Impromptu SketchCrawl, Davis Style

We seem unable to coincide with any official SketchCrawl outings. For instance, next weekend there’s one to Alcatraz, which sounds like a wonderful idea, but I’ll be in Maine. So today we decided to do our own.

The car was due for its 10,000-mile maintenance, so we left it at the Honda dealership and walked across to Mocha Joe’s, one of the better cafes in town even though like Common Grounds it’s in a mall [cue scary music]. On the walk there, on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, a headline blared out: the Provost of the University of California had abruptly resigned yesterday for promoting friends and relatives.

Normally these kinds of things are par for the course, except this Provost used to be the Dean of Graduate Studies here at UC Davis, where I used to work. It was before my time but a strong and brilliant personality like this leaves its mark long after any kind of physical departure. (Given that Greenwood had taken a leave of absence to go to Washington to work for Clinton and set her sights on a Chancellorship when she returned, which she in fact nailed at Santa Cruz in short order, this mark has to be interpreted at best as “mixed.”)

She’ll be returning, the Chronicle assures us, to her “first love teaching.” Probably here, in Davis. This is a universal euphemism in academia. It means “he or she got canned.” Only Greenwood didn’t; she resigned first. If only Rove could be so honorable…

Our sketching took us to the Yolo Bypass where the sharp-tailed sandpiper was seen earlier this week. There was no sharp-tailed that we could see, and after sketching resting dowitchers and dunlin we were about to move on when two American bitterns flew in and landed within a few feet of us.

There is no benediction like that of a bittern. University politics, governmental politics, the whole hoo-ha over Covell Village—all of it melts away; to be in the company of this spirit-presence is like nothing I can describe. I tried, miserably, with a sketch, two, three, but mostly it’s just reverential whispering and holding your breath.

The birds finally moved on and so did we, sketching frolicking at the dog park, the salsa bar at El Mariachi where we had lunch, then patrons at the Yolo County Library (where I finally read Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit; a philosophical treatise that has me puzzled in certain respects—I think his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remark to a post-operative friend is off-base, but on the whole it was very provocative, especially the examination of how bullshit is different in so many ways to lying).

Sketching your way around your environment: it’s a way to see things. Fresh. Cutting through the bullshit.