QUIET PLACES

The best part of living in a city is the convenience of walking instead of driving, going to events such as baseball games and parades that occur nearby, eating in numerous restaurants, attending plays and listening to newsworthy speakers, and living within a diverse community. I learned long ago that I also needed to discover quiet, green places in a city to stay connected to nature.

Right out of college, I moved to NYC. Luckily my roommates and I found an apartment on East 88th Street, a half block away from Carl Shurz Park with its Gracie Mansion, where the mayor lives. We couldn't have found a safer place to live in a big city. I could walk through the park, look towards the 59th Street Bridge, and watch the ships and boats ply the East River.

When we moved to Tokyo in 1998, we were lucky to find an apartment close to our son's school, Nichimachi. To reach the school we walked through Arisugawa Park, along a pond full of turtles, green meadows, walking trails, and a 700-year-old ginkgo tree. Early in the morning when we came to the sports fields at the end of the park, we could watch groups of young teenagers, dressed in baseball uniforms, performing drill after drill before they left for school. Once Theo and I left the park, we would pass a woman outside her front door. I would greet her with a slight bow and the formal morning greeting, "ohayo gozaimasu."

When we moved to Paris, we were close to the Bois de Boulogne where we could watch groups of men playing petanque, the French version of bocce ball. We spent more time in Passy at the Jardin Ranelagh with its puppet shows, at the pond in the Tuileries near the Louvre, and at Parc Monceau, on the Boulevard de Courcelles, with its elegant mansions surrounding the park's meadow. Besides the public places in Paris, we had the traditional window boxes filled with geraniums that are seen everywhere. Those geraniums helped to brighten my day.

Here in San Francisco, we've again been lucky to find an apartment next to Mission Creek with three small parks on each side of the building. The two of us walk over to the park that lines the creek to sit and watch seabirds and people going by.

We will be moving soon to a new place in South Beach at the bottom of Rincon Hill, just blocks from the Financial District with all its traffic, concrete, and glass high rises shading the streets below.

I've discovered my new quiet place, South Park, (named long before the TV Show), a block-long park sandwiched between 2-to-4-story red brick and Art Deco buildings. It's a hidden gem, not only because the height of the buildings reaches my maximum for human-scale buildings, but because it has a long history. South Park, the oldest park in San Francisco, was designed as an English strolling park in the 1800s and the street has housed everyone from well-dressed strollers to longshoremen to families and pensioners. Recently, small tech companies have opened up shop in the buildings that line the park. The employees, mostly young, collect together at lunchtime on the metal tables spread throughout the park. Families gather around the unusual climbing structure at one end of the park, and solitary people rest on the benches in the shade. The park is already a good place to go after picking up a coffee from the cafe around the corner. A quiet place in the city. 

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Reimaging South Park:

https://www.fletcher.studio/southpark 

FOGGY ADVENTURE

Sooty Shearwaters hunting anchovies

The anchovies are running up the coast again. Last year in Aptos, we watched as an extraordinary long line of Sooty Shearwaters skimmed across the top of the ocean above the swimming anchovies. This year, first the seals and sea lions gathered in great numbers on San Carlos Beach in Monterey. Then came the whales. Anchovies are food for all these sea animals.

Cormorants  Photo by Bill Slavin

I've never seen a whale out in the ocean. On my birthday this week, we went on an adventure down the coast to Pacifica, a small town just south of San Francisco. Dressed for a sunny day, I looked out the window at the blue-sky morning and turned west towards the ocean. I saw fog. I wondered if I was dressed warmly enough and grabbed another layer. We set out down Highway 280 to Mussel Rock Park. As we turned into the parking lot, a small sand-colored coyote scampered across the road and up an incline. He stopped, turned his head, looked at us, and watched us go by.

The fog hadn't lifted as we parked and walked towards the cliff's edge overlooking the beach. Mussel Rock was barely visible at the bottom of the cliff and the ocean had disappeared behind the fog. We disturbed a young man who sat on a picnic bench near us. No whales to view here, but a spot for someone to enjoy a few moments of quiet.

We decided to look for coffee and headed further south to Pacifica, which is a small beach town broken into three coves by the hills that run down to the sea. We drove around the homes on the first cove, then stopped at the middle section near the municipal pier. The fog lingered around the fishermen who lined the pier. They talked with each other in various Asian languages as they fiddled with rods, lines, and bait. They too were there for the anchovies. We watched as one caught an anchovy, unhooked it, and placed it in a bucket filled with seawater. We looked for the horizon but the fog still covered the ocean. No whales to see there.

Pacifica Municipal Pier    Photo by Bill Slavin

We continued our trek along Highway 1 and came to the southern section of Pacifica. The fog had lifted  and before us, we saw another cove whose shape created a surfer's beach. Surfers lined the waves, their legs dangling off the edges of their boards while they waited for the perfect wave to bring them back to shore. The sun brought warmth, and we parked and walked toward the sand. We looked to the horizon and couldn't tell at first if what we saw was an illusion. Finally, though, we spotted a spout of water erupting from the sea, and then a black object moved up out of the water and back down. Far away, but a glimmer of a whale indeed. We watched a flock of white gulls flying around the same spot and saw spout after spout break the water's surface. To our delight, one whale breached so that its head and white throat shot out of the water.

Pacifica State Beach   Photo by Bill Slavin

When we lived in Danville, a host of wild animals lived in our neighborhood. We heard the cries and yips of coyotes late at night, we scrambled to the window to watch deer leap over our low fence, looked for the one rabbit that visited our hill each year, watched out for rattlesnakes along our path, and marveled at the flight of swallowtails who would return to the garden year after year. A dense city like San Francisco also has wildlife, but they are mostly nocturnal and have learned to be wary of humans. We hear the calls of gulls, crows, and other scavenger birds early in the morning, but we don't see the proliferation of wildlife that we used to. Sighting those whales, even from a distance, reminded me what an effect nature can have. The desire to see wildlife in their own habitat makes me more aware of our connections with other life on Earth.

Whale-watching was a good birthday present.

Check out the Pacifica Whalespotting group on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/352947586172817/