Chris Watson in the Santa Cruz Sentinel:

For such a little county, it’s amazing how often Santa Cruz wriggles its way into the media.

Just as Beth Lisick was cracking me up about UCSC co-eds, an August edition of The New Yorker magazine was slapped into my mailbox, falling open—sort of—to a nice long article by author JONATHAN FRANZEN, he of "The Corrections" fame and Oprah notoriety.

In his reflective article titled "My Bird Problem: love, grief and a change in the weather," Franzen focused on his developing passion for bird-watching, proving in his complex essay that good nonfiction is at least as entertaining as fiction.

Gliding easily from one emotional subject to another—his feelings about the life and death of his marriage, the life and death of his mother, the life and death of species—Franzen dallied with issues big and small.

Most impressively, he considered the bipolar tendency in man to, in one moment, cling to "unsustainable" ideas and then, in the next moment, "bankrupt ourselves as rapidly as possible."

Good stuff.

Now for the Santa Cruz bits.

In the middle of all his emotional turmoil, Franzen meets a vegetarian Californian writer who steals his heart and, incidentally, lives near some fine bird-watching habitats.

While in Santa Cruz, he goes looking for Eurasian wigeons, towhees, grosbeaks and scoters, which is when—binoculars in hand—he has an aha! moment:

"How different my marriage might have been if I’d been able to go birding!"

And later:

"Days passed like hours. I moved at the same pace as the sun in the sky; I could almost feel the earth turning."

At one with the earth, Franzen became one with the birds: the threat of their extinction became, in the end, a threat to his extinction.

A long piece worth the read.

I have many fond memories of the Santa Cruz boardwalk from my middle-school days in California, although the undertow there nearly killed me once, and there were some unfortunate mixes of corn dogs, blue cotton candy, and mountainous car rides. Nevertheless, that waterslide was top-notch. And the corn dogs and cotton candy were worth it. There were also, sometimes, dolphins.

Categories: Jonathans