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.

Yesterday morning I stopped at a small shop in North Berkeley to pick up some office supplies. When I went up to the counter to pay, a middle-aged Asian man (who I think is one of the store’s owners) and a young white woman were ringing up sales and a handful of customers was waiting to pay. The woman was handling the transaction of an older man who stood out from the pack because he was wearing a sportsman’s cap and camo fatigues. This is not the customary mode of dress in Berkeley, although it’s not unusual once you get a bit further afield from urban density.

That would have been the end of it, except that I happened to catch the tail end of his casual, cheerful chatter with the saleswoman:

“… if he got attacked by three black guys over six feet tall, the only thing that would bother him would be if one of them got away.”

With that, he completed paying for his purchase and walked out of the store. There was a beat, during which “Well, I guess some people aren’t worried about political correctness” ran through my head, then the saleswoman said something like “Can you believe that?” and everybody started talking at once. The customers were a typically diverse Berkeley group (although no one there was black). I hadn’t caught the first part of the conversation, so I didn’t know who or what the man was referring to (I would have noticed if he’d had a dog with him). But it didn’t really matter. It was such an unusual thing to hear spoken within the city limits that everyone was busy making sure we’d all heard the same thing.

A woman who looked like a fellow Baby Boomer pointed out that the man was of sufficiently elder status that he probably just didn’t realize how his words came across. My reaction was that it said something positive about Berkeley in this day and age that someone could feel free to speak his mind in such an uninhibited fashion while seeming blithely unaware of the cultural context. The city prides itself on being the home of the Free Speech Movement, but an increasing amount of intolerance for differing points of view has crept in over the years, some of it quite ugly in tone. The various witnesses to the incident seemed to agree that the man had been speaking metaphorically rather than pejoratively and didn’t intend any offense. Even though I had been startled by his language, I found it rather refreshing that a random group of diverse individuals was quickly able to reach a mature, rational conclusion about its intended meaning.

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…