On Sunday D. and I were almost able to answer that question. On a sunny but extremely windy, gusty day we set out on a simple field trip, but our plans kept on morphing like grains of sand scattered in a gale.
First we went to the Alviso Marina County Park to see the marshes. The path is a raised boardwalk over the reeds and muddy marsh.
It was so windy the birds couldn't fly, and there were whitecaps on the bilious salt evaporation pond.
But we did see lots of nice flowers. Wind-whipped, but nice.
Then D. realized: Windy? Wind harp!! So we headed up to South San Francisco.
It was so windy we could hear it even before we got out of the car.
It's a big mutha. Ninety-four feet high. All of those bars create spaces for the wind to resonate. And resonate it did! It yelled and howled and sang and keened with thousands of unintelligible voices, rising and falling with each heavy gust. It even drowned out all but the absolutely closest planes, going right overhead, taking off and landing at nearby San Francisco International Airport.
The towers were quivering in the gale. They look solid, but they are fluted in a fashion. Some critters have made nests in the base of several.
On one side of the grounds there was a little butterfly garden. I think that's statice. There were no butterflies fluttering by on that day!
More pretty flowers, ready for the butterflies when the wind stops.
Here's the view toward San Bruno Mountain, with the little garden on the right. We sat on the bench for a while. Now and then I could feel the bench resonating with the deep tones of the wind harp. I began to think about maybe designing the bench itself to be a wind harp, and you could get a massage just by sitting there on a windy day. Of course, you would probably also go deaf from all the racket as well.
I really wanted to lie on the grass and veg out listening to the wind harp, but it was too darned windy to be comfortable. So we wandered around looking for another cool place to go but got lost. While blundering our way back to the freeway to come home we found the Golden Gate National Cemetery. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Gate_National_Cemetery) So we went there and had a little look-see.
Lots of headstones.
Here's one of several plaques on the base of some monument that had been removed.
Here's the base of the flagpole on top of the hill.
Here's a granite star.
Here's the view from the base of the flagpole, looking out toward the Bay and the East Bay Hills. The black fingers of the wind harp can barely be seen poking up in the center right.
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