Into the Wild: Kingsolver by the Sea

This past Friday I turned yet another book loose into the wild through the BookCrossing program.  I'm trying to find places that would be appropriate for the theme of the book (my last release was a book of poems by Mary Oliver, who writes primarily about nature, so I put her on a park bench at the top of the Pablo stairs), and since Kingsolver's book is titled "High Tide in Tucson" I thought I should take the book where tide and land meet, to Ocean Beach.

I'm perfecting the art of this kind of book release with each drop.  Ocean Beach is usually pretty populated, save for days that it's raining or there's the threat of tsunami (I've been there at both).  I know that my chances are better for getting stopped when I try places like this, but I also know how to pace things so that I can walk away from the book without revealing ties to it.  Today was a calm and cool day, and the population sparse, so I just dropped it on the bench.

I have dropped thirteen books so far with this program, and no one has registered them found and/or added notes.  This business is a haphazard one, very much a "message in a bottle" technique.  I can only hope that they aren't discarded--that someone finds them and enjoys them.  And if it's just the homeless finding them, well, at least I'm giving the homeless something at last.  And I'm giving them something that doesn't enable them to drink or get high.

BookCrossing has another type of release, called a "controlled release," where you go on the site and see if anyone wants your specific book and you send it to them.  I'm saving that for a mood booster--just leaving books and never hearing back can border on the "imaginary friend" side after a while.  And some of these books have me perplexed as to where to leave them; where, in God's name, am I going to drop the Reagan biography in Northern California without someone torching it?  That one may go to the library, she says with a wan smile.

In other notes:  I actually walked the three and a half miles from my apartment to the ocean to place this item, a refreshing walk in the cool morning through the forest of Golden Gate Park.  As I passed I was warned that coyotes had recently been spotted in the outer reaches, I passed a crowd of people heading to a bluegrass festival that wasn't strictly such, and I had the opportunity to see a newly-minted windmill on the approach to the sand.

I love the copper band around the rim, but...couldn't they have made the windows bigger?  I don't know my maritime architectural requirements.  It just seems as though with the view this building affords that windows so small are limiting the occupants.

Books next to release in the wild:

• "Dutch:  A Memoir of Ronald Reagan" by Edmund Morris.  Currently on page 500, with 192 readable pages to go and clearing about 100 pages a weekend;
• "Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way," a collection of poems by Charles Bukowski.  Currently on page 109, savoring at no discernible rate of consumption, but I know where I'm putting this one upon completion, and am looking forward to the drop--a location that I haven't been to in six years.

Onward, dear reader.