Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Eternal Heart
Happy Saint Lustful Pagan Cherub Day! I’m tired and have too much work to do, and sort of let this manufactured event sneak up on me like garlic breath after a cheap pizza. However, I have this excuse: I’ve been thinking of more weighty matters - the dead, and their remains. I live in a ‘hood that used to have a lot of cemetaries, but now they’re mostly all gone and even the ghosts have fled. But just up the street is a very special realm where many still lie at eternal rest, and these have been the ones who have had my attention lately. Thus:
It’s great to live just a few blocks from a National Park, but one must make allowances for particulars. The Presidio of SF is a new park but an old fort, going all the way back to 1776 and the birth of this city of Nuevo Yerba Buena. That’s a lot of years to barrack troops, a lot of wars to provision and outfit, a lot of live fire training and guard duty and all the other peripherals associated with such facilities. Though it’s surrounded (on land) by a fairly well-established city, the Presidio itself has more dark forest groves, mossy abandoned outbuildings and eerie windswept flats than most any normal acreage of equal size. If it’s true that old soldiers never die, the grounds they haunt are likely as not the grim halls where they were hewn and housed. The Presidio, like any old fort, is consequently full of ghosts.
The first of these to occur to my mind are those of the merchant sailors. These men were the foundation of San Francisco’s erstwhile fame as the most important port on the West Coast. In days when the seas were our lifeline, these nameless, homeless sailors risked their lives to grease the wheels of commerce. Their lives were squalid and difficult, and they tended to die young and far from home. If, while here on one of their globe-spanning journeys, they grew very ill, they were sent to the Marine Hospital in the Presidio. There, many of them lost the fight for immortality, and the fallen were interred in a lonely cemetery off Lincoln Boulevard amid the cedars and under the fogbanks. This graveyard stood from, oh, 1885 to 1912, but then the sailors stopped coming here to die and eventually their hallowed ground fell prey to pernicious neglect. The area was left unmaintained and unvisited. Wooden grave markers rotted to dust and returned to the earth whence they came.
In time, the small marine hospital down the hill was upgraded to a big, and then a large, hospital, before coming out of commission altogether in the 1960s. In the interim, the big open field to the north was used by construction crews as a staging area, scraped to anonymous utilitarian flatness by diesel graders. Someone paved the field over, and plopped a few tennis courts down on one end of it. That’s the area as I came to know it, just an empty space with plenty of inconvenient parking. Kel and I learned basic motorcycle handing skills there because it was so under-utilized. The area felt still and at rest, but not in a refreshing way – more like the quiet, imperturbable breath of the mausoleum.
Lately the powers that be have rediscovered the permanent residents of that old graveyard-cum-parking lot. On a recent drive up Caulfield on Coronary Hill next to the old morbid site, I saw earth movers, jackhammers, lots of canary-yellow equipment - both heavy and light, and in its midst, the blank blacktop had been peeled back off the surface of the earth, revealing rich brown dirt that was heaped in dozens and dozens of slim mounds, six or so feet long, a foot or two tall. The sailors had been rescued after seventy years adrift and abandoned. What will happen to them next, I do not know, but I am pretty sure I won’t be riding a chopper over them again. Though their names were never preserved, they deserve a due measure of honor in death.
*****
Half a mile west of the sailor’s place of repose, just down the hill form the old abandoned hospital, past the piney woods and hemmed in by Lobos gulch, some ghosts of a very different nature cavort on a playground that now exists only in memory. Just inland from Baker Beach, a National Guard post holds the fort against the vicissitudes of policy and time. It’s an uninspired brick block of a building that makes up for lack of architectural imagination by its setting: a reconstructed wildflower meadow with a tidy boardwalk wending between hillocks spangled with lupine and sage. Marked guideposts point out some of the biovariety and it’s easy to imagine that this bucolic area has been preserved in a state of nature since the Army first moved in… but of course, it hadn’t been. The whole zone is a new creation of the National Parks service, as they strive to mitigate the degradation wrought on mother nature by our armed forces.
Back in the day – the day I moved to San Francisco – this was not a voluptuously mounded wildflower preserve: it was a hardpacked open field, a parade ground perhaps, or just empty space. Random scrubbrush and wild mustard fought for rootspace and water, but large areas were just too rocky and dry to sustain even these hearty plants. We’d go there to walk dogs, or we’d cut through on our way to the beach, and nothing was there to arrest our attention or slow us down - except for the backstop and ballfield. Down in the corner by the reserves post, a worn-out backstop of hurricane fencing and splintered old boards stooped against the foggy winds. I only saw it in use once, and it is thence the ghosts of this field arise:
Somebody else set it up – I never knew that many people that I could invite to such an event. We’d brought along some friends of our own, but mostly it was our old college crowd transplanted from the east coast, liberally augmented with random local co-workers and neighbors. We might have had thirty people there – fifteen to a side. Now that’s a good set-up for a friendly game of kickball.
Everybody played, no one terribly vigorously. The ball was perfectly bouncy and resonant, and the sky sparkled overhead. We were young, energetic, and probably a little buzzed. I recall only that my “outside” friend Mark was a total kick-ass kickball stud, making plays like an all-pro. Beyond that, all that I remember was the event itself, and the corroded old backstop that kept the ball in play and anchored our recreation. For years after that one great game, I’d wander or bike past the field and recall a truly euphoric afternoon of undifferentiated camaraderie.
Over those years, my circumstances changed. More friends moved out, some moved away; new friends joined my circle and some left it. Mark and his wife went their own way. Glen (I think he organized the whole shebang) alienated everybody and dropped out of the scene. The only thing that remained unchanged in all that time was the backstop, always rusting and crumbling, yet persevering from season to sesason.
Then the park service upgraded the field. I have no complaints about their work – it’s much nicer there than it had been before (even if the dogs can’t run it free any longer). There are many more flowers and it’s an active, vibrant habitat for many living things. It’s just that, well, the old backstop didn’t survive the transition. Where it once stood, is now a callipygian twenty-foot hill. I sometimes stroll past that hill, on the new boardwalk or on my way to Baker Beach. I like it. Regardless, each time I see it, I sense that old backstop, torn out and away but still somehow present for me, sheltering defunct friends and friendships under its porous roof, backing me up still from my buried past.
*****
The actual military cemetery at the Presidio is on the classic “Arlington” model: manicured lawns and hills on which decamp rank upon rank of white markers that troop in orderly files in death as they did in life. It’s an austere, somber place, despite a stunning bluffside setting and the crisp clean white against verdant green. A tall fence of black iron spears holds the world at bay, and an ornate gate convincingly bars access. It’s not a place for a casual visit, and the souls that reside there seem stern, as if still in uniform and at attention. If ghosts be there, they keep to themselves.
But down the hill toward the waterfront, in a jumbled acre or two under the shadow of Doyle Drive’s elevated speedway, is another graveyard – one where the ghosts run right up to say hello. It’s the Presidio Pet Cemetary, the least military spot remaining from the pre-park days. Though it was one of the very first boneyards in the fort where soldiers and some natives were laid down, it’s now a reminder of all the families that lived there in the countless stucco cottages and gabled brick houses and tacky concrete apartments that are strewn across the 1700 or so acres that now comprise the park. Yes, soldiers – for all their carefully-cultivated uniformity – are people, and they had families who were delighted to move with them to free housing in San Francisco, and these families had pets. I’m sure no one knows how many pets lived at the Presidio, but there’s got to be more than 100 of them lingering at their cemetery. Gravemarkers are various, often improvised; they bear collars and photos and little medallions. Inscriptions are carved, or neatly inscribed, or scrawled in some long-lost dog or cat or turtle’s favorite friend’s childish handwriting. Foodbowls and cherished toys are often incorporated into memorial displays, sunbleached and dusty and still bearing signs of enthusiastic use however many years ago. The plots are disorganized and haphazard, as if chosen by the occupants thereof of their own accord in a big hairy land rush.
I’m not sure if anyone is actually responsible anymore for this menagerie of the deceased. It doesn’t seem to benefit from any kind of upkeep and many of the jumbled memorials are falling over and apart. I find this air of casual disorder to be entirely appropriate. At the Presidio Pet Cemetery, ghosts ramble and lounge and leap up to greet visitors with joyful delight. These ghosts know how to enjoy their afterlife. I’m glad they now got to spend it in such a lovely park.
Have a delightful Valentine’s Day. Share it with someone you care about, whether conventionally alive or otherwise. In love, death is transformed. In death, love can yet transcend.