widowmakers and mushrooms and cows and deer

For the deer the rut is over. Last week the young bucks were calm enough to sit down together in groups. This week the does and fawns and young bucks have begun to graze together in peace. The old bucks? The only time I've ever seen them has been at night in the autumn when two large-racked, massively muscled specimens were facing off.

The cows (well, maybe they're better described as calves) are also grazing, but they're not quite calm. There is a patch of hoof-worn mud along the barbed wire fence. Just in front of the mud is an extraneous fence post which blocks the path. It seems that the young bulls like to graze alongside the young heifers as they approach that obstacle. Yesterday I found four young bulls surrounding a heifer at that point, and the one in the rear was trying to figure out how to take advantage of the situation. They stopped and looked at me as I walked alongside. They have no horns, but they are as massive as I am, yet when I started toward the fence they all scattered.

A tree crew is still prowling around with their saws and chipper. They have taken out several large bay trees, one very large leaning fir tree, and lots of branches along the paved pathways. I take the deer trails, and this morning I encountered several piles of debris which were the result of one widowmaker branch crashing its way down and bringing lots of others with it.

After clearing the trail I found a nice collection of mushrooms. I think they were genus boletus, but I didn't inspect closely enough to be sure.

heraldry meme

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Milord Sir Lord Hephæstus the Introspective of Mabe Burnthouse Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

inspiration courtesy of ariyanakylstram

that's pretty boring

In England High Street means the main street at the town center along which the most important business is located. In Santa Cruz High Street is the venerable path which starts at the site of the mission(*) and ascends westward up the marine terraces toward the spring(%) which served as the water supply for the mission. As the city of Santa Cruz grew it expanded its water supply by tapping various streams as much as 8 miles to the west, and the water mains which conduct that liquid currently run along and beneath High Street.

During this past year the residents of High Street had to endure the complete replacement of the water mains as part of a major civic infrastructure enhancement. The process mostly done to the west of CA route 1, but not the connections to the rest of the city water supply on the east side of the highway. The process of making the connection has just begun.

There remains a short, disconnected piece of High Street which starts at the current site(+) of Holy Cross Church. The west end of this stub connects to the pedestrian bridge over highway 1. It is the activity at this location which inspires this post.

In preparation for connecting the new water mains the city has dug a huge hole in High Street. Sitting at the bottom of the hole is a boring machine on rails. It is clear that sometime within the next few days they will start boring under CA route 1 to make a tunnel to connect to the water main on the other side.

Did I say boring? If anything goes wrong with the boring then the traffic patterns in Santa Cruz could actually get very interesting.

(*)Actually the second mission site. The first mission site was right along the San Lorenzo River, but after the inevitable flood they moved the mission up onto the first marine terrace now known as Mission Hill. A trench was dug to carry water from Tres Ojos de Agua to the mission, and the resulting stream was once a seasonal waterfall cascading down to what is now North Pacific Avenue right at the original and ill-fated first location of The Crêpe Place which was crushed by a large falling rock that had probably been undermined by the aforementioned waterfall.

(%)The street branching off of High Street which heads toward the spring is the eponymous Spring Street. The spring itself has always been fed by the artesian pressure from the even higher marine terraces which are now the UCSC campus. After the secularization of the mission the spring site was quarried for limestone, and all the land surrounding the quarry pond has since been developed into housing. Residents of Mission Hill in the vicinity of Escalona still experience annual shifting of their house foundations as unchanneled remnants of drainage expand the soil beneath them.

(+)The current site of Holy Cross church sits atop what was the cemetery for the mission. When the church was constructed the tombs were relocated to two parcels of land about three miles east, overlooking Arana Gulch. These parcels are along the original route of Capitola Road (now called Capitola Road Extension, which was the route before the bypass that goes through Arana Gulch, and the original name for that pathway through Live Oak was Lower Soquel Road), Rodriguez Avenue, and Seventh Avenue.