The Golden Gait

Day Two: January 29, 2009

Route: From Sixth St. and University Ave in Berkeley, to Sixth St. and Cedar, and then zigzagging one block north and two blocks east repeatedly, past Solano Ave, into Albany briefly, up through the Thousand Oaks district, to the Arlington and into Kensington, taking still-extant childhood-known footpaths to the Reservoir on Grizzly Peak, and catching The Memory Trail in Tilden Park to the Little Farm.

Mileage: 5.5 miles.

Fauna and Flora: Crows, brown towhees, robins, scrub jays, verbena bonariensis, magnolia, coast live oak, house finches, squirrel and their nests in sweetgums, yellow-rumped warbler, oak titmouse, Bewick’s wren, dark-eyed junco, chestnut-backed chickadee, fox sparrow, ruby-crowned kinglet, raven, Stellar’s jays, varied thrush, bufflehead, hermit thrush, and wrentit.

Logistics: From Little Farm I walked back up to Grizzly Peak and Spruce St. and took the #67 down the hill, transferred to a #51 back down University to my car.

This walk blew away my sense of scale completely. I had grown up in Kensington looking at the view of the Bay every day. The Berkeley pier was usually distantly visible and I was convinced from that vantage point that it was very far away. I imagined this day’s walk would take many hours and require a break from the exhaustion. In less than three hours it was completed, easily, and I realize that I had a kid’s memory of the hills. In some experiential corner of my brain I still carried a kid’s reluctance to walk up hill, a kid’s desire to walk down to the Variety store for candy but the dread of the hellish punishment of walking back up to my home. The candy itself never made it all the way home and was consumed as fuel and consolation for the steep climb. This time it was easy and required no sweets.

All along the walk I cannot help but notice beautiful gardens. I see a garden with Verbena bonariensis, a five-foot tall purple pom-pom on a spindly stalk. I remember in the mid-nineties seeing some at a friend’s house, a place of good taste, strappy tenax plants in pots, and colored concrete pavers. Up until that point I had not realized that there were avant-gardens that I could not keep up with. I had been asleep at the wheel with my old-fashioned rockrose, gaura, Mexican primrose and ceanothus. Today I am sure that Verbena is as passé as my mother’s era of juniper, ivy and Mexican sage. Has anyone else noted that miniature agapanthus is IN but full-size agapanthus is archaic? One could probably date the age of the occupants of houses by what era of floral style their gardens hold.

Bird life is rich by any standard in these pleasant gardens. Mature trees and many coast live oak crowd the Berkeley flats and hills. I see a flock of crows and remember having wished to make a study of their lives but never getting around to it. As I climb further up in the hills Albany Knob accompanies me off my left shoulder. There I saw my first monarch butterfly roosts in eucalyptus. Beyond I can see the bay again, the shabby fringe of manite (Patty Donald’s word for the shore’s ubiquitous concrete chunks) that believes itself worthy to hold the water back. I love this semi-natural half-real, half-manufactured ecotone, the Emeryville mudflat sculptures of yore and the Albany Bulb homeless architecture and simpatico free art park amidst fennel, rebar and coyote brush.

There are incredible specimens of tree in the Thousand Oaks district of north Berkeley. One live oak tree on Contra Costa Avenue has limbs so huge and improbably aloft that my family referred to it as the Wow tree. Its arms were muscled brazos, its roots flowed over sidewalks and into the street (another tendency of city-planted camphor trees that I love) and its trunk was beyond belief. An appreciative and lucky neighbor had gone to the expense of hiring an arborist to wire up its many limbs in support, and the city had painted the opposite curb red in order that parked cars there would never force other cars to move too close to the tree. It should win an award, or one of those plaited massive ropes that are bestowed on heritage trees in Japan. I feel privileged to have seen this tree alive in my lifetime.

This district is graced with stone as well. Wonderfully placed lichen-laced climbing rocks (like Indian Rock) seem to personify solidity and eternity; they proclaim an ancient aesthetic that makes you breathe more deeply. They are in fact ‘outliers’ a term that gives them the role of mere pebbles thrown up and strewn by a massive landslide a thousand years ago that fell from Grizzly Peak down to the flats. This area is still an active landslide as can be evidenced in all of the cracked and twisted foundations and facades of the houses built here in the early 20^th century. This is not bedrock and earthquake worriers should take note.

This day's walk is riddled with memory triggers. It skirts around friends’ houses, my daughter’s schools, the stroller and latte mecca of Solano “The Good Life” Avenue, past my sister’s first room away from home, past our own north Berkeley home of many years on The Alameda, up to Kensington.

Kensington! The memory parade is dense here as this was the stage upon which I tread–the place where I always walked. I was little and afoot. This day I had to keep in check my tendency to remember extreme forms of family dysfunction that I witnessed along these narrow dull-housed streets. I can remember with some effort the normal families that were all around, the wholesome ones, but I have to admit to remembering more vividly the stories from the households bedeviled by drink, neglect and abuse. But that’s for a different path’s description.

In what could be a contribution chapter to a sociological analysis tome called “The Last Childhood” my cohorts and I in our Kensington era were allowed to run free. We did not know the term play-date. We watched television only when it was dark. This is where I noticed nature –the argentine ants on a crushed snail, an ornamental cherry tree snowing petals that met ash rising from our backyard incinerator, an arboreal salamander in a hole with automatic sprinkler faucet controls, huge maples that were street trees, non-native, but who knew. I walked often to school along the Lake Drive Trail unaccompanied except by the aroma of warm coyote brush and mugwort, the clicking of dry poison hemlock stalks and the greeting of Sandy the horse standing in what I considered a miracle of ruralness, a pasture. On days after school when no activity was pressing I would walk, often with friends, sometimes alone, down into Wildcat Canyon, thrilling especially when the old bridge that was poorly closed off still stood, back home past Jewel Lake and up to Grizzly Peak. It was a fantastic time and twenty-five years later not one I would allow my own daughter. I lost my gumption when it came to her safety, which I fear may have only been the result of an increased reporting of danger coupled with the atomized neighborhoods that the East Bay and working parents produce. You know the story.

One of the greatest things about this childhood time was the access. Kids knew every backyard, every route. We were never told to leave because we were rarely seen going up and over fences, into trees, down into the interstices between properties. There were routes that never touched a front yard or a road. There were routes that hardly touched ground. Hide and Seek led to such an intimate knowledge of every hollow and gap that we were like animals, safe yet wary we would be found. It was physical. I had noticed while walking this day, up and up, past my home, that one does an urban walk, flowing as fast as possible across streets, into crosswalks, timing strides to make lights, looking ever for the car that might kill you. There are many moods of walking, many rhythms, but I think the child gait was by far the best. It made its progress in a series of elevation changes and detours and regroupings and it was never late.

I take my fifty-year-old self (well still forty-nine yet) up to Grizzly Peak again, past the now-roofed reservoir with its delightful frozen mid-flight seagulls to Wildcat Canyon Road, and shortly thereafter the Memory Trail, which goes along the hill to the Little Farm and the Nature Area of Tilden Park. Memory trail is well named in this instance, a dirt tour route of memories of joy–The Pony Rides, the Little Farm, the raccoons feeding in the picnic leftovers at dusk, here I collected clay, there Sharon and Annie and I had our hollowed out hobbit holes in trees slipping into Wildcat Creek. This was my playground. And it has hardly changed. Lucky it.