Once Begun is Not Half Done

Day One:  January 26, 2009

Route: From the end of the Berkeley Pier, over the fairly new pedestrian bridge across I-80 to a seat outside Bette’s Ocean View Diner on Fourth Street for a latte.  Mileage: 2.6 miles.  Fauna and Flora:  Pelagic cormorant, western gull, loon, willets, scaup, canvasback, horned grebe.  Logistics:  One foot in front of the other in disbelief that this might be the beginning.  Took the #9 bus from Sixth and University back to my car at the Pier.

My first day of walking began with no intention of doing so.  We were visiting the Bay Area to be with my ailing father-in-law.  I had only intended to look for winter birds on the Berkeley Pier on a beautiful clear day.  After reaching the end of the pier I realized that this would be the spot where my walk would begin.  I had considered starting at the Emeryville mudflats, or even Kaiser hospital where I was born, but once at the end of this ‘embarkation device’ it was clear that this would be the perfect place to begin the walk.  This was a place that, like my life, was lucky enough to be embraced by the waters of the San Francisco Bay.

The striking thing about this walk –especially in these early stretches through a landscape so familiar as to seem rutted by the number of crossings I have made of it – is that the thoughts are a jumble of reminiscence with no sequence.  Each step conjures a personal history that follows no timeline.  Here was the place I saw weird fish being hauled up when I was a kid ­– fascinating enough for me to overcome my shyness and speak to any successful fisherman to ask what was in the bucket.  Here are the concrete wind-breaking benches, the cold and hard high-backed loveseats that made for private kissing booths in high school in the seventies.  Here is the marina where I fell off the dock at the age of six.  I can remember the gold green light full of specks and algae with pilings looming further away.  I want to believe there were fish. It seemed a long pleasant time in this underworld until my mildly panicked father yanked me back by my ponytail and landed me on the dock.

Memory shouts loud here and drowns out whatever new message the land might be sending me.  This spot near the restaurant was the scene of an armed robbery in a friend’s VW bug.  That green lush park there used to be the dump, its contours assisted by family contributions over many years.  In order for this account of my walk to not range into an autobiography of great length and stupefying minutiae I need to enforce some kind of structure.

I will try to stick to a path.  I will describe what I see on the walk that day, and add one or two stories that sum up my relationship to each of the major biotic zones that I am passing.  The whole point for me is to try to pin down those experiences that earned me my early nickname of Nature Girl.  I hope to trace the evolution of an addiction to witnessing and bearing witness for other fascinating forms of life that co-exist on the fringes of human drama.

How to Build a Spider Web

After strolling the pier full of families, friends, lovers, and unsuccessful fisher people I veered up over a landfill landscape planted long ago with Monterey pine and non-native shrubbery, which of late has been enhanced with native species.  I come off this fake hill to view the Shorebird Park Nature Center’s straw bale headquarters and original temporary classroom where for two years I helped with marine science programs for Bay Area kids.   

I found the Shorebird PNC’s creator Patty Donald striding back from her lunch break. Tall and thin with a stride that doesn’t need to hurry because it is so long, her wiry blonde hair gives the appearance of being windblown even when there’s not a molecule of air moving. This is a woman whose endless energy is hidden by her friendly and smiling calm personality.  She is the person who taught me all I know about effective teaching.  Definitely.  

I had read about Patty Donald’s marine science courses for California school kids in a newspaper article that promoted her Bay Interpretive Training Program for volunteers.  Not only had Patty founded the Marine Science Center on Berkeley’s land left over from the auto ferry that shut down when the Bay Bridge opened but she had developed a killer docent training program that taught her volunteers more than just facts. 

I signed up because at that point I had a high opinion of my factual knowledge of the Bay.  I had taken umpteen marine biology courses at Cal State Hayward.  I had a job gathering mud samples from a Hayward marsh, cataloguing the denizens of the muck, (how many microscopic worm parts can you identify in a day?) and had had the privilege of holding a salt marsh harvest mouse when surveying for them in a Martinez marsh edge as part of my job assisting with the preparation of Environmental Impact Reports for a consulting company.  I had so much to offer kids I thought. I was all prepared to just let my knowledge rip, deluging the young impressionables with the facts they were undoubtedly looking for.

In Donald’s formal volunteer program I learned quickly and with the gentlest guidance from Patty that my knowledge meant nothing if rotely administered in a lecture format. Through this incredible training program I learned to listen and question and wait and respect the child’s mind as well as impart a few engaging facts.  We were given the task of preparing a small informative lecture to children in under fifteen minutes. I decided to teach how a spider makes a web.  I went way over, got tangled up in my demonstration device of two sticks stuck in foam, and I am still working on this presentation to this day.  My daughter made me a set of permanent web branches in ceramic that I treasure but cannot master.  

I asked Patty how she and the program were faring.  She had recently won a local Jefferson Award for community service having been nominated by a recent crop of stunned and grateful graduates of her training.   She spoke of the numerous difficulties that emerged when the Cosco Busan spilled its oil in 2007.  In addition to the death of hundreds of diving birds, shorebirds and gulls and the fouling that required the hand cleaning of stones in the Center’s beaches she spoke of the hardship of fielding volunteers’ emotional anger and grief.  Not a pretty sight for sure, and one that I cried about in Washington state, far from the grim reality. 

To this day I use the wisdom gained from this program, but not directly in teaching.  I have more used my experience to help me fashion effective, richer, loyalty-building programs that reward volunteers.  I cannot say enough good about this program and its creator. 

Ah the Delights of Berkeley

After leaving Patty’s office I strolled along the undulating ribs of the former auto ferry approach, rounding a crescent of beach that was speckled with shell and long-legged willets, and crossed for the first time the “new” pedestrian bridge across the Nimitz freeway.  The structure is elegant, the two statues at either end way over the top in self-congratulating energy.  Rather like Berkeley itself and thus fitting. Then down past Aquatic Park, this isolated-from-its-mother bit of bay that can have the best birding on the planet in the winter.  Up past the Sake plant (that I still have never visited) to Fourth Street and its village of luxury and edibles for a latte.  Afterwards I walked up to Sixth and University and caught the bus back to my car at the pier.  I supposed it unrealistic to imagine each day of my walk being so easy on the feet.