Weekends are usually slow traffic here at the Worth A Dam Cafe. We usually get about 150 hits on saturday, less than half of our weekday traffic. Its possible that’s because on the weekend people have time to go look at beavers for themselves and don’t need to read my writing about them. It’s possible that beaver fans have such rich and exciting lives there’s no time to look at the webpage. Or its possible that beavers are really only interesting enough to read about at work, where the competition is less stiff and distracting.
(Which isn’t a complaint, because sometimes I appreciate the break.) But yesterday we had more like 600 visits with 2800 page views. Think about that for a minute. That’s a lot of readers on a rainy Saturday. Why the sudden bump? Were the children of California all suddenly writing reports on beavers at the same time? Is the economy depressing people so badly that only beavers can cheer them up? Or is it news of our Mom sighting that got passed from person to person and merited a visit?
I’m going to guess the latter. Mom’s got star power. She’s recognizable and central to the action. Heck, she even has a beauty mark.
Whatever the reason let me take this opportunity to greet new readers, and welcome back old ones. As we’re heading into Spring there’s going to be a lot more beaver activity to see and participate in, and the beavers need your support more than ever. In addition to the Worth A Dam Sierra Club presentation, we’ll be working with the city engineer, the ESA students and an interested eagle-scout candidate to work on tree planting. Next Month there’s Earth Day to look forward to, and after that the environmental fair, the creek seeker’s express and our beaver seminar.Your interest and enthusiasm continue to make all the difference.
Still, since there’s high traffic at the moment, I’m going to re-post my sheetpile comments to the council, because Martinez foot the bill for this, and its now a prominent feature of the beavers lives and our lives when we go watch them. The photos researched for this presentation inspired a UC Professor to contact me about using it to teach a course in Historic Photographs, but only 213 people from Martinez have seen it. Even though it was discussed in the LA Times, the Gazette never kept its promise to write about it. None of our fair-weather beaver media friends came to do a story on it, and there was never a sense of shock or outrage that the city spent vast sums of money on a project that improved the life of a single property owner.
[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=rQefxDQemaA]
The moral of the story is that your city lied about the need for this sheetpile, and rumor is now that the restaurant Bertola’s will be closing because the rent was raised unreasonably high to force them out. Steadier minds than mine have suspected that there were plans all along for that property.
The Sheetpile secured them.
