Notebook 1: The site. Late August

Reputed to be the foggiest airport in America, the Eureka-Arcata (or is it Arcata-Eureka?) airport is actually in neither city, but rather north of them in the unincorporated community of McKinleyville, California. It is just east of the coastline and Highway 101 and is bounded by Airport Road to its south and Central Avenue to its east and northeast. Though it is mostly flat (it has been artificially graded), it is not entirely level. Its northwestern corner, in particular, has a significant slope as it drops down toward Clam Beach and the Pacific Ocean.

On Google Maps, the airport resembles an irregular rectangle with a big X in the middle made by two long runways. The compound is home to a coast guard facility, a bus depot, a commuter terminal for flights to and from San Francisco, and various facilities for helicopters and private planes. Most of the actual space, however, consists of large fields of grass, wildflowers, low-lying blackberry vines, and a few other plants capable of withstanding the occasional mowing by groundskeepers. The airport complex as a whole is too large (and largely inaccessible) for this project so I have chosen to focus exclusively on the southeastern corner of the facility where the property line bulges outward to accommodate the terminus for the longer of the two runways.

At this point, Airport Road curves south to meet Central creating a little triangle of quasi-wilderness complete with unmowed grass and shrubs and a small stand of evergreens. This area, like the rest of the airport, is blocked off by a tall chain link fence with razor-wire along the top, but is readily observable from a muddy fringe of grass and weeds that separates the fence from Central Avenue. This location is just a short two-block walk from my house on Johnson Lane and so it is here that I will be doing the bulk of my observations.

I drive past the site about twice a day and frequently visit it when I go on walks, so though I will be doing more detailed observations as part of this assignment, some of the more interesting things I've seen have come from the fleeting glimpses I get while doing other things. Therefor, I'm not going to bother with exact dates. These entries reflect my impressions over a period of time and are plainly being typed up after the fact (mostly to spare you from my penmanship), so specifying a specific date would be a bit disingenuous in any case.