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Up at Pulgas Ridge, Megadog and I walk the Cordilleras Trail past the multiple-addiction rehab center tucked at the edge of San Francisco Water Department land. This open space, reserved for hikers and their dogs, is flanked by the rehab on one side and the county mental health services on the other. Sometimes we see guys playing basketball out in back of the rehab building, its tile roof and pale stucco walls aging with Katherine Hepburn style under California live oaks. Sometimes we see them tending their garden, where tomatoes still ripen on the vine on into the fall. Occasionally, they are out playing cards in the morning heat, or washing cars to raise funds for the center. Today, no one.
Decomposed granite crunches under our feet as we pass outbuildings maintained by the water department, surrounded by dry bunch grasses and cracked clay in a wheat-colored meadow. Water is the only reason this land is not covered with houses, condos, a mall: water and its exigencies have kept much of the peninsula south of San Francisco an open woodland. Looking at its green hills now, it’s hard to imagine that over a century ago, this area was clearcut to build the city not once, but twice.
Mega wears her red saddle bags and halter. Her short hair is the same color as the grass, and her 50-pound body appears to be all muscle and sinew as she powers down the path. She has a black nose with a white blaze under her chin, and as she pants, her mouth curls up into a muscular smile. She carries her own water. Past the wooden bridge over a blackberry choked creekbed, the granite path ends and the trail becomes dusty clay the color of rust. We walk in the shade of oaks. The buckeyes have lost their leaves by now. The trail angles up over a canyon lined with leather leaf ferns. Massive California bays reach up to us from the dry creekbed below, their roots exposed by the winter rains that have been so stingy the last few years. No water is running, but the creekbed looks dark, and I imagine putting a hand down there to feel the coolness of the secret water below.
Mega presses on.
The only thing slowing her down is the saddlebags. Without them, she would chomp at the restraint of her halter and try to take off after every lizard on the trail. Wearing the saddlebags in pack mode, she would stay on the trail and close to me even without the leash, but it's required here, where woodrats make their homes under piles of lichen-coated brush. They don't need a one-year-old Mutt crashing through their shelter in search of fun.
The trail opens up and becomes sandy, lined with sunbaked chaparral. Flaky lichen clings to the bases of the chamise and manzanita here, a reminder of the rains that have let us down lately. I've read laundry lists of the native understory plants that bloom here in the spring, but can't remember their names now. Only the desiccated stalks of sticky monkeyflower here and there suggest that something more lush and colorful has happened recently.
At the top of the Ridge we stop for water just inside the split rail fence that surrounds the off-leash area. From her saddlebags I pull Mega’s bowl and water bottle. She laps at the stream of water as I fill the bowl on the ground. I drink too, then unbuckle the saddle bags and leash to let her run.
She sniffs, pees, and is off.
We clamber down eroded paths past monumental blue gum eucalyptus planted while this place was still a tuberculosis sanitarium, a refuge from the city fogs and a place apart. The hospital buildings have been pulled down, but here and there concrete stairs with galvanized hand rails lead down through the crackling chaparral and live oaks.
Stone retaining walls from early in the last century remain to dam up fallen leaves and support cascades of poison oak. Dedicated people, people with fixed ideas, have here and there planted pre-Columbian species to ward off the oleander and eucs and pepper trees, the remnants of a California that was a cultural colony. Plants as facts on the ground.
Under one of the oaks I see a couple of old concrete footings that look like a good place to stop and rest in the shade.
I leave the water out for the dog and sit and look around. About 10 feet away, someone has constructed a small shelter close to the ground, out of a fallen oak branch and smaller brush. It looks just big enough to crawl into, maybe huddle with my dog for warmth on a cold night in fall. The thought fills me with comfort. Near my feet, a small concrete pipe pokes out of the ground. Its cover reads: Domestic Water.
As Mega scrounges around, I decide to explore near some stairs and take a side path that dead-ends near an old pepper getting crowded out by one of the intentional live oaks. Pepper trees are a particular favorite of mine. Despite being known as California pepper trees, they came originally from Brazil. The Franciscans planted them in dry packed mission courtyards and they became a signature of the Old Spanish California scene romanticized—or fantasized—by the yankees. When I was growing up near LA, in a landscape swiftly turning from agricultural-utopian to suburban-bland, every vacant lot was home to an old pepper, whose branches invariably swept the ground and made a perfect playground for my girlfriends and me. The old fruit trees would go to ground if untended, but the pepper trees survived on their own until the bulldozers pulled in. So maybe it is no accident that I stop and walk around the tree and look at the ground around it, climb in under.
And in this out of the way place I see it—a stone. A flat, oval stone, clearly a marker. I call Mega over and, as I get closer, I imagine it must be a memorial to someone’s longtime companion here. A strong, happy dog like mine who would stay close and come when called, mostly.
I crouch down and see the words I love you written in script at the bottom of the stone. At the top is a picture obscured by dust. I start to wipe it with my hand and stop, suddenly still and cold. The first thing I see in the picture is what must be human front teeth, the large, protruding, recently emerged front teeth of a child.
And suddenly I do not want to be here, but I can't leave.
In front of me is a gold painted concrete oval with red, white, and blue striped edges inscribed in pink, blue and white script. Some of the words have faded and are not legible, but I think I can fill them in, in my mind.
Megan Marie Kuhn
7/4/1989 to 10/24/07
Courage is ___ what you’re ___ to do
…
There can be no courage unless ___ scared
Always in my heart I love you
Courage is not what you're supposed to do.
There can be no courage unless you're scared.
Courage is doing what you're not supposed to do.
There can be no courage unless you're scared.
Always in my heart I love you.
I think of the different variations. How disrespectful, I think, to read this as a sign; how childish to read it as a warning. How self-important to feel it's somehow my special duty to witness its message.
Which weakness do I choose?
I go with the third, thinking on my way down the hill about this particular dead girl—and I was meant to think of her as a girl, her picture there being obviously one of someone much younger than 18. And then generalizing to the many girls, dead and disappeared, to whom I have been called over the years to bear witness. All the lives of all the dead girls.
Like cool water running under dry land.
As we leave, guys are out in back of the rehab, playing chess, reading. From here it looks easy to be in recovery, but hard, immeasurably hard, to be recovered, and to leave.
I think of this essay as a kind of epilogue to my memoir Nobody’s Property, about my aunt's disappearance in Germany in the 1970s. Her story, for me, is a presence, an obsession, and yes, an addiction.
Music from ccMixter by copperhead: "I Need Something;" and by Alex Beroza: "Too Young," featuring snowflake.
Domestic Water