The Crane

When I stopped by the Viewpoint just now, there was nobody there--until an acquaintance of mine came along on a bicycle, stopping for a second, and then going on. There was a vaguely blue cast to the light, with a certain amount of haze in the distance. More leaves have come down from the Sentinel and the other trees, and it's even clearer that fall is past its prime. In just a few days, it will be Halloween, and then the typically rainy month of November will be upon us.

The one thing out of the ordinary that I noticed today was a crane jutting up into the sky around Hunter's Point, but on the other side of Union Bay, south of the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge. It's funny how from one place only yards long, you can see so much territory and observe the effects of so many human actions.

Illumination, or Lack Thereof

If you go to the Viewpoint after dark, you see a beautiful array of lights in the great expanse that makes up the "view" one sees from the Viewpoint. Some of the lights are orangish, some bluish, others white. Some are red, some are green; some are bright, some dull.Without carefully examining their configuration, you might think that every night the lights are the same. In fact, just which lights are shining where changes a good deal from night to night. The more you know about where each light is, the more you can begin to understand about the social or demographic patterns governing their illumination or lack thereof. By contrast, the moon, planets and stars appear and disappear with no relationship to human activity, with the exception of the effects of pollution on the visibility of the celestial bodies in the night sky.