The oil spilled into San Francisco one week ago and even today, even with all our news vectors and sources and RSS feeds, we still don't seem to be able to wrap our minds around it. Baker Beach, where I walk each morning, remains closed. The sign announcing its closure has a peculiar old-timey look to it. White wood stencilled with words about the oil spill. This being a former Army base, it should come as no surprise that there are Army-letter-looking stencils lying around, waiting for the day an impromptu sign needs to be made.
So. The daily walk now leads east-north-east, towards the cemetery, a national cemetery, a place meant to ensure that these people would not have died in vain. The walk moves me away from the Pacific and closer to the site of the spill. Spill: to flow or allow something to flow from a container. Yes: Event of one week ago matches dictionary. Yes: Container ship gashed along a bumper on the Bay Bridge and then oil flowed.
And now, yes, and now the birds die. I try not to think about this and feel this, the idea that while I sit here with fingers lightly tapping keys, less than a half mile away, in the cold dark, some shag or gull feels the deep cold of oil coated feathers. Feels cold, then slowly gives into this wave of fatigue, all the while wondering, what can all this be?
What to do while we wait to hear that the beach is open or that they need more help -- there remains endless cheer herein with the news there are too many volunteers at present -- what to do? Well, the decision was reached this is no time for long, blond hair. If the birds found themselves reduced to the deep brown of bunker oil, I would join them. I wandered down to my friend Patrick Richards salon, where he ageeably chopped my hair short and then coated the blond with brown dye. I no longer look precisely like me. I am no longer me, and I am no longer me because the place where I need and desire to walk has been taken away. What I mean to say is just this: I think we each of us are defined and created by the landscape in which we live. When we stop responding to the demands of our current reality in a specific place, we cease to be fully human and alive.
As example, I think of my friend Ed, who lives in a town called Orinda. In Orinda, people place lights under their front-yard trees and illuminate their yards at night, next to their illuminated homes, gestures wherein one begins to feel the lure of the Taj Mahal after sunset. But what do these lighted trees mean for the birds who try to make sense of 24-hour light pollution? Does this cross their minds? When the sun rises, and the tree-lights fade in comparison, the homes sit and stare at the few walkers on the street. Walking in Orinda is an exercise in jumping the hell out of the way of ginormous black SUVs roaring towards the clogged freeway. Walking in Orinda is something people choose not to do, not in the sunlight, and certainly not at night. So who are the tree lights for? What do they mean in the context of placing ourselves in a landscape? How is this at all connected to the oil spill?
Spill: To come from a building or other confined space in large numbers. I invite the people of Illuminated Tree World to spill into the streets, to cut their hair, to lay down in the dusty road and see who can make the first angel.
Meanwhile, my hair remains chocolate brown and short. Meanwhile, the beach is closed. Meanwhile, as a poet once wrote, the real world goes like this: Each day we awaken to the same white light creeping into our eucaluptus stand, the banana slugs remain eager to gnaw the skin on my palm given half a chance, and our local crow family dives and alights in the silver trees. Meanwhile it is yet a beautiful day.
When you drag a comb through your hair today, think of the birds of the near-shore Pacific. Hope they fly clear when word gets out something evil this way comes.
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