Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Walking the dog around the circumference of Laguna Del Rey in Monterey yesterday, I came across large chalked letters along one side of the parking lot. They said THANK YOU.
At first I thought this was a novel way for the Embassy Suites by Hilton Monterey Bay Seaside to welcome lodgers, perhaps an attempt to make up for the cancelled managers’ receptions, the disallowed visits from housekeeping, or the closed up fitness center, all due to Monterey County COVID-19 ordinances. The world is a dangerous place, but I think we did a good job of not breathing other people’s air or touching common surfaces. Only the elevators would have forced us into close quarters with strangers, but with our room on the second floor, we found it easy to take the stairs.
The first time Kate and I visited Monterey, we could hear the surf from the open windows of our bed and breakfast. That was also in September, and we had just been married in Hinsdale, Illinois. The wedding had been a joyful reunion of our families and closest friends, some of whom we had not seen since. We saw our honeymoon trip to Carmel and Monterey as a consolation that our extended Labor Day weekend with all those delightful people had come to an end.
On that 1992 trip, we tandem-biked the entire 17 Mile Drive from Monterey to Carmel, where we had lunch, and then we biked back. Making that same drive yesterday in our minivan, we remarked on how narrow and twisty those roads are, with insufficient shoulders for bicycles. Perhaps we were too confident and naïve to be worried about the safety of the endeavor, especially with all the tourists looking to spot the famous Lone Cypress rather than looking out for bicycling honeymooners.
We are lucky to have so many beaches just a couple hours from Davis. Yesterday, as I looked out on the western horizon from Asilomar State Beach, I found myself wishing that I had taken classes with the world-famous UC Davis Department of Land, Air and Water Resources so I could better name and describe what I was seeing.
Then I remembered that my son Truman shares a September 26th birthday with a favorite poet, T.S. Eliot, so we might remember Eliot at the same time that we celebrate Truman (with music, 15 candles on a cake, and a weekend away). This is how Eliot described the coast along Cape Ann, Massachusetts in his poem “The Dry Salvages”:
The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
Sometimes a poet’s words can suffice when one lacks formal training in Marine & Coastal Science.
As we drove away from the hotel parking lot yesterday morning, I realized that this was once a staging area; our temporary home had housed some of the people who most deserved our thanks: Firefighters. This had been a staging area for the heroes who just a few weeks before had worked selflessly to protect homes and wildlands in Monterey County. The fact that no rain had washed away the chalked thanks reminds us that the threat persists, that our Golden State vacation hotspots remain hot, imperiled, and needful of our concern and protection.
I’m grateful for the firefighters, grateful for Truman on his birthday, and grateful for our first summer vacation, taken a good month after the schoolkids’ end of summer. School starts for UC Davis this week, giving us all a chance to see how we handle the coming threats and opportunities at home. We will see what heroes will step up for our community.
Thanks to all the subscribers to the Pub Quiz! Tonight’s Quiz will feature questions on the following: Nicknames, Ellen, groups of books, executive producers, flagship species, valuable horses, federal taxes, Shia, Kentucky, Yo-Yo, programming, David Bowie, prominent Native Americans, the King of France, moss, misinformation, novelistic output, Paris, five year margins of error, fibers, California cities, forgiving friends, Missouri exports, Thoreau, doorbell rice breeds, fierceness, nests, pipes, chess, founders, successful coaches, shoes, and Shakespeare.
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Best,
Dr. Andy
P.S. Here are four questions from last week’s quiz:
- Name the Year. We first went for a walk with Pokemon Go, we laughed at the female Ghostbusters, and we watched the Chicago Cubs win the World Series all in the same year. Name the year.
- Famous Mountains. Found on the eastern edge of one particular Unitary presidential constitutional republic, Mount Ararat is the highest peak in what country?
- Famous Movies. What actor and director ad-libbed this famous line in the classic film The Third Man? “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
- Science. According to NASA, what W phenomenon comes in the categories of longitudinal and transverse?