances can be deceiving. When a man, or a woman, sets his mind to a goal, even a weird goal, the force of desire can propel him beyond his normal comfort zone.

And.... Welcome to Maker Faire, this weekend only at the San Mateo fairgrounds, where people who care madly about things that few others ever think about, strut their stuff before a tolerant and inquisitive crowd.


Maker Faire is hard to sum up as a whole. At best you can describe its parts: part county fair, part performance art, part Burning Man wanna-be, part how-to crafts festival, part inventors fair, part art show, part hobbyists' Valhalla, part futurist convention, part alternative music festival. It's about people who make things, and the process of making. Sometimes they make gallery-quality mechanical squid, or Road-Warrior-caliber solar/electric trikes:



And because the faire is about making, many exhibitors want you to make something: electronic gadgets, art projects, or just some sort of creative contribution to their dream.

Which is how I found myself alone inside a wooden crate reading aloud the text of somebody else's novel as it scrolled up a screen and a hidden camera recorded me. The experience was both routine and oddly creepy.

I never did figure out why it was important to post videotaped readings of this guy's novel on YouTube. It won't be a best-seller, either -- his young daughter came up with the plot -- but he was an interesting guy, a programmer who'd worked in Ethiopa, of all places. ("'Learn C, visit Addis Ababba,'" he giggled.)

And that's the other great thing about Maker Faire: talking to these people. It's a weekend of conversation with people who care passionately about something:



I personally can't think of a more fascinating way to spend time. But that's just me.

Rhumba and I stamped through exhibit halls and outdoor arenas today. We dodged "steampunks" on Victorian-era motorcycles (which never existed, of course), a self-powered Tilt-a-Whirl car, and fully-operational replicas of old sci-fi movie robots.




We drew our visions of the future, researched converting our Prius to a plug-hybrid with feminist green mechanics from San Francisco, videotaped statements on how technology would change the world for someone's website, and chased a woman in a motorized Barcalounger around the exhibition floor. (The black dog in her lap is the controller.)


And we learned things, and saw things, and roamed through art installations of peculiar outlook and herculean size made by mad welders from the East Bay.


We'll go back tomorrow to see everything we didn't see; currently we're parked in a Marriot in Foster City, which is an alternative universe its own self. I'm blogging, Rhumba's knitting. I guess we're Makers, too. Bet you are, too.

The Maker Faire has one more day to run, and if you're in the Bay Area, I'd recommend it: check it out.

http://www.makerfaire.com

The Return of the Big Choo Choo

After the '89 quake wrecked its building, the Logos bookstore here in Santa Cruz temporarily moved into a decrepit warehouse while its new home was under construction.

"Logos at the Warehouse" was a total hoot. First, it was gigantic; a single empty room that was three or four times the size of the original bookstore. With all that space to fill, the Logos people put every single book and record they had out on the floor. There were rows of bookshelves, mazes of bookshelves, full neighborhoods of bookshelves You could get lost in there. It was practically a tourist attraction. We took visitors there just to see it.

And the ceiling was 30 feet high. Sound went straight up and vanished in the dim space above the hanging light tubes. It could be quiet as church in there. A dim, dusty church, but nonetheless...

The warehouse sat next to a little railroad switching yard; at one point the tracks passed very, very close to the old building. Several trains trundled by each day. More than once a line of slow-moving lumber cars blocked my car from leaving. Still, nothing stopped you from parking wherever you wanted -- there were no "No Parking / Violators will be Towed" signs.

But at the corner where the tracks came within ten or twelve feet of the building, the staff wrote a warning on the wall: "Do Not Park Here, or the Big Choo Choo Will Come and Take Your Car Away."

I do not know if the Big Choo Choo ever carried away a car, but I liked that sign a lot. To me it said that carelessness is its own punishment; the law only gets involved to do the bookkeeping.

Logos stayed at the warehouse for a couple of profitable years, then moved to its new building on Pacific. The roof of the warehouse collapsed in a big storm a year or two after that, and somebody tore the place down. A snazzy apartment house stands there now.

But I've always remember the Big Choo Choo. Partly because I have an old fondness for trains. Partly because the aftermath of carelessness, while often tragic, is almost always -- well, embarrassing.

And what's more embarrassing than a big black choo choo taking your car away because you couldn't figure out that parking right by the tracks was a bad idea?

This afternoon I piloted the Green Psycho up to UC Santa Cruz on business. And darned if I didn't almost kill me a college student.

He stepped off the curb and right in front of the car, eyes locked straight ahead. No more than a cars-length ahead. Right in the middle of a block. I jammed on the brakes and stopped in time. If I'd even been scratching my nose, I might not have made it. And he didn't even notice, apparently. He was too busy listening to his iPod. I honked at him and shouted, "I nearly killed you!" He shouted something without looking back.

And if I'd hit him? Sure I'd feel bad. But an investigation by authorities would ultimately establish that a young college student with an adam's apple as big as his nose, somebody whose parents spent maybe half a million dollars to get him to this point in life, didn't know enough to look both ways before crossing the street. Much less find a crosswalk.

Beware the Big Choo Choo, young man. If you don't learn to watch out for yourself, it is waiting to Take You Away. And that might result in tragedy, or it might not. But it damned well will be embarassing.