1. Rehome Your Dog
The turnaround circle is paved whilst the football field parking lot is still gravel, another reason to park up at the end, less dust. That was why Glynda was resting in the passenger side of the campervan when she woke up hearing the dogs.
Through the windscreen a bloke was running angrily to her right, still holding on to his hat, the walking path by the bay inlet in Berkeley, California. Glynda’s shoulders stiffened. Was there going to be a row?
“He’s had surgery, there’s a reason he’s on a leash!” a woman’s panicked voice cried out. Her dog was leaping forward to defend itself from two unleashed larger dogs, one a pale labrador, the other a black poodle, who were barking and jumping at it from both sides. Glynda rolled the window down. “Hey!” she said.
Then the owner came running in, trying to gather both jumping animals at once, the lab stopping immediately of course, but the aggressive male pulling away and re-engaging with a crazy ROW-ROW-ROW! “Stop!” Glynda commanded involuntarily.
Glynda flinched as the man snapped the leash onto the dog’s collar and tugged it to him, smacking the labrador’s soft flanks again and again with his open palm. You don’t have to be hit often, she thought, for it to make a big difference in your life. Once is enough. “Please, sir! Don’t beat your dog!” Glynda sobbed. The golden labrador cowered at the man’s feet, unwitting of its transgressions.
Now he grabbed the black poodle and pulled it up roughly by the collar while he fumbled to find right ends, losing his hat as he did so, which allowed Glynda to see the hot pink face of the enemy, twisted with fury, an older man than she had expected, nearly bald, with a wispy white beard. “Please, Sir,” she called out, “Rehome Your Dog.” She saw look at her in surprise as he finally began tugging his dogs away. “Mind your own business,” he growled at Glynda, pulling them back into the wild.
Without realizing it she had thrust her shoulders all the way through the side window of the camper. “Rehome Your Dog!” she insisted. She hoped it wasn’t already too late. Now the male pawed two steps toward her, raising hands wrapped with leather. Fuck you.
It upset Glynda the whole rest of the day, made her want to leave for Santa Barbara right now. Only, no gas. She still had some SNAP on her card, but the campervan sucked petrol. At Trader Joes she bought four more cartons of eggs, that gave her eight, about four gallons. The Egg Lady, they called her. $3 a Dozen. She liked to think of it as a job. Losing seventy-nine pence with each transaction whilst despoiling the planet, just to put it in the proper perspective.
She got out and walked around her blue and white campervan, fondly wiping away a smudge from Sara’s shoulder. She liked that the old model RV had been named a SERENADER, she felt in a way over the past two years the homey little vehicle had helped her bring her voice to the world too. She’d driven Sara down from Portland during the pandemic, when gas had suddenly become a lot less expensive and people kept their proper distance, settled into their proper places. Here in Berkeley neighbors had been standing on both sides of their barricaded streets singing songs to each other.
When she got back home from Trader Joe’s and getting gas it was half six, with the light of the late sun starkly shadowing the tall dry grass and bushes that bordered the practice fields. Defiantly she pulled the campervan into the same space she had occupied that morning, standing tall with her foot in the cab, scanning the vacant land for any signs of movement, the precise spot where she had seen him disappear.
After a while she unfolded the campervan kitchen and carefully cracked three of the eggs she had left for a bit of dirty rice, chopping up some scallions as well, cooking over a built-in propane burner Glynda had herself devised. While she ate she opened her note book and tried to channel her anger constructively. The words had been burning and buzzing in her mind all afternoon and she wrote them down quickly in pencil, just the first line anything like lyrics yet:
“Rehome. Your. Dog.!” The chorus for the new song. “Hope. It hasn’t. Al-read-y. Been too long!”
I watched a man beat his dog with a strap. He was mad about losing his hat. Bitch has to learn, he said. Who let those pups run wild? I pled. Does it make you feel free-er to thus punish real freedom.
Glynda paused for a moment and then crossed out “thus”. The hat part was a hook you could hang something on. There was a lesson in it, it could be a real protest song, like a Natalie Merchant. How would the dog have felt? Or the bloke what wore the hat for that matter.
“Leaving means the absence of restriction, so you speak of no rules at all.” She traced out in pencil. “Soft yellow fur//INNOCENCE”, which really seemed almost like a breakthrough. She could always tell when she was beginning to become upset.
On Tuesday she was in one of the athletic field spaces and she saw him again in the sideview of the campervan, emerging with the two dogs from the bushes and dry dead fennel that lined the shoreline park access road and retracing the route of the earlier day. Would he recognize the Serenader? It was facing the opposite direction. At least he wasn’t flipping her off this time. Glynda flexed her hands on the wheel of the van, as though admiring the rings that adorned all her fingers, forming the signs but keeping them low, holding fire. The dogs, big ones—she was amazed at how wild he let them go, running everywhere with alarming speed, constantly snarling and nipping at each other at the feet of their owner, who ignored them. He stopped and raised his hands to his head and a huff of smoke appeared. Didn’t he realize how dangerous that was? Obviously a narcissist.
By Friday she was certain. His clothing, while not filthy, never varied, dark pants, a blue T-shirt. His ten-thirty “constitutional” always included a stop at the Port-o-Lets at the southeastern corner of the football field, always the furthest to the left. Glynda was pleased; she favored the greater security of the plastic stall closer to the frontage road. During this seven to ten minute interlude, she noted, the dogs remained docilely in position on the outside pavement, secured to their owner by the leather leashes, which prevented the hinged door of the toilet from latching. True cruelty to animals, she thought, wrinkling her nose, would be forcing the beasts to share the grotty enclosure. She watched as he filled a plastic bowl that had been left next to the water fountain.
Later Glynda went that way on her regular afternoon walk, taking a sip from the fountain and looking meditatively across the gray waters of the bay inlet. The tide was high and still and four or five brown pelicans were swerving across the sky and splashing down to catch fish. Just below her a fisherman cast his line into the sea. It was still possible to imagine a better world, Glynda thought, to ignore the slab of discarded concrete the man stood on, to unsee the mile-long rectangle of landfill that faced her, now Caesar Chavez Park, but for decades, she knew, Berkeley’s city dump.
She went past the place where the man and his dogs always came out of the bleak wilderness. South of the racetrack and the Tom Bates athletic facility an unimproved strip of landfill sits between Interstate 80 and the bay that gets run by the East Bay Regional Parks. There’s nothing much but a tangle of bramble and native weeds, though more than once Glynda had seen the Berkeley Turkeys feeding there. She hoped the man had not allowed his dogs to chase the turkeys. There’s a tall dusty blue eucalyptus on the freeway side, a scattering of smaller trees, and, near the bay side, a thick willow tree that had produced a glorious cascading dome of chartreuse growth Glynda admired each day as she passed.
She went all the way down to the sign that told the story of why it’s called Sylvia Mclaughlin Regional Park. It was really quite a heroic tale and made Glynda think about Mum. You should have seen the evil plans those men had to completely fill in San Francisco Bay back in the 1950s! Until the women, led by Sylvia, put their collective foot down. It’s thanks to those ladies that we have a Bay Commission today!
(Ab) Bay Comm -i(A)- sion (Ab) (G)To – day!
Glynda smiled as the words sprang out at her. That’s if you wanted it to sound ironic. She might try it out at the Live Mike, where no one would be listening anyway. “Ode to Sylvia.” Live Mikes were on Wednesdays at the Missouri Lounge, which had finally reopened. San Pablo, a couple blocks south of Dwight.
Who said she had no friends. Actually Glynda had indeed acquired several here—for some reason she found the atmosphere of Berkeley much less restrictive than in Portland. Less moralistic, if that makes any sense, I know it doesn’t. Of course most of them were unaware that she/her lived in their car.
She sighed. By now she had walked all along Marina Way where everyone else’s vans and RVs were parked, reminding her once again of her status as a car-lady. This gypsy life had been a creative period –now, at thirty-four, she thought about finding a roommate, getting a job, web-site estimation was what she had done. Though that too was so regressive.
All the same, do you ever have that feeling that you’re where you are for exactly that reason. You’re lucky if you do, Glynda knew. In her case growing up in New Jersey when father emigrated after the war. She’d been right there when all that stuff happened. Occupy Wall Street. She spent three months with those people. It was why she’d ended up in Portland.
She went along the edge of the Marina, looking at the boats and thinking again about how living in one wasn’t too different from a campervan, except you always had that docking fee. All the people she knew that lived on boats were mental, claustrophobic. Had Glynda gone batty that way as well? It was one reason she always took a long walkabout each day. She went toward the restaurant that was having its happy hour and turned left to look out at the old Berkeley pier, thinking more about the songs.
“They don’t even call them ‘Albums’ any more, do they?” she had said to Molly late one night at the Miz. Wednesdays from 8 to 11 the Missouri Lounge put on Live Mike, where everyone would raise a token glass to the resurrection of creative expression. “Good old Mike!” Glynda always burst out when she was drunk enough. That was before it was much more than the concept of a plan. The Berkeley Cycle. “Mostly songs you guys have already heard, some other stuff I’ve been working on.”
A Few Facts about the Comet, (It’s leaving our system, it’s backing away from us quick. It may have seen too much.) Glynda had looked into the western sky every night until she almost thought she could see it, which was poetically nearly as good. “It will happen just after sunset, if you’re ever up that late.” She thought the lyrics should be wistful rather than apocalyptic.
She still could make out the marker stars, Antares blinking red on her left, Arcturus, hard R, lover on the right, athough the comet’s ellipse of visibility had lapsed. You will utter neither ellipse nor lapse, she lisped longingly. Arpeggios of stars. Constellations of chords. Got it? Part of the problem was that she wanted it to fit in with the other songs on the New Release, which she had tentatively titled “Bitter and Sarcastic—Glynda Stemple Vents”. “Rehome your Dog, Jerkoff. The Laws are for Everybody!” Okay, now, calm down…
What you saw from here was a lot of the Bay Bridge and Treasure Island, but parts of San Francisco were beginning to sparkle behind it. She walked up and put her forehead against the fence. A few years ago they told her, you could walk out most of a mile on this pier. The signs said the trains and roads went out more than three miles where people and cars would catch ferries to the city. In the 1920s there had been a plan to put the SF airport right there in the middle of the bay, on Treasure Island. What would Sylvia Mclaughlin have thought about that? Questions for Sylvia?
Glynda turned away from her thoughts and headed back home, stopping to pay grudging respect to the queer concrete statue of a warrior astride a mythic animal that stood behind her at the end of the road. You know that story, of course, it’s so Berkeley—an eccentric sculptor proactively “donated” the massive piece to the City, and initiated a subsequent city-wide vote to leave it in place, despite its unique weirdness and belligerent theme. “Rehome Your Dog,” Glynda advised the thoughtless warrior, who aimed a stone arrow skyward, legs clasping the grotesque beast. Jerkoff.
Song for the Pier. You always seemed so exciting. An easy three mile long. I fished the swirl through your pylons, I loved your distance from shore. You were a great place to catch a shark. Or the Ferry to Babylon. Was that getting too personal? Glynda wondered. And now, I suppose, you just slowly fall apart. How long will that take? Kind of the danger with metaphors. Behind the fence the fifty foot wide walkway remains unbroken for hundreds of yards to this day, massive redwood planks that once supported railway cars. Sometimes the problem was with putting too much material into the songs, not too little, you know.
Only she really was so dreadfully poor. Well, it was self-inflicted, there was always Mum, but stuck living in a vehicle she could scarcely afford to drive. Its Oregon plates marking it for moving. For a while Norie had let her park in the alleyway behind their house until someone decided that was an encroachment, maybe they just didn’t like her bloody singing, she joked, but it hurt. These days her address was the open lot behind Tom Bates field, the closest thing you could imagine to being run completely out of town.
Indeed she was seriously considering a retitle: Glynda Stemple, So Done with Berkeley.” Somewhere she would come up with the money to relocate for the winter. Capitola, or maybe even Santa Barbara. Because it was already October, and with the election coming, it was going to get cold at night.
Glynda gave up and called Mum. “Hi, it’s me. Can I have a thousand dollars to move to Santa Barbara?” Are you still selling eggs? No Mum, it was a joke to make you worry. Well, they’re not going to want to listen to songs about Berkeley in Santa Barbara are they? No, she admitted, probably not. She might go back, after the album was done. Have you seen that person with the dogs again?
Almost every day. On Halloween Glynda happened to be at the Berkeley Public Library where she was researching Sylvia McLaughlin. “Did you hear about the shellmound at Spengers?” Jason, the bearded librarian asked Glynda. “Ohlone people are protesting the condos there.” He pulled a folded flyer from a nearby bulletin board. “It’s obscene.”
“How are you otherwise? Aren’t you worried about the election? How’s Jason?” Mum inquired. “I know!” Glynda said. “All anybody can do is talk about Trump. It’s like a cancer, even here.”
“How are you and Jason getting along?” “Super,” she said, “we’re going to the rally together Saturday. He might come visit me in Santa Barbara.”
“Why do you want to move there? I mean, you’ll forgive me if I say it sounds like you’re running away from things again, Glynda.” Oh I will, will I? Mother, it’s not so much wanting to leave as being driven out. But if you can give me the thousand that will help a lot.
2. Make America Once Again Great
Of all the things Trump might do that would come back to bite her was the nationwide abortion ban. Otherwise Glynda was happy for having not voted. Don’t blame this mess on me, it was one of her jokes, being multi-national, I mean, what-do-you-call-it, dual citizenship. “So you know, I’ve applied for deportation, but they haven’t rung me back.”
“Just leave me Ohlone,” she joked to Jason. “where do you live?” he’d asked as they drove to the memorial at Spengers. “Nearby. Albany. I park by the racetrack. It had been Jason who showed her the URLs of all the maps that the three creeks people had put together, along with the ones the tribes had that showed where the shellmound had once stood. Cool, Jason said, as if matching off liabilities. “I live with my parents. North Berkeley.”
Jason didn’t really have to lecture her about the indigenous peoples who had lived in this part of California, that was what the slanted signs were for. Those were days of plenty, the People feasting on the bounties of the bay, the great shellmounds arising from the annual harvest of the oysters. Jason turned down University Avenue in his old Subaru, toward the so-called flatlands. “At that time all of this area was coastal marsh,” Jason said, indicating Fourth Street shopping district with disdain. ”There were no railroad tracks here then, of course.” Spengers Fish Grotto itself was quite a landmark, Glynda knew, though a little before her time. That would have been before the Historic Restaurants Association got involved. “Try to be respectful,” Jason warned, though he truthfully didn’t know her that well yet.
He parked by the old seafood restaurant and they walked around a fenced in parking lot to join a small group of people on the northwest corner. “Stand back from the street or they’ll think you’re looking for work,” someone laughed. It was true, Truitt and White, the big lumber yard, was on the next block and the Mexican guys would stand outside scanning the cars. “Are you reporters?” Another person asked. They laughed too. “No,” Glynda said. She lifted her sunglasses and looked around. “Wow. No shells at all. Nobbut rubbish.” She picked up a Doritos Hot!Hot!Hot bag. Who knew where these things came from. She walked over to the nearby railway tracks—there was no sign of shell in the infill there either.
They explained that the spray-painted marks on the asphalt were the likely perimeter of the old mound. A mound of that size might have contained numerous burials and offerings to the ancestors. “The shell itself, though,” Glynda said, “I wonder where-ever they could have put that much material.” The archives Jason had produced contained just two blurry photos. “Just landfill to them,” someone said glumly. By this time Glynda had realized how close to home she was—Wow, if the tracks were here, then the end of the bay strip was no more than a half mile diagonally. Could it be? She had this funny idea, she started to tell Jason.
“I just want to say in advance, ‘Don’t do it,’” one of the group near to them spoke, an older man, “We can tell you’re some kind of blogger or reporter.” Songwriter, Glynda said, and he made a face. “Poet is okay.”
“Hi, my name’s Marquez. Maybe it was the name that made him seem more Mexican than Native American. “Not to steal thunder from the matriarchy of Sogorea Te’, we’re here to mark a small memory to the ancestors and to mark the transition of our brother-warrior Norman Wounded Knee De’Ocampo, a good friend of mine.”
“That’s what I was telling you,” Jason said. “A Memoriam.” It was good to know he had chosen a funeral as their first date. “Pleased to meet you, Glynda Stempel. This is Jason Pierson. Don’t do what?“
“Commit cultural misappropriation, of course. I could see it in your eyes. If I had a dollar for every rock I sold off of Alcatraz island I’d be rich too. The women here,” he hunched his shoulders comically, “have stern rules.”
“I was just saying…” Glynda explained. Marquez sighed. “My best guess is the landowners took their own initiative, probably even before they applied for permits. There was still a lot of dumping going on everywhere in the 1950s. It would’ve been easy.”
Glynda didn’t know what Marquez and Jason’s problem was, these ladies seemed fine to her. Everyone quieted and the director spoke out. She was short, with dark hair, pale skin, a strong voice. “Mark’s right, this isn’t a media event. That will take place on November 29th, the walk from here to the Emeryville shellmound.“ She paused, looking directly at Glynda and Jason. “I woke up this morning thinking about how nothing had really changed and then I realized we had lost our dear friend. But really that’s a lesson he would have wanted us to remember, that the Longest Walk never really ends. We’re all at once ancestors, Wounded, thank you for the lesson. Himmetka: In one place, Together.” It seemed natural that Glynda should take Jason’s hand in that moment.
Jason had filled her in beforehand. After years of fighting and trying to ignore it, the Berkeley City Council had given in to Corrina Gould’s stubborn demands for dignity in the treatment of the remnants of the Ohlone (Lisjan) peoples. Jason’s mom had been active in that. Anyway, in a surprise move the City had moved to sign the property over to the Sogorea Te Land Trust. “That’s why I wanted to show you—sometimes the good people do win.” He approved of their policy of rematriation as well, he confided to Glynda.
The man named Marquez had begun speaking, in a low voice, choked with remembrance. “I often tell people that we met at Alcatraz, but of course that couldn’t be true. But I know we walked together in ’78, I was with Norman for the last Longest Walk too. Miwoks, I’m forgetting, how can I forget that, both of us down here from the hills a long, long time ago.” Marquez looked up suddenly and for a few moments you had the feeling he was back skidding timber on the far side of the Sierra Nevada. “Anyhow,” he said finally. “Lot of tribes, a lot of sacred ground covered. Lot of people we both knew. Goodbye, old friend.” He knelt and shattered a small vial on the asphalt surface.
She could feel Jason’s excitement. “Did you know those American Indian Movement guys too? My Dad’s from South Dakota.” Glynda slipped forward and deposited the handful of shells and glass she’d selected at the beach that morning. “Himmetka,” she repeated, uncertainly. Everyone looked around. Marquez raised his palms in a gesture of acceptance. “Heṭeeyakkas' aa?,” he replied, saying it differently. “See, that’s what I mean.” Glynda found herself blushing. “It was just what I was feeling,” she said.
One thing she had learned from looking up the history of Berkeley—a lot of those people were still actually around. Like Jason’s parents, who had apparently been serious radicals back then. It was weird how things had changed in just a few years, Jason said. All the steam seemed to go out of the movement after the late 70s—Berkeley used to be crazy, man! “Oh yeah,” Marquez agreed.
“That’s why we need to be steadfast in affirming female stewardship,” one of the other women interrupted. Her T-shirt identified her as one of Sogorea Te’s “Land Workers”. “Sustainability.” We’re certainly voting for that! Glynda said, stroking Jason’s hand again.
3. c/o Tom Bates Field
“I just think Kamala doesn’t get fracking,” Jason explained to Glynda. “It’s going to kill her in Pennsylvania. “Can you drop me off afterwards,” she’d asked. Glynda had caught the 57 bus up to the library in order to meet Jason there. Wasn’t Kamala from Berkeley too? It was funny people didn’t talk about that more.
“Things are a lot nicer around here since they cleared the tent people out last year,” Glynda babbled to Jason as they went over I-80 toward the SeaBreeze coffee stand. “This black metal fence is all new, put up by CalTrans. You couldn’t blame them, there was garbage and shit everywhere. And it made things harder for the car people too.” At its horrid peak the homeless encampment had filled the University Avenue cloverleaf, dozens if not hundreds of the destitute sleeping rough under camping tents and tarpaulins. Glynda had watched in amazement as work crews trundled away the rubbish and transformed the soft landscaping into a hostile field of jagged boulders. Like pigeon spikes on public buildings, she thought. Anyway, it was a lot easier to park now, she told Jason. “Turn right here.”
Jason drove along the frontage road. “Oh, I remember this place. We used to ride our bikes here.” It’s about half a mile on the left, she said. On the back side of the practice field and Glynda had him turn in and park next to Sara. “This is it, my humble abode,” She pointed nervously at the campervan. “Would you care for the ten-cent tour? A glass of wine or a toke or two?”
“Here’s the solarium, I see my plants are still alive. This is the kitchen. There’s a table that folds out where I write.” She could see his vision trying to fit his way into the tight space, failing. “Let’s sit outside.”
“It’s nice,” he pronounced as she shook out two collapsible camping chairs. “It’s perfect for you.”
“If I get high I might sing. Do you fancy red wine?” Trader Joes had a lot of French wines pretty inexpensive these days and she’d purchased three bottles at the University Ave. store. Jason said he’d love to try whatever she had bought. See, he could do it if he tried. “Such interesting people today…those women.”
“Wouldn’t it be perfect if the whole Tom Bates Sports Facility turned out to be built on an Indian graveyard? No, I mean like in Spielberg’s movie Poltergeist,” Jason said. It was getting dark now and the football players scrambled to and fro in the dusk like ghosts. “That’s really not what I had in mind,” Glynda laughed. The sports complex had come years later, hadn’t it? No, what I was trying to tell them about is this area. She waved at the scrubland to the south, a wide, unfenced expanse of brush and grass perhaps a half mile long. It looked far more sinister than the modern facility, which had just turned its lights on.
“That Mr. Marquez was quite a character, wasn’t he? I wonder what his story is,” Glynda mused, “the sisters of Sogorea Te I get that, about respect for our native ancestors, the connection to the land, deep but poetically straightforward, you know. Did you notice how they didn’t really like him? I mean, he reeks of the Patriarchy.”
Jason took the rebuke in stride, accepting a solid glug of wine. “Marquez Murillo. He’s seen it all! Pine Ridge through the worst of it, when the FBI was gunning for AIM in the 70s. Dad and Mom were still in South Dakota, only they hadn’t met yet. I was born here in November 1989, the year of the Earthquake.”
She didn’t think he looked like a typical Scorpio, doubtless his worser qualities would be revealed later. He did have certainty and a lockjaw enthusiasm she found endearing. He was surprisingly tall, perhaps as much as an inch or more over six feet.
“Not fully individuated,” she decided. “My Mum was an actress,” she explained, that’s where I get it. “Gloria Stempel, you can IMDB her. I’m thirty-five, born in eighty-eight.”
“What part of the U.K. are you from?”
“New Jersey. Dad’s the real Brit in the family. Now you know my other secret.” She could see him start to ask. Maybe later. “Is your birthday coming up then?” November first, he said, two days ago. They had only just met, you know. “Oh,” she said. That explained the lack of meanness. “Earth Snake,” he said proudly.
“I suppose you’re voting ‘yes” on Prop 33. I still haven’t decided on Measure PP, which was the tax on old buildings in Berkeley that burn too much natural gas.” What made Jason the maddest was Donald Trump and his lies in the mainstream media over the Haitians eating dogs and cats, sorry to bring this up right now. “The way they’ve been picking on that poor city, Springfield—J.D. Vance said the other day that they were going to ‘start there.’ Fucking Fascists. Excuse me. Let them try that crap in Berkeley.”
Glynda laughed. “Now, are you speaking as a communist or as a centrist democrat?” She’d known for ages that politics in the United States always ends up in the collision of great social forces with peoples who will not be moved. “My Grandfather fought against the Germans, I met him one time in Wessex.”
“My parents were both tear-gassed by Ronald Reagan,” Jason brooded. “You got to listen when he says he’ll bring in the troops.” He gulped a little more wine, holding the ceramic cup out for more. “I have some weed somewhere here.”
“Did you see the comet?” Jason asked later, interrupting her thoughts. “We saw it pretty clear in North Berkeley.” Their first kisses had been wine-stained, hungry, unsuited to the side-by-side chairs. Now they sat on the metal bench on the bluff overlooking the bay inlet, holding hands again. Dark, except for when Jason occasionally worked the lighter. “Enough for me,” she said. She hadn’t brought the guitar, so she just sang it, a cappella:
A few facts about the comet—
She’s backin’ out fast, she may have Seen Too Much. She’ll be back to see you later in about Two Hundred Years.
There are no second chances in InterStellar Space.
Solar Wind.
It will happen just after sunset, if you’re ever up that late.
I never get up this early, I just wanted to let you know.
‘There’s a Comet in the Sky!” (Don’t let the World End)
“Pretty wacky, huh? Kinda needs the twelve-string. I’m having trouble finding the right rhyme for Oort Cloud? Dirt Proud? Do you remember the Hale-Bopp comet? I was just a girl, but we always went out to look at it. Nine, I guess I was. Wow, that takes me back. Do you remember it?”
“So Oorta There?” Jason tried. “Yeah! I got to see the comet through a big telescope a few times. Magic! Like the first time you see fireflies. Do you know fireflies?”
“Of course, I’m from New Jersey, remember. I don’t think they have them in Britain. Glow worms, perhaps. Wait, did you see that?” As if on cue a turned down light came on and began to move across the darkened field to their left.
4. The Glass Path
“He lives out here, the old man and his two dogs. I ‘m not sure, suddenly he just appears. That must have been him we saw moving around last night.” Glynda said. For a full five minutes they had watched whoever it was stumble tentatively through the darkness before the light blinked one last time and went away. “Come on, I want to show you something.” The sleeping loft was surprisingly spacious, Jason thought, wishing that he had drunk less wine. A little hard to get out of. “What day is it?”
“Ha-ha, I know. Monday. The election’s tomorrow. What time do you have to be at the Library? Did that time change mess you up? It did me. Come on, let’s go.” She was right, the mornings were getting prettier these days. The sun was up over the hills now, giving the vacant land to the south of them a softer, more inviting look. Two crows circled the eucalyptus tree and flew on. He held Glynda’s hands as they stepped down the bluff to the service road below.
“It’s got to be the weirdest beach ever. We won’t go down there, it’s full of old roadway rubble and grotty metal things buried in the sand and stuff that has washed ashore. But the birds like it. I see oystercatchers and turnstones a lot of times. There’s a lot of broken glass, which is what I’m going to show you, especially down at the other end.”
“He always comes out here.” A row of bushes took over where the tall grass ended, but you could see the path worn by the old man and his dogs close up when you got there. “Those crows were scanning for the redtail that likes to sit in the eucalyptus. This whole area must have been bulldozed in at some point.”
“Yeah, your theory,” Jason said. “Could be. We used to buy our Christmas trees from a lot down here. Big family fights over exploitation and pagan observances. Are you still planning to be in Santa Barbara at Christmas?” I don’t know yet, she said, about the best she could do. “Because,” Jason persisted, “I’m still thinking, I might come down.”
She felt suddenly helpless, as hopeless as ever, she hoped it didn’t show. “That would be splendid,” she said. Even with the thousand dollars. He was right, she didn’t really want to go, could it be that he now really did? “The Native plants people have been pulling weeds again, I see.” Tangled heaps of uprooted wild radish lined the bay trail, the work of John and his crew.
They walked by the big willow tree that Glynda had noticed before and descended a short path to the shore. Here the bay waters ended, restrained by a rocky barrier. Parallel to it, a large concrete storm drain emerged from the landfill and poked out into the water. A short gravel beach arched away, sparkling in the morning sun. “It’s glass! Sea glass. See how worn it is?”
“It’s the action of the pebbles, of course,” Jason explained. “Wow.” There were four colors, five if you counted clear. Lighter than stone, the shards had been worn flat and heaped upward by high tides. You could almost see the physics involved. He reached down and let a handful of the small pieces dribble through his fingers, white, green, blue, brown. “Wow. I never knew this was here.”
“I saw the light shining off the beach from up on the trail,” Glynda said with some pride. “There’s just so much of it. I wonder if they had a glass factory here or something. A little further down the beach is where I got those shells.”
“See,” Glynda pointed, “It’s eroding. A hundred feet or so down the steep bank began, layers of dirt and stone interspersed with bits of glass and ceramic. Maybe it’s all landfill. Oh my god, look, the rim of a buried tyre. I feel quite like an archaeologist.”
In fact they could see the evidence of digging—heaps of loose dirt excavated from the base of the six-foot tall coastal bluff with sticks and screwdrivers by those who seek intact noxema jars and liquor bottles, perhaps even an antique or two. It’s very therapeutic. Glynda had met a couple of these “delvers,” on her walks, Scott and Carmen, Scott picking at the bank industriously while Carmen sat and smoked pot. Scott had found a lot of intact bottles, she told Jason.
Jason still couldn’t get the hydraulics off his mind, Rounded and polished like gemstones by the constant action of the waves, the gleaming shards were strewn along the shore in casual natural ribbons. He stooped again to retrieve a particularly interesting piece, hesitated, nearly put it into his pocket, then let it drop. Then he remembered. “There was a pile of colored glass like this back on the trail.”
Scott had thought perhaps a factory, she summarized. She also talked a lot with the fisherman, who liked to cast for “stripers” when the tide was high. “What? Did you see something else back there?”
The traces were faint but unsubtle, a scattering of clear glass shards, untempered by time, lay on top of this summer’s bent grass growth on the interior side. This way. Jason and Glynda exchanged glances. “You first.”
It’s really not that scary, though watch your step. Jason’s hiking shoes were heavier, but Glynda’s thin sneakers felt every irregularity and she tried to walk around the path rather than along it, much as one might walk to avoid the waters of a tumbling creek.
There was as much glass here as they had found down on the beach, probably more, the shards larger, more jagged. In places the ground was paved with the circles of broken bottle bottoms pressed into the pink soil, in others ankle-deep accumulations showed the way. “It’s the Glass Path!” Jason pronounced unnecessarily. A slight declivity caused them to veer to the right. The clumped sedge gave way to a winding glitter that filled the distance.
“But HOW?” Glynda repeated. Were they digging it up out of the ground? “And when?” She looked around.
“This part is almost like a maze,” she said to Jason, pointing to the alternating rows of green and white and brown glass that spiraled through a ghostly forest of fennel. The stalks were gray and dead for the season, but still stood five feet tall, hiding the two of them momentarily from sight. Do you remember the board game “The Game of Life”? There you go. Like in the game, you can only see where you’re going a little while before you get there.
Jason got down, pushing at the design with his hand. “Look,” he said, “these green pieces have been worn down by the water. This stuff all had to come up from the beach.” That was weird too. He scrabbled for his phone to take a pic. “Stand over there,” he said. It would be perfect on their timeline.
It reminded him of Buchanan Street, the Albany Bulb, just to the north, where artists had transformed another tendril of bay landfill into a painting and sculpture park. After years of toleration a city-wide initiative had authorized the relocation of the free-spirited resident population that had developed there. Rats had been seen. “This was probably done by one of those guys they kicked out,” Jason theorized. “It’s great!”
He felt the glass fragments popping and breaking beneath his feet like ideas, tiny allegories, sensed time passing by. The thing is more than three hundred, nearly four hundred feet long. Even if the shards had been dug from the ground it still meant that each piece had been collected, moved, set in place here. Millions of pieces. No, be realistic, but it had to be hundreds of thousands.
Meanwhile Glynda was getting nearly rapturous from the sheer poetry of the place, turning the words “glass” and “path” against each other in her mind as if to tumble their rough edges. The path begins in the middle and grows toward its ends, she tried. The past and the future. Ancestors. Wow. She could see how some of the patterns overlaid others, implying years or generations. Brilliant!
Jason’s phone went off, destroying their shared isolation, the Marseillaise, appropriately, and he answered. “Hi Mom. No. Sorry. At a friend’s. I should’ve texted you.” Jason looked at Glynda adoringly, raising an eyebrow, which made her heart lurch, “well, you’re talking to me now, aren’t you?”
5. Yes, but long-term I can see it becoming a problem
At the Berkeley Public Library a section of the annex was marked off for the electorate to cast their votes, it seemed to Glynda like a good but not great turn-out. Not exactly what you’d expect from a favorite daughter she thought. She thought it had to be Kamala’s stance on Israel. You would have thought she’d have more sympathy for the displaced Gazans, with her mother being a poor renter in the flats all those years.
While she waited for Jason to work, Glynda looked it up, “the glass path”, then “glass path Berkeley”. She wrinkled her forehead. Was it just her or was the internet getting dumber these days. There were no results, though a couple of other musicians had picked up on the phrase, look, someone had written a Guide to 126 Hidden Walkways within the City, that sounded promising.
Around three pm the false celebrations began. Polls would close on the east coast in two hours, the women turning out in overwhelming numbers to show exactly what they thought of the evil Dobbs decision by an overreaching Supreme Court. Glynda felt a pang, perhaps at the very moment of conception. How could they think they could control people’s lives this way?
She looked over at Jason, sitting at the library reference desk, stoically explaining to people why their self-checkouts were not succeeding. If you don’t push down on the spine hard enough the sensor can’t detect the chip. In the long term the agency granted to the public by the self-checkout process far exceeded the ten percent confusion rate, Jason told her earnestly. “Remember the old days when a Technical Librarian had to take a member’s ID, stamp the book card with the due date, physically move the items past the security barrier, etc. etc.” It had been Jason who showed her how to access the map archives.
“My parents will be going to a victory party, you could come over. Don’t worry, I live in a separate unit in the back,” Jason had said. Well, she had been planning to continue her research for the songbook anyway, not saying she had nothing else to do.
Next she tried looking up “Marquez Murillo”. There was more on him. 1954. So she’d been pretty much right about his age. The Wikipedia article was brief, devoid of personal detail, but the old news stories were interesting: “Native American Consultant testifies in E.I.R.”, “Rancho Casino Negotiations Continue”, “Unaffiliated Tribe chooses Spokesperson.”
“This lack of Federal recognition negates neither our existence nor our fundamental rights,” the activist was quoted as saying. Murillo had spent two years in Federal custody, the article stated. It implied he’d been released as part of a cooperation deal. A sell-out. Wow, how sad.
It seemed to Glynda that you couldn’t just tell a people they had to leave their homes, where to go, and then drop bombs on them when they went there. It was genocide. It made her mad to see Kamala forced to defend the immoral US policy this way. Of course Trump was no better.
“Let’s just go home,” Jason said, interrupting her thoughts. He was touched with the worry too. “I’ve seen this movie before.” The mood in the Library had become somber as early east-coast results failed to confirm a liberal landslide. “It could be a long night. I’ll punch out.”
Who was this “librarian” she had become entangled with. Glynda feared the next invitation would be to a Thanksgiving dinner. Was needfulness a word? It was so very evident in Jason. I don’t mind, she decided, long-term I can see it becoming a problem. Jason came out from the back with his bags and she gave him a big hug so that anyone could see, not that anyone could miss all the attention he’d been giving to this cardholder. They drove down to MLK, north across University to Rose. “I usually ride my bike to work,” Jason apologized. So serious.
“Let’s just turn this off,” she said, flipping the radio knob. “It’s poison.” She sat back, purposefully exhaling. “This part of Berkeley is so beautiful.” Because it reminded her of New Jersey. “Yeah, it is,” Jason said, swerving to avoid a pedestrian dressed in autumn drab. “My folks moved here during the Clinton years. I was little.”
She expected brown shake siding, was surprised by a light lavender stucco house on an ample lot, the yard a bit overgrown. “I live in the cottage, in the back,” Jason said, turning in.
6. Always a snoop herself
She detected evidence of planning. A parcel wrapped in coloured paper sat unopened on the table, its birthday card signed with a flourished “W.” Six days hence, he’d said, not really a November baby at all. The bicycle stood against the wall by the door, a startling metallic green. “Oh, this is lovely,” she said, and it was, spacious for a single person in the way that her tiny campervan was not. Though only a single room, the cottage had a separated bath, a bed behind a full screen. Two closets! Jason seemed anxious for her approval but it was genuine.
“This is perfect,” she said, using his term. “I love it.” I don’t know how much you sleep around, there’s always this tendency to mix up the person with the place. I’m getting better, Glynda winced, even though his folks will be home any minute. But instead of feeling that way, she just sat down.
“It’s okay. Sorry about all the fossils. I’ve lived in this room since I was twelve. It’s about time I let the dust settle.” They were everywhere, a nice collection of specimens in heavy cases. “I was planning to become a paleontologist,” Jason apologized. He reminded her in a way of Greg.
The sex was reassuring too. Certainly the sleeping chamber of the campervan hampered movement and a lot of marijuana had been involved, but one so missed passion sometimes. You don’t necessarily think of librarians as skilled mouth wrestlers, though why not, but Jason put on quite an exhibition. And the knock on the door did not come until somewhat later, after which it opened immediately as the parents burst in.
“I think we all need a strong drink,” Jason’s mother said. “We won’t find out about the propositions until later. What a disaster!” Her eyes, brown like Jason’s, flicked across Glynda inquisitively.
“I knew as soon as those rural Georgia counties started coming in,” Jason’s father said. “They just can’t bring themselves to vote for a woman.” He peered uncertainly at Glynda. “Sorry, Wendy.”
“How did South Dakota go?” Jason interceded. “This is Glynda,” he said. His father jerked his shoulders. “Fucked,” he said succinctly.
Dad and Mom still had a lot of friends back home, Jason explained. South Dakota. “Was abortion on the ballot this time?” “Hi, Mr. Pierson, Mrs. Pierson,” Glynda said.
“Jason! It’s been illegal since Dobbs. You know that!” The four of them stood there, flabbergasted by the sheer grimness of the political situation until Jason’s dad finally said, “I’ll make us some martinis.”
“Glynda’s from New Jersey, Mom,” Jason said. “Oh really, I was going to say Britain or something.” “Yes, I get that a lot. From my early years to my teens we lived in Cornwall.”
“What do you think will happen?” Glynda asked Jason’s Mom. She was wearing a nice dark jacket over a sweater and skirt, she was tall, like him, a little like him in the eyes. Which met Glynda’s thoughtfully.
“That’s what I’m terrified of, the nationwide ban,” Clarice said, “My name’s Clarice, I’m Jason’s mom. Now that they have the Senate and it looks like they’ll keep the House. Mike Johnson can’t wait to get started.”
“Johnson’ll do what Trump tells him to do,” her husband interrupted authoritatively, rattling ice cubes. “Remember what Trump said about the people wanting the states to make the decision.”
“There you go believing what comes out of his mouth again, Clyde. I’m telling you, he’ll sign it in a foetal heartbeat. Those Pro-Life people were going crazy even before the election, there’ll be no stopping them now.”
“Whatever,” Clyde Pierson agreed, giving his aluminum bottle a last vigorous shake. “It’s the mass deportations that have me freaked out.”
“What was your family doing in Cornwall?” Clarice asked Glynda, trying to change the subject. Glynda took a drink of gin, her cue.
“I don’t bloody know!” Truthfully she recalled those teen-aged years as drearily normal, and it was the memory of that angst that gave her line its zing. Usually she’d launch into “Teatime” at this juncture, tonight, well, maybe later. “My father was an aircraft engineer, my mother was a movie actress.” She explained to Clarice how her parents had divorced after they had moved to New Jersey in 2006.
“Just so you know,” she said, hooking Mr. Pierson in with her usual line, “I’ve applied for deportation, but they turned me down. It’s all a bit ludicrous, isn’t it? Where are they going to start? By calling in the military to stop people from eating cats?”
She could see the same dismissiveness that Jason showed towards the offbeat results that came up in their library searches. “Do you know how many verified cats have been eaten?” Zero. Where she’d been perhaps a little more inclined to wander down the back alleys of Springfield Ohio looking for strays. “That’s my point exactly,” she said.
“We met an old activist from the American Indian Movement yesterday,” Jason told his dad. “Marquez Murillo, do you know him?” Oh my God, she heard Clyde Pierson say bitterly “that backstabber.”
Strangely, even though everyone was drinking and talking, no one was drinking much except Glynda. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said, pouring her third gin. “When I drink excessively I sometimes sing,” she cautioned. The ice cubes reminded her. “Tell them about the glass path,” she urged Jason.
“Remember where we used to buy our Christmas trees? It’s right there! Amazing! Broken glass everywhere!” Jason described to his parents the part I haven’t mentioned before, how the glass path begins/ends at the base of the large willow, the carpet of fragments swelling to encircle its massive trunk.
“They’re planning to turn that property into a park,” Clarice said. For some reason the statement hit Glynda hard, maybe it was that extra drink. “Who? What?”
“EBRP, the East Bay Regional Parks District. They own all that land down there, thanks to Sylvia McLaughlin.”
“Wait, I thought that the City…”
7. Help Plan a Park
Wait, so was it the City that posted the Public Notice, or EBRP, or CalTrans, or some other kind of inter-agency, inter-modal co-operative working group? Sensitized by numerous citations, Glynda thought first of the California Highway Patrol, who were always mean to her. Someone at the Corporation Yard had built a sturdy frame of 2x2 lumber, spray-painted dark grey, a square base that supported a head-high poster-sized rectangle to which the Public Notice was afixed. “In Your Face”, the words sprang out at her like a song, the sign seemed aimed so precisely at the solitary campervan parked in the athletic field parking lot. It was only then that she noticed the nastygram tucked beneath Sara’s wiper blade. Bad luck always comes in twos.
“It’s merely a warning ticket,” she told Jason, throwing the thing in the rubbish bin. They had switched to a two-part form from the old one with the pink and yellow to save money.
I’ll describe it in words so you don’t have to look at the picture of the poster, you’d need to read them anyway.
Who was this “Community” they were talking about? Glynda wondered. The seventeenth. That was the day before her own birthday, less than two weeks away. The picture showed a pretty good aerial view, obviously taken by a drone. Her campervan was parked near the star marking.
“Read the fine print,” Jason said, stooping. “They call it the ‘Shoreline Park Improvement Project.’ Guess we know how much community input they’re really expecting.” He pulled out his phone and scanned the QR code on the poster.
“Would you like to sleep over again tonight?” he pressured. “or I could stay with you again…” Jason eyed the campervan nervously. “Do you need some more money for gas?” he asked. “You could park on the street up there.” Glynda frowned. “No, that’s okay. I WILL have to move her. I’ll come up on the bus later.”
“Or call me and I’ll drive down.” After Jason left, Glynda took care of the plants and scrambled some eggs to settle her stomach. Whew, what an evening! She hoped they didn’t think too little of her… Oh my God, had she really promised to introduce them to Mum? There was a pledge to be broken.
The purpose of such social rituals is to enact a transformation and it was true, she did feel like hell, there was every indication that it would turn into an enduring condition. Donald Fucking Trump. My God! And when the singing had come later she’d taken the opportunity to dust off some old Phil Ochs, they’d all bonded over that. All in all… “What is it you do?” she had asked Clyde Pierson. “Environmental Lawyer,” he’d answered bleakly. Things didn’t look good for climate litigation.
Glynda went around and sat in the driver seat, poised to start Sara’s big mercedes engine, pausing as the door of one of the Port-o-Lets slammed shut. There he was. She watched him jerk the black dog and the white dog to a sudden halt in front of the sign. She watched him reading, could sense his increasing agitation in the angle of his shoulders. We’ve all got problems, buddy. She turned the key in the ignition. The starter motor rotated twice and then ground to a halt.
Oh no! She thought she had charged her phone at the Library, but it was dead as well. She supposed she could walk to the coffee stand later and call Jason, even though she really didn’t want to, did it make any sense to do that now?
There was a rude pounding on Sara’s passenger side and a deep male voice. She couldn’t see him. “Are you following me?” the voice said. “What?” she said.
“I saw you. STOP IT!” The last words were directed not at Glynda but at the man’s white dog, who had begun jumping up and clawing at Sara’s surface.
“Yes! Stop it!” She agreed, getting right into the spirit of the moment, “What the Fuck!” She started to get out of the campervan. There is no occasion that cannot be made worse by dogs. “REHOME YOUR DOGS, SIR!” she screamed, as the god-damned animals got loose and ran around and pawed and barked at her unrelentingly, actually drawing blood.
8. B positive
No, she didn’t require a transfusion, though her arm did bleed profusely. “My name is Steven,” the angry old man came on at her, suddenly unbearably solicitous, “I’m so sorry!” Two things she scarcely needed to know. He kept trying to dab at her arm with the hem of his pale blue T-shirt, which was also disgusting and left deep purple stains. “Stand back, please, sir,” she said firmly.
“Sure, sure, sorry, sorry” the man said, stepping away. Shortleashed, the two dogs stumbled after him, their dreadful slimy tongues dangling from their mouths, thankfully now oblivious to Glynda. “At least let me offer you a jump start,” Steven tried again. “My car’s right over there behind the willows.” Glynda stared at him uncomprehendingly.
“I thought you lived here,” she said. Steven snorted. “I KNEW you were following me. But I can see how you might think that. Me and the dogs walk around this place every day. No, I park over on the other side.” The hat was pulled down carelessly over long, uncombed hair, like a hippie or deadhead, though she was soon to learn that wasn’t true. A big grey moustache.
In Glynda’s mind he had been even poorer than she was, sparechanging on Telegraph for scraps to feed his dogs, camping rough on the land, in reality Steven wasn’t even from Berkeley, his house over the border in Oakland instead. “These guys should stick to picking up trash!” he said, gesturing at the Public Notice.
“But somebody’s living out there, I’ve seen their belongings. I didn’t mean to snoop.” Glynda apologized. “Oh no, better stay away from that guy,” Steven said, with obvious concern. So instead of remaining enemies, they became friends, though it was weird.
It turned out he had missed being a Scorpio by a couple of days, November 26th. That explained a lot. For instance how he had gone into leasing, Steven Voss said, whereas, you, with your singing and poetry. Capricorns, we’re a lot more literal.
“You a Buddhist too?” Steven asked, “Yeah, I thought so.” He pointed at the dogs, who leapt up at his gesture. “Meet Yin and Yang. Oops, I guess you already have.” From the way his mind veered from subject to subject, Glynda had a sense of great knowledge, or at least of great impatience.
“There’s a big market in leases and I sell derivatives of those,” Steven told Glynda, who refrained from saying that she could care less. His expression became animated, intense, as he thought of something he had to do. “I do most of my work from home so I’m able to get out here every day. Been coming out here for years.”
She became quite fond of the two dogs, though they still terrified her. Both were from the same litter, Steven said, the mother had been a golden retriever and the father a poodle. And there you had it—a pale retriever male pup and a curly poodle female. Yang and Yin. “Jeannie and I never had kids,” Steven said, “These are our babies…”
Are you going to the meeting? They talked about what they would say. “You know they just closed the Golden Gate Fields racetrack, right?” The sprawling multi-level facility crowned a natural hill to their north, visible for miles. “I just hope they don’t put in a low-income housing development. Now that Trump’s in,” Steven said. “they’ll put something better there.”
“He’s a Trumper!” Glynda told Jason later. “It’s so weird."
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