Lately I’ve been mired in a funk. My stomach has been boiling with stress and everything seems lackluster.
I’ve been trying to make myself feel better. I went to the Humboldt County Library and applied for a library card. The library is modern and beautiful, on a rise above the bay near the Manila Bridge. I wandered the stacks feeling kind of funny–everybody seemed to know what they were doing except me. I tried to pretend I knew where everything was when truly I was a newb.
On the second floor I found something called the Humboldt Room. A little old lady library volunteer asked if I’d like to come in. I didn’t really know if I wanted to come in or not, but tried to act like maybe I did. She directed me to sign the register, then turned me loose in a dark wood paneled room full of books.
I’d been wondering about local history, thinking I should read a few books, then found myself hanging out in the library’s special collection of non-circulating historical documents. There were shelves of yearbooks for all of the local schools, crazy old maps, newspapers from the time of the gold rush. There were silver haired scholars sitting with magnifying glasses at a long table, poring over scrolls. I found the section on local biology, zeroed in on local birds, and unearthed a treasure: The Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Humboldt County produced by the Redwood Audobon Society.
I sat at the long table with my tome. It was incredibly geeky. They’d divided up the county into sectors, and birders had counted species for four years with an emphasis on breeding pairs. For each species recorded in Humboldt, there was a two page essay with distribution and random facts. I turned to the Short-Eared Owl, and read something similar to:
Everybody remembers their first Short-Eared Owl. They may not remember the place or the time, but they remember the feeling. For this owl is more than a simple Strigiforme, it is a graceful, lethal energy.
I was eating it up. I paged through the countless indulgent birder non-fictions. There were too many to digest, but no worries, I’ll be back–I think I’ve found a new favorite place. And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, it did: two little biddies were gossiping about history, each trying to one up the other, when one asked, Well, do you know the story of how Loleta got its name? As a matter of fact I don’t! Well, it’s quite vulgar. I’ve read that it’s a colloquialism in the local Indian dialect for let us have intercourse!
As I watched them chortle in the Humboldt Room I couldn’t help but giggle a little bit myself.
