A Foggy View

We moved to Santa Rosa to get away from the dispiriting Berkeley summer fog. Rarely did we see the sun on a summer morning. Sometimes the fog squatted over the hills from the bay for the whole day, sometimes it would clear by 2pm only to return at 4 o'clock. It was never warm enough to eat outside. It was always referred to by the weather person as the 'marine layer'  Some misguided poet...I forget who...described it blowing over the hills from the ocean and into the San Francisco Bay as coming on 'little cat's feet'. A cold, grey blanket, more like. 

Occasionally I was able to hike up into the hills between Berkeley and the rest of the East Bay and get above the clouds which looked soft and fluffy with just the tops of the Transamerica Pyramid, the Sutro Tower, Mt Tamalpias and Mt Diablo. It was quite a sight, but I actually preferred the full panoply of three bridges and the bay with its scattering of islands, the most notorious of which is Alcatraz with its now closed but once notorious prison. San Quentin, jutting out into the bay at the San Rafael end of the Richmond bridge is still in use as a high security prison.

This morning was foggy, but we welcomed it with gratitude, as it keeps the temperature down and the humidity up and reduces the risk of fire.The sun has come out now but it is much cooler.

The extra photo shows the two huge tree cutting machines that were parked at the end of our road...or what is left of it. These huge machines can get into some amazingly steep and treacherous terrain, but they can also destroy the road which is rapidly earning its name of 'Wildwood Trail' as numerous Cats and other large beasts like these continue their work of moving first burned houses and now burned trees. It is a huge job as the steep wooded slope down which the fire burned is just beyond these beasts.

We still have brown leaves in the oak trees between our property and the one next door. They are too high off the ground for us to remove and it is difficult to tell which branches extend from trees on our side of the property line and which are from the other side where two houses burned to the ground. We have all had our trees checked by arborists who have advised us to wait a year from the time of the fire to see which trees are going to come back.  It has been almost a year and we will probably wait until the green leaves fall to have the arborists back. 

The brown leaves will never fall off unless the branch they are on is cut down.