Mount Tamalpais from Cesar Chavez Park (also known as Berkeley’s lovely reclaimed old garbarge dump). We wound up there the other night after walking the dog in our neighborhood. It looked like the sunset would be a show, and I said that to Kate when we got home. She said, “Let’s go down to the marina.” It was a great spontaneous moment, and we did it.
Bay, Before the Storm
From Cesar Chavez Park on the Berkeley waterfront, an hour or so before last evening’s thunderstorm blew in.
Wrath of the Bird Man
Among the various schizoid tendencies evident in Berkeley life is the battle between the town’s self-conscious live-and-let-live creed and the habit of instructing fellow citizens about how they ought to behave. The laissez-faire creed honors panhandlers, naked pedestrians, tree sitters, borderline and full-blown mental cases and a panoply of other truth- and attention-seekers; the knee-jerk impulse to correct targets every manner of real and imagined infraction, public and private.
Today’s case in point: I took the dog down to the marina early in the afternoon. The weather was showery and there were few people around. As I usually do when the park is deserted, I let the dog run across the southeast meadow unleashed; he romps the quarter-mile or so to the official off-leash area, stopping fifteen or twenty times along the way to check on ground-squirrel excavations.
This afternoon, an older woman walking a young black Lab preceded me across the open area As she walked along, she was intercepted by a long-haired, bearded man of middle age who was holding something up and shouting at her. When I got closer, I heard him yell, “Your dog should be on a leash! This is an extremely rare bird that a dog just killed!” And then, as I neared him, he turned on his heel and marched straight at me, thrusting the bird carcass toward me. “You have to leash your dog!” he shouted. “This bird was just killed by dogs.”
The guy (pictured above, in an actual action photo) was wearing a cap, and he had a dark green-and-black-plaid jacket on, and from a distance I wondered if he was some sort of park volunteer. So I said, “On whose authority?”
“What?” he asked.
“On whose authority do I need to put my dog on a leash?”
“On my authority — as a citizen!” he shouted.
OK: letter of the law, he was right. The place we were, dogs are supposed to be leashed. But like I said, with no one around, I let the dog run and follow the municipal code by picking up after him if he takes a dump. And I do keep an eye on whether he harasses birds, and although he occasionally will take a run at one of the big herons and egrets who show up to hunt in the meadow themselves, he has shown no interest in smaller birds like the unfortunate one the Unofficial Nature Warden was holding aloft. I told the man that as I walked on. I must have been a little too dismissive.
“This is not your property!” he screamed, stepping toward me. “This is not your fucking backyard!”
I looked at him for a moment, then remembered I had my camera. “Wait a minute–I want to take your picture,” I said. When I took the camera out, turned it on, and pointed it toward him, he threw the dead bird at my feet and turned and walked away. I noticed then that he had a plastic bag in which he was carrying his own camera. I told him I wanted him to come back and tell me about the bird, but he stalked off, saying that if he had to take his camera out and snap my picture, then the incident would become a matter for the police. He didn’t stop walking.
I looked at the bird. I couldn’t tell what kind it was. It could have been a shore bird, or it might have been one of the killdeer who settle down in the meadow after dark. It was impossible to tell what did it in, though there are feral cats around and other small predators that would be more likely to dispatch birds than dogs would. In fact, in all the times I’ve been down to the park, I’ve only seen one dog chase small birds, and it wasn’t close to catching anything, let alone killing it.
But protecting the birds down there wasn’t what the Unofficial Nature Warden was trying to do, anyway. He was just bearing witness to his sense of grievance about other park users flouting the rules. And for just a little extra spice in his existence, he might get off on bullying and intimidating the dog walkers he encounters. Several other people I met today said they’ve encountered him before and reported he was just as angry and confrontational as he was today.
Nature vs. Nitwit
Over the last few weeks, Scout (a.k.a. The Dog) seems to have become obsessed with ground squirrels that apparently infest Chavez Park, the place we take him to run. He’ll stop near a fresh burrow and give it the once over; every once in a while, he’ll dive nose first into one and start digging furiously. So far as we can tell, he’s never come close to catching anything; most of the time I figure the squirrels are looking out from some other entrance to their burrows and having a good laugh.
But maybe not.
The other day, we saw a great blue heron in the meadow we cross on our way to the off-leash area. Scout was so fixated on squirrel world that even when we were within 100 feet of the bird, which stood about 30 or 36 inches tall, he was oblivious to it. We gave it a wide berth, in any case. When we came back about 40 minutes later, it was still there, though it had moved about 100 yards or so across the grass. It wasn’t until I stopped and watched that I realized it, too, was hunting whatever is in those burrows (Scout still was paying no attention, though I put him on the leash so he wouldn’t go charging after the heron once he spotted it). It struck twice while I watched, plunging its beak into the burrow holes, but it came up with nothing.
After a while, a couple stopped and watched what was going on. The guy said he’d seen herons catch squirrels in the field–impale them on their beaks, then sort of toss them up and swallow them. “A couple of times I’ve seen herons out their with their beaks completely red with blood.” I think the herons have a couple advantages over Scout and his like: they’re stealthier, they strike suddenly, and if they hit their target, there’s no fight.
Not sure if the bird above is the same one we saw the other day or not (didn’t have my camera with me then). It was in the same place, anyway (for a local reference in the picture: that big white building that appears above the telephone pole in the middle distance is the Claremont Hotel, which is probably three miles in a straight line from where we were; the high point in the hills beyond is Vollmer Peak Round Top, about 1,900 1,760 feet above sea level and about six eight miles away).
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Random Sky Drama
On a walk with the usual suspects in Chavez Park this evening. Above: Clouds running over the ridge between the Marin Headlands and Mount Tamalpais (Angel Island is silhouetted in the middle distance). Below: Mount Tam from the Chavez Park meadow (left) and from one of the trails in the off-leash dog zone (right). Over the past 10 years, we probably went down to this park about once or twice a year; most of my walking and local outdoor recreatin’ has been done in the other direction, up in the hills. Since The Dog arrived among us in May, we’ve probably been down there three or four times a week on average. The view is different every day.
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Dump
I don’t have the exact statistics at the ready, but something like 35 or 40 percent of San Francisco Bay has been filled since the region was settled in the 19th century. About 95 percent of the wetlands surrounding the bay have been diked, drained and developed. Berkeley’s most visible modern contribution to the great, undeclared bay transformation project is its old garbage dump, part of a complex of old fill projects that stretch more than a mile along the waterfront and extend more than three-quarters of a mile into the water from the old shoreline (which itself is at least one-third of a mile west of where the European interlopers found the water’s edge).
The dump was a great place. Noisy, smelly, full of garbage and construction debris, seagulls and big graders. I worked as a construction laborer for a while after I moved out here, and every once in a while was sent on a dump run to unload a pile of old shingles or lumber or fractured plaster and splintered lath. A cashier took your fee, then sent you on your way, out the potholed road to the mountain of discards. A worker out there directed you to the edge of a live pit, and you added your stuff to all the household garbage, old tires, unwanted furniture, lawn clippings and miscellaneous unidentifiable sweepings from all over the city. I would always feel a little exhilarated to see it all and to throw mine, whatever it was, in on top. The graders and other heavy equipment were constantly at work crushing the trash, packing it down, making room for more; once a pit was full, it would be covered with dirt and the garbage would go to a new one. The old pits would settle over time and be reopened to take on more refuse. This went on for years.
About two decades ago, the dump reached capacity. So much garbage had been packed in that at one point it had been squeezed out in the Bay under the dikes built to contain the fill. The city built a “transfer station,” a big open warehouse-like structure where all the trash would go to be sorted and re-transported, if it wasn’t recyclable or compostable. The old dump was covered with dirt, lots of dirt. Part of it was landscaped and turned into a manicured city park and named after Cesar Chavez, the late farmworkers’ labor leader. Most of the fill was planted with native flora and studded with pipes to vent the methane and other gases from the old buried trash. Roads and trails were built. Part of the semi-wild-looking area at the center of the old dump has been opened up as a park for off-leash canines.
So, at the end of this environmentally unfriendly epic (a story line shared with many great city parks, like Grant Park in Chicago), we’ve got a beautiful piece of waterfront property with staggering views across the bay and back toward the hills, filled with bike riders, hikers, dog-walkers, picnickers and kite-flyers. Our garbage? It’s headed someplace else, where it’s unlikely to grow into something similar.
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