Turns out our state’s volcanic activity isn’t on Wilshire Boulevard but in the far North of the state, in Shasta and Lassen counties. Lassen Volcanic National Park features all four types of volcanoes (which is apparently unusual!) and has the bubbling mud pots and hot springs typical of an area with a lot of seismic activity.

Last week we headed to Shasta County which is a bit less remote than Lassen, but still part of the Cascade Range that makes up the Pacific Ring of Fire (Mt. St. Helen’s is also a part of the Cascade Range). Mount Shasta hasn’t had a whole lot of activity in modern times (one of its most recent eruptions was about 10,000 years ago and created a part of the mountain known as Shastina which makes me think of Christina Aguilera but as a volcano) but the volcano is by no means dormant and scientists monitor it carefully, especially since almost 200,000 people live in Shasta County.

While less remote than Lassen, Shasta is still a five hour drive north from San Francisco. A drive that makes you realize just how vast California is. Europeans realizing the “bigness” of America was one of the fun parts of hosting the World Cup here. Just one of the parks we visited on this trip is bigger than all the national parks of Scotland combined.

That park was the site of our first walk — the 2.1 million acre Shasta Trinity National Forest. We focused on a tiny slice of it, a series of waterfalls along the McCloud River. After a drive down dirt roads cutting through pine forests, we parked and started hiking on a path along the river.

The air was hot and dry and dusty — that particular piney pungency that I associate with the mountain forests of California. It’s always startling to leave the foggy cold of a San Francisco summer and walk in the heat. I melt easily.

While the forests felt dry, along the river it was surprisingly verdant. Long and luxurious grasses were thriving. An unfamiliar plant with large swoop leaves was abundant. My plant identifier app initially called it liverwort which didn’t make any sense. I’m not a competent botanist by any means, but I saw lots of liverwort in the bogs of Scotland and it’s a tiny little plant, like moss. Were the Europeans right? Is everything bigger in America? Even the liverwort?

I tried using the app again when the path came much closer to the river, and this time the app identified it as an umbrella plant. Maybe it was a problem of perspective — umbrella plant seen from far away kind of looks like liverwort up close.

The path went high over a series of waterfalls, the water startlingly clear, running smooth and fast, even this far into the summer. The water in the upper falls ran through a steep canyon; it was easy to see how water had cut a deep and narrow passage through the rock.

The path cut away from the river for a bit, running against a vertical wall of volcanic rock, porous and rough to the touch. Another bend and we were back along the river, where chipmunks and lizards skittered through the manzanitas and across the path right in front of us. Their boldness was surprising.

After a final waterfall, the river started to spread and slow a bit, tumbling gently over rocks and logs. Further down the valley were little groups of people lounging on chairs on the riverbank and swimming in the shallow pools of water. It was clearly a well-loved spot.

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We headed back to our car for the next stop. Mt. Shasta was looming over us wherever we drove in the area. Earlier in the morning, it had a strange collection of clouds - a little fluffy hat in an otherwise brilliantly blue sky day.

Later, after the clouds drifted off, you could see the snow on the peak.

Mt. Shasta is the 5th tallest mountain in California, but what makes it really stand out is its prominence. Prominence is basically a measure of how high a mountain is compared to everything around it, and Mt. Shasta is one of the most prominent mountains in the entire US, which is why it dominates the sky for hundreds of miles.

We pulled up to McArthur-Burney Falls State Memorial Park, a popular resupply spot for hikers on the 2,600 mile Pacific Crest Trail — we saw more than a few weary, dusty, tan hikers enjoying a little slice of modern convenience (running water, ice cream) before heading back into the wilderness.

The main attraction of McArthur-Burney Falls State Memorial Park is Burney Falls, a spectacular and strange waterfall. To reach it, we walked down a long and shallow ramp that switchbacked the hill to the base of the falls. The trees along the hill provided a welcome relief from the heat. Occasionally, the wind would blow across the falls just right and we would walk through a pocket of air the felt like someone had just opened a refrigerator door — a delicious and surprising coolness.

Burney Falls has an interesting and unusual geology — there are two sources of water for the falls. The first is an aquifer 3/4 of a mile upstream from the falls, supplemented by snowmelt in the spring and early summer. Incredibly, later in the summer and fall, the surface-level water dries up and the falls is only fed from the underground aquifer. This water makes its way downstream and over the top of the falls. I imagine at certain times of the year, it looks like a waterfall from nowhere - a magic trick.

There’s a second source of water that comes out of the middle of the cliff face of the waterfall. The face of the waterfall is made up of two layers of rocks. The base layer is old volcanic rock, which used to be the top surface of the valley. Then, between 1 and 2 million years ago, lava flowed through the region, covered the old layer of volcanic rock, and created a second layer of basalt rock - the Burney Basalt. This new permeable rock allowed for rain and snowmelt to seep into the ground easily, but the older layer of rock was impermeable. This means instead of the water continuing to seep into the ground or into aquifers, the water drains out in a series of springs about 2/3 of the way up the face of the waterfall. Right where the old and new volcanic rock meet.

These two different sources of water make it seem like the whole cliff is a waterfall — as if the water is coming from everywhere.

We walked further along the creek, a steep field of lava rocks to the right, crossed a bridge, and started back towards the falls. This path was much rougher than the path on the other side of the river, and much less crowded. The trail became steep as we climbed up and up and over the falls. Finally we reached a long bridge that spanned farther upstream from the falls. The foliage was strange — tall pine trees lined the riverbank and bright green and tan plants grew in abundance. Even the rocks that poked from the water were covered with a short little layer of plants.

These strange and beautiful waterfalls were almost destroyed by the creation of Lake Britton, a reservoir built by PG&E in the early 1900s. PG&E had started buying up land in the area, with a clear intent to dam the Pitt River for hydroelectric power. The dam would’ve created a giant lake, flooding the valley and Burney Falls. The local people were furious at the prospect of these magical falls becoming submerged, so the McArthur brothers bought the land around the falls and donated it to the State of California for the creation of a park, to be named after their parents. The dam eventually was built and Lake Britton created, but further down the valley.

McArthur-Burney Falls State Memorial Park became the second state park in California. Thanks to the McArthurs, we now get to enjoy what Teddy Roosevelt called the “eighth wonder of the world” today.

Continue through the valley, through small towns and past fancy vineyards with beautiful wine tasting villas. Past the local Grange hall and a farm supply store and after 17 miles you’ll see Jumbo’s Win Win, which is more delicious and less expensive than the burger place in Cloverdale, and then turn left after an apple orchard and drive over a little bridge crossing the Navarro River and enter Hendy Woods State Park.

Hendy Woods is named after Joshua Hendy, who came to California during the Gold Rush, founded the first redwood lumber mill in the state, and then started a hugely successful iron works that made mining equipment. When he died in 1891, he willed the land that would become Hendy Woods State Park to a nephew, with the stipulation that he old redwood groves would never be logged.

Joshua Hendy was not the only lumber baron who had a special grove of redwoods that he wanted to protect.1 Odd that we name places like Hendy Woods after men that were responsible (in various ways and degrees) for cutting down 95% of the old-growth redwood forests in California in less than 100 years. But Hendy’s last wishes to preserve the redwoods almost went unheeded — the nephew got into some financial trouble and sold the redwood groves to a lumber company. More on that later. Let’s take a walk through the redwoods first.

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Andy and I started our hike at a parking lot near the back edge of the park and headed into the redwood groves. There is nothing like the colors of a redwood forest - every shade of green and brown imaginable. The electric green of new needles. The red-brown bark, sometimes slashed with the dark brown scars of a fire from long ago. The feathery green of the ferns that cover the forest floor. The light brown duff that coats the ground, dampening the sound and giving the redwood forest its famous silence. The dark mossy green covering fallen logs. The blurry, rich blue green of the redwood needles as you crane your neck to look up hundreds of feet into the forest canopy.

The calms that comes with noticing all these greens has scientific backing. It turns out that for evolutionary reasons, humans are really good at detecting different shades of green - we can detect more hues of green than any other color. Andy told me that image compression algorithms are made with this in mind — basically they leave more room for variations of green than for other colors. Some scientists believe that since our eyes are so good at detecting green, it’s easier to look at the color, thus putting less strain on our nervous systems, which is what makes green a calming color.

This redwood forest was louder than other ones we’ve been to — we heard more birds and saw more animal life than in other forests. Andy and I speculated on the reasons for this. Many redwood forests we’ve visited have been tucked into narrow valleys — isolated and dark. Hendy isn’t isolated in its own steep little valley; it’s bordered by meadows and farmland and isn’t the only ecosystem within hearing distance.

We walked to the edge of the grove, where there was a fence, marking the boundary between the park and the neighboring apple farm. We saw a sudden movement in the apple orchard and a deer leapt through the trees, stopping for a snack. It felt like we were in a Disney movie - I half expected a flock of birds to start putting me into a beautiful ballgown. But of course this was real life — after nibbling on an apple, the deer simply bounded away.

One of the trails marked on our map was to a “hermit hut.” I’d visited a hermitage in the UK; I associated them with aristocratic estates so it seemed incongruous to have one in a redwood grove in California. I wanted to check it out.

Finding the trail was tricky — we doubled back over paths and fire roads and spent time wandering up the main paved road through the park, where we were passed by two small boys flying down the hill on their bikes from the other direction, whooping with their feet off the pedals.

Finally we found the right path and climbed up a hill to the hermit hut. I was surprised to find that it wasn’t some English folly — it was a simple lean-to built into a redwood stump. It served as a home of Petro Zailenko, a Russian World War II veteran who lived in the woods for nearly 20 years, starting in the 1960s. Known as the “Hendy Hermit,” Zailenko jumped off the Russian fishing trawler he was working on when it stopped in San Francisco. Undocumented, he held various jobs in northern California, including at a mill in Anderson Valley, until he was asked for his immigration papers by a boss and fled to the woods.

Zailenko’s immigration status left him terrified of authority figures (he did not want to be sent back to the USSR), so he retreated to what was then right outside the official borders of Hendy Woods State Park, living off the land and the occasional kindness of campers and neighbors. Zailenko made his own shelters, a few of which remained; the land he lived on was later acquired by the State to expand the park in the 1970s/80s. When he died in 1981, park rangers spread his ashes in the park, so he could forever be amongst his beloved redwoods.

Rumor has it that Zailenko was imprisoned as a POW by the Nazis. He must have seen and experienced terrible things in his life, and it’s understandable that he seemed to find some measure of peace among the beautiful old redwoods. I did have mixed feelings about walking around the former home of a man who seemed so intensely private, but making the trail and preserving his story also seem important. That the life of a man who died with $4.38 to his name is just as valuable as a wealthy Englishman who built a hermitage in the 18th century. That both homes are worth a visit and have something to teach us.

Back to the creation of Hendy Woods State Park. Hendy’s nephew sold the land to a timber company and the land changed hands a number of times but was miraculously never logged (some speculate this was because there weren’t any local mills that could process trees that big). In 1938, the Unity Club, a local Anderson Valley women’s club, heard a lecture about how the redwood forests of Sonoma and Mendocino Counties could be preserved as parks. The women decided to take on the project of turning Hendy Woods into a park - they formed committees, lobbied the government, and brought press attention. In 1958, the State bought the land. Five years later, it opened as a state park.2

That wasn’t the last time the Anderson Valley community had to campaign for Hendy Woods. The park was slated to be closed as part of the 2012 California state budget. With the memory of Zuccotti Park still fresh, “Occupy Hendy Woods” began. Organizing, a fundraising campaign, and the creation of an organization called the Hendy Woods Community helped save the park for future generations.

“I knew the Mischke kids” my dad would tell me. “I was friends with his brother.” It felt unsurprising — baby boomers from big Catholic families who grew up around St. Paul and went to Cretin High? Of course he knew the Mischke kids.

That’s why when I saw someone named “John Mischke” had messaged me on Facebook, I decided to open it. The message was months old; John said he’d been friends with my dad in high school, had just learned of his death, and was putting together a reunion of the men who had built the Williams Lake Lodge in the 1970s.

The lodge rang a bell — my dad told me stories of building log cabins in the Canadian wilderness, in a place so remote you had to take a floatplane to get there. He was 18 or 19 when he went on this grand adventure — a kid from the suburbs turned into a lumberjack.

My dad’s summers building in the backcountry were on my mind a few weekends ago as I hiked to a much less remote lodge — the Tourist Club.

The Nature Friends San Francisco Tourist Club sits high above Muir Woods in Marin County. It was started in 1912 by a group of largely socialist German immigrant tradesmen. The club was part of a much larger organization, Die Naturfreunde, founded in Austria in the late 1800s, which was created to expand access to nature for the working class. “At a time when the Hapsburg monarchy and other elites still controlled access to most of the Austrian mountains…Berg frei—free mountains—was their slogan.”

The parallels with the Ramblers in the UK — socialists fighting for working class access to the countryside — are obvious, but I never came across the Nature Friends during my walking research in Europe. Instead, I learned about them through a friend who is working to become a member. While it’s a private club, there are a few public events every year, which is how I found myself hiking in the Marin hills.

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I had parked my car on the winding Panoramic Highway and spent a few terrifying minutes walking down the tiny shoulder of the twisty road until I got to the trailhead. Spread before me was a magnificent view of the valley, the ocean hazy in the distance. I started the descent, going down rough and eroded steps, crossing a broad and sturdy bridge over a shallow stream and then started climbing up again. The path hugged the side of the hills, which rose steeply and dramatically to the right. The crevices between the hills were full of bushes and trees — it was easy to see where the water flowed.

Gradually the path took me from grassland to scrubby forest to redwoods, the air gradually getting cooler and more moist. After a switchback, I took a fork off the path to a little road. I could hear polka music — I was definitely in the right place.

I padded down a flight of stairs and there it was — the Tourist Club. A jumble of charming Alpine chalets terraced onto the hillside. People in lederhosen and traditional German dresses milled about, drinking beer and eating pretzels with mustard. A friend of my friend’s, who is a full-fledged member of the club, gave us a little tour of the place. We followed her along porches and through a gate and down steps to a little house with a magnificent view out back - remarkably tranquil despite the hundreds of people nearby.

The next stop was the bar, complete with little homages to the tradesmen who built the place and the activities of the club:

The original lodge was built before the Golden Gate Bridge existed — when you had to take a ferry to Sausalito and then a train to Mill Valley and then hike in. All the building materials had to be brought in by men or mule. While my dad might have had some technological advantages building cabins 60 years later, I can imagine the remoteness of the place having some parallels — felling trees on-site, being creative with your resources (no quick popping over to Home Depot), the camaraderie that can come with adventure and hard work.

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For readers not in the know, Mitchell’s is a San Francisco institution, an ice cream parlor that opened in the 1950s and is now famous for its tropical flavors — they were doing ube before it was cool. The grocery store near my house sells half-gallons of Mitchell’s. Once in a blue moon, they will have grasshopper pie, which is their best flavor, or peanut butter indulgence, which is also their best flavor. But usually the grocery store only seems to carry inexplicably unseasonal flavors like eggnog and pumpkin. Also rum raisin, which I believe is not something anyone actually eats (let me know in the comments if you’re a rum-raisin-head!).

I had Mitchell’s on the mind and knew going to the grocery store was useless, so I proposed to Andy that we walk to the Mitchell’s store. “That’s like five miles!” he said. “It’s only like three,” I said. The days are long now, and we didn’t have anything else going on that evening, so I eventually convinced him to go on the journey.

Looking to avoid going up too many steep hills, we started meandering south and east, strolling past old Victorians. The bougainvillea was in full bloom, which Andy and I are both suckers for, so I kept stopping to take pictures. Andy found his dream combo — bougainvillea stacked on top of a fragrant jasmine bush. Look how happy he was!

We reached Divisadero and I realized we’d overshot a bit and had no choice but to climb the last bit of it and turn onto the top of Castro street. I firmly believe that inefficiency on these walks is part of the point. Meandering in the general direction of a place and not in a straight line allows you to stumble on beautiful things, like the bougainvillea/jasmine combo, or this striking green house on Divisadero:

We continued up Castro, walking past the edge of Corona Heights Park, a small and steep park with fantastic views of the city, and made our way down to Market Street.

At this point, it was time for a break, so we ducked into Antoine’s Cookie Shop, which bakes Steph Curry’s favorite snickerdoodle. This is not to be confused with Anthony’s Cookies in the Mission, which I prefer, but Antoine’s chocolate chip cookie was still pretty good. (And yes having a cookie on the way to get ice cream was absolutely necessary because we ended up climbing almost 500 ft. uphill!)

We turned down Dolores Street, passing a building Andy lived in for a few months, the bay window of his former bedroom now filled with an alarming number of frog plushies. We passed Mission Dolores, the oldest building in San Francisco and one of two graveyards in the city (to find out what happened to the rest of the graveyards, read my post on Colma). Andy told me he’d never been to Mission Dolores, a place visited by tens of thousands of people every year and located in the neighborhood where he lived for the majority of his time in San Francisco.

That’s the funny thing about living in a very touristy city — if you live in one, you often don’t do the touristy stuff. The stuff people travel thousands of miles and pay good money to see. And I shouldn’t judge Andy because I’ve also not done all of the touristy things. For example, I’ve never been inside Coit Tower. But I watched the fog and clouds swirling around it from the top of the UESF building in North Beach, pacing back and forth across the roof as I talked on the phone during their strike. Looking up through the mist at Coit was so jarringly beautiful and instantly calming and someday I’ll go in it, but I think that experience is enough to hang on to for a while.

We turned off Dolores and onto Guerrero. It was the golden hour, which this time of year seem to stretch on forever; the sun glows off our white and pastel city and the buildings are luminous. One of the Victorians had a golden setting (or rising?) sun painted on the second story and it was lit up as though hit by a spotlight. Sun on sun.

Guerrero is a wide, four lane, traffic-choked street that’s surprisingly delightful when you’re outside of a car. There are lots of quirky houses with surprising gardens and unexpected decorations, like this Christmas house.

Guerrero kind of turns into San Jose Avenue, which is where Mitchell’s is. A block or so before Mitchell’s, we came across a riotous, out-of-control bougainvillea that spanned the sidewalk, forcing us to crouch down to walk through the flowers. A rather magical portal to ice cream.

We were pretty far south in the city so the fog had rolled in and the temperature dropped, but ice cream fanatics were undeterred. I got an ice cream sandwich made with peanut butter indulgence ice cream in the middle. Perfection.

The Mitchell’s story is over 100 years old, when Noe Valley used to be dairy farms. The Mitchell family had a dairy farm in the late 1800s, which they eventually sold and built the apartment building where Mitchell’s is today. Two Mitchell brothers decided to try their hand at ice cream making and opened up the shop in the 1950s. In 1965, a customer who was a fruit importer suggested they try making mango ice cream, which has been on the menu ever since. The brothers expanded into making more tropical fruit flavors, which became a hit after a large influx of Filipino immigrants came to San Francisco. This influx was due to the U.S. Immigration Act of 1965, a victory from the civil rights movement. Before the Act, racist quotas were in place for immigration that essentially banned anyone from Asia or Africa or really anywhere outside of Northern or Western Europe from immigrating to the US. The Act lifted the quota and created a new system of immigration to America. In 1960, only 95 people immigrated to the US from the Philippines. In 1970, that number rose to 23,951. Many of those folks came to San Francisco, and Mitchell’s tapped into a whole new market by offering ube and buko and langka ice cream flavors. An unexpected connection between immigration policy and the longevity and success of an iconic San Francisco ice cream parlor.

The cold and foggy weather didn’t keep my ice cream sandwich from melting and I got quite a few drips on my coat as we walked over to Church street. We ended up walking over five miles, so Andy’s estimate turned out to be right, but that’s because of the aforementioned tendency to meander in the general direction, turning down streets based on the size of the hill or if we see something interesting or we don’t want to wait at a light. We ramble and that always means the journey is a bit longer.

The ramble is the point. Capital is pushing all of us to become more efficient in every aspect of our lives — from workouts to work. And I suppose I reject using AI for the same reason that I reject taking the direct route when I’m walking somewhere. A little bit of inefficiency allows room for serendipity, for day dreaming, for thinking. For reclaiming our time and our brains. It feels almost grandiose to say it, but allowing our minds and our feet to wander keeps us human. Plus sometimes there’s ice cream at the end.

The vibes only got weirder as we walked on. Giant signs warning of ticks were everywhere, which made sense given the tall, disheveled grasses. We walked past a yellow clapboard house that looked a bit worse for wear. This was the park’s visitors center, though the hours were extremely limited and the building was closed.

We continued on up the hill, passing a beautiful old wooden barn with a strange tree stump out front. The views went on for miles, out across San Pablo Bay.

The barn seemed to be the only well-cared for building on the property. As we continued up the hill, we passed more shabby, derelict buildings, the paths to them overgrown with grasses. Fearing ticks, we stuck to the main path, which eventually took us past the buildings and into the more “naturey” part of the park.

To the left ran a creek, shaded by trees. Gnarled oaks splayed across the hills, creating patterns of dappled sunlight. A wild turkey strolled across the path, startling us because it was alone. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a solitary turkey — what was going on with this place?

The path led to a recreation of a small Coast Miwok village and a chaotically labeled native plant garden. We could’ve continued up into the hills, but decided to turn around. It was hot and the whole place gave me the heebie-jeebies.

We walked down the hill on a different path, passing a stucco mansion boarded up due to a fire. There wasn’t really an explanation of this haunting sight, so we continued down to our car and drove away.

I almost didn’t write about this walk because it was such a strange combination of unsettling and boring. Weeks later, I looked into its history and discovered why it felt so unsettling — and also that this park is anything but boring.

The Coast Miwok people lived in the village of Olompali for thousands of years in what was likely the largest indigenous village in Marin County. The land continued to be home to the Coast Miwok until the mid 1800s. The Mexican government granted the tribe’s final Hoipu (headman) a deed to Olompali village and the surrounding lands. The Hoipu, Camilo Ynitia, was one of only two native people given a land grant by the Mexican government. (Never mind the absurdity of deeding land to a person whose people have been living on it for generations).

Tensions between Mexico and America were heating up when Camilo Ynitia was granted the land, and those tensions came to Olompali. In June of 1846, the only deadly battle of the Bear Flag Revolt, a short-lived rebellion against Mexico for an independent California republic, occurred in Olompali. The Bear Flag Revolt lasted less than a month — it was basically a precursor to the Mexican-American War — but it had a lasting impact on our state; today’s California flag has a bear on it with the words “California Republic.”

Camilo Ynitia sold Olompali in the 1850s to James Black, who granted it to his daughter Mary on her wedding day. Mary married a dentist, Galen Burdell, who became wealthy from inventing a tooth powder. Galen killed Mary’s mother (unclear if it was an accident) while performing a dental procedure. James Black began drinking heavily after his wife’s death, falling off of a horse and eventually dying. He wrote his daughter out of his will, a will she tried to invalidate by ripping his signature off the bottom of it and eating it. After numerous court battles, she got to keep the property, which she passed on to her son who built a giant stucco mansion with over two dozen rooms on the property.

Eventually, Olompali ended up in the hand of the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit school near my house. USF intended to use it as a retreat for priests but ended up renting it out instead.

And this is where the story gets truly wild.

In the summer of 1966, the Grateful Dead rented out Olompali, putting the property on the radar of Bay Area hippies. In 1967, Donald McCoy rented Olompali to be the home for his commune.

McCoy was born wealthy and made even more money as the first houseboat developer in Sausalito. It is said that Otis Redding wrote (Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay on McCoy’s houseboat (though I’ve also heard he wrote that song at the Berkeley Marina so who knows). McCoy got tired of the fast-paced houseboat mogul lifestyle so took his three daughters and around 20 other people that he called “the Chosen Family” to Olompali.

The Chosen Family was pretty much what you’d expect out of a commune in the 1960s. The Grateful Dead were regular house guests, even shooting one of their album covers there. The Family baked hundreds of loaves of bread every week, which were distributed by the Diggers to hippies in San Francisco. Each week, the adults would pick a child’s name out of a hat and would act as the parent to that child for the week. Drugs were plentiful. During one police drug raid, when asked who owned the seized pot, McCoy said “It belongs to God. I just smoke it.”

After less than two years, as happened with so many of the communes of that era, things started to get dark. McCoy fought with his ex-father-in-law about money, eventually losing custody of his kids and going to a psychiatric facility. People started moving in who didn’t hold the original ideals of the Chosen Family. The old electrical wiring in the mansion caught fire and half the building burned down. Two toddlers fell into the swimming pool and none of the commune’s beater cars would start; the girls died due to the delay. The death of the children was the final straw for USF (the Jesuits still owned the property) and the place was shut down. In the late 1970s, the land was sold to the State of California and it became a state park in the 1980s.

It seems that not much has changed at Olompali since the fire in the late 1960s, with the exception of the reproduction of the Miwok village. This is not a park that has seen a lot of investment — apparently it’s regularly on the list of state parks to close during economic downturns. The place seems frozen in time, strewn with old debris and falling apart buildings, the few interpretive signs clearly from over 30 years ago. But beneath the ruins and seeming neglect is a fascinating and surprising history — I’m glad I chose to dig a bit deeper.

But it’s the LA I lived in for the last week, walking the half mile back and forth between my hotel and the United Teachers Los Angeles building in Koreatown as the union prepared for a potential strike of its 37,000+ members.

That walk took me down Wilshire Boulevard, one of the main thoroughfares through the LA area. Wilshire starts at the beach in Santa Monica, and wanders East and then Southeast, passing UCLA and going through the heart of Beverly Hills, along the La Brea Tar Pits, the Miracle Mile, Koreatown, Macarthur Park, and finally, after more than 15 miles, terminating in Downtown.

Wilshire was a thoroughfare before California was a state — it connected one of the largest Tongva villages, near what is now City Hall, to the La Brea tar pits (which the Tongva people used for building materials) to the ocean. In the 1800s, as the city of LA was being developed, a man named Gaylord Wilshire donated a parcel of land to the city for use as a boulevard, on the condition that it be named after him.

Unlike many of the namesakes of California places, Wilshire was not a missionary who murdered indigenous people or a general who murdered indigenous people or a politician who supported racist and eugenicist policies. Gaylord Wilshire was a wealthy, flamboyant, oddball — and a socialist. He ran for office as a socialist — one of the first to do so — in his 1890 bid for Congress. He started a hugely successful socialist magazine that published articles by Upton Sinclair and got in trouble with the USPS. He classified people “into two great classes—Fools and Socialists” His late-in-life promotion of quacky medical devices makes me think that he was perhaps both a fool and a socialist, but the medical stuff was largely harmless and it was nice to see a road named after a largely unproblematic wealthy man who lost all of his money publishing a socialist magazine in the early 1900s.

I’m sure that Gaylord Wilshire, who ran for Congress on a platform of the abolition of poverty, would’ve been horrified by some of the things I saw on my half mile walk to work down his namesake street every day. There were a lot of folks who were struggling - with addiction, disability, lack of stable housing - on the streets of Los Angeles. I see folks with the same struggles in San Francisco and it’s infuriating that in the fourth biggest economy in the world there are still so many Californians who are forced to struggle to get by.

I would begin my walk each day at Oasis Church, which featured a Hollywood Walk of Fame style star for Jesus. In the various crevices of the church building, people slept on the ground. Seeing people sleep outside next to a church is always particularly galling to me — a direct contradiction to “share your food with the hungry, and give shelter to the homeless” from Isaiah. I suspect the church was unembarrassed by the hypocrisy.

On the curb in front of the church was a busy bus stop, a reminder that despite the city’s car-forward persona, many Angelenos rely on public transit (about 25% of Koreatown residents don’t own a car). Next were the Indonesian and Philippines Consulates - the neighborhood is full of consulates and tourism boards of dozens of Asian and Latin American countries. On the next block, I walked past a multi-story mall, where I one day got perfect soft-serve, drizzled with caramel and salt.

Next to the mall was the Gaylord apartment building, named after our good friend Gaylord Wilshire. It’s an old school LA apartment building, with a giant neon sign on top of the building that says “GAYLORD” and can be seen from near and far. A few boring office blocks later and I was at UTLA building — a mini-skyscraper almost at the border of Koreatown.

I had a few hours off last Sunday and decided to treat myself by switching things up and walking West down Wilshire. I saw more Blue Jacaranda trees in this direction — I love being in LA when they are in bloom. You can often see the bursts of purple and blue flowers from the plane.

Then, I was treated to the sight of the truly unique Wilshire Boulevard Temple, home to the oldest Jewish congregation in LA. The Temple’s architecture has the look of a set from some epic movie made in the 1930s, which makes sense given its prominent members included the Warner Brothers. I would’ve loved to go inside, but some sort of bagel festival was happening (complete with a check-in tent for influencers, a very LA scene, and also bagel influencer is my new dream job).

Down the street, I spotted the Wiltern, a magnificent art deco office building and movie theater, a pop of shimmering color against the grey and beige of the other office buildings. I also passed the headquarters of the Korea Times and a few other Korean-language media outlets, fronted by a surprisingly stunning courtyard with trees and ornate lamps.

After eating in a cafe tucked away in a shopping mall on Western Ave, I went back down Wilshire, passing St. Basil Catholic Church. Next to the modern church building was a raised plaza surrounded by beautiful trees and fronted by a dramatic statute. “That looks like a nice park” I thought to myself, eventually finding a little flight of stairs to go check it out.

It was a parking lot. What a bait and switch. This city really loves it cars.

Of the dozens of times I walked down Wilshire, my favorite walk was both the shortest and the slowest. A coworker and I were returning from lunch and came across a woman crossing Vermont at a glacial pace. The light was about to turn, so we held up traffic while she walked. Then she turned to cross Wilshire, and I held out my arm to steady her. She clutched my coworkers hand, gripped my arm, and the three of us slowly made our way across six lanes of traffic.

“God bless you for helping” she said. “Why are you helping? Are you Mennonites?”

A bit taken aback (I was wearing a long black skirt but never in my life thought I would be mistaken for a Mennonite) I told her we worked for a union. “For teachers,”I added.

“Oh teachers!” she said, her face lighting up. “I signed to support you! I love teachers! I hope they give you everything!” Turns out everyone knew about the impending strike. Eventually, we deposited her safely across the street, where her grandson would be picking her up. “Good luck!” she yelled, and we walked back to the office, boosted by her enthusiasm.

I often feel like there are pieces of my heart all over San Francisco, which seems fitting given its a city where many people leave their hearts. Just the other day, I was walking on Franklin Avenue, a busy thoroughfare lined with tall buildings and choked with cars. As I walked up the drab sidewalk, a flash of iridescent green appeared as if by magic. It was a hummingbird flitting in front of me, eventually darting back to wherever it came from. An unexpected burst of beauty that almost made my heart stop. A reminder that there are glimpses of magic in even the greyest parts of this city.

A few weeks ago, I had errands to run in the southern part of the city and decided to walk the few blocks that I had missed in the Ingleside neighborhood in my quest to walk every street in San Francisco.

I lived in Ingleside over a dozen years ago when I first moved to San Francisco, and I have mixed emotions about the place. I fell in love with the city there, but the neighborhood was perpetually overcast, becoming especially foggy and cold in the summer. Ingleside, a mixture of working class families and students at the nearby San Francisco State University, was in the process of being gentrified. My roommates and I, students and people with low-paying jobs, knew we were going to be pushed out when our landlord stopped returning our calls about pests and repairs. A notice raising our rent by over 50% came soon after, and so ended our time on Ocean Avenue.

The day I returned to walk down Ocean Ave, the sun shone bright and the air was warm. A perfect spring day. I walked past the McDonald’s, one of the few drive-thrus in the city. I had a roommate who would go there often, befriending a man who split his time between the McDonald’s and a laundromat down the street, exchanging fortunes for cups of milky coffee.

Down I walked, past the tiny library with its huge sections in Russian and Chinese, past the taco place and the Laotian restaurant. Past a coffee shop/bakery/gambling parlor where I used to occasionally treat myself to greasy breakfast sandwiches before work and old men would spend the day doing scratch cards and various lottery games. I peeked in — the old men were still there, but the baked goods were sold out.

I was amazed how much was still the same. Yes, there were shiny new apartments where a gas station used to be. My old office was empty, the bottom floor of the building converted from a laundry mat to a seafood store. But the little nail salons and Chinese restaurants and hardware stores mostly seemed unchanged, and I felt an overwhelming and surprising nostalgia.

Eventually I turned left onto Jules Avenue, the street I needed to walk. I could understand why I’d skipped it — Jules is quite steep. I started the climb, walking past the St. Emydius Catholic Church and the CYO center and the tidy homes with trees and flowers in the front.

Jules eventually dead ends into another street, so I turned right and climbed an even steeper hill for a block until I reached a tiny park. There are a few of these parks scattered across the tippy-top of the hills in Ingleside — places that were too steep or rocky to build on. Or maybe they were left open as a little memorial to the open fields of wildflowers that spread over Ingleside before being paved over for housing in the 20th century.

I always loved these little green outcrops when I lived in here, especially since the neighborhood is weirdly devoid of parks. These tiny parks were a beast to get to, but that little pocket of nature with its sweeping views of the ocean and the city made the ascent worthwhile.

As I climbed up past the poppies and other wildflowers, looking out over the ocean and across to Sutro Tower, I was startled to realize that Ingleside is one of my hearts of San Francisco. It was often tough to live there, a precarious time in my life, but it was also magic.

A beach day in our part of California usually means a biting wind, wearing layers, and walking to keep warm. Our beaches are beautiful but rugged — not exactly inviting for lounging around.

Yesterday was different. Only a whisper of a breeze and strong, bright sunshine. We headed south down Highway 1, past coastal hills and marshes and scrubland blooming with flowers. Entire fields turned yellow with mustard and buttercup and the aptly-named California Goldfield flowers. It’s the time of year when everything is in bloom — orange California poppies spilling out of sidewalk cracks and magnolias dripping off trees and camellias bursting through dark green leaves. The hills are lush green, if they aren’t covered in blankets of yellow or purple or orange. It’s exhilarating.

About an hour south of San Francisco, we stopped at Pomponio State Beach, where we hiked down a small bluff to a sandy beach bisected by a creek. I laid down on a beach blanket in a mere t-shirt, soaking up the sun, feeling as if I were on some tropical island instead of the rugged San Mateo County coast. Eventually it became too hot (!) so we headed inland to the little town of Pescadero for some refreshments.

The next stop was Pescadero State Beach. We parked on high sand dunes and made our way down a sketchy, windy path to a rocky beach, filled with huge pieces of driftwood, bleached white by the sun. A dad and his son had made a little fort out of the driftwood, from which they were operating some sort of complicated ham radio setup with wires and antennas everywhere.

We hiked through the rocks to the sandy beach. Unlike Pomponio, Pescadero’s beach and waters were strewn with large rock formations, which the waves dramatically crashed against. We walked up to a group of rocks that looked black on top. What I had thought was discoloration turned out on closer inspection to be thousands of California mussels. The mussels cling to the rocks in the intertidal zone, spending part of their day above water and part below.

Next to a clump of mussels were what looked like chocolate donuts, covered in sand. But the hole of the “donut” moved in a startling and creepy way. These donuts were creatures - some sort of sea anemone.

We moved on along the coast, marveling at the strange plants and creatures clinging to the rocks and lurking in the tide pools. I learned later that this stretch of coast is famous for its tide pools; the rock formations are perfect for creating little protected waters and the biodiversity in them is immense. It wasn’t the right time of day for tide pooling, but I still spotted snails and (dead) crabs and kelp and sea lettuces and Torrey’s surfgrass and a species of algae called green rope.

When he goes scuba diving, Andy tells me he often can’t tell if the organisms he sees are plants or animals or neither or some in-between, and I got a little taste of that on the beach. Was I looking at a rock or a barnacle? Algae or seaweed? Anemone or plant? My childhood spent near rivers and lakes did not prepare me for the vast weirdness of the ocean.

The waves were sneaking closer, so we made our way back across the sand, which was carved into intricate rippling patterns. I don’t know what made these designs - another mystery of the ocean.

I saw this view many times over the past two weeks at nearly every time of day, from before sunrise to after sunset. I saw it in sunshine and rain and mist and fog as I biked from my house to the office of the United Educators of San Francisco, the union for teachers and paraprofessionals and social workers and many of the other folks that make our schools run.

UESF was on strike last week for four days, fighting for stability in a city that feels hard to be stable in. Fully-funded family health care, decent wage increases, more resources for special education students. A contract that would actually allow people to be in San Francisco Unified School District for their entire career. A contract that would make it possible for educators to live in the same city they work in.

The night before the strike began, I ruptured a tendon in a finger on my left hand and the ER doctor told me I couldn’t bike. By the morning of day 2 of the strike, I drove back home and switched my car for my bike. It was impossible to get around the city in the way I needed to by driving. I couldn’t spend the strike stuck in traffic.

As I coasted down the hill from my apartment, I almost immediately encountered the strike. The elementary school around the corner had taken over the iconic bridge that crosses Geary Boulevard at Japantown. The traffic islands and corners of the intersection were filled too, with parents, educators, and students chanting and waving signs, the air raucous with honking.

I took a left and headed up Webster, where John Muir Elementary sits perched at the top of the hill. Folks there had a picket line that went on a loop around the corner of their school and then across all of the streets, chanting as they waited for each walk signal. Their goal seemed to be to obtain maximum honking — it made it hard to have a conversation with the picket captain, but neither of us cared. After our check-in, I jumped back on my bike, making my way through the morning rush hour traffic and back to the office.

It was a noisy few days in the city. An organizer friend of mine jokingly called her car her “mobile solidarity machine” and told me she felt like honking at picket lines was the most significant thing she’d done to help a strike as an organizer. It’s the one thing I missed about my car during this strike — my bike bell didn’t quite have the same “oomph” as a car horn.

After finishing up at the office, I hopped back on my bike. It had started to rain by this point. I decided to skip the hills and ride through the drizzle along the flat Embarcadero, past the piers and the choppy Bay, turning onto Market street, dodging busses and street cars and jaywalkers until I got to Civic Center. My destination was the city-owned War Memorial Opera House, a magnificent stone building home to the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Ballet, built as a monument to San Franciscans who died in World War I. It was a surreal place to have bargaining during the strike; it felt strange to wheel my grubby bike through its marble halls.

As I biked through UN Plaza and up McAllister towards the War Memorial, I heard a wall of sound. A teacher stood on the back of a flatbed truck, microphone in hand, leading thousands of educators and students and community supporters in chants. “One day longer! One day stronger!” they yelled, waving banners and picket signs and banging drums, soaked from head to toe.

The bargaining team had left the War Memorial to watch everyone walk by and almost all of them had tears running down their faces. “Teachers who taught me when I was a student and my own current students were marching side by side,” one of them told me later. “I cried.” How could you not?

So many of us love San Francisco but it often feels like the city doesn’t love us back. The tech-oligarchs and venture capital billionaires have made this beautiful place profoundly unwelcoming to ordinary people. But this past week, as I biked around the city, and heard the honks, and sat in picket captain meetings every night hearing about the loving way that San Franciscans came out to support their schools, it finally felt like the city was ours again.

A city of austerity and instability is not an inevitability — it is a choice. And what San Franciscans won through this strike was the possibility of a different choice - stability, investment, care. Tens of thousands of San Franciscans flooded the streets every day - from North Beach to the Bayview — and showed that a different future is possible.

Ocean Calling asks you to:

1. Select a stone and place it in the chute

2. When ready, pick up the phone and speak to your lost loved one

3. Let the wind and waves carry your words

4. Say goodbye for now and hang up

I came to this phone booth by the ocean because I didn’t know what else to do. I had donated to rent relief and written to businesses that were supporting ICE operations and spoken with my friends and family in Minneapolis every day since this horrific occupation began.

It felt like the only other thing I could do was come to this spot and think of Alex Pretti, Renee Good, Geraldo Lunas Campos, and Victor Manuel Diaz — lives stolen by ICE over the past few weeks — and send my love out into the waves, knowing that all water is connected and that these thoughts I sent out into the Pacific would eventually make their way to the Mighty Mississippi.

Apparently I wasn’t the only San Franciscan who had this thought. A chalk memorial to Renee Good was in front of Ocean Calling. I wondered how many more names would be added before this monstrous agency is dismantled.

Minneapolis is where I learned to walk. It’s where I learned to march and door knock and walk a picket line. And now its where my family and friends are marching in sub-zero temperatures to protest the kidnapping of their neighbors. It’s where they are patrolling street corners and schools and playgrounds to keep people safe from fascist thugs or — at the very least — to bear witness.

I am unsurprised by how Minnesotans have stepped up during this time. It is not because we are an inherently good people. It is because, as this brilliant essay explains, white Minnesotans finally started reckoning with the contradictions of fiercely loving a place that does not love everyone back. This reckoning, combined with the inherent stubbornness of Minnesotans and their knowledge that if you give into a bully, they won’t leave you alone, they’ll simply extract more,1 meant that Minnesotans were not going to let fascists operate a large-scale campaign of terror without a fight.

It feels impossible to write about walking right now while I watch what happens in my hometown, hence this post of rambling thoughts. I’ll leave you with this. I don’t know how this will end. I am not an optimist but I also am not one to succumb to what Sarah Jaffe calls the “pleasures of doom.”

But what I lack in cheery optimism, I make up for in hope. Mariame Kaba wrote that “action is a practice of hope” and the actions of the people of Minnesota over these last few weeks give me tremendous hope. I know from experience that courage begets courage, that solidarity is a powerful weapon, that people can do scary things when they do them together. I love you Minneapolis. Keep fighting. As we say on the picket line “I believe that we will win.”

On my penultimate day in Minneapolis, it snowed. The temperature was just below freezing, so the snowflakes were big and fat and heavy with moisture. There’s nothing more magical to walk through - everything quiet, the whole world muffled under a blanket of snow. All of the trees and plants that had previously looked so sad and dead were now covered in white, transformed into magnificent sculptures.

The day after the snow was the Minneapolis of my childhood. Booger-freezing cold. A temperature of 11ºF with a windchill of -3ºF. My dad had a lot of geography books that I liked looking through as a kid, and I remember learning that Minneapolis had lower average temperatures in the winter than Juneau, Alaska. I took a weird pride in that - we’re colder than Alaska! And while one of the reasons I’ve stayed in California is the lack of bone-chilling winters, it was nice for one day to take a short walk in the bracing cold, the sun shining gloriously overhead, making the snow glitter.

And now my traditional (it starts becoming a tradition the second time you do it, right?) end of year book round-up . Here are some of the best things I’ve read this year:

Tir: the Story of the Welsh Landscape. An exploration of the connections between the Welsh language and the land and how those connections and traditional Welsh farming techniques can help create a more sustainable future.

Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands. A meditation on living on a small Scottish croft, rural community, and the healing power of nature.

Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm. The fascinating account of a couple that turns their English farm over to nature. Inspiring to learn how quickly nature can heal itself once humans change how they interact with the land — the farmers saw a rapid increase in biodiversity and soil health and were better able to deal with the impacts of climate change.

The Singing Sands, To Love and Be Wise, and The Daughter of Time. This year I finished reading the mystery novels of Josephine Tey, the pen name for the queer Scottish writer Elizabeth Mackintosh. Her books were written during the 1930s-50s and are slow moving but suspenseful, many with gorgeous descriptions of the Scottish countryside. I also had fun reading a series by modern-day author Nicola Upson which feature a fictional version of Josephine Tey solving mysteries.

Walking in Berlin. There’s nothing I love more than reading a book about walking a city while I’m walking in that city, so it was a real treat to read this book, written in 1929, while walking around Berlin. But you don’t have to be in Berlin to enjoy the wonderful descriptions of the city during a fascinating and increasingly dangerous time in its history.

Perilous Bounty. After reading more than a dozen books about agriculture and rewilding in the UK, I thought I should turn my attention to my home country. This book is a great primer on the peril and promise of farming in America.

Through the Arc of the Rainforest. Shoutout to Matt from my bookclub who chose this book for us — one of my favorite books of the year. A totally delightful tale of a Japanese man in Brazil who has a spinning ball in front of his head. It sounds like an absurd premise for a book, but the author’s blend of magical-realism, humor, and tenderness is utterly charming.

Atmosphere And now a shootout to the Kreder bookclub for this pick — a lesbian love story set in NASA in the 80s. This book inspired me to read Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space which was a fascinating and candid look into one of my childhood heroes.

Everything is Tuberculosis. Turns out pretty much everything can be connected back to TB, including romantic poetry, cowboy hats, and Adirondack chairs. A short book about the long cultural, scientific, and political impact of this terrible disease.

The Silent Traveler in San Francisco. Over a span of almost 40 years, Chinese scholar and artist Chiang Yee wrote his “Silent Traveler” series of books about cities all over the world. His book on San Francisco offers a delightful glimpse into the Bay Area of the 1960s. He describes walks and drives he takes around San Francisco, Marin, and the East Bay — he even gets to visit the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. The book also includes Yee’s Chinese poetry, charcoal and pencil sketches, and paintings.

Awake in the Floating City. Set in a future San Francisco that’s underwater thanks to three years of constant rain, this book follows an artist who lives in a high rise and ends up caring for an elderly neighbor. It wasn’t exactly fun reading speculative fiction about a disaster happening in the city I live in, but the book is beautifully written and immersive.

The Impossible Fortune. Another Thursday Murder Club mystery. I don’t find Richard Osman to be an especially engaging TV host (Andy and I would occasionally watch his game show in the UK) but he’s an utterly engaging writer, and I look forward to all of his books — they’re a real treat.

The Garden Against Time. A beautifully written book about the author restoring a garden woven in with her personal history, the queer history of gardening as a political act, and the dark history of English manor house gardens, funded by slavery.

The Feminist Art of Walking I have not read this book yet, but I have ordered it and am excited to read it, so it’s going on the list. This is the latest book from Morag Rose, a wonderful scholar and activist who I met and walked with in Manchester. She’s a delightful person and a wonderful writer and I can’t wait to read her book in the new year.

That’s it for the year! If you enjoy my work, please share it. Happy New Year, friends.

Love

O

Sea Ranch is not technically a town (it’s an unincorporated part of Sonoma County), but it is a defined place. It’s a planned community with clear boundaries — even the road signs are different, ugly metal poles replaced with long, elegant white pillars, the names of the roads written vertically down the side.

This place took form in the 1960s, when a developer bought a sheep ranch with the intent of turning it into a planned community. It would not be a typical suburban subdivision of cul-de-sacs and cookie-cutter houses that would destroy the landscape and bend nature to its will. Instead, it would be low-impact, preserving coastal meadows and open space, building small houses of natural materials designed to blend into the landscape.

The first time I visited Sea Ranch was in June of 2023. Andy and I parked at the famous Sea Ranch Lodge, the hotel/post office/restaurant/coffee shop/store/social hub of the community, and walked to the back where the land spread out to the ocean. A path took us through meadows still bursting with flowers - magenta and fuchsia explosions of color sharply contrasting with the golden grasses.

As we wandered along the path, we passed through stands of cypress, gnarly and permanently blown sideways by the fierce winds off the ocean. At first I barely noticed the houses. They were tucked unobtrusively among the stands of trees. All had redwood siding, which turned a weathered grey in the salty air, further camouflaging them. The shapes of the houses were plain, with a distinctive sloping roof to buffet the wind and plenty of large windows to let in the light and the magnificent views.

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To me, all of this pollution makes the Bay an unappealing fishing spot, but there are a surprising number of folks who hang their poles off bridges and piers and little boats. A few weeks ago, we talked with some of these brave fishers (which I guess I will use as the gender-neutral term for fisherman?) at Benicia State Recreation Area.

To get to the park, you drive east across the San Francisco Bay and then north, through Richmond and past the sprawling Chevron Oil Refinery, and then through the hills that turn a sad brown-gray in the winter as if a sepia-toned filter had been put over them, then across the Carquinez bridge and finally you take an easy to miss (which we did) exit right before the highway onto a modest little road, badly paved, that takes you to Benicia State Recreation Area.

The Park isn’t on San Francisco Bay but on one of the many bodies of water connected to it. The Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers empty into Suisun Bay which then flows through the Carquinez Strait (where Benicia sits) and into San Pablo Bay which flows into San Francisco Bay. 40% of the freshwater in California (that isn’t used for farming, drinking, etc.) flows into the San Francisco Bay, and the vast majority of that water flows through the Carquinez Strait.

It’s hard to get a sense of the enormous complexity of these bodies of water just by looking at a map, which is why one of my favorite places to take visitors is the Bay Model, a 1:1000 scale model of the water of the greater Bay Area. Built in the 1950s by the Army Corps of Engineers to test possible projects (which simply wasn’t possible with computers at the time), it’s now free and open to visitors who can watch a day’s worth of tides sweep across the giant warehouse-sized model in about 15 minutes. (While the Bay Model is incredible, it also helped facilitate the Army Corps’ trail of destruction, including dredging, marshland infill, and water diversion which makes any visit a bit more somber when you think of how the model was used).

All of that fresh water flowing into the Carquinez Strait and mixing with the increasingly brackish water of the San Pablo and San Francisco Bays create a unique ecosystem — a perfect example of the liminal landscapes I love so much.

We parked and began walking up the road, acres of marshland spread out to our left. It looked almost dead, but the long-legged herons and circling hawks and scampering sounds of little creatures made clear the marsh was very alive. More than 80% of the marshland around the Bay(s) has been destroyed — especially bad news as climate chaos leads to sea level rise and marshes aren’t there to absorb the impact — so it was nice to see this pocket of marshland in such an industrial area. The whole park is a wonderful little oasis in the midst of oil refineries and ranches and ports and manufacturing.

We continued down the road, eventually taking a little diversion into the Forrest Deaner Native Plant Botanic Garden, a charming, volunteer-run operation that must look wonderful in the spring but was rather subdued in the winter cold. The plants were labeled and I had the great delight of learning about the Jelly Bean Fiesta Marigold Monkeyflower, a plant that seems to have been named by an overly-enthusiastic five year old. In fact, it’s a hybrid plant created by horticulturalist Richard Persoff with striking flowers that I’ll have to come back to see.

After crossing next to a parking lot and some delightful broccoli trees, we went down a path and towards the water.

One of the main reasons we’d picked this park was a cute picture in a brochure of the rare Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse eating Pickleweed. Unfortunately, we did not see the mouse, but we did lots of Pickleweed floating in the water. It is a plant that, shockingly, looks like pickles. It’s also known as turtleweed, glasswort, saltwort, Virginia pickleweed, sampfire, and sea asparagus (the name Andy knew it as from scuba diving). According to the Suison Resource Conservation District, it is extremely salt-tolerant, growing where few other plants can, and is critical to the survival of the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse which I suppose is why they were pictured together.

We continued to the right, along the shore, and found a picnic table with a great view of the bridges and the giant pylons that cross the strait. The sun was bright, reflecting off the gentle waves.

We retraced our steps and decided to see how far we could continue along the shoreline. That’s when we started to see all of the folks fishing — dads with little kids in waders, groups of teenagers, old men. “What are you fishing for?” I asked a teenage girl who stood near the path, rod in hand. “Oh I’m not really fishing it’s my brother” she said, pointing to a kid with curly hair and glasses. “We’re fishing for stripers and maybe even a salmon,” he said. “We’re from Winters [a town towards Sacramento] so we usually fish in rivers. I’ve never fished in the Bay before. I wanna get something big — a real dinosaur you know?”

We wished him luck and continued down the path, chatting next with three friends who had a whole setup for their day of fishing with chairs and drinks and coolers. I’m not usually too outgoing on my walks, but something about these people fishing made me chatty. And folks were eager to talk, much friendlier than I expected. Most people were fishing for striper, a type of bass fish that lays up to one million eggs so I suppose there are a lot of them, although of all the folks we talked to, only one person had actually caught anything. Nobody seemed especially disappointed by the lack of action, though. After a few more fishing conversations, we made our way back to the car and home.

Benicia State Recreation Area was not the most majestic or scenic state park that we’ve been to — no dramatic clifftops or stunning landscapes or historically significant buildings. But it had some of the best vibes of any state park we’ve visited and also had the most diverse (in terms of both class and race) array of visitors of any park that we’ve visited so far. This little jewel might not be a destination park like the Sonoma Coast or the Mendocino Headlands, but it’s clearly loved by people in the area — a place to walk their dog, take their kid on a safe road to bike, do a little fishing, and, if they’re lucky, see a Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse in the Pickleweed.

Sugar Loaf is in Sonoma County, more than an hour north of San Francisco. We set out mid-afternoon, the marine layer mostly burned off, save for a small patch of gray right on the Golden Gate Bridge - it looked as though the fog was commuting from Marin to San Francisco.

North we drove, soon leaving the highway for country roads. People say that California doesn’t have seasons but we do - they’re just subtle. Autumn shows up in the vineyards, the rows of grapevines turned from green to yellow and orange and maroon.

One of the vineyards we drove past was the Jacuzzi Family Vineyard, a garish Italian villa. Foolishly, I hadn’t realized that Jacuzzi is to hot tub what Kleenex is to facial tissue and that there is an actual Jacuzzi family. The descendants of Mr. Jacuzzi extricated themselves from the tub business long ago and now make, according to Andy, terrible wine.

We drove past miles of vineyards, the land flat and dry and then turned onto a twisty road that took us toward the mountains. The temperature immediately dropped ten degrees. The air was cool and damp. Besides us ran a small creek, trees towered over us, and the banks of the road were covered in an electric green moss. The contrast from the arid vineyards we had just left was startling.

We made it to the entrance of the park, where a volunteer docent kindly highlighted a map of trails for us, and pulled into the parking lot by the Robert Ferguson Observatory. The observatory is operated by the Valley of the Moon Observatory Association and is the largest observatory on the West Coast devoted to educating the public about astronomy. The ring of hills that surround the observatory block light pollution which makes it an excellent spot for stargazing.

Andy picked this park because it has a scale model of the solar system. When he was a kid, his first elementary school was arranged along one long hallway, and Andy and his dad would talk about how it was a perfect spot for a scale model of the solar system. They never built it, but Andy’s got a bit of a soft spot for planetary models, so once he found out about the scale model at Sugar Loaf, we had to go.

We started in the parking lot with the sun. We were both a little disappointed that the model sun was 2D and not a big ball, but we managed to swallow our disappointment and move on.

The Planet Walk presents at the same scale the size of the planets and the distance between them. In order to fit the solar system into the park, the designers of the Planet Walk shrunk is more than 2,360,000,000 times. This means each step you take on the walk is about one million miles; if you take five steps a second, you move at the speed of light.

The man who spearheaded the Planet Walk, Angelo Parisi, was no stranger to long-distance walking. He was a letter carrier in Novato, walking eight miles a day to deliver mail. Parisi was also a volunteer docent for the Valley of the Moon Observatory Association and thought the Planet Walk would be a fun way to demonstrate the vastness of our solar system. His dream became a reality in the late 1990s after being approved by California State Parks and built by a local Boy Scout troop.

We followed a path that curved around a field, recently burnt to mitigate wildfire risk, which is a serious concern in this area. 80% of the park was burned during the Tubbs Fire in 2017 and 75% of it was burned again during the Glass Fire in 2020. As the climate catastrophe worsens, California’s risk of wildfire continues to grow, making Indigenous land management techniques such as controlled burns all the more important.

Next to the charred field was Mars. Somehow we had missed Mercury, Venus, and Earth. We figured we’d catch them on the return trip and continued on to Jupiter, making our way through a forested area, the late sun lengthening our shadows.

After crossing a wide, sturdy bridge over the tiniest trickle of a creek (that will hopefully be roaring come spring) we climbed upwards through the forest, passing Saturn and Uranus. We followed a long series of switchbacks farther up the mountain, the trees gradually giving way to shrubs.

We spotted a precariously perched bench ahead — it was Neptune! We caught our breath at the bench and looked down into the valley, spotting the observatory parking lot, where we started our journey at the sun. It was at this point that I started to understand the vastness of space.

On the mountain to our left was a small vineyard. It seemed an absurd place for a vineyard - remote, steep, inconvenient. Andy later discovered it was Robin Williams’ family vineyard, named after his kids. Williams named the estate surrounding the vineyard Villa Sorriso (Villa of Smiles) and its remoteness was the point — a quiet place where he could wake up and see beautiful vineyards.

We couldn’t linger too long though - we had to keep going for over a mile to get to Pluto. Despite the tragic demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet (not calling it a planette was a real missed opportunity), Pluto is included in the Planet Walk as a representation of the last part of our solar system — the Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt was only confirmed to exist in 1992 and includes Pluto and other dwarf planets like Haumea, Quasar and Makemake.1 (There’s possibly another part of our solar system beyond the Kuiper Belt called the Oort Cloud, but it’s theoretical and much further away and really how much can you expect to fit into one state park?).

ANYWAY, the journey to Pluto was rough. We wound around the mountains, sure that we’d reach Pluto at the next crest, only to be disappointed each time. Finally, after over a mile of ups and downs, we came to a series of switchbacks through the brush. This is when Andy casually mentioned I should watch out for scorpions. “All the pictures of this park online were of people with scorpions and they’re crepuscular so they start coming out now.”

“Thanks for waiting to tell me this until the middle of the hike,” I said. Good thing I was wearing big hiking boots.

Luckily the hike was scorpion free and at long-last we made it to Pluto. A bench dedicated to Christine Churchill-Kozel “Docent Dreamer Dancer” and decorated with flowers and a ballet slipper provided a welcome place to rest and look over the valley, awash in the golden light of the setting sun.

According to the plaque for Pluto, at the scale used for the Planet Walk model, the nearest neighboring star would be 10,000 miles away. In other words, I’d have to walk to South Africa to get to the next stop.

Sunset was less than an hour away, so we didn’t linger long. We walked quickly down the hills, past sun-bleached tree branches and through clouds of gnats. We took a small detour to a little grove of oak trees which shaded a cluster of beautiful Adirondack chairs. We were miles from a road and I wondered how the chairs had made it up there.

Down we went through the brush and past the Toyan shrubs with their cheerful red berries and through the forest and over the dry creek beds. When we made it to the meadows, we slowed down a bit, admiring the rising moon, white against a lilac sky. The setting sun cast a yellow glow behind the mountains.

As we re-approached Mars, we passed a father and his son who had also missed the first three planets. We all ended up back in the parking lot, poking around for signs of them.

It turned out that Mercury and Venus were across from the Sun, on the other side of the parking lot. And thanks to instructions on the Venus plaque, we found Earth, posted on the side of the observatory. Remarkable that the first three planets were all in the parking lot while the distance between Neptune and Pluto was well over a mile.

All told, we’d walked over 7 billion miles. Tired and out of water, we were glad to be back to earth, and we headed home.

The data backs that up. This year, Americans were estimated to spend $13.1 billion dollars on Halloween — $4.2 billion of that on decorations (more than we spend on costumes or candy!). And retailers are putting out Halloween merchandise earlier, especially this year due to the tariffs (perhaps unsurprisingly, we get most of our Halloween stuff from China). My anecdotal observations turned out to be correct - Halloween is coming earlier every year.

There aren’t many front yards in San Francisco, but people still figure out how to get into the spooky spirit. One day I walked way up the hill from my apartment to Pacific Heights — one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in a city of immense wealth. It has a street informally named Billionaire’s Row. It’s the kind of neighborhood where people hire professional Christmas light companies to decorate the outside of their houses.

Despite the lack of front yards, the rich people still got into the holiday spirit. There was a rather sad and dull display of dozens of beige pumpkins. Ghosts in trees along the street. A smattering of skeletons. A murder of beady-eyed crows on a gate. Nothing too gruesome. Definitely nothing home-made.

One of the things I love about wandering the same streets again and again is seeing how the houses change over the seasons. The decorations for various holidays bring out the personality of the homeowners a bit. Something private made public.

Tonight I’ll head out to one of my favorite walks of the year - the Dia de los Muertos procession through the Mission. The homemade altars and burning sage will be a very different vibe than the commercial decorations of Billionaire’s Row — and for that I am thankful.

I’ve written before about the importance of movement in social movements. How walking and rolling and marching collectively helps move us both literally and metaphorically forward. To me, picket lines are a special and …

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Boy was he right.

We drove through subdivisions towards the mountains and suddenly the Garden of the Gods came into view. Huge red and white rock formations. Some seemed thin and delicate - like you could scrape the layers apart with your fingernails until they were dust. Others were thicker and more substantial, with edges that had been softened by time. Clouds were coming over the mountains, moving fast and sputtering rain. Gaps of sunshine spotlit parts of the landscape. The kind of storm-sun sky that’s radiant and biblical.

This magnificent landscape is, incredibly, a city park. The children of a railroad barron gifted it to Colorado Springs on the condition that it be “kept forever free to the public.” They put up a plaque and everything. Even the parking is free.

A road loops through the park and after a stop along the side of the road to admire the view and take a picture, we ventured further in and parked. We walked past a meadow and into the heart of the Garden.

Nate is one of my few union organizer friends who is a naturally gregarious person with every stranger he meets (I think many of us are outgoing for our jobs because we have to be, not because of our personalities). So hiking with Nate, in this beautiful and busy place, was a highly interactive and delightful experience.

We cut up a side trail and begin climbing a long series of broad and shallow steps turning around occasionally to admire the view. Nate greeted everyone we passed. Some people got extra attention — “Hello Minnesota!” he exclaimed to a man in a Vikings sweatshirt. “This is quite the hike” the man answered. “Tougher than walking the Lake of the Isles” agreed Nate, and everyone chuckled knowingly, our shared lake heritage forming a temporary bond.

The steps ended and we began a bit of a scramble up some rocks. I’m not known for my nimbleness, so we didn’t push any higher and instead enjoyed the view.

We climbed down the stairs, Nate greeting every person we passed, and walked back onto the smooth pavement and wended our way through some of the rock formations. A strong wind came whipping down from the mountains, causing everyone to shriek with laughter and hold onto their hats. Just as quickly as it came, it was gone, and Nate and I returned safely to his car.

The next day, I had the morning off and decided to visit the Garden of the Gods again. Nate and my visit was too short — I had gotten a taste for the place and wanted more. This time there were no storms on the horizon, just hot blue skies.

I pulled into the parking lot at the entrance of the park and took a pedestrian tunnel under the road and up a hill. A father and his small daughter, who was wearing a tutu skirt and a sporty sun hat, tested the acoustics of the tunnel, their little yelps echoing up the walkway.

I turned onto a concrete path and began climbing up to the central rock formations. I passed stubby oak trees, specifically Gambel Oaks. I’ve long had a special affinity for oaks (I think because my initials are OAK) and in my walks over the past year, they seem to be everywhere. Next to peat bogs in Scotland and on mountains in Spain and on the coastal hills in California. They’re hearty and stubborn and like to spread out a bit, giving room for other plants to blossom. Perhaps I share some of those qualities…

I walked higher into the central garden, past rock formations with names like “the Scotsman” and “kissing camels.” Time and weather had sculpted grooves in the rocks that looked perfect for rock climbing. I’m not the first person to have noticed this; rock climbing routes were mapped here in 1910 and the Garden is considered one of the birthplaces of technical rock climbing. In the distance, I saw a rock climber rappelling down the rocks, looking tiny against the giant sandstone formation.

I also noticed tiny trees and plants that had somehow rooted themselves in the faces of the rock. They reminded me of the California poppies that grow out of sidewalks and parking lots. Life and beauty taking hold in the most inhospitable places.

It was a busy day, even busier than when I visited with Nate, but the scale of the place is so massive that it didn’t feel crowded. I’m not an outgoing person, so with the exception of a few hellos and nods and smiles, I didn’t talk to anyone. But I did eavesdrop.

Well I’m not sure if you can call it eavesdropping if the person walking behind you is talking very loudly. She was a motivational speaker (or something like that) from New Zealand who was recounting in loud detail her last trip to Colorado during which she got terrible altitude sickness. “I was supposed to go speak but all these ‘medical professionals’ were telling me I had to go to the hospital. And I told my team no, I’m doing this and so all of the energy healers got to work on me and I drank a lot of water that had been specially charged and I was fine.”

I had one thousand questions that I wanted to ask her, but that’s the thing about overhearing other people’s conversations - you’re an innocent bystander, not a participant. Though I hadn’t drunk any specially charged water, my pace was faster than this woman’s, and I soon left her behind and went back to enjoying the juniper trees and sage and Prairie Junegrass, turning every once in a while to look back at the mountains.

At the edge of the parking lot, I saw what looked like mini sunflowers. According to my phone, that’s exactly what they were - wild sunflowers basking in the final warm days of the year. Just like me.

While I was waiting for my car to charge, I decided to walk to one of said big box stores and cross some things off my list. And this is when I was reminded that Colma is a profoundly strange town.

Colma is a necropolis — home to sixteen2 cemeteries holding millions of “underground residents” but less than 2,000 above-ground ones. Cemeteries cover 75% of the land in this little town. It is a city for the dead.

I left city hall and turned down El Camino Real, a busy thoroughfare. The day was gray and humid and a bit drizzly at times, shrouding San Bruno Mountain in a mist. It’s often foggy in Colma, which feels fitting.

The first business I passed was a monument showroom and manufacturer. At the front of the building were gravestones of various levels of ornateness — some blank and some filled in. Many were in Chinese. A few featured photos of the departed. An eerie display of wares. Next door was a flower shop full of sunflowers - it looked more festive fall than funereal. Still, the flower shop fit in with the theme; this was death’s company town.

In fact, calling Colma “death’s company town” isn’t far off. The town was incorporated at the behest of cemetery owners in 1924. But how did so many cemeteries end up in the area in the first place?

Thanks to the Gold Rush, San Francisco’s population exploded and cemeteries in the city started running out of space. In the late 1800s, the Catholic Church opened a new cemetery in what is now Colma — a convenient location just a few miles south of San Francisco. The land was mostly agricultural so the Church, soon followed by many others, bought up farmland and turned it into a cemetery.

By 1900, San Francisco banned burying any new bodies in the city limits. But the city’s growth was rapacious - the government wanted to use the land of its small city for the living not the dead. In 1914, San Francisco essentially evicted all of the cemeteries, ordering the graves and bodies moved to Colma.

The moving of graves was performed with various levels of care. Some bodies and their gravestones were moved together and carefully re-interred in Colma. But more often, bodies were simply dug up and put into mass graves. Horrifyingly, sometimes the bodies weren’t moved at all; only the gravestones were relocated.

This enormous project seems to have been done with little respect. Gravestones and monuments that were broken during the removal process were often used for building projects - a cheap source of material. You can see gravestones paving the gutters of Buena Vista Park or as part of the pier at the Wave Organ in the Marina.

While gravestones and bodies are still all over the city, only two official cemeteries remain in San Francisco — one small one at the Mission and a large military cemetery in the Presidio.

The removal of cemeteries from San Francisco is so emblematic of the cruel side of the city. Its rapacious need for growth at all costs. Its tendency to privilege real estate over people’s lives. Let’s not forget — moving the dead had an impact on the living. Families couldn’t visit the graves of their loved ones, either because they were moved far away or the family didn’t know where they ended up. Families and friends pinched pennies to pay for a memorial to their dearly departed, only to see it used as rubble for a building project. A whole new cycle of grief. A horrific chapter of our city’s history.

San Francisco’s callousness brings us back to the creation of Colma. As the cemeteries in Colma expanded, the cemetery owners became concerned that San Francisco would try and annex their land to grow the city. Thus Colma was incorporated as a town — to protect its most important business.

After walking past the death-adjacent businesses, I came to my first cemetery — Greek Orthodox Memorial Park. It was simple and shabby; a few graves with ramshackle flowers and decorations and an overflowing trashcan. Seeing the deflated balloons and faded fake flowers right next to the busy road was a depressing sight.

The next cemetery, Greenlawn Memorial Park, looked a bit more well-cared for. I turned off the busy El Camino Real onto a side street that winded its way next to Greenlawn, with its larger monuments and green grass and palm trees.

After a curve in the road, the cemeteries transitioned to big box stores. A scattering of day laborers were near the entrance of a Home Depot. It was already past noon on a Sunday; I wondered if any of those folks got work. I passed a Raising Caine’s, music blasting from the windows of the cars in the drive-thru. I turned into the shopping plaza, did a few errands, and turned around to walk back.

The weather became more misty, and the humidity made me feel clammy. Both the inside and outside of my rain jacket were damp. But the view was incredible; down a gently sloping hill spread with cemeteries and out to San Bruno mountain — lush and green but also gray with mist.

I turned back onto El Camino Real, noticing the spread of the Italian Cemetery before me. The Italian Cemetery was started by La Società Italiana di Mutua Beneficenza, an Italian immigrant mutual aid society which provided medical care and death benefits. In the late 1800s, the society purchased land for a cemetery in Colma, joining a host of other immigrant organizations like the Jikei-kai Japanese Benevolent Society and the First Serbian Benevolent Society that set up cemeteries there. Most of these cemeteries now bury people of all faiths and nationalities.

I ended my walk back at City Hall, across from a DaVita Dialysis Center, which is next to yet another graveyard. A grim place to be a patient for many reasons. Perhaps those patients look out onto the cemetery and take comfort in the town’s unofficial motto — it’s a great day to be alive in Colma!3

Rivers are my favorite waters to wander along. Maybe it’s the forward momentum of a river that compels me — it really goes somewhere. Often that somewhere is the ocean — the river splays out at the end as if trying (and utterly failing) to meet the ocean’s vastness. The murky edges between river and sea with their messy mudflats and marshes and strangely cut channels and little islands full of birds are magical liminal spaces and were some of my favorite walks in the UK.

Unfortunately we don’t really have a river in San Francisco. Well we used to have creeks and streams but most were buried or diverted and are now only remembered during flash floods, the water in search of its former home. We do have the Bay, which feels more like a weird brackish giant lake if anything. So I get my river fix when I go back to Minneapolis, where I was this past weekend, and I visit the Mississippi.

I feel as though I know the Mississippi so well — its bluffs and locks and dams and sand bars. But of course I hardly know it at all — my little patch of a few miles that I grew up next to is dwarfed by the over 2,300 miles of the length of the Mississippi.

I found a National Geographic book from the 1970s at my mom’s house this weekend — The Mighty Mississippi — a meandering look at the history and geography and geology and groovy outfits of the people who live near this vast river. What was most striking was that all the problems the river faces today — floods, pollution, dwindling biodiversity, the negative impacts of the various Army Corps of Engineers projects — were problems people knew about in the 1970s. How astonishing that our species can identify problems so clearly and take so long to solve them.

Above all else, the Mississippi is a working river — it has been for centuries. I loved reading Life on the Mississippi as a kid — it was mind-blowing to think that the river I walked next to regularly could be so full of danger and drama; that skilled steamboat pilots would memorize every sandbar and branch and curve of the river.

Steamboats have been replaced by barges, which ship 500 million dollars in goods every year, including 60% of our country’s grain export. Returning the Mississippi River to a more natural state would make most of that shipping impossible and — according to shipping companies at least — result in drastically increased carbon emissions. According to one study, shipping by barge is more than four times as fuel efficient as shipping by truck. For now, we’ve decided to trade the environmental devastation of continuously dredging the river for the environmental benefit of decreased carbon emissions.

But not all of the river is dredged for shipping; the river isn’t navigable for commercial shipping north of St. Anthony Falls. The difference is noticeable. One day, we walked north of the Falls at Mississippi Gateway Regional Park in Brooklyn Park, a suburb north of Minneapolis. The park recently opened a new visitors center and treetop trail, so it was packed with families enjoying the last bit of summer. We walked along the treetop walkway, which was interspersed with play structures and slides. It looked out over a marsh and a forest that bordered the river. After circling the treetops, we walked down to the boardwalk on the marsh, spotting a few cattails (or nature’s corndogs, as my sister calls them). In the distance was the only human-made structure on this stretch of the Mississippi, the Coon Rapids Dam, which is only there to prevent invasive species from coming further up river. The river was untidy, rough around the edges. A bit wild.

The next day we walked south of the Falls on Raspberry Island, a small island in the Mississippi near downtown St. Paul. The river has a funny horseshoe bend here, dividing off a little chunk of St. Paul — including the infamous Wabasha Caves where gangsters used to hide out during the Prohibition era — from the rest of the city.

We parked on the south side of the horseshoe, near the town of West St. Paul which is actually south of the city of St. Paul but on the western bank of the Mississippi which, because of the horseshoe, runs east-west at this point and not north-south, so it’s really the south side of the river and it’s this kind of buffoonery that makes Minneapolitans feel superior, but I digress. We walked across a bridge, past houseboats and docks, and on to the island.

The setting felt so jumbled. We were low on the Mississippi looking up the hill on one side to downtown St. Paul. Along that bank ran a long freight train. Some sort of tugboat chugged down the river. We were surrounded by bridges on all sides and on the opposite bank rose shiny new apartment buildings. It all felt so industrious and commercial, the wildness of the river tamed to its Army Corps of Engineers channels. The island itself was a bit shaggier, with flowers and long grasses. Two young people practiced their Aztec dancing and drumming at the bandshell on the far side of the island. Scattered on one side of the island were giant Alebrije sculptures — fantastical, colorful creatures made out of papier-mâché. This whimsical Mexican folk art towering above us was a marked contrast to the muted riverstone and rusting metal around us.

Before I flew home, I visited my dad’s bench on yet another stretch of the river. The foliage was thick and green, with a few yellowing hints that fall is coming. The river was calm, the current almost imperceptible.

I felt as though I’d walked alongside three different rivers — each part felt so unique. Maybe some day I’ll walk the length of it, this mighty river that contains multitudes. The river may change but I don’t think I’ll lose my way.

I’ve been in England and Wales for five weeks now. I’ve read books about walking here, visited archives and libraries, interviewed walkers, academics, and activists, and hiked dozens of miles. But I don’t think I fully understood how important and popular walking is to the UK until I came to the Lake District.

On the 3 mile drive from the grocery store to the cottage we’re staying in, I counted 25 walkers (and no less than seven dogs). On a Monday. In the middle of the day. In December. In an intermittent drizzle.

But these numbers would have paled in comparison to the thousands of ramblers that flooded the countryside each weekend in the first part of the 1900s. It was the ideal activity. Train fare was cheap or you could bike safely. The clean air was a respite from the polluted factory towns. And walking and camping are free and fun - perfect for the young people who had all left school at 12 (later 14) to work. These walks in the country were freedom.

Sort of.

The land around Manchester that had once been for the commons and open to all just a generation or two before was fenced off and privatized. The public was restricted to a few miles of paths - excluded from hundreds of square miles that had once been theirs.

These paths were crowded. It seemed a great injustice to leave the cramped cities for the country, only to be cramped onto a little trail. The land beyond the public paths was mostly used for grouse shooting (more on that later) and patrolled by game wardens. After a rather unpleasant interaction with a game warden in which he was forced to turn back, a 20 year old from Manchester, Benny Rothman, thought that if he’d been with a larger group, they wouldn’t have been forced to turn back. Sick of being confined to a few paths while miles of moorland were reserved just for the rich, Benny and others organized a mass trespass on Kinder Hill on April 24, 1932. Hundreds of young women and men stepped off the trails and into the wild.

Kinder is an enormous and slightly foreboding piece of land. Numerous people mentioned to me how dangerous it could be, especially in the winter. So I was very grateful when Dave Toft, Chair of the Hayfield Kinder Trespass Group, graciously offered to give me a tour.

Dave (and his adorable dog Meg) met Andy and me at the New Mills train station. We drove up to Hayfield, the town closest to Kinder Hill (train service there was cut in the 1970s) and started up the Snake Path. The Snake Path was one of the first rights of way battles in the area — if that path hadn’t been secured by activists a generation before, the actual trespassing part of the mass trespass would’ve started much lower on the hill!

The initial climb was on a road that had been in use for hundreds and hundreds of years. Its was full of giant stones - tough walking. Recent heavy rains had sent rivulets of water flowing and there was mud everywhere, especially near the gates.

We finally finished the first ascent, passed through the last kissing gate, and entered the moor. “Moor” is the ultimate British word - I immediately think of Heathcliff and brooding people in cloaks. But I never understood what a moor actually was — only the vibes. When I asked Dave the definition of a moor, he looked a bit surprised. I guess it’d be like asking an American what a prairie is. It seems a bit obvious when you’ve been around it your whole life.

Anyway, THIS is a moor:

Ahead on the left was the old hunting lodge of the Duke of Westminster. All of this moorland had been privatized so that people like the Duke of Westminster and the Duke of Devonshire could hunt grouse. Really it was more of a slaughter. My uncles hunt birds, and I’ve never seen them come back from a day of hunting with 2,000 carcasses. And I have a lot of uncles. But they’re no match for the rich assholes who would sit in a blind while beaters came through the moor and disturbed the birds so that they could be shot more easily.

Incredibly, the argument against open rambling on the moors was that it would disturb the birds. In the Rambler’s Federation Handbook of 1935, one person pointed out that “ramblers are often taunted with being noisy and with singing the country, but nothing has ever been said about the din that is made in a shoot.” I can see why it was hard to take the landowners seriously. The people so concerned about delicate grouse breeding patterns that they couldn’t possibly allow the public to lay a single step on the moor were the same ones blasting those birds out of the sky.

Ahead of us, Kinder was shrouded in mist — it looked majestic and spooky. To me, it seemed a foreboding and surprising place for a fight for access. But I also understood the magic of it — and why it was worth fighting for.

The weather was dismal and we didn’t have the time to actually climb the hill, so Dave brought us down the valley a bit and pointed out where some of the events of the trespass happened. The hundreds of trespassers marched in a line on the public right of way basically until they got to the hill and then spread out to climb it. There were game wardens stationed to stop them, but just as Benny had predicted, there were too many trespassers and the game wardens couldn’t turn people back.

Instead, the police arrested 6 trespassers at the end of the day. Right near the Snake Path sign, ironically enough. After a farcical trial, five of the trespassers were handed down sentences of two to six months.

Most of the official Ramblers groups in the area (largely middle class professionals who didn’t necessarily like the countryside being flooded with working class teenagers) were against the trespass. They’d been negotiating with landowners and crafting legislation for fifty years and viewed the trespass as a giant step backwards — an unstrategic and provocative act. But the trespassers didn’t want to wait another fifty years to have access to the moors — it was time for action. Benny had learned from the example of his British Workers’ Sports Federation comrades in London, who had used direct action to win better recreational facilities for working class folks; he used those wins to inspire the trespassers at Kinder.

The trespass might not have had such an impact if not for the state’s overreaction to it. Trespassing was a civil matter, but the Kinder trespassers faced trumped-up charges that turned the case into a criminal one. While they disagreed with the trespassers’ tactics, the various Ramblers organizations were horrified at the severe sentences handed down to them. The publicity around the arrests and the trial put a spotlight on just how fragile and minimal public access to the land was. It galvanized people and led to more trespasses and activism, which eventually led to the passage of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949. Not coincidentally, the first national park in England was in the Peak District (the region that Kinder is in).

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But there’s still much more to be done. As Dave told me, only about 7% of the land in England is accessible to the public. 30% is still in the hands of the aristocracy (interestingly, roughly the same as the percentage of land owned by the Federal government in the US).

Unsurprisingly, the benefits of owning the land continue to be privatized while the costs are socialized. Grouse shooting is a perfect example. In order to feed the grouse, landowners burn the moors to stimulate heather growth (which is what the grouse eat). Burning the moors harms the peat beneath it, turning a landscape that should be a carbon sink into a huge source of carbon emissions. The rich get their grouse hunting and we all deal with the climate catastrophe. Oh and also the grouse moor owners get £10million in public farm subsidies every year (as of 2018). The public is forced to subsidize its own destruction.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Just as the Mass Trespassers chose to ignore the ruling class that told them “that’s just the way things are,” to imagine a different way and put it into action, so can we. The most potent weapon of the powerful is to make you believe that you don’t have any power. But if there are enough of us, we can’t be turned back.

————

A very special thanks to:
Dave Toft for picking up two American strangers and taking us on a walk in the rain
Julian Batsleer for his sharing of resources
Morag Rose for introducing me to Julian and Dave and for being a wonderful and generous resource for walking Manchester
The archivists and librarians at the Working Class Movement Library and the People’s History Museum.

I highly recommend reading The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes, an engaging, beautiful, and infuriating book and listening to the Manchester Rambler by Ewan MacColl.