My husband Hursey and I haven’t been more than a mile from home in many weeks. Cabin fever! We are getting mighty tired of the same walks through the Fruitvale barrio and our beloved neighborhood in East Oakland, a mix of working-class African Americans, immigrants from Salvador and Mexico and the newly transplanted millennials from San Francisco, who post their grievances on Next Door Neighbor: packages stolen from front porches, car thefts, late night gunfire and fireworks.
There is much beauty here…in the wisteria and roses in our neighbors’ yards. The lovely scent of jasmine. The plum tree gracing a lawn of plastic grass. The laughter and soprano voices of children playing soccer in their driveway with their dog. “Sancho! Aqui! Ahh-kee.”
There’s also the curbsides littered with broken beer bottles and crumpled pizza boxes. An abandoned car sits across the street with its windows smashed out. An old couch and expired cartons of Ensure scattered in front of the HUD apartment building. A block away on High Street, the grimy lots, an auto body shop, and the always-busy funeral home. Nearby Island Market, its orange exterior walls covered in artistic graffiti, sells no island fruit but plenty of liquor.
Last Saturday evening on our daily walk, the sound of gunfire just a block away, had us turn around and quickly head back home. “Basta! Enough! Let’s take a break!” So we sneaked out to Half Moon Bay the very next day.
“Is this smart?” we asked ourselves. “Is it legal?”
Driving the 25 miles out of the city and over to the coast felt naughty and even a bit dangerous, especially given that Hursey is African-American. “If the cops stop us, what will we say about why we are so far from home?” I asked him. “Let’s synchronize our stories!”
“We’ll say,” Hursey smiled, “that the hardware store in Half Moon Bay is the only store that has the part we need to fix the latest leak on our hot water line.”
“Great idea! That could so easily be true!” I agreed.
We have been living without reliable hot water for too long, with this virus running rampant in the world. This virus that needs hot water and foamy soap to break down its spiny exterior and kill it. Today I had the blessed luxury of my first shower in five days. Hursey has found six leaks so far, courtesy of the contractor who bungled things so badly at our Oakland house (which had a serious fire three years ago) that we haven’t yet sold the house.
We had to tear out and redo all of the contractor’s carpentry, electrical and most (it should have been all!) of his plumbing work. We would have sold the Oakland house if he’d done his work right. But then we wouldn’t have had a safe place to live – we’d be hosting Airbnb guests at our home in Pleasant Hill, where we had been living for three years since the fire at the Oakland house. Today, such as is, the Oakland house is a safe, isolated place to shelter during the pandemic. So instead of cursing the contractor, who wasted two years and 50 grand, I now bless him and call him “Saint Dennis.”
But tracking down six leaks hasn’t been easy. Especially frustrating when we have to rip holes in the newly sheet-rocked walls (that we just finished priming and painting ourselves) to get at the faulty connections in the red plastic Pex water lines.
“We need a change of scenery! Half Moon Bay it is!”
We had heard that all of the coastal beaches and parks are closed, but we know the secret trail that locals use to get to the ocean, so we thought it was worth a try. Over the last 20 years, we had spent many a delightful weekend in that coastal village, when our friends still owned the old railroad depot on the abandoned Ocean Shore Railroad, built in the early 1900s. They had fixed up the delipidated depot themselves, raising it up with 50 car jacks to repair the foundation, then painting it bright yellow. We helped out with minor repairs whenever we stayed there. When our dog, Chico, who loved to romp on Poplar Beach died, we buried him in the wide space overlooking the ocean, behind the depot.
One weekend when our friends were going out of town, they invited us to have the place to ourselves. We settled in with a sigh of delight, but on Saturday morning our sleep was interrupted by loud knocking at the door. We tried to ignore it, whispering to each other, “Maybe it’s the Jehovah Witnesses?” But the knocking turned more insistent and we heard the dreaded words, “Police! Open up!” The local policemen, a Hispanic guy, who was staring down at his feet and a red-headed Irishman, were apologetic. “The neighbors seem to think you’re not supposed to be here. That maybe you broke in.” The unspoken but obvious reason why as they glanced at Hursey’s chocolate brown body, a beach towel wrapped around his waist. We had to prove that we had a right to be there, even as other people thought we did not.
Still, we had many lovely memories to draw on to help us recover from that incident. The ocean called us. We drove past the closed Poplar Beach parking lot next door to the railroad depot and parked on one of the residential side streets. As we got out of the car, releasing Navi, our friend’s retired guide dog for the blind who we were babysitting, we heard and then spotted a drone hovering overhead.
“Hmm. Is it watching us?” I asked Hursey.
“Seems to be,” he replied grimly.
“Should we walk away from the beach? Pretend we’re going somewhere else?” The news reports of drones used to enforce the quarantine in France replayed in my head.
“Ok, let’s try.”
The drone finally moved on. Feeling nervous and wondering about possible police patrols on the coastal path and whether Hursey would be singled out for not looking like a local, we persevered towards that hidden path the locals know. At the Railroad Avenue dead end, we went around the yellow barricades and made a quick right turn onto a narrow dirt path almost completely overgrown with coyote brush and wild beach strawberry plants. Savannah sparrows and purple finches flew in and out of the brush as the path meandered through Cypress trees and Monterey pines towards the ocean, a quarter mile away.
We had come to “gain a world in holiness,” as Dostoevsky wrote. To soak up the blessed earth, sky and sea. Calla lilies growing wild on that glorious Sunday. Huge piles of driftwood sculpted by God. Miles of sandy beach for the eyes, weary from city ’scapes, to rest on. And for me, best of all, the smell of the salt breeze, the sound of crashing ocean surf.
A fishing boat rocked on the waves. “They’re fishing for halibut and stripers,” Hursey informed me, his eyes glistened with the hint of an old fisherman’s longing. Walking along the coastal bluff, sixty feet above the beach, we scanned the ocean for dolphins and whales that we’d occasionally seen from here in the past. Navi frolicked in every mud puddle, turning her yellow lab legs grey and black. A red-tailed hawk circled overhead. Children on bicycles shrieked with joy. It was easy to step off the path and let the occasional hiker or biker pass by, a good ten feet away. We soaked in the sunshine and sea breeze, the sights of butterflies and blue-green ocean.
In this glorious world there are so many people vulnerable to the virus. The deaths at overcrowded homeless shelters, prisons, and immigrant detention centers. My friend Linda wonders how many men will survive of those she has bonded with in the anti-violence “No More Tears” program at San Quentin. Around the world, people huddle in squalid refugee camps. Families fleeing Mumbai and New Delhi on foot for ancestral villages. No water, food or shelter for their long journeys of hundreds of kilometers.
How to hold it all? How to possibly hold it all?
This beauty, that horror.
This gentle, wide-open space of sky and sea, that teeming, crowded lack of safety.
This bounty, and at the very same time, this heartbreaking failure of humanity to care for all and especially for the poor, the marginalized, and many of the essential workers. The daily anguish, grief, and rage of so many black and brown folks over the latest racist atrocities, the ongoing police killings.
Hursey and I talked this over and then paused on the bluff to do Tai Chi, looking out at the ocean. The movements centered and calmed me, especially, “Angel Works the Shuttles” and “Wave Hands Like Clouds.” As the sun set, we walked hand-in-hand back to our car to drive home to East Oakland. We turned on the radio to hear the news reports of the latest protests in the streets.
What gives us hope? The outrage and demonstrations in cities across the world. The confederate flags and statues coming down, police departments defunded. A good start. The courageous young people braving tear gas and rubber bullets, chanting “Say their names. Say their names.” Indifference to the police killings has finally, finally stopped being the overwhelming response of many white people. As James Baldwin wrote, “Neither love nor terror makes one blind; indifference makes one blind.”
From the largest cities to the tiniest coastal villages, this is a struggle for the soul of this country. Are our eyes and our hearts really opening, as we hope? Will they remain open?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Irene R. Baker was the first female telephone lineman in Michigan in 1975. She worked in the trades for 25 years as a bricklayer, stationary engineer (electrician/plumber), wastewater treatment plant operator, and park ranger. After hurting her back while lighting the Dead Sea Scrolls at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, she became a Montessori teacher and teacher-trainer. She has been published in Montessori Life and by Montessori Services (Ideas & Insights).