Walkin' with Joaquin

There was some bad news about the fountain at this months FOJMP meeting: it's busted; another part failed. "But on the bright side," president and Park Sprite Dale Risden reported, "there are tadpoles in the fountain." I grabbed a friend who was long overdue for a walk with the me a.k.a. The Writer (and transitively Joaquin) and climbed the stairs. She gushed over the landscaping and I bragged on the volunteers who plant, prune and weed with such consistent love and care.  And there, at the top of the stairs, were the wee wiggling wonders, their legs sprouted and kicking them upwards for gulps of air with round mouths. Hundreds of them! How these babies appear in concrete ponds amazes me. I hear rumors that they are tree frogs and live near the cascade, singing their hearts out for summer sunsets. Before the plumbing was put in on this hill, were there frogs? If not, how did they get here?  there is a super tiny frog floating on this wood chip, checking out that

There are some contradictory facts about the Fremont monument, a square stone structure off the theater parking lot.  It was built to mark the spot that an adventurer first saw a sunset over the bay, but it's now surrounded by trees on all sides, so the best view is really of a nearby picnic table. It was built by a meditative poet who guided the country's gaze inwards, but it's really  one of the best places in Oakland for a new kind of self-reflection, the selfie. It was built by a white man who sympathized with native people,  to honor a general who partook in their genocide. Huh? This is one of the core controversies about Joaquin Miller that  Liam O’Donoghue  explored in his well-researched and wonderfully listenable   100th episode of East Bay Yesterday, “Who Was Joaquin Miller?” There are many others, such as whether or not Miller deserves his acclaim (he does), whether or not he was a bad husband and parent (he was and wasn't), and whether or not he was a big f

Since the “cyclone bomb” in January , the rain has continued. March came in like a lion and seems to be going out like a lion as well, with pouring rain and power outages and c-c-c-cold temperatures that make the clueless say "I thought it was supposed to be global warming." The giant, mature trees that are now coming down now with heartbreaking frequency all over town—on highways, city streets, back yards, buildings—all over the Bay Area, are coming down for a reason. Stressed by drought, unable to withstand the rare 80mph winds, many are also at the ends of their life spans. It's hard to imagine this land without them all, but when they were founded, San Francisco and surrounds were treeless, rocky places. There was a tree-planting frenzy in the latter part of the 19th century, a cultural dream of a gentler future. I was delighted to discover, recently, that California’s Arbor Day was started by none other than our own passionate poet and planters, Joaquin Miller! He, I

As part of Oakland's citywide day of service, the Berkeley Branch of the California Writers Club is again hosting an Earth-day writing event at Joaquin Miller Park. Join the "Wolf Pack" writers of the California Writers Club in putting pen to paper and "Howling at the Moonshot." As the weather takes its revenge, we need to continue to inspire and guide others in new ways to forge a new relationship to nature—which always wins.  If you are working on an earth, nature, or climate-related project, please join us at the Ranger Station in Joaquin Miller Park for a few hours of hard work. We'll have lots of prompts and ideas available, too. Write your letters, articles, op-eds, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama, science fiction or cli-fi. Come any time during this 3-hour focused writing window. Write indoors or find a spot outside to focus on your words. When we're ready to put our pens down we'll go outside to share our works, for our second annual &quo

We cannot overstate the significance of what just happened here in Oakland! Concept art courtesy Sogora Te' Sequoia Point, which teens in the 50s and 60s used as a necking spot (ahem, how many Oaklanders were made there?) and from the looks of all the broken bottles and butts is still a prime party spot, is no longer Sequoia Point. And it has been returned to its proper place in history, as Ohlone land. Not a reservation, but a rematriation. Those five acres have been renamed Rinihmu Pulte’irekne , which means "Above the Red Ocher" in the Chechenyo language, which was spoken by the people of this for 1000 years. (The East Bay has been inhabited since 4000 B.C.) With a few other Friends of Joaquin Miller Park , I attended the Land Back ceremony in December. Festivities began at dusk, with a shivvering crowd gathered around leathered and feathered dancers from different tribes dancing on the near-freezing patio of the Chabot Science Center. They led the crowd in pra

Last fall and winter, I marveled at the mushrooms and wowed at the water . Life things and other urgent projects have cut down on my marveling and wowing time in recent months, but when I started walkin' in 2023, well, it was like six months of wow in a week. More like woah. Woah.  The New Year's Eve "cyclone bomb," which they warned us about after the fact, was a feature of the coming "atmospheric river" that they'd been talking about for weeks. Many of us shrugged, preparing for storms but skeptical of the creative spin that must be put on each weather event now, to out-do all those "weather-'pocalypses" that we had a decade ago. (Are we post-apocalypse? Is this the new normal?) Weather cycles come and go, so we shall see. But until this year it was really hard to imagine things getting worse. I moan a lot about erosion, either on this blog or to anyone who will listen. But this year it's more like an explosion. Today on my walk from