The Two Big Events
Most Californians now are well insulated from the two yearly grand pageants that eclipsed all other shows put on by Mother Nature.
If you had grown up aware of those two great celebrations, surrounded, enveloped by their lavish pageantry, how could you ever again live life with such a small [?] as most of us now live it?
Can you guess? Both of them last for weeks if not months. Both require no work or preparation or trouble of any kind on our part. To our predecessors, both meant not only excitement and beauty, but also the year’s two big food shipments arriving. One came after a long, hot, dry wait. The other came after a long, cold, wet wait. There are still those among us who look forward to one or both of these events as the high points of our personal year.
Both, to those of us who really know them, so far surpass our traditional, “man-made” celebrations like Christmas and Easter and New Years and Halloween that the latter have receded to insignificance. Both still have the power to uplift anyone’s bleak spirit and bring power and joy, even rapture. So . . . what already?
- The spring annual show, coinciding with the end of the rains and start of warmth, protracted weeks and weeks, but no two days alike. (Also spring salmon run?)
- The great Entrada—the arrival of the massed flights of geese and ducks and cranes, swans, pelicans, shorebirds, on and on, filling the valleys with celebratory clangor, heralding the long-needed rains and the regreening, and the finny hordes of salmon, and ripening of acorns . . .
