The bridge across the Gate awash in rain. Victoria's Requiem is playing, the chorus' major sixths ascending the tall towers, pinnacles of refined sorrow and they carry my heart with them. I cross the Californian aorta, the main way from the Californian heart, the Bay of San Francisco and it beats still, but faintly.
Each year brings with it rain, and rain freshens the rivers that at last flow out the Gate, and the salmon hold until the water tastes right to them. There were millions of them, not long ago, and I have talked to men who remembered watching salmon harvested with pitchforks. From the ocean they came, the Californian sacrament, leering monsters from the deep set on wriggling their way past the mouth of the creek I live on, up through the Delta and the Valley, to fling themselves onto the cobble bars of Sierra Nevada rivers, food for grizzlies and condors and people. They sacrificed their lives so their young might live, and smolts tumbled down the streams each year into the Delta.
There were three runs each year, or four, depending on how you count them, great pulses of Chinook into the rivers for their young to tumble down in turn.
Thousands of miles of spawning beds reached by the Gate, a watery hand with a hundred fingers, and one by one we chopped those fingers off. The dams went in. Snowmelt languished in dull reservoirs, and downstream the winter and spring run chinook staggered. Those runs are a historical curiosity now. The spring run on the San Joaquin River is extinct: the San Joaquin's slack, piss-river tributaries are, below their respective dams, far too warm for spawning in spring. The Sacramento spring run and the Winter runs on both branches of the Central Valley watershed are not far behind. It is the fall run of Chinook that has survived so far to keep Central California a salmon country. That run is a fraction of its historic size, but still a quarter million fish a year.
But not this year. The fall run of Chinook into the Central Valley has collapsed.
I cross the opening of a dead heart, and Tomás Luis de Victoria's grief a half-millennium old is near too much to bear. They have fallen, there below me, kept from the mountains we have so betrayed. Oh, my mountains. Unto you all flesh once came, dug redds in streambeds, mixed milt and egg with meltwater, brought life out of the gravel. They are falling now, the last of them. The bay constricted and intoxicated, salmon smolts sucked by millions into turbines, their water shipped to the desert to grow cotton, billion-dollar concrete aqueducts running past rivers dry in summer, fish curling in the sun on the bottoms.
The soul of California's land and water and we are losing them.
Top 10 Reasons To Live In Nova Scotia
1.The only place in North America to get bombed in the war... by a moron who set a munition ship on fire
2. Your province is shaped like male genitalia
3. Everyone is a fiddle player
4. If someone asks if you're a Newfie, you are allowed to kick them
5. The local hero is an insane, fiddle playing, sexual pervert
6. The province that produced Rita MacNeil, the world's largest land mamma
7. You are the reason Anne Murray makes money
8. You can pretend you have Scottish heritage as an excuse to wear a kilt
9. The economy is based on fish, lobster, and fiddle music
10. Even though it smells like dead sea animals, Halifax is considered Canada's most beautiful city
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Genealogy Taglines
Can a first cousin, once removed, return?
Genealogy: Tracing yourself back to better people.
I trace my family history so I will know who to blame.
It's hard to be humble with ancestors like mine!
Friends come and go, but relatives tend to accumulate.
Genealogists live in the past lane.
Genealogy: A hay stack full of needles. It's the threads I need.
Genealogy: Collecting dead relatives and sometimes a live cousin!
Genealogy: Where you confuse the dead and irritate the living.
Heredity: Everyone believes in it until their children act like fools!
Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.
Theory of relativity: If you go back far enough, we're all related.
A Step backwards is Progress to a Genealogist.
I'd rather be looking for dead people than have them looking for me!
Ever find an ancestor HANGING from the family tree?
Evolution is God's way of issuing updates.
Genealogists are time unravelers.
Old genealogists never die, they just lose their census.
Genealogy...it's not a hobby, it's an obsession.
I think my ancestors had several "bad heir" days.
I'm not stuck, I'm ancestrally challenged.
It is hereditary in my family not to have children.
Only a Genealogist regards a step backwards as progress.
When marriage is outlawed only outlaws will have inlaws.
Genealogy: Tracing descent from someone who didn't.
I finally got it all together. Now where did I put it?
The black sheep keeps the best info on the family.
Whoever said "seek and ye shall find" was NOT a genealogist
You Can Make Book on That
by Bill Norin
As Published in March/April 2008 Genealogical Helper
Many genealogists have as a long term goal the publication of a family history for, after all, most of us are doing this for our kids. As someone once said, “There are two legacies that you can bequeath your children, one is roots and the other is wings.”(author unknown). So at some time in our research we start constructing a written family history. For some it consists of ancestral and descendent trees, others take a narrative approach and yet others combine both. For me, I favor narrative because the only ones who fully understand and appreciate tree charts are fellow genealogists. Others just look at them with a glassy stare and comment, “Oh that’s nice”.
I wrote a narrative family history many years ago (The Mac Donalds from the Bras ‘d Or to the Estrella), back in the days before word processors, and I paid to have it typed, contacted my cousins to find out who wanted to purchase them and then had them reproduced, collated, packaged and mailed. When I was all done I had a great feeling of satisfaction that I had left a legacy that was worth the effort. The only thing that haunted me was that I didn’t want to give up the research and I knew my book would be out of date as soon as I uncovered new material.
Soon along came computers, genealogical software and the Internet. Many new vistas opened up for me. I could quickly correspond with relatives in Nova Scotia. Formerly, I would write a letter and wait two weeks or more to get a response. My database was expanding and I was receiving all kinds of new information on my family, information that would cause me to drastically revise my hard copy family history. But alas, I couldn’t very well revise the bound document. I could see only one solution and that was to have the book scanned, a costly proposition in my case because it was 300+ pages, but one that was well worth it. I could now make all kinds of revisions and my family story would be a work in progress as was my research.
I now have on my desktop and icon which when clicked leads me to my story. Without having to use ‘whiteout” (what ever happened to that goop?) I can easily edit my document, revise passages, remove material that wasn’t correct, change font size and font style and all the other miraculous tools of word processors. I can even use the “find” function to locate words or sections of the book. There are new features that weren’t in the hard copy. I have added some very short abbreviated descendent trees. I said earlier that I didn’t think tree charts interested the non-genealogist but the ones I use contain only two generations and are placed at the start of a chapter where those folks are featured. Hyperlinks let readers access web pages related to my works.
The newest feature, and the one that provides me with the most fun, is the capability of adding pictures. A few years ago a cousin presented me with a virtual treasure trove of 50+ family pictures that cover the period from 1910 to 1950. I have sprinkled these about so they appear above or below the reference to that person. In addition to these pictures, I realized that the Internet contained a gold mine of pictures. Did you know that a Google search using “Images” on their toolbar opens up an endless supply of pictures that can be copied and pasted into your history? Typically these images are of people, places and objects mentioned in the story.
Well, now I have a wonderful digitized family story that is easily burned onto a CD which can then be sent to family members at little cost. In fact the price is so minimal in producing these that I send them gratis to those who wish to have them. I am now thinking about converting my story to html so that I can make it a link on my home page.
This has been a wonderful experience and as I continue to collect new info about family members from new sources, new web pages (WWW. CastleGardens.net, 1837online.com), newly discovered relatives, and fresh LDS sources, I have come to the conclusion that publishing a hard copy family history is passé -----and you can make book on that.
