The Wormlips Scrapbook

Yesterday afternoon Yo-Nenny and Jason (who happens to be her husband) came over.

We played seventeen-thousand, four-hundred-twenty-two million games of double canfield. During breaks, Yo-Nenny would go check her e-mail as Jason tried to sneak up on her.

Lulu and I had a bat-oriented night in Davis last night. First, we watched a live presentation starring a cast of orphans.

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[All filmography by Lulu. Ginna edited and produced it. The first song is There Ain't No Bugs on Me by Jerry Garcia and David Grisman. The second is Doc Watson singing Summertime. Corky is the name of the woman who handles and tells us about the bats.]

Then we drove along a maze of dirt roads that cut through glistening rice paddies like swollen veins.

Our destination was the far end of the Yolo Causeway bridge, whose underbelly is home to 250,000 (if you don’t include this week’s 125,000 babies) Mexican Freetail Bats.

It was interesting to see how the bats conduct their mass exodus from their roosts. Normally they live in caves, flocking from the mouth at twilight. No caves here, but apparently they still need something symbolic of an opening. For unknown reasons, a quarter of a million bats have decided a certain tree is the “opening,” and they fly along under the freeway from far and near until they reach it, emerging only then. They appeared in four waves. First, we’d see flashes of orange under the bridge as wings caught the sunset. And then seconds later, thousands of the tiny creatures — looking much bigger than they actually are — burst into the open, flapping up and over the tree in a fluid cord that thickened as it spiraled into the darkening sky.

The organization that sponsors this class is the Yolo Basin Foundation. They lead fascinating-sounding trips out into this northernmost part of the Delta, which is loaded with birds and natural drama. Check ‘em out. I’d like to go on more little outings.

This is another of my nature self-portraits:

As a belated b’day present for Lulu, we met up with P & J for a performance at the Freight. It was Cheryl Wheeler, who gave us her usual abundance of gut-laughs and music-induced emotion, pausing only for hot flashes. Her final number — and her last song ever at the original Freight — was the classic hound-oriented song, Howl at the Moon. Her descriptions of her life in rural Massachusetts made me want to live in New England.

Here’s a video A Certain Someone posted on YouTube:

Afterwards, I got to keep my Lulu for one whole night! She edited my final revisions of my application to SIT, for which help I am eternally grateful. How could I have spawned someone with such literacy skills!