This piece was featured first on Jul 23 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.
This is my bench. Technically, it’s not my bench, but it’s my bench. You can find it high up in Strawberry Canyon along the Upper Jordan Fire Trail, right where the trail flattens out, underneath the peak that’s called Spiral Knob.
It’s exactly four miles away from my house, and I run up to that bench as often as I can. My route takes me up through Berkeley, past Nabolom the anarchist pizza place, through a beautiful little neighborhood up to Cal’s stadium, which is situated over the top of the Hayward Fault. I love the strange poetry of the geology, as described by Robert Charbonneau, who wrote a watershed management plan in 1987. “The upper Strawberry Creek watershed consists mostly of the geologically very recently uplifted Berkeley Hills which hinge along the northwest trending Hayward fault zone,” he writes. “In general, the steep hill area is unstable and bedrock is close.” Bedrock is close.
But the picture is more confusing than one simple fault. There’s another hiding there, too, the Wildcat, which has a little offshoot that runs nearly under the bench. All these faults have wildly deformed the hills. Here, not only is bedrock close, but the rocks “are steeply sloping to vertical and the time sequence is thus commonly horizontal rather than lying in vertical succession.”
I like to stare at the wobbly lines of rocks that form the hillside. They are eroding to nothing. Or no, that’s not right. If I really look, I can see they are eroding into habitat. Paintbrush is happy up here. Sticky monkey-flowers, too. At the base of my bench, where the hills are turning into simple rocks, there are tiny poppies blooming in the thin soil.
Many native flowers are happy up here, though I know that the flora of this place has been changed immeasurably by the eras of colonization. Just down the hill from the bench, Spanish explorers camped next to the creek. “We went on for a league more to the northwest and halted on the bank of an arroyo which is about one league from the parallel of the gate,” their diarist Juan Crespi wrote on March 27, 1772. “As soon as we stopped the soldiers succeeded in killing a bear, so that they had fresh meat to go on with… On the plain we saw many lilies and an abundance of very leafy sweet marjoram.” They reported seeing no “heathens” and few signs of any other people, and that they were harassed horribly by mosquitoes.
There are no bears in the woods. (We killed them all.) No mosquitoes really, either. I wish we knew so much more about what the people who stewarded this land for generations knew and thought of this place, rather than the observations of interlopers who rarely had any idea what they were looking at. And yet, it is something to know that on a certain day of a certain year, on this same creek, someone observed the Golden Gate and Mt Tam, just as I did today.
I’ve been reading a strange Swedish book called Tangled Roots by Maria Turtschaninoff, which tells the story of a plot of land in rural Finland over four centuries. It’s composed of dozens of tiny stories about how that place came to be. It’s so rich, strange, and mysterious. Even in the old world, time creates such unknowable losses and vast absences.
At one point, my bench started to totter. The work that had been done to keep it flush to the trail had been lost and it was dangerously tippy. Someone, someones, some spirits of the canyon added some reinforcing rocks around the legs and voila, it was steady once again. I know I’m not the only one who loves this bench.
Strawberry Canyon is the canyon that taught me about Bay Area canyons. I’ve watched it go through every season for years and years. I know when it will feel hot and when it will feel cool. I know how to place my feet along its rocky paths. One run, for reasons I don’t understand, the entire trail was filled with swirls of variable checkerspot butterflies. They dipped in and out of my slipstream, each flapping its own beautiful contribution to the chaos of the world.
Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum
My Tipline
- The SF Art Book Fair is one of the very best events on the Bay Area calendar. Go go go!
- But if you can’t, maybe go to the latest Winslow House Project Open House.
- A puppet making workshop. A bird puppet making workshop. A bird puppet making workshop in Olema. That’s dreamy.
- Love this programming at the Berkeley library: Octavia’s Legacy. (Octavia Butler, of course)
My Picks
NEWS
Alameda County Sells Black Housing Developers Abandoned East Oakland Lot for $10
Intriguing model!
LIVE
Me and Samin, Live in Oakland
Next week! It’s gonna be fuuuun, I promise.
ART
Nvidia Founder Pledges $75 Million to Replace CCA With Another Art School
Huh. Something to watch here.