Walkin' with Joaquin

January First, 4pm.  The afternoon sun lights up bright green patches of grass between the tall tree shadows. I’m on my way to greet the new year from Lookout Point, where we all like to look out at Oakland. Pyramid hill glows with the indescribable color made by orange light on bright green grass. Beyond, the bay is shining, Lake Merritt glistens. The whole city looks quiet and clean from here, rinsed by last week's rains, ready to start a fresh new year.  A year ago today park was in shambles after the “cyclone bomb” of a storm that decimated this urban forest. A great number of Joaquin Miller’s trees are history now, the ones he planted 120-150 years ago to create a park setting on the Ohlone’s former grassland hunting ground. My 2023 photo album is  full of green devastation . I soothed my sorrow knowing that these hundreds of lost trees died a natural death— they were at the ends of their life spans and killed by nature. But I also still feel that they, and all ...

The California Writers Club's annual literary picnic, "A Blanket and a Basket of Chow," was blessed this year by the first good rain of the season.  The last time, and every other time, writers have gathered in this space, we've been shaded by tall trees. This January, they fell like dominos in the devastating New Year's storm. It cost the city six thousand dollars to have all the wood removed.  Ten months later, the meadow looks as if it's always been open, the light is welcoming, and an enormous stump remains, a natural stage in its own right. Our event, which overlapped with the Friends of Joaquin Miller Park annual meeting, was the perfect occasion to re-christen the Fire Circle as the California Writers Circle . Plans are afoot to re-configure the Fire Pit, which was erected some time in the 1960s or 1970s, guessing from the modular cement design, but until then, a makeshift stage will do.  Three panels were constructed from reclaimed wood by a volunteer,...

Happy Indigenous Peoples Day! This is a reprint of my Medium article from 2021, when the Biden administration just went ahead and did the right thing. 

There was a work day in September at which an army of volunteers from Oakland's Rotary Club appeared to clear away debris that had piled up over the years, and give the Dog Parks a refresh. Their assistance was so gratefully received, as the Park continues to struggle, even with more city hires in 2022. Joaquin Miller is the City's largest park, half the size of Golden Gate Park, has been embattled, like the whole city has, with petty crimes such as vandalism and graffiti.  But the dogs don't know that. They have a dedicated and fenced off-leash dog area with 1.25 acres to socialize like dogs do: sniffing butts, herding, chasing balls, and fake-fighting. Need a shot of pure joy? Come and watch them play. Watching the happy hounds frolic in this rare safe play space for citizen canines, I couldn't help but imagine what Jack London would think about those anthropocentric words I just used in the first clause of this sentence. His stories have dogs in raw interfaces with ...

A truck loaded with tree trunks A brand new tree A denuded hillside  Kids building a teepee A bee on a poet's sandwich  A poet (and her scholars) A summer mushroom  Moss (which I just learned sequesters hundreds of times more carbon than trees) Landscaping by children  Monkey flowers in bloom And the tiny house of a big personality. Happy summer everyone.

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 h...