Pungent prophecy

This art always left me embarrassed, and I never had cause to show it — except for self-flagellation. Which I'm not above.

But events transpired last week that demonstrate quite clearly:

I'm a prophet.

Does, or does not, that ugly lump the Boy Scout is holding high aloft resemble 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the comet that the European Space Agency's little ship Philae landed on, more than 300 million miles from Earth?!

And didn't the space agency begin its amazing chase for the comet 10 years ago, when I made this art?

Case closed. I saw this coming. Eureka!

Wasn't 67P, as its friends call it, just a blip on a screen of blips back then? Could I have known its shape? No.

I'm like Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, raking a pile of mashed potatoes into the shape of Devil's Tower without really knowing why.

Call Spielberg. We've got a movie to shoot.

(Let me just say: If Philae never makes another peep from its shady perch on 67P, never sends another bit of data, this endeavor will still have been worth the undertaking. I hear the same chestnut popular when I was a kid and Apollo astronaunts walked and rode and golfed on the moon: Why? When we have so many problems on earth that need money and attention?

(I can't disagree about the problems. We've probably got plenty of solutions if we only willed ourselves to apply them and weren't sheep to convention and politics and fear and deference and obfuscation.

(We yearn to know, though, and I say "Go!" We want to understand the innumerable mysteries that surround us. We yearn for it so deeply that smart people figured out how to aim a rocket at a comet in fast flight millions of miles away. It sent a satellite (Rosetta, named after the stone that helped smart people decipher ancient Earth languages) which flew by Mars and specific asteroids on its way to 67P, and finally, deftly, dropped its own spaceship, Philae (named for the obelisk smart people used to help unlock the mystery of Rosetta), nestled in the satellite's womb for a decade, on to the speeding comet, where it landed with a couple of slow bumps.

(More than 300 million miles from here.

(For all those amazing accomplishments, the pity is very small that Philae's harpoons did not work and the little lander bounced from a flat sunny place to a precarious dark spot on the comet, where the sun could not recharge its batteries.

(Keep trying, I say. Keep going. We learn from Philae, and will still from Rosetta as it orbits 67P; we will learn from the next one.)

The thing in the Scout's upraised arms is not the comet, of course (or is it?) It's supposed to be a fairly realistic lump of gold, though realistically the Scout would have a hard time lifting such a lump off the ground, let alone over his head.

(Also, realistically speaking, what are those, some kind of comic book superhero Extend-O Arms®™? See, I'm good at this flogging business.)

When I was all done and applied color to all the objects, I stepped back and realized: Oh, it looks like the Scout is holding excrement. Dung. A turd. A cow patty, not unlike what one would find on the cattle ranch that played host to the Scouting event being promoted.

It doesn't look any less like feces in black-and-white, I'm afraid.

I changed out the lump for a gold ingot in the final art (or I think I did), and stamped the bar with "24 K" to stamp out any doubt.

Camporee is a sort of Scout Olympics, in which Troops and Packs within geographical regions compete in Scout skills, and build monkey bridges out of ropes and sticks, and eat s'mores, and hang out at a big campfire, and go to Sunday services if their stupid Scoutmasters really, really insist, and generally goof off.

The two Scouting districts, Pioneer and Prospector, were merging that year, and this event was a kind of mutual Welcome Wagon.

Camporee took place in the wet red earth of the foothills not far from where Gold Rush encampments filled the Sierra ravines.

Who knew we were really prefiguring a gold rush of discovery in the heavens? 

•••

In other news: The best name yet in the incessant email come-ons I receive for sex enhancement drugs: Mrs. Dolorisa Mooring enjoins me to "Make her shiver in ecstasy and desire more!" So Victorian, so illicit!

Twin sons of different mothers

These two muck about in my head lately, knocking over the furniture.

Maybe it's their Irish natures, though sewn through with Irish myself I'd hate to cast aspersions.

Maybe it's because they crave attention or like to get their way.

If it wasn't for all the commotion up there, I'd swear they're the same person.

Actually, I think they are.

Spooky resemblance, don't you think? In look and deed.

The guy on the left is Sam Brannan, hero and villain of my tour of Sacramento's Underground.

On the right is his sesquicentennially separated twin, San Francisco Giants "closer" Brian Wilson. He's the pitcher who's supposed to preserve a win for the Giants in the final innings of each game — except he's been out all season having his pitching arm rebuilt. Every day, fans feel his absence, as the Giants make do with an array of relief pitchers known as closer by committee. His absence is less of a nuisance as the Giants near clinching the National League West title, so Wilson has taken to inhabiting the dugout, leading the cheers for his team, his billowing black beard filling empty space.

Each has been the toast of San Francisco in his day.

Sam Brannan is a wonder to me, mostly because few people on tour have ever heard of him. The exceptions are fourth graders who have been paying attention to their California history lessons; alumni of Sam Brannan Middle School in Sacramento; and occasional visitors to Calistoga, the resort town Brannan created in the Napa Valley. That's OK, because I get to tell people his strange story.

Yet almost everyone on tour — even a family from rural Illinois last week — will have heard of John Sutter, who built a fort near what became Sacramento, and dreamed of empire.

Sutter built his life by charming creditors and running away from debt he inevitably amassed. Fleeing debt and family in Switzerland, he lit out for the western United States, living on credit and learning about forts and frontier hospitality as he went.

In 1839, Sutter essentially bamboozled the Mexican governor of the California territory into believing he was a great Swiss military hero, and was granted 68 square miles of land at the Sacramento and American and Feather (Plumas) rivers to watch out for Mexican interests in these far northern reaches. From his fort he rescued weary travelers from the Sierra, including survivors of the Donner Party, and carved out an agricultural base, and did his part to decimate the Indian population.

His plan to create a vast Swiss colony, though, literally fell apart at the discovery of gold. Onrushing gold seekers destroyed his fort and consumed his crops, and Sutter fled again, seeking but not getting redress from Congress.

While Sutter had no idea what to do with the news, Sam Brannan seized on it, exhorting the world to come looking for gold and then selling the onrushing hordes the equipment they'd need.

Brannan had come to the West Coast with his own dream of empire — for the Mormon church. An elder in the church, Brannan had sailed from New York with more than 200 Mormons at the same time Brigham Young was leading most of the Mormons out of Illinois to what became Salt Lake City, Utah. When Brannan failed to convince Young to keep moving west, it was the last straw in Brannan's fitful relationship with the church. They agreed to a mutual divorce, and Brannan returned to California still dreaming of empire — a land bonanza.

Gold gave Brannan the means to lure people west, and he became California's first millionaire on their lust. He continued to gather fabulous wealth by finagling land, selling at high prices, lathering, rinsing and repeating. He owned a fourth of the new city of Sacramento, a fifth of San Francisco, and at one point had invested more in the Central Pacific Railroad than any of the Big Four (Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker and Leland Stanford). He subdivided a vast ranch he bought in Los Angeles, effectively beginning the urbanization of Southern California.

With a small armed force, Brannan even tried to take Hawaii from King Kamehameha III in exchange for a pension for the floundering monarch, but the king's police chief sent the raiders packing.

A brawler, Brannan is said to have presided over the first marriage in the state of California — and organized the first hanging in San Francisco. He gave generously to San Francisco schools, but tore down squatters' homes in Sacramento, and ordered enemies shot. Let's say he was flawed.

Brannan's speculative empire fell apart in an expensive divorce and a massive grant of Mexican land he had neither the means nor the wits (he was a drunk) to maneuver. Brannan is forgotten, save for a Yuba City park, a state park in the delta, a San Francisco Street and the aforementioned middle school. Yet Sutter's name tattoos so much of northern California, a puzzling imprimatur of grace and stature — Sutter Home Winery, Sutter Neuroscience Center, for example.

Two colossal figures who fell apart suddenly and ignobly. Two alcoholic philanderers. Yet one lives on in sanitized, romanticized memory and the other recedes. I wonder why.

Bearded Brian Wilson builds his legacy as I write. He's more of a persona, and the real person is probably hidden deep. As his beard grew and became unnaturally black during the Giants' 2010 home stretch to the World Series, Wilson rose in off-kilter flamboyance, and he reveled in it, becoming one of the most popular players on the team, a roaring lion of eccentricity.

The beard and close-set eyes, like Brannan's, make him intimidating. Giants fans and ordinary citizens know to "Fear the Beard."

Wilson's beard grows larger, and tattoos have crept the length of his left arm during his free time.

The Giants should clinch the Western division this weekend, and will have done so without Wilson on the mound. He will have to reassert his presence on the team next season.

So I have to wonder: Is Wilson Brannan's karmic cousin, or does he just bear a strange resemblance?

Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind …

Signs bloom like wildflowers in Old Sacramento and, in the absence of protests to the contrary, I'm going to show you more of 'em. These pix come courtesy of Heather Lavezzo Downey, the city's interpretive specialist. The signs are part of a broader project by the Historic Old Sacramento Foundation and the Center for Sacramento History to inform visitors about the origins of Sacramento.

Somewhere in back of this Waterfront Park sign (left; click to get a close-up) is a real steamboat, the Delta King, which did its work (including as a troop transport during World War II, painted Navy gray!) in the 20th Century, and now is a hotel and theater. Though part of Waterfront Park, the restrooms are not the focus of the sign. You can find smaller interpretive signs along Waterfront Park now, too.

Heather got much better pix than I did of the Lauriet Assay site, where signs have blossomed as well (left and below). It's a quirky site: You can see below the sign the foundation of the buildings and the hollow spaces beyond. Someone has put doors where the brick-barrel vaults were, and created small narrow shop spaces (unused at the moment). Right behind the sign would have been the Assay office, where Prof. Lauriet weighed miners' gold and assigned value to it.

Heather wrote the text for the signs, and has a great way of engaging visitors to think about how they would have lived in Sacramento during the gold rush, and the decisions they would have made.

I'm sure I mentioned it before, but "gold rush" wasn't in use until 1860, more than a decade after the gold rush began. California-bound gold seekers were more likely to call their venture "going to see the elephant." Since a circus elephant was sure to be the most exotic thing Americans had seen up to that point, adventurers equated their Westward journey with it. Whether they struck gold or not (and it was usually the latter), they would say they had seen the elephant.





























Also, they often called themselves Argonauts, after the Greek myth of Jason, assigned the task of finding the golden fleece. Jason and his sailor searched aboard the Argo; thus, Argonauts, sailors of the Argo, because whether traveling by actual ship or covered wagon across the plains (which is hard to do in a ship), they looked like windborne sailors on a mission. Now you have 1/47 of my Underground Sacramento tour for free. You're welcome.

Signs have gone up around the base of Pioneer Park, so that while visitors approach the strange sight of cast-iron pillars holding up nothing but the shade, they can find out why these ancient ruins are there. While one person reads and learns, another, having read and learned, refreshes himself with drink; a little girl uses her sign to hide; the traffic cone seems transfixed by the new information.