Nature does nothing in vain.

“The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that of nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces but does not abolish.”

— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Here

Here Is

Here Is Where

Here Is Where We

Here Is Where We Walk

I listen to the afternoon wind hit the eucalyptus trees and watch silken emerald ivy flutter along scaled grey trunks. Tree trunks often recede from view but they invite tactile reflections. See me. Feel me. Touch me. Heal me. But I also listen to the radio:

We have this peculiar intimacy with all around us.

There is no such thing as nature. 

We share DNA with onions. 

What comes to mind, equally with the trees and the wind and radio, is a conversation with a vulcanologist in New Zealand who said, the main difference between you and a star is your water content. Then I pick up my reading glasses and go back to work.

The Presidio is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA), which features well-known landmarks such as Alcatraz and Muir Woods among its 76,500 acres, making it one of the largest urban national parks in the world. Great — this gives the paper context. Of the 800 acres of open space (54% of total area), approximately 145 acres support remnant native plant communities ranging from wildflowers to oak woodlands. It provides habitat for sixteen rare or endangered plant species, including five protected by the Endangered Species Act

These days time slows. I did not mean to come to the woods and write about them. The next book was going to be about Frank Arthur Worsley, Shackleton’s navigator. Instead it has been all trees, all dunes, all wind and sky and ocean and digging and building and planting things around me. It has been all crawling and reading and wondering what, if anything, there is to say. I culled through hundreds of pages — diaries of walks, readings, research, and I saw this book had no middle, nor an end. Could a book be all beginning? I recalled something an art historian once told me. She said someone asked Picasso how he knew when painting was done, and he said, It’s done when I stop painting.

The issue with writing about a place is that it’s so darn easy to forever begin. Begin with this walk or this sunrise or this black-lace fringe of branches and halogen back light at 5 a.m. The longer I document and mull and saunter, the more I get what a dazzling genius we have in Thoreau. Walden is a tricky book, a series of observations and stories and edicts that sort of builds and sneaks up on you. Sly old Thoreau: He didn’t give a rat’s ass about a beginning or middle or an end. He threaded his essays together and revised revised revised. Perhaps this would be my own salvation: Let Thoreau go to my head and thread together a collage of Presidio book beginnings. But that’s a bit false. It’s not a book about the Presidio of San Francisco. And it’s not entirely a book about walking. Maybe, just maybe, it’s a book about aesthetics. Yes. That might be it: It’s a book that wants to think about how we create and manage and mingle with environments, how our tastes change, fueled by our needs, and how with the world changing now with the climate changing, maybe it’s a good time to stop a minute and invoke the Talking Heads and say, well, how did we get here?

We experience a Dickens’ moment — a ghost from the future — showing us how things will be. We see scientific experiment. We write lines. Word and image.

We sense the concept and idea of a nature that is more aggressively not stable. We see there is less nature than was once thought.

The importance of reading place as image and text reminiscent of the days, hundreds of years ago, when people called Costanoan and Ohlone and Miwok, wandered the shores of San Francisco Bay. It is not possible for us to know. We imagine we can know, can parse a story from scraps and conjecture, get to know what it was like to be of that world, based on fragments and beads and baskets we find in the sands. I wandered over the to the DeYoung Museum to see what had been pulled out of the sands and shoved into glass cases. Am I the only one who is left cold by the trail of stuff to life? Don’t get me wrong: I love going to museums and seeing it all, the cracked worn bejewelled delights. But I like it for what is now, not what it may have been. Usually, I spend some of my time thinking about heists in museums and how one would get rid of hot art in the form of baskets.

How do we create and make nature with words? How do we generate time? Can images and words, paper, pen, blade, make the world anew?

Story. Image. Idea. Experiment. Senses. Reason. Meaning. Intimacy.

How much have we lost to ideas of the same and the familiar? Allegiance to the familiar? The world built and developed on some psychotic stream, a river of sentiment that said, make this all look the same.

After half a day’s voyage they came to a harbor that brought to mind the Bosporus. The Golden Gate on the other side of the world. Let’s call it that. Not thinking about how that choice would inform the culture hundreds of years later. 

Let’s paint the bridge a shade of red or brown or orange. Let’s make sure everyone can see it in the fog.

What color?

Sherwin Williams International Orange. (Make it yourself: 

The PMS code is 173 or the 

CMYK colors are: 

C= Cyan :  0%, 

M =Magenta : 69%, 

Y =Yellow : 100%, 

K = Black : 6%)

How the color determines the color of many other things built around it: roofs, dining rooms, how paint shop clerks can mix it for bathrooms. How we see coats and hats and ties and say, wow that’s the color of the Golden Gate Bridge. But then we find out it is not the same color. It is a hard color for people to remember accurately. People think of it as red, when it is more of iron oxide — faded by the salty air and sunshine, the color can only be the color when it is there, on that metal span, shining in the fading light. 

It was only when I moved to Iowa, far from the bridge, that I discovered how tonic and pleasing it was. When I first moved to San Francisco I was 28 and found the bridge to feel entirely synthetic. It seemed to be kitsch. The other bridge, the Bay Bridge, felt more authentic to me. A real, silver bridge carrying an enormous spread of lanes jammed with cars hurtling in either direction. Of course, I changed my mind. 

Now, given the fact it is 1.2 miles from my front door, I can walk and see it each day. It never grows uninteresting, never loses its allure. When studying photos of the Golden Gate before the bridge, they appear entirely false: Someone has photoshopped our span out. A visual trick, a trompe l’oeil. 

After half a day’s voyage they came upon. 

After half a day’s voyage they came upon a shore that was home to Indians who called themselves Ohlone. As with most Indians who lived along shorelines, these people were doomed. Could they imagine their doom? 

Or is that a modern concoction, the idea we know when we’re about to get it? Do we ever know we are about to get it? In the way actors portraying scurrying people in today’s sci-fi movies turn and look back over shoulders, baring teeth and eyes alive with panic. Surely they will not be able to find cover from the monstrous space ship rising from the distant horizon? Rising and growing. And then. 

May 3 2012

When I was 10 or 12 years old, growing up in then-rural Maryland, I used to spend most afternoons in a wood called Rock Creek Park. I could walk a long ways before encountering  anything remotely resembling civilization. One of my more curious compulsions included walking for hours to find what I thought of as “the other side.” I knew the woods had to be bounded by roads somewhere and wanted to feel the wide stretch of the place, defined by its end points.
The whole endeavor of seeking the edges thrilled me: Hauling out an old Boy Scout backpack, green canvas smelling vaguely musty, purchased at a yard sale for 50 cents; packing a lunch that included a can of something, sensing people who took long journeys needed to be keenly alert to food spoilage; grabbing a red Swiss Army knife, the sort with dozens of tools; shoving in yellow legal paper purloined from my father, pencil stub for mapping and notes. Yellow paper seemed a smart choice in case of some emergency: Injured girl hauling herself by arm and elbow to Rock Creek, fashioning a small, canoe-inspired vessel made from of twigs and a dissembled pair of elbow-length kid gloves with pearl buttons I also shoved into the backpack. The gloves were a gift from my grandmother, some piece of luxury from her more glamorous, younger life. I pictured a hastily designed and constructed vessel as a sort of canoe, with the kid gloves cut and lashed onto the twig-frame using a material we called “gimp,” a plastic twine, summer-camp staple used to fashion key chains for one’s mother.  I never had the chance to save myself in this manner and I was too young to know then what was going on: How my woodsy life saved me.
I would emerge from the woods in time for a hot dinner with my sisters and mother, then soak in our small, square blue bath. Easing into the warm water, the day’s markings made themselves known – legs and arms a Jackson Pollock canvas of scrub, branch, and briar scratches. The acid sting of water on the cuts offered me a sense of accomplishment. I didn’t bear my markings for others to see, didn’t discuss what was seen in the woods, didn’t share my future plans for exploration. Instead, I sat and soaked and reflected on small moments of glory. Finding ink berries and making a design with their dye on paper, watching a bright flash of red as a male cardinal hopped on a dogwood tree’s long, slender branches, the square-ish white flower of the dogwood tree waxy, more green and like a leaf than white and like a petal. None of it needed to have meaning, to offer specific information. I’ve never had the instincts of the field botanist, the instinct to record facts of leaf shapes, flowers, to look in order to discover and memorize as fact.

More people came. The walk into the woods was often interrupted by run-ins with other people. There were the weekend motorcycle riders, men with brown beards and pipes and questions about trails and access roads. There was the color poster of President John F. Kennedy nailed to a tree and then riddled with bullets. There were the groups of other children, invaders of a sort in my mind, arriving with hammers and nails to build tree houses. Of course it would be a lovely gift to myself now, to have detailed, hand-rendered images of that place, which remains rather fresh and alive in my mind — the creek in winter, vanishing in a chaos of summer greens, vines and leaves, its reappearance in the autumn as the leaves died and fell to the ground, as I grew taller and less interested in finding the edge, which turned out to be a not-so-distant road close to the home where a yellow school bus was parked in the driveway.

I recall the spring the bulldozers arrived, followed by a squad of dynamiters. That summer, as they dynamited a new batch of basements into the nearby woods we used to sit, my sisters and me, at a white table and eat breakfast cereal and marvel at how our house shook.

The only real inkling of what was to come was the enormous grocery store, Super Giant, that sprung up near the tiny crossroads of Route 108 and Georgia Avenue. Awfully big store for such a tiny town, my mother would mutter, pulling her sweater closer in the Arctic chill of Giant’s air conditioning.

* * *

Does everyone develop her own philosophy of place? This is the question that came to me on a chilly March afternoon — came as though presented by the long arm atop the sea called maritime layer, a layer in which I frequently live. It is not a place for all eyes and ears — the rich vellum gives the trees a ghostly appearance, distances compress. The world becomes a two-dimensional exercise in perspective.

It is, however, a place where the brain and body are free to float, untethered from the distractions of foregrounds, backgrounds, and other permutations of “grounds.” Then, only one ground. And so a person inclined to sit around listening for the specific music of the world may be able to hear this question — tucked safely into the physicality of ideas, as though slipped between the pages of a book.

Such a question is rarely uninvited; that is, I had spent the morning reading about John Cleves Symmes and his theory of a hollow Earth. Whenever I hear the word, Earth, it brings my mind to a specific place. The place changes, of course, but the path is the same.

It seems hilarious in our times but the idea of a hollow Earth was actually pondered and written about by esteemed scientists.  Beginning in the 16th and then nudging into the 19th century, scientists joined this discussion. In 1692, Edmund Halley advanced a theory that the Earth is composed of a series of inner concentric spheres capable of sustaining life. But it may be Thomas Burnet’s Telluris sacra theoria, later expanded and revised in an English version The Sacred Theory of Earth, that offers the most fetching and complex design ideas for a hollow Earth. Burnet envisioned the planet as a “Mundane egg,” with the shell the Earth’s crust and a yolk nestled in the interior. It has been written that Burnet’s geocosmic vision of the planet Earth also functions as a kind of microcosmic sacred theory of the psyche.

Among the most interesting facets of these imaginings are renderings of actual designed orbs,

The British Library

This design describes a series of concentric orbs, nesting one inside the other. The portal into these worlds existed at the poles.The fact of the theory’s ongoing persistence is also illustrated in the U.S. Government’s funding of an expedition to look for the portals. The U.S. Government funded an expedition looking for this point of entry – known as Symmes’ Hole for John Cleve Symmes, who vigorously advanced ideas in the early 19th century. If I type “hollow Earth theory” into Google Chrome, I find 235,000 hits in .25 seconds. Among them are an expedition planned for later in 2012 to the freshly ice-free Arctic Ocean to finally confirm the long-understood but carefully concealed hole to the center of the Earth. As these ideas of place faded from scientist’s minds, they came to reside in the imaginations of writers, Edgar Allen Poe and Jules Verne and Ralph Waldo Emerson among them. Emerson’s American Transcendentalism was a place where nature existed as a system of concentric circles. Emerson’s essay, Circles, is considered to be the first, true American essay of place and person, and he declared the circle to be the “highest emblem in the cipher of the world.”

You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which builds is better than that which is built. The hand that built can topple it down much faster. Better than the hand and nimbler was the invisible thought which wrought through it; and thus ever, behind the coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer cause. Every thing looks permanent until its secret is known. A rich estate appears to women and children a firm and lasting fact; to a merchant, one easily created out of any materials, and easily lost. An orchard, good tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a large farmer, not much more fixed than the state of the crop. Nature looks provokingly stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the rest; and when once I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so immovably wide, these leaves hang so individually considerable? Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial. Moons are no more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.

* * *

September and October are the most beautiful months in the Presidio – a Spanish word meaning a place of defense or a garrison, meaning also my home, a national park once home to armies and loaded-gun emplacements, a place in its earliest days designated by its location, overlooking the Golden Gate and the bay and sea, as somewhere good to set up a post for observations.

So I come now in their footsteps, or bootsteps, but the place I observe and walk is under restoration. The guns and their attendants closed shop one night in the 1990s and through a special act of Congress, a fort and base and post became urban park and reclamation project.

Our home is a mid-century townhouse, with split-level, brown-carpeted stairs and sliding windows. From the orange couch, the view is due west, towards the Farallon Islands and the setting sun.

So. Now I stand watch for the Presidio. From my post, I observe rats chewing – grass and when the weather turns cold, my cabinets. I can’t really hold it against them. Where else are they supposed to go? It’s me who has invaded their urban wildspot. Then red tail hawks, aloft riding a stiff breeze. Hovering around my backyard fountain, Anna’s hummingbirds under the watchful gaze of scrub jays. Night comes and companionably ambling across bark and cement, benevolent banana slugs. Less pleasant the raccoon family residing in the cypress tree in my backyard. Then the 11 p.m. visit from our local skunk. Finally, the last, doomed quail huddling under a small shrub.

We all live atop a tall sand dune, dense with trees, although less dense than when we first arrived, when the deliberate and ineffable desire to remove trees and unwanted shrubs and plants, the removal and reclamation of a dune landscape began. We live amidst iterative urban park design, or to put that into plain English, the times are changing here in the Presidio.

This ceaseless pursuit of beauty catalyzes our curiosity. The place is one giant tangle of ideas, abandoned forts and baracks, adobe uncovered, reclamation of creeks and springs, remediation of dumps, scavenging scrap — bath tubs, fixtures, kitchen sinks — and finally the reconstruction of our major thoro-fare.

I walked down the hill to watch them take the road down. It’s a rare opportunity — to see a major demolition, covering three days, 24-hours a day, taking down an elevated road in 15-minute chunks. Wars, earthquakes, other natural disasters tear apart roads, too. The image that stuck — two jackhammer machines punched into old concrete, making a white mist of dust and this image of was framed by the bay and its white sailboats, and the wind kicking up the crests into white spray. What also struck was how few people had come to watch at that moment – I stood alone with a camera crew from the Spanish-language news channel, three boys en route home from Little League, and a group of Japanese tourists. But our small band shared an exuberance and delight for the sound and feel of it — the screeching, tugging, and general pulverizing.

As I walked the length of the orange barrier, setting the site off from the viewers, I saw a single shrub clinging to its cement home. I saw the wind-blown soil first, then the seeds dispersed, then one hopeful sprout, then a dash of green, then this pouf of leaves. I don’t know if the plant reclamation people will come and save it. And its lonely, adaptive existence wanted to be labelled courage by me, and wanted it to be set aside somewhere in the forest, an homage to its endurance and fortitude. But this idea only underscored how small our notion of beauty is when we see something true.

As Doyle Drive fell, moments of park and plant revealed.

When you take up the study of gastropods, leading to a reflection on the banana slug, the facts and superlatives quickly boggle the mind. Their adaptations reveal a breathtaking enthusiasm for making do with whatever the current realities might be. They live in the deepest patches of sea floor, line steam vents in these depths, slouch around the woods, in estuaries, and in deserts to name a few. 

Before I lived in the company of banana slugs, the lives of gastropods had rarely crossed my mind. This is but one reason living in a forest or other non-parceled place is such a good idea — unexpected things happen in nature and whether you desire it or not, it is the unexpected that brings real change. If we plan and deliberate on our experiences — travel, love, walking — we mediate them to the point where they become more synthetic than actual.  

The banana slug is the state mollusc of California. I don’t know how many states appoint state molluscs. It is a fact that does not appeal to me. Once something is appointed a “State” anything, it is a sure-fire sign we see it as valueless in its essence, redeemed only as symbol: state 

Flower, state rock, state poet laureate.

Climbing up the slick hill in front of our house, first to clear the roadside drain with a shovel, then to march over to our garden to survey the damage. Right by the guardrail a thick, bright yellow banana slug feasted on a eucalyptus leaf. I gently picked it up and it quickly stiffened into a slimy plug in my palm. I’d learned to be patient with the banana slug, a creature I much admire and that never ceases to dazzle. After a minute or two, as the rain began to drip with a more fierce intensity off my hood, I felt the familiar gnawing. Yes, the slug was eating my skin in its delicate, exfoliating way.  

An unusually hard storm hit the shores the night before thus sending me out this morning to our community garden to check on the scarlet runner beans. As I guessed, the hastily pieced together trellis had fallen over into our neighbors kale. The wind flattened the dahlias, parsley, and lemon verbena. The sugar pumpkins sat there looking completely unfazed by it all. 

In the early morning when I walk out my front door, in the gloamy light, before the sun reaches its ultra-white ascendency over the eastern rise, I find myself in the company of the banana slug. My slug memories from childhood embarrass me now. They were a source of summer entertainment in the woods of Maryland and I used to enjoy dumping salt on them. What a horrible way to die, I have since learned. Dehydrating them into a slow demise. 

I walk the concrete sidewalk strewn with eucalyptus leaves and stop to observe the banana slugs. The slugs crazed, meandering path is laid out in so much slime. The slug trail and trial on concrete suggests Jackson Pollock, one of the paintings where the eye is invited to wander curvilinear paths, a line offering neither destination nor point of embarkation.

I squat on the ground. The banana slug in question is more ochre than yellow, and from its size, perhaps five inches in length, I presume it has been meandering amidst the leaves for some time. No one knows how long these slugs live in the wild, although they clock in for a couple years in man-made habitats. 

The slug’s slimy path shines, a varnished trail easier to follow than Hansel’s, should any other living creature desire to follow its meanderings. 

The slug must have been on a single three-foot square of concrete for some time, because the artful lines jam and loop together.

When I returned home, I had a note from a friend who had found the research of one George Evelyn Hutchinson, also known as the father of modern limnology, the scientific study of lakes and other fresh water bodies of water, both physical and biological features.  She felt I would find some inspiration in this fellow traveller meandering the path of curiosity and concern.

He was born in Cambridge, became a world-renowned scientist, but did not limit his work to science. When he learned of a plan to put a military base on Aldabra Island in the Indian Ocean, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, part of the Seychelles, a raised coral atoll, the second-largest of its kind in the world, home to the world’s largest popular of giant tortoises, as well as the Aldabra rail, the largest surviving flightless bird of the Indian Ocean region. Hutchinson heard plans to build a military base there in the late 1960s, when the atoll was part of the British Indian Ocean Territory.  He presented a report to the Royal Society, arguing to abandon planned destruction of the complicated biota. In the end, Hutchinson’s voice prevailed.

“I have not expressed, in the formal document, my personal feelings on the matter, namely that the intended occupation of the island is a sickening and criminal attack on what I would call a natural work of art, and bad as it is in itself, would set precedents that would impoverish the world even more completely and rapidly than is being done. I cannot believe that the people involved wish to go down in history as they well may with the epitaph, ‘They saved money.’ “

One reporter called Hutchinson a sage of enlightenment.

What I gathered about Hutchinson was all the world offered him ideas, regardless of where he was or what was transpiring in his own life. As example of this, I read how he stayed in Reno, Nevada, in 1933 for six weeks while getting a divorce from his first wife. What resulted was important observations, advancing ideas on physical and chemical conditions, with calculations on heat budgets, oxygen deficits, and a new approach to the stability of meromictic lakes.  Meromictic lakes are a particular curiosity, because they lack complete water circulation, the deepest water contains no dissolved oxygen, the sediments are relatively undisturbed and therefore offer a detailed record of the history of the lake. This is water behaving like rock: permanently stratified.  In what are called ordinary lakes, holomictic lakes, at least once a year surface and deep water physically mix, often driven by wind, wind driving waves across the lake’s surface.

Hutchinson coined the term meromictic in 1957 in his Treatise on Limnology. Very little can live in the deep recesses of the meromictic lake, among them are a bacteria called purple sulfur.

On August 12, 1986, the meromictic Lake Nyos in Cameroon, shaken up by winds or heavy rains or a landslide – no one knows for certain  — unleashed a limnic eruption, also called an exploding lake, a rare sort of natural disaster. Imagine the placid, deep blue undisturbed waters of Lake Nyos, 1.5 square kilometres and 200 metres deep. People gazed at its wide, blue calm, thought of their youth, wondered what sort of weather lay before them. Maybe someone held a metal cup filled with sweet tea.  

So. The lake a piece of a volcanic landscape called Oku, inside a maar, in a maar and basatic cinder cone landscape. Maars can be pictured easily: circular indentations caused by volcanic eruptions, then filled with water. Dramatic. Lake Nyos offers its remarkable dark blue on that morning and then the water bubbles awake, releases 80 million cubic meters of CO2. (I have seen the mechanism explained as similar to what happens inside a can of soda; through volcanic activity or decomposition of organic material, massive amounts of dissolved CO2 saturate a lake. The water pressure aids in the ready dissolution of the CO2 and like a soda, bubbles form when pressure is released, like popping the top off a bottle of Coke. See the foam, feel the pin pricks of the bubbles on your tongue.)

A cloudy mixture of carbon dioxide and water droplets forces itself aloft, some mythic cloud, one some would attribute to the wrath of a spirit woman who resided in local folklore, the cloud stretched 50 meters in thickness and took off like a jet engine, roaring skyward at 100 km an hour. It rose to 120 meters above shoreline within the crater, folding all living things into its mire. Then it settled into a downward flow, 20 to 50 kilometres, a sleep-offering vapor, swirling into at least four villages, where the people would be discovered, many still in their beds, peaceful, dead.

After the gas was released, Lake Nyos sank a meter lower in surface level and at least 1,700 people, as well as thousands of cattle, birds, and all other breathing creatures, died. 

The banana slug is part of the mollusk family, ariolimax columbianus, and relatives include the delicious oyster, the literary squid, and the pesky snail, all of whom have a place in world cuisines. Banana slugs can grow to be 18 inches long, although the biggest neighborhood slug appears closer to 8 inches. Still and all, a big slug. People hate slugs, in general, and when I tell them I admire them for all their slimy wanderings, I rarely argue in a manner that convinces my audience. We think slug and we see traits that in combination disgust us: slimy, hairless, cold. What if we had to touch it. They are the hallmarks of death: slimy, hairless, cold. We think slug and imagine our mother looking down at us, curled on the couch at four on a Saturday afternoon, happily reading Misty of Chincoteague, and we hear her say, listen, my little slug, go outside into the sunshine.

Do you like slugs, I asked my son. 

That’s a weird question, he said. 

There aren’t many people who think slugs are amazing and extraordinary, he added with the cool certainty of teen-age years. 

I explained about the dismal appeal of cold, slimy, and hairless.

Well, warm, slimy, and hairless is pretty bad, too. He said.

We decided cold and hairless had its own appeal: ice, river-smoothed rocks.

My son said, well, what do we like that is slimy?

Do not paddle or swim out when the ship arrives. Do not track or try to engage with the people who emerge from the smaller boats they bring to land. It will take them forever to find you, if you are careful. These are men of the sea, not men of the land. And they don’t know what to look for.

I know: Your natural inclination is towards a sort of poetic curiosity. But trust me on this one. If you can just sit tight, you will be able to think. And now is the time for such thinking.

The world is about to change and you don’t really have much in terms of experience for dealing with the change. Don’t be offended: The map of history is littered with culture that couldn’t adapt to change. As I write this, we live in a world where the seas are rising and chemically changing and warming and cooling in new ways and there are plenty of people rolling around here with no ability to think and Get It. They are doomed, too. Just like, I hate to say, you are.

Get my point? If they come to you, don’t drink their water, nor accept any of their bright-colored cloths. These are not gifts in the true sense. One might more comfortably call them a lure. Don’t be conned or fooled by their knowingness, either. What do they know of the world?

Back to my contemporaries, there are people here who continue to burn fuel here to propel themselves at 80 miles an hour across roads, solo, to places where they, too, are lured into trading for bright cloth and shiny things. See: We have more in common than you might have thought. This is one of the reasons why you should listen to me.

These ship-bound men won’t tell you how they hunt down and kill other men, men who look or act in a way they have already decided is the wrong way to look and act. They won’t tell you they cannot be reasoned with, nor about how easily they breath and sleep after a day of such killing. Such killing feels to them the way bathing does to you – when after many weeks in the hills with the hunt and your hands weighted down by weapons, then dried blood and guts of the stag or elk, you slip into running water, find a deep place, and scrape off all the viscera, watching as it floats from your finger tips. Then your hands feel light again. Your skin feels tight again. So you know this feeling? Of course you do.

This is how they feel when they chase the women and children across the hills and grab their bodies and do what they please, a frenzy. Then they take a deep breath. You must also remember what they won’t say: They won’t tell you that they don’t have any curiosity akin to yours. They do not have the heart of the poet and the soul of the great man. No. They are copiers, cultural duplicators. Their goal is to make all the world familiar to themselves.

But trust me when I tell you this: You will be an ancestor to no one if you don’t show some self-restraint in these times. If you restrain from seeing this moment as one of pure poetry, of art embodied in human life. Too much of the world looks this way to you, imbued with meaning a perfect clarity. Beauty is found in the forest, the sea, the sky. Yes, yes this is true.

PS:  Please respond to this letter when the appropriate moment arrives. Being without a chirographic system of communication, you are limited in how you can tell your story in your own words. This is good news and bad news. The good news is this: You will know the joy of recitation, feeling words come to you, breathless, large, in the world, entwined with sea and sky.

The bad news is that those ancestors you need to keep the story straight for won’t be able to recall the stories. They will forget the stories. The bad news is the stories will die as fact and return as myth and many of the wondrous details you painstakingly recorded will be lost to all ears as the land is lost to all eyes.

Just remember: Restrain yourself from going out to the boat.

Headstones exist only in our national recreation area. Land left for the active and the living. And yet. the Presidio lined with so many dead bodies. Lost under heaped soil and then a surprise:  Woven over it all, rows of white tombstones, so many wax teeth pushing up from green hills.

Do you think it’s easy to get those lines to look so fine? To look like there is intent in how we bury our dead. And what would those dead folk say, if they had teeth and tongues and soft palettes. Would they find their fate ironic? Would they find their fate even mildly amusing? That here, right now, right down the hill from their final resting place we have a building called House of Air and in this place, children trampoline on fabric stretched tight. Jump. Scream. Twist. So many cinders hurled aloft towards a fossil sky.

Case 2: These events took place the day you were born.                                                                 Trees felled to open land to sunshine and air. There you were, a monk with no order, forced to hold rocks in your mouth, the bitter serpentinite with its pleasing metallic edge, its menacing hint of poison. The rocks were meant to keep bitter words out, to help you listen to all you needed to hear. Here, you heard it first said, there are no shrines or churches or abbeys, only fallen trees in a forest, rings of yellow sand along the shore, rough rock lined with silver lichens, and where, for a moment we are allowed to rest.

Case 3:  The gun emplacements buried in the mist.
The smell of fog a mix of smoke and decay and water keeps the people away. When the rains come the path will melt into slick mud but for today, the sand is dry and covered with fine gravel and all is brittle. Merely lost in the fog.. You cannot see the blue-tailed skink or the red-winged hawk or the mole. All lost to the tangle of grey air. The fog is a sort of miracle, the sort of effect you wouldn’t really believe if you did not live in it, feel it, walk into it. When did you first see the fog? On television, as men emerged from graveyards with black hats and coats and canes or umbrellas. How they got it all wrong! Those men in their tall hats and with their bent heads. No, the fog feels like God, everywhere and all places and wrapped around you like so much hair.

In order to write about the 1,491 acres called Presidio I need to be in the shabby industrial corner of San Francisco called Dogpatch. I haven’t researched how this part of town got its name and I don’t want to start. Because research about place is a sticky subject — no sooner do you decide you fancy a little information about a name like Dogpatch, but you find yourself no longer working on your book about the Presidio. Instead, you find yourself clicking on the tiny icon of an orange fox swirling around a blue Earth. (Earth Day flag for the 21st century?) Then you find that Dogpatch, Arkansas, is the first hit, but that the second hit is, yes, Dogpatch, San Francisco. Then you click on the link: Why not, you’ve come this far. Why turn back? It is heartening to know I write in a place where the words, worker, populist, quaint, quirky are used to describe it. In an 1862 photograph by Eadward Muybridge, it is impossible to recognize Dogpatch. The docks had not been built out and the bay had not been filled in. I see in the photo there is no self-storage unit complex lining a main boulevard nor food truck called Mama Cass selling Vietnamese sliders as there are today.

It is a neighborhood of mixed industrial and residential use, a neighborhood that survived the 1906 earthquake and fire, a place of a mere nine blocks, a place where Bethlehem Steel was once one of the big employers. It is also a place where they have community ambassadors. These ambassadors ride the Muni lightrail and stand on the corners. They cheerily say hello and hand out brochures. If you stop and talk to them, they will tell you about how they want to make people feel safe, because there have been a few beatings on the Muni lightrail. They seem eager to tell you about these assaults, as though hearing who got it and who gave it out and how we’re not going to take it anymore. But knowing the dangers of riding Muni makes the act of coming here to write less of a slog and more of an adventure. Each day, the writer takes on a dangerous world in order to report on life in the forest.

From my studio window I can see a huge mountain of the California state rock, serpentine. To look out, I have to lean over a colleague who is designing bike parts and sending out plans to factories in Taiwan. I also have to shove aside Leonard, who is some sort of fabricator for the architects who reside across the studio. All I know about Leonard is that he is there all the time and he is always building things that look like mid-century lamps. His bosses are two architects who make large installations bound for museums — installations reflecting speculative thinking about how the built world will change in tandem with changing nature systems. When I cannot write, I sit there and stare at their models. One is a seven-foot rectangular solid skyscraper with a mid section held open by stilts. The ground of this open floor undulates like white lava.Tucked into the white waves are tiny acid-green translucent plastic people. Some are buried up to their armpits in the waves. I ask why they are like this and Leonard says: They are in a hot tub. He says this without laughing and it makes me look again. But I think Leonard is having me on. So I nod and move on.

Back at my desk, I am tucked into a wall of white modules aglow with pale blue lights. The lights move in response to a wave algorithm, human motion in their proximity. Imagine a wall of nodding, wholly abstracted Georgia O’Keefe origami cow skulls, white paper heads, nodding at me as I type this. This wonderful thing, these nodding heads, is a prototype of a wall proposed for a museum. I find it to be both clever and staring at it is a terrific way to waste time but not feel like one is wasting any time at all. The same feeling unique to art galleries and museums around the world, the sense that somehow or other the work of largely male, dead people, somehow enriches our experience of being human right now. The sad news today is that this wonder had been entered in a competition at an actual museum, to be a permanent fixture, and we’ve just learned it has been rejected. Quelle drag, as they say. I think I am both sad for the architects but happy for me. Maybe we can keep the nodding heads. All to ourselves.

The studio is in an old tin-can factory and this is my second tenancy. There was a time when these rooms were filled with kerosene lamps and smoke clung to the walls — at least in my imagination. These days, it is a place where architects and model makers and interactive toy designers and letterpress printmakers and chocolate makers gather and expertly and earnestly make their mark. This mark-making piece of the old cannery is not lost on those of us who on a daily basis question the writer’s life and wonder if it is not too late to make a career change. During the first stint, a few years ago, I shared it with a man who built biomimetic walls and lamps, a man who designed snappy, hip lunch kits for Japanese companies to counter plastic bag waste and the bike-parts designer  — all of whom are white, have ginger or blond hair, unusual eyeglasses, and remarkably similar features. It took me about three months to say hello to one of them with complete certainty I knew which one I was talking to. When one of them told a joke, they all laughed in a rather similar way. They were were both affable and tough. I thought of them as a unit and in my head called them the Triplets. The Triplets were full of information, largely about the design thinking behind objects I had never really thought about — teapots, thermal mugs, car bumpers, bicycle lights, camp chairs. The Triplets were Scanners and Decoders, panning the world for ideas they adapted into their work. The Real World for them was filled with gorgeous design ready to be adapted for dazzling and ridiculous human endeavor. And the Triplets were highly productive. One of them made a lamp over several months using biomimetic techniques. He sold it for ten thousand dollars. When he told the other triplets and me about how much that lamp sold for, they all laughed their common laugh. I sat there for the rest of the afternoon wondering if I could make a lamp, too. It didn’t look that tough to do, in all honesty. It just looked tedious, suggesting one needed a great deal of patience in order to get it done.

All this having something to show for yourself made my head spin. But the gift the Triplets gave me was a reference point for my own work. I thought about how over the years I had evolved into a shy person who needed and wanted to write down a world of truths. It was as though my voice was located in my hands and feet. Feet to carry me on my sauntering across the continents, hands to write it all down. It was as though my whole body had been designed as a Recording Device, a Scanner, a Digital Eye.

One day as the sisal-haired Triplets (they had all taken to wearing sarsaparilla-colored, plaid shirts) laughed and glided like ships among their latest projects  — the walls alive with pinned up, fresh sketches of what they were making, one had a big installation go up at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — I sat at my desk pretending to write. But I was actually secretly reading a story in The New York Times about a singer who had made quite a stir in Europe with her haunting, thrilling voice. I got up and walked into the studio kitchen (I was dressed in my usual grey — as though anticipating a squall, or mimicking the endless grey of a San Francisco winter), and boiled water for tea.

The story explained how, after a horrific car accident (she was hit by a Jeep Cherokee) she had a long, casted recovery. During this time, she learned to play guitar and write songs. During this time, as the story went, she emerged with an awareness of the fragility of life and a greatly heightened sense of what matters. I held a hot teacup (poorly designed, I noted with my freshly honed ability to judge objects) and gazed outside, across the serpentine rock, a creepy bluish protrusion against a pale grey sky, the slowly decaying, empty industrial buildings adding to the dystopic mood. I could imagine how it had been here, before the bay was filled in and the hills flattened, in the days when mollusks were roasted over clay stone embers, fresh squid drying on a line, people hammering wood into dwellings, dreaming of a road and street lights, and I almost laughed at their idiocy, with their tin-lined drawers filled with flour and their heads filled with memories of voyages on wooden ships to get here, trips past rocky end points of land seen from the other side, seen from the perspective of waves and prayers for staying on course and an absence of splintered hulls.  The serpentine rock, waxy and content, had been dynamited accidentally by the city at one point, as the story went. They quickly realized their mistake: Serpentine is asbestos and blowing it up creates a fine dust that is toxic to people and many other living things.  So the serpentine sat there, untouched and unslayable; I considered to all the other things that were touchable and slayable— ice, people, air, blue sky, penguins.

As I folded away the newspaper with the article on the singer, one paragraph again caught my eye. The singer’s producer said most of the singers he worked with had survived illnesses or other challenges as children or young adults and were also extraordinarily shy. Most of the time he said, they express a feeling of being equally two people — outgoing and outward-looking as they were on stage and private, and entirely to themselves when not. Most places, I considered, express a feeling of containing a multitude. In Dogpatch and in the long, cast shadows of abandoned ship works foretold, in the cinders ground deep into the soil, in the puddles sloshed through by the tall, striking woman dressed in black skirt and black rubber boots, in how mud cakes the tires of trucks grunting up the hill, through the puddle, in how the water in the puddle can no longer be savored, in how it is something to be gotten through, not to drink or slip into for a respite.  There is nothing in the woods to reflect our image — until we reach the creek or pond, as the woodsman always does in a Disney movie, where he lays down his quiver and cups a hand (well-designed for this, I might add) pulling water to his mouth. We all relate to this gesture, thirst slaked, even if we are not woodsmen ourselves. Then in the still water, we see the woodsman as he sees himself, and this is always a revelation — for him and for us.

According to Kant, color is an irrelevancy, is adventitious, beauty rooted wholly in form, smell also irrelevant, apparently.  How to walk into the Presidio and see. How to walk.

How to walk

H o w

T o w

A l k

A code, something sent in lines of dots and dashes.

…. — .– / – — / .– .- .-.. -.-

In how to elide my desire.

If I were not writing a book about the Presidio in Dogpatch, San Francisco, in a former canning factory now a weirdly concentrated idea incubator, I would live along the shores of Lake Superior and write and work on experiments in electricity. I would study Edison carefully and try to recreate his work. I would not do the experiment, however, where a living elephant is electrocuted with sixty thousands volts of juice. (The rationale then was that she was wild and would not obey and thus she was condemned.) There on the shore of Lake Superior I would place a penny on my tongue and a silver coin underneath it. Then I could taste the electricity and record the flavor. On the shores of the lake, lightning hits sand and leaves fulgurite behind, rods of glass, jagged and capturing the look and feel of lightning. I would write about how these are called amorphous rocks, from the Greek meaning shapeless. I would like for amorphous to be something other than shapeless, because the act of turning sand into a jagged rock in a flash of lightning is so much more and it is certainly a shape. It is not shape the rock lacks it is language we lack for describing it.

The sublime is a failure of the mind, Kant said, to understand what seems formless and boundless.

And so we walk.

.- -. -.. / … — / .– . / .– .- .-.. -.-

Why did you want to write a book about the Presidio?

After I moved in here, I was added to some sort of email and mailing list for residents. I started receiving slick newsletters about doings in and around the park. It was a time of tremendous and accelerating change in those days, and so the newsletter had an air of ‘dialogue’ around it, as in, come join us as we make decisions about the park. So I took their invitation quite literally — and I grabbed a pen and some paper and began to write little commentaries on this “redesign.” Then the obsessive research started. The Presidio is a story — it is a story about the pursuit of beauty.

Did you see yourself as a stakeholder?

At first, yes. And this was quite exciting. I imagined documenting the transition and redesign of this open space to reflect current user expectations. But then…

I’m sorry?

But then I had this sinking feeling that it wasn’t an actual dialogue. And I began to see that the Presidio had a set of rules about how it had to be managed, many of which were based on the fact the park needs to be “self supporting.” So there was a capitalist agenda as the base line for this grand invitation to come and pull out invasive species and “join in.” But this ultimately became interesting to me. I mean, this is a national park, which means, as Woody Guthrie noted, This land is your land. I just think we’ve all gotten rather conditioned into these money-making arguments. Everything has to be monetized. If you buy the idea that national parks should be profit centers, then the rest makes sense. What I hope this book gets going is a discussion of why it was set up like this in the first place — cafes serving $3 lattes, an inn charging $325 a night, housing with rents as high as $15,000 a month. And all of these services are run by private contractors, hired by the government. It’s the same thing in Yosemite and other national parks. I jus think that in the Presidio it is all much more amplified. And I worry that this will be a test case model for other federal lands. Does $10,000 to rent a three-bedroom house seem excessive to you? Who even sets that absurd rate? You and me as stakeholders? All the book invites is thinking these issues through. Beyond the money talk.

I’m not saying there’s evil afoot. It’s about how the place is set up, in terms of land use and revenues. They cannot charge an admission fee they will tell you. They have to make money somehow. I guess it would be interesting to argue this piece of it: Who set these goals for land that is part of the public domain?

Meaning?

They argue because there are no entry fees like in most national parks, they need to find other ways to monetize the space — so that they can afford to maintain it.

What’s wrong with that?

Nothing. I am not here to act the fiscal naive nor to suggest a better way nor to be a stakeholder as involved people like to call themselves these days. I’m here as an artist, trying to tell the story of a place in transition. The political aspects need to be mentioned but in the end, the management hierarchies and revenue streams are deathly dull to me.

I’d rather write and read about banana slugs. Now there’s a species I can get behind — giant, shell-less mollusks whose best defense is slime.

I guess the slugs, as native residents, are more stakeholders than you and me. Do you know where the term originated?

No.

Well, some say it comes from the Western United States, from the days when men and women would make a land claim and then stake out the territory. Some think it is related to betting as in “stakes.” Either way, it’s a term that has been in vogue for some time — used by politicians like former Prime Minister Tony Blair rather liberally, and now here, in the Presidio.

But you are not a stakeholder?

Not in the traditional sense. The true stakeholders are those who control the land and its use. All the rest of us are simply transients.  The stakeholders monitor the rest of us — there’s a stakeholder who watches my community garden and sends me emails when I don’t harvest my cabbage on time. There’s a stakeholder who enforces parking rules. They seem to increase in number each passing year, these stakeholders…

What sort of relationship does this create between you and the Presidio?

May I use a metaphor? I feel like the dresser for some aging starlet. I feel like the person who knows that person best, even though I am not an expert in any accepted way and remain unknown in my intimacy. I feel like the character Anthony Hopkins played in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. Walking here, looking around all the time, getting to know all the small indentations, branch lines, clogged roadside drains, owl nests, short cuts. Then one day I’ll walk away. And my presence here will be unlauded and unmarked and no street will be named for me. But that’s, in my opinion, how we should behave in a place. Try to leave no trace of us there. Which is actually the hard part, isn’t it?

What do you mean?

I mean, it’s easier to plan big monuments with Frank Gehry and get all the stakeholders to buy in and then build it then it is to leave things as they are.

Kant says, Hardly anyone apart from the botanist knows what sort of a thing a flower is. 

I agree with Kant, and add, Hardly anyone apart from a forester knows what sort of thing a tree is.

In order to write a book about the Presidio and what it means to live and walk in a forest designed and revised by people to afford an oasis packed with biological diversity, leveraged views, spectacular trails, I settled on the idea of working in an entirely different part of the city. A place where no trees dare to live. These places are easy to spot. Look for the sidewalk free of intricate shadows, where the sound of cars radiates and rattles through your brain. Look for the places where there are no birds, save pigeons and gulls.

Why go? Because living in the Presidio for six years has caused me to lose some of my view of the place, as though a sci-fi filmish mist has descended on the hills and while I squint and get glimpses, I can no longer make out the granular details. So much construction, so many trees torn down, the place has lost most of its peculiar, gothic charm. But gothic charm isn’t something that lasts forever, is it? What was once a place dominated by the historic forest, empty dunes, and dilapidated buildings, each whispering a specific story of people vanished, their little plans wrecked and torn asunder, and how time and  life, as it were, goes on now, as it always has, is a place of remediation craters, shiny campsites, and cafes where children in matching tee-shirts sing Ten Little Monkeys. Porous, this severed earth, a vapor rises in the way it does on a subway platform. We turn up our collars, eyes closed, heads bent as we march along Crissy Field where the construction of a big, new road means piles drivers and the hum and whine of machinery drown out the egret, heron, pelican. It brings to mind lifting a band aid from a rash, the skin bleeds. Call it all a body, this Presidio. Call it a Body and not a Place.

To wish the Presidio to be something other than what it was six years ago, abandoned hospital decorated with graffiti in a rather artful and bleak statement, quail running wild around my back garden, the single fat skunk who came by the glass door each night at 11 pm, the family of red foxes cavorting amidst melon sunlight in tall weedy grounds of Fort Scott at day’s end. To wish it otherwise is a fantasy, a dream within a dream within a dream.

The skunk no longer trundles along — perhaps a late-night snack for the great-horned owls that patrol these dunes at night, foxes now keep a low profile, and the quail have vanished, the victims of domestic cats.

So.

And yet I remain, with my human hands and little notebooks, to tell the story of our brief lives together here in what many these days call, Nature in the City. I don’t quite know what that means, nature in the city. As though there are concentric circles of existence or that the city is some sort of terrarium. Or is it nature that is the terrarium, in which case, it would be a terrarium within a terrarium within a terrarium, and on and on. What the Presidio ruins made me ponder was how we perch our little fires and edifices on these moving tectonic plates and how we lose ourselves in the hallways and rooms and colors of our own design. The fantasy in the fantasy in the fantasy.

Periodically we yearn for something we have not made and cannot wholly control. So we seek the woods. Some go rather far afield, places like Alaska and Montana and the Great Smoky Mountains. Some even die there, trying to camp in dried-out river beds or at the tree line in the bitter cold. Avalanches and flash floods take them out. But most don’t go to the margins of the true wild. Most of us lose ourselves in designed natural places, where trails and huts and signs and interpretive posters lead and guide us into the dream of a dream of a dream.

At any rate all of this is brilliantly clear to me when I sit in an old warehouse, amidst architects and bike designers. After I walked two miles in a thick fog this morning with my friend the artist Lynn Marie Kirby, I took a bus and a municipal light-rail train to the old canning factory where we artists and designers are holed up these days.

Yet as I set out this morning to patrol the northern, fog-soaked borders, nine people in white suits with huge hoods came marching towards me — on the path to my front door. The casual observer could construe this to mean toxicity spewed into the atmosphere from the recent Japanese power plant meltdown had been found in my home. One could imagine these white-robed people came to fetch samples of the things sampled when we fear contamination by radioactivity.

One could further speculate there is van waiting, a windowless van, waiting to take a person away from the dunes deemed Native Habitat by some government agency. This same group has deemed that Native Habitat can be tied to a clock set to some point in the year 1776. It is not hard to to picture a clock with enormous lighted, red hands, sitting in a basement in Washington, DC, tended by a man wearing a white lab coat. But we must put this clock out of our minds most days. Native Habitat in these dunes goes hand in hand with Native Americans. The year 1776 was the year Europeans came in force to this, or so I am told, and then began the slow, laborious redesign of all they saw. The Native Americans were among the first to vanish. For this act alone, I feel a blue-lavender grief, a pain that irradiates outward, a pain that takes the form of a whitish glass moth that does not look of this world, wings the pale green of glacial ice in one-eighth light, lined with a rough fringe of icicles. The clock for Native Habitat Restoration is set to the days before the Europeans arrived and the people in the white suits know about this clock and they have a list of all the interlopers, the new arrivals that squeeze out the fragile native plants.

Waving hello to the white suits, I see they are all college students and when I make a hilarious, dated comment about their post-nuclear apocalypse garments, one of them smiles in the manner one smiles at someone who makes dated, asinine comments, and says, it’s for the poison oak, dude.

Fantasy within a fantasy within a fantasy.

I ask the last one in line, because now I know they are recruits in the all-volunteer Park Stewardship Legion, a woman with vintage glasses that look like those worn by my grandmother and have an equally ugly effect: Do you think Europeans were called Europeans in 1776?

She turns her glinting, rhinestone-embellished cat’s eyes at me looks at me and sort of cocks her head. The rest of her squad have stomped off to my side yard, where invaders await a fast death — ripped by hand from the ground they need to survive. I can already hear the crackle of roots cracked out of their home soil. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Why?”