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Overpass: 2003
Summer: Coming home from downtown, I walk from the Balboa Park BART station, here in the south-central outskirts of San Francisco. This place is not on the maps of the city that you see in the Travel pages or in guidebooks; usually it gets cut off just below the Mission. This is the last stop before Daly City. It is a place eviscerated by freeways, BART tracks, MUNI lines—bypassed, razor-wired, forgotten. But people live here, and on the side streets you can see sherbet-colored stucco bungalows built before World War II. The place is like a jigsaw puzzle made up of mismatched pieces from different boxes. You can’t put it together.
I walk along the desolate eastern side of the station, a Brutalist cliff of pock-marked concrete. At the corner of Ocean and San Jose Avenues hunkers an abstract sculpture of rusting steel. I laugh at the optimism of public art in a place like this: its hopefulness just underlines the sadness of the scene. The piece, which I may be the first person to actually look at in some years, is signed and dated: 1977.
I walk through Balboa Park itself, a large, overgrown city green space slated, as are most spaces in this part of the city, for “revitalization” at some time in the not-too-near future. I pass the creosoted wood playground and head back toward an ivy-shrouded concrete ramp that will take me to the freeway pedestrian overpass. My anxiety increases with each step. A city worker wearing camouflage uses huge shears to hack away at the bushes obscuring a soccer field. He could follow me with those shears, I think. There’s no one else around and the roar of freeway traffic drowns out any distinct sounds as I start up the ramp. He could follow me, or there could be someone up at the top, waiting.
I’m only taking a walk.
Once I get onto the overpass above the rushing traffic I feel calmer, although I’m not sure why; I’m visible, but who in those cars barreling toward downtown at seventy, eighty miles an hour has any power to help me even if they chose? I am almost off the overpass when a large, burly man with dark shoulder-length hair steps into the chain-link tunnel ahead of me. We are walking toward each other and I think something along the lines of “This could be it.” He carries a jacket in his left hand, trailing beside him, and he takes up a lot of space in the center of the tunnel. The traffic is roaring. He doesn’t move into my path, but he doesn’t move to the right as walking etiquette demands, either.
If something happens, it will be my fault for walking here. That is clear.
They say to make eye contact with strangers in vulnerable situations: would-be assailants don’t like to know that you know what they look like. But that is too much, here. I stare at the ground ahead of me, where I’m going.
We pass each other.
The whole time I had my cell phone in my hand, but what was I going to do with it, dial 9-1-1 while the guy cooled his heels on the overpass, shout into it at the emergency operator over the roar of the traffic, tell her where I was—and where was I, on an overpass over 280 off of what street? If I couldn’t remember now, I surely would not have remembered under pressure. It was ridiculous! Ridiculous to think that anything but the odds could keep me safe.
Once I get off the overpass and round a corner I am in my own neighborhood. It’s foggy and cold today, in the fifties, but the walk has warmed me. I pass old houses in various stages of decay and restoration, half-million-dollar houses crouched above the highway. The concrete buildings of City College sit like bunkers on top of the hill. I speed up as I pass a van parked by the curb. A dented Ford pickup, rusted in its bed and at every margin of its body, looms out of the blowing fog—a ghost of the Seventies. In the fog, the place seems to have one essential quality: indistinctness. It is without light or dark.
One more time, I have survived to see this scene. “I won’t walk that way again,” I think. But which way will I walk?
Hillside: 2010
The hill behind Heather School is redolent of eucalyptus oil, mineral earth, and dog shit on this first morning after the first rain of November. All the summertime eliminations have dried in the heat, preserved for this moment of sudden wet. If the rains keep up, you'll hardly notice any shit at all till the end of May, maybe June. The springtime showers have extended the past couple of seasons until the summer solstice, creating a steaminess so strange for these dry, oak-and-Toyon hills. On the other hand, in the last weeks of October we experienced temps in the nineties on more than one day, and now a Valley Oak below the upper trail here is showing new-spring-green foliage. All of California's predictable tragedies—drought, fire, flood—seem to be giving way to quieter, more insidious failures: rot, premature growth, failure to thrive.
But the Toyon is fruiting right on schedule. At first, when I pass one thinking of other things, I don't recognize it as Toyon. I just see its ripe, deep orange-red berries and sharply toothed leaves, some of them already turned orange and ready to fall into duff, others curled in on themselves, curled around some already departed thrips or perhaps some fireblight that left a blackened spot, tinged with red. I see the plant, something beautiful, singular, and subject only to my seeing, not a part of anything else.
I walk on, throw the dog a stick down the hillside, call her back so that she can go down and fetch another. Then we head toward the lovely glass house below the lower trail, where the people have not fenced their yard, preferring to savor the illusion that their property extends beyond their back patio and past the centenarian oaks, on up the hill. This is one of the best spots for squirrel hunting, and I hear Meg crash down through the oak leaf mould and whimper out her squirrel alert. Then she races back across the space, patrolling the hillside. This is where, on separate occasions, both the man and the woman who live here have come out of their beautiful house to chastise me from the safe cover of the trees, telling me that my dog is supposed to be “under control” here in the off-leash dog area.
As I make my way up the path Meg follows me, runs past panting, doing this thing that is the only way to calm her body and mind for the rest of the day. The last time it happened, when I heard Meg barking down by the glass house, I called her off and she came immediately (which, to be honest, pleased and amazed me), and the man observed with an irony that his German accent turned nasty “Oh, he's really under control, I see!” Several replies went through my head, the best (as always) being the Buddhist rejoinder, “I'm sorry you're suffering.” But I said nothing.
And the main thing is he is right: my dog is not perfectly under control. She loves people (especially kids), other dogs, even the cat, but she will bark if you glare at her or if you shrink away in fear. It is true that dogs smell fear, and they don't like it, not one bit. And the training that she must sit and observe when she senses fear or hostility, rather than bark and escalate the scene, continues. It will always continue. Each time I walk her off leash here I bring treats and work on reinforcing the command to “Come,” and this time it did work: when I told her to, she came. She left the Teutonic grouch to his own unhappiness. But no, she is not “under control,” I think; she’s alive.
And then it comes to me: the plant I had been looking at. Toyon. Heteromeles arbutifolia. California Holly, where Hollywood got its name. The berries, like clusters of tiny apples, gave the plant its Latin generic name, which means “different apples.” Here is a plant that Carl Linnaeus never saw, but that owes its botanical name to his insight that all of life might be classified in a hierarchical system based on physical form, and more specifically on sexual characters. The number of pistils and stamens, the sexual parts of plants, provide the first point of departure for classification. This was risky business in the eighteenth century: Some theologians and even scientists of the day considered it an obscene and heretical system, but Linnaeus declared, “The flowers' leaves...serve as bridal beds which the Creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity...” He more than once claimed, in Latin, that “God created, Linnaeus arranged” (Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit).
His wife Sara gave birth to their first son, Carl the Younger, seven months after their marriage (sin being the first principle of organization, the infraction often so much finer than the rule that governs it.) Linnaeus's coat of arms featured at its center an egg, which he recognized as the seat of all life. His inclusion of homo sapiens among other “anthropomorphs”--or 'man-like creatures,' apes and monkeys-- and his classification of mammals as mammals, that is, based on the way their mothers feed them, were both revolutionary. Apparently he could tell a good story, was often full of his own exploits and accomplishments, at other times spoke of offing himself if only he had possessed “a rope and English courage.” He was a man so alive that the intellectual conception and classification of all life were not beyond him.
The Toyon. Linnaeus took away the Toyon, the singular shrub with red berries, and left in its place Heteromeles arbutifolia, each individual of which could reproduce sexually with any other individual and make another, many others, and not only on this hillside but anywhere in the world. He took away the local gods in favor of creation; took away singularity in favor of organization; and based his entire system on the chaotic imperfection of sex.
I'm still thinking of what I could say to the man with the glass house. I even see myself picking my way down past the oaks to his patio, shaking hands, introducing myself and trying to explain what we're doing here, Meg and I, maybe making some progress in this world. But the response that feels most natural, maybe most authentic, is this: “No, my dog's not under perfect control, Man, but then, neither are you.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Linnaeus
(Carolus Linnaeus, from De Systema Naturae, quoted in http://curieuxunivers.umontreal.ca/en/classification/hmv/page4.php)
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/tribute_linnaeus.html
Music from ccMixter: "I Need Something," by copperhead, featuring Admiral Bob, WillemWillem, Norm Peterson, and Robert Siekawitch; and "In the Garden," by snowflake.
