The Pt.  Isabel Dog Park lies right off two freeways that run along the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay and is tucked behind a giant Cosco warehouse store, but once you set foot on its 23 acres of grassy meadow, gently rising hills and overgrown fields, the feeling of entering another world is unmistakable. The views of the bay and the Golden Gate bridge are stellar, but the real magic comes from the fact that humans are not the dominant species there. Leaving the parking lot, civilization’s last outposts are Mudpuppies’ Tub & Scrub (a shop and dog-washing service) and the Sit & Stay Café, where people hang out enjoying breakfast or lunch or anything in between as their animals run wild. Beyond that, the dogs take over. On any given day, hundreds of them will be there with their persons, walking, racing, swimming, chasing balls or sticks, and digging for the plucky little gophers who throw dirt at their noses (effectively slamming the front doors of their burrows). It’s easy to tune into a wavelength of wild energy, as infinite combinations of dogs hook up and communicate their needs and desires. It’s so large that there’s rarely any altercation of note, simply because everyone has space to do their own thing, nobody gets cornered, and the vast majority of beings present has an innate sense of fairness. I find myself wishing sometimes that human society could evolve to display such civilized forms of social interaction and conflict resolution.

My father grew up in Berkeley, and my brothers and I spent lots of time there with our grandparents while we were growing up. My grandfather was from the Deep South, and he instilled the finer points of Southern culture into us from our earliest years. I could sing “Dixie” practically by the time I could talk, and our family photo albums are filled with pictures of little tow-headed boys struggling to aim rifles taller than they were, practicing up for induction into the wide world of hunting.

At the same time, Berkeley and San Francisco were Ground Zero for the latest innovations of California culture: from the beat poets to the hippies to radical environmentalists and counter-culture spiritual leaders, the edge of human potential was being pushed on numerous fronts. It was an incredibly exciting and dynamic time to be alive.

I grew up associating the stability and strength of my grandfather’s Old World conservatism with the values and principles of the counter-culture and the environmental movement. In my mind, there was no contradiction between the two. In a simpler era, this fusion might have yielded real progress on the pressing issues of the day. Instead, something ran off track a generation or so ago, and wheels have been spinning fruitlessly ever since.

From a green perspective, the current global economic slowdown offers a historic opportunity to retool the machinery of progress and set it back on the path to a better future. There’s nothing materially holding us back. I keep coming back to the idea that in crisis there is opportunity. We should be able to find our way out of the ditch if we openly and honestly examine and affirm the commonality of our interests across the artificial constructs that keep us divided.

From The Rhyme of the Southern Rivers: With Notes Historical, Traditional, Geographical, Etymological, etc. by Martin V. Moore, published in 1897.

NOTES ON THE RIVERS OF VIRGINIA

2. SHENANDOAH. This is really the Shannon-Doah, or Shannon-Toah, the final term “Toah” a well-known Indian word for river. The word has three forms in different dialects: It is found as “Taquah,” as “Toah,” and more briefly as “Tau.” The writing as “Ta-ho” is precisely the same original word. It shows origin in the germ-words “Te” and “owa,” or “au,” water, its literal significance that of deep water. All the different forms are found in the names of deep waters in various parts of the world. As Ta-ho, it is the native name of a deep lake in California. In Spain there is a deep river having the prehistoric title Ta-ho, the word appearing in the modern Spanish idiom as Tagus. In China the writing in English letters is Tai. The oldest form of the word is in the Hebrew in the writing Toah, in the name of a water, Neph-Toah. A term for water simply is found in many languages in the English writings “Owa,” “Oah,” “Owee,” “Au-wa,” and “A-haw.” The old Teutonic form of the word is “A-wa,” or in the Roman idiom “A-qua.” This, in a composite with the root-word for the deep “Te,” gives the form of the term as “Taqua” seen in the native names of many of the deep waters of America. Other forms of this word will be referred to in Note 61. The term “Shannon” in the Virginia name appears to be of more modern origin. It corresponds to the old Irish word Shannon, the name of a river in Ireland.

In loving memory of Dr. Jean Allen Battle.

This is the time of year when I have always most strongly felt magic seeping out of the environment. California’s seasonal shifts are subtle, but quite tangible. On some days, the air is filled with an enchanting freshness and vitality that hint at new life and energy beginning to stir just beneath the seemingly still surface of the natural world. There’s a feeling of having emerged from a burrow and being poised at the top of a long, slippery grass slope, waiting to be swept away into the explosion of Spring.

I moved a few months ago to a place that has a nice amount of space both indoors and out — not too big and not too small (if I can’t set up a sustainable way of life here, then it’s hopeless). I’m still getting settled and there’s been lots of rain recently, so I haven’t spent much time out in the garden. But it’s a beautiful setting, and I look forward to watching its secrets unfold. It has fed me from the day I was handed the keys, from daily tangerine juice the first several weeks to dandelion greens for my vegetable-herb elixirs to the oranges and Meyer lemons that are just now beginning to ripen.

There’s a plum tree or two, along with a shrub that I think is a Mexican lime. But two of the trees are a mystery. Somebody thought the one in the back was an apple tree (which would make me very happy). The tree on the side of the house had leaves in late fall that resembled peach leaves, but someone thought they were too big, and it may not be a fruit tree at all. I was advised to just water and fertilize it and see what crops up, which about matches my skill level — I know the basics of organic gardening, but have always been too busy with other things to properly tend a garden over an extended period. I haven’t had time to peruse the Sunset Western Garden Book to see if I can dredge up clues, and, anyway, there’s no rush. Mother Nature will reveal all in due course. In the meantime, I’ve dubbed them “Mystery Tree A”:

and “Mystery Tree B”:

At a Back To School Night about five or six years ago, Berkeley High’s Advanced Placement Chemistry teacher dejectedly explained to a classroom full of parents that the school’s renowned science program had been pared to the bone, forcing labs to be held outside of regular school hours if the quality of instruction were to have any hope of being maintained. His wife had recently given birth to their second child, and I hoped his depression was due to sleep deprivation piled on top of having to work longer hours for no pay increase. The good news is that he’s still at the job (having little mouths to feed will do that). The bad news, according to this recent article from the LA Times, is that a situation that seemed at crisis proportions back then hasn’t improved in the intervening years.

If I were to wade onto the minefield of this subject for a more in-depth look, here are some hot spots I would examine: Read more…

A prayer from the Yokuts Indian tribe of central California.

My words are tied in one with the great mountains
With the great rocks, with the great trees
At one with my body and my heart
Will you all help me with supernatural power
And you, Day, and you, Night
All of you see me one with this world

A town hall meeting on repairing California’s dysfunctional government was held the other night in the peaceful valley where I live. The state senator who ran the meeting and the panelists he had assembled were all smart, knowledgeable, down-to-earth and articulate about the systemic roots of the problems we collectively face. I have lived in California all my life, and it was instructive to have empirical data laid out supporting my perception that, in a relatively short amount of time, we’ve degenerated from top-tier status among the 50 states to appallingly low ranking in critical areas such as public education. The crowd that turned out on a rainy night to participate in the discussion ranged from rednecks to lefties, united in a desire to constructively work to fix what’s broken.

California has long had a reputation as an experimental cauldron where new ideas get tested. When they’re successful, they tend to radiate out across the country for widespread implementation (when they’re not, they either retreat into the shadows or get added into the ongoing mythology about Left Coast Loonies). The idea coming into vogue now is that, after all the pyrotechnics and questionable ethics that have dominated American politics in recent decades, real change is going to have to come from the ground up. Read more…

Several months ago I ran out of cinnamon, which I like to put in my hot cereal. When I went to the store to replace it, I found that a popular brand has stopped calling it plain old cinnamon. Now, it’s “Saigon Cinnamon.” The label reads “We’ve searched the world to gather the most exotic, premium herbs and spices so you can create an authentic flavor adventure all your own.”

“Was it worth it?” immediately popped into my mind — tongue-in-cheek, of course, because the no-brainer answer is “No.” Forty years ago, my brother Bill had recently returned from Vietnam. He spent the rest of his life plagued by nightmares and flashbacks. When he died of a sudden heart attack three years ago, I had to settle his affairs and sort things out with my niece and nephew, who were like a pair of wild animals living down in the LA urban jungle.

My nephew broke his collarbone in a motorcycle accident a few months ago. He called me from some emergency room down in the desert near the Arizona border, and the combination of tough guy stoicism with a bid for sympathy really tugged at my heartstrings. When I called to follow up with him a week or so later, I asked him what kind of health insurance coverage he had and he sheepishly responded that he didn’t have any. I read him the riot act about getting his butt into Kaiser ASAP and lining up a basic policy. It was the starkest reminder to date that the surrogate parent role I was thrust into after Bill died was not a temporary affair.

But hey—maybe forty years from now “Iraq Cumin” will be on the market. Will everyone then be grateful to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for their keen prescience about the urgent needs of American society? Somehow, I doubt it. I’ll give the history profession greater credit than that. There are many questions that invite significantly better scrutiny than they’ve received to date, starting with how the hell, after everything that went down during the Vietnam era, was the fiasco in Iraq ever allowed to happen?

My late brother Bill was a born storyteller with a flair for the exotic. Filled with restless energy, he was instrumental in shaping my earliest impressions of magic and darkness. Throughout childhood, he chafed at the confines of small-town suburbia, and at sixteen he ran away from home to join the Army. He volunteered to become a paratrooper and go to Vietnam, and he spent two years there in the late ‘60s.

Maybe he was searching for adventure and excitement—I don’t know, I never asked. Right out of the starting gate into adult life, we ran in different directions—me to the left and him to the right. It wasn’t until mid-life that we struck up a friendship and found out how similar our world views were. But I think it’s safe to say he got more than he bargained for at the tender age of nineteen.

In 1999, after thirty years of struggling to lead a conventional life down in the LA urban jungle, he decided to cut the shackles binding him to civilized society and set out in search of adventure.

For a few years, he had a wild and exuberant time. Read more…