Borderlands



Notes from today’s WALK…

The WALK takes me to a natural place. 

Or does it? 

Our house is 10 minutes from a State Park, a National Recreation Area, and a Land Trust. It is also 10 minutes from San Francisco. Our house has electricity, heat, and a modified bitumen roof. It is also half a mile from a redwood grove. I live a liminal existence, traversing the borderlands between grime and grace, civilization and survivalism. 

Or perhaps I’m overstating this. 

On recent WALKs, I have encountered, in some particular order, coyotes, a bobcat, snakes, foxes, rabbits, red tailed hawks, red shouldered hawks, deer, dead deer, and turkey vultures. The trail goes through a primordial forest of bay tree, live oaks, redwoods, ferns, and huckleberries before breaking into the windswept chaparral of manzanita, scrub oak, coyote brush, sage, toyon, lupine, and sticky monkey.

Along the same path today I also saw a matchbox car, sunglasses, and a rusted out VW. And when I arrived at the top of Homestead Hill, I saw an expanse of pacific blue to the west and the smog of Chevron smokestacks to the east. 
 
The WALK takes me to a threshold place (in more ways than one, on a good day). But it also makes me doubt the purity of this place and its purpose. 

An old dear friend, the redheaded urban planner, derides the space where the WALK takes place. Not the specific trail, mind you, but spaces like it. He shines his lovably self-righteous light on the fallacy of so many of our supposed natural places. To him, there is pure nature and pure city, and everything in between is a subdivision of self-delusion. Because the in-betweens are impure; they are not what we say they are. Muir Woods is an ancient forest with a parking lot. Mt. Tam is a State Park with an air force base on top. 

Today I am afraid the redheaded urban planner is right. Can I be at one with nature when I can hear Highway 101? Am I close to the earth when I see it dotted with blue New York Times bags filled with dog shit? Today I see the uneven stitches on the story I've so carefully woven.

Most days, though, I forgive myself. Most of us land in the liminal spaces. Most of us live in the in-betweens. I’m doing the best I can, just like everybody else. Are we to blame if the border has become so wide that it now makes up most of the map. Yes. We probably are. And that’s the part that’s harder to forgive.


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If I Told Me I Wouldn’t Believe Me

When I was a freshman in college, I took a class that covered, among other things, the way human beings measure the passing of time. One method, which in my dimmed memory was called something like “astronomical time” or “real time,” referred to measures of time that are rooted in celestial events. For example, a day is a day because that’s how long it takes the earth to revolve on its axis one time. A year is a year because that’s how long it takes the earth to travel its orbit around the sun. Long before there were people, there were days and years. Some things happen whether or not we’re paying attention. There is another kind of time. I wish I could remember what the professor called it. Human time? Invented time? These are the measures of time that humans create. Epochs and eras, ages and empires, months and hours. Perhaps they are not quite arbitrary, but they are most certainly invented. We think that a year has to have 12 months, but it doesn’t. A day could just as easily b...
Read more

Growth Mindset

            “So what do you think we’ll do today?”             My son asks this question frequently.             His grandfather sits at the round table with the checkerboard pattern. He methodically works the New York Times crossword puzzle, periodically throwing clues in H’s direction.             “Winnie-the-Pooh catchphrase?”             “Uhm…honey?”             “Eight letters.”             “Uhm…”             “We’ll come back to it.”             H circles the table peripatetically...
Read more

The Yearbook

There are many things to say about my middle school. So many factoids, experiential leavings, tragicomic anecdotes. Like my math teacher, the deaf World War II veteran who made us write lines when he saw our lips moving. Or the English teacher who sent me to the vice-principal’s office for publicly correcting her spelling of “greatful.” Or the rampaging flocks of seagulls that laid siege to the yard during lunchtime (we had no cafeteria), stealing sandwiches from unguarded six graders and shit bombing a student or two per day. The school was located across the street from a sewage treatment plant. We once had to evacuate because of a chlorine gas leak. It was designed by the same architect who designed San Quentin. The dark tinted windows allowed us to see out, but no one could see in. My town was a progressive one, even more so in the mid 1980s. Yet I somehow recollect that the majority of our black classmates were in the same homeroom, assigned to a husband-and-wife teach...
Read more