Thursday Grab Bag

In one week I’ve had two ridiculous injuries.  First came the pulled groin muscle which I got from trying to climb over a baby gate while holding a glass of wine in each hand.  Then I managed to pull a muscle in my back while washing my foot.  Each injury causes me to walk like a penguin, lest I bend more than a half degree in any direction and send hot wires of pain threading up my spine and across the front of my leg.  I wish I could say I was disarming an armed assailant, doing freestyle heli-skiing, or competing in the world Judo finals, but the ignominy of these injuries is in their banality.  Headline:  suburban dad does boring things and manages to hurt himself.

Good, now that’s covered we can go onto the color of water in the harbor.  Each morning I get to see San Diego Bay as I bank high off the highway and drop down through Little Italy on Hawthorn Street.  Every day the water has a different color profile.  Sometimes it’s like beaten foil, white hot and inscrutable.  Other mornings, while the fog is still being burned to shreds by the sun, the water seems lit from beneath, a translucent jade vessel run through with veins of kelp.  If I’m lucky it’s overcast except for a beam of morning light that strikes the far side of the harbor, spotlighting white plaster houses on a tan slope as one would find clinging to a cliff edge in Mykonos.

Finally we end with an image from the Border to Border book, a sample of which is up here.  This project is evolving so stay tuned for Land Rover adventure travel writing!

Exploration

The world is an amazing place.  When you’re a kid you’ll act on impulse and if there’s something to be explored, you go after it.  This weekend Toddler Harbat spied a treehouse in our friends’ back yard and in a flash she was headed for the ladder.  Never mind the old lumber with rusty nails hooking out of it and ready to grab a soft hand, her mind was made.  As an adult you run through a tedious checklist involving safety items, convenience, schedule of time in treehouse vs. time before a nap, social niceties of using someone else’s treehouse, safety considerations again because that railing looks a bit wobbly.  BORING!  “Babbo I wanna go up in the treehouse!”  Up she went.

Picture by my wife

As she climbed above me I noticed she’d put her underwear on sideways.  Listen, explorers don’t need to follow society’s rules on fashion.

Before the treehouse adventure I’d been on a long mountain bike ride, doing my own exploration.  I’ve found an open space preserve with miles of tracks through canyons, broad grassy plains, and through rocky scenery and during my ride each trail tempted me to veer off and explore.  One track was deep red dust snaking down a hillside through chaparral and past home-sized boulders in repose atop grassy hillocks.  Another criss-crossed a cobble-strewn creek bed in exhilarating banked swoops.  Others teased me away from the main trail in tire-width meanders into canyons and through cottonwood valleys.

Exploration should be a childlike experience.  Try to let go of some of the checklists and give yourself permission to follow your nose.  You’ve no idea what you’ll find but the journey will be magical.