Friday, January 06, 2006

Sweeping Up After Earth Day

This is a big day for Chuckles – my last day at work before taking paternity leave for five weeks.  I’ve got loads of stuff to get through, but I’m also going to be thinking every step of the way about the changes this day represents – in my work, my career, my life.  This will be my last morning ride downtown for a while, and when I get back to the job in late February, things will look different.  I’ll have changed somewhat (and not just Zach’s diapers), but the scene will be physically different too.  I wonder with curiosity what changes I’ll notice, and which ones I’ll overlook completely.  And this curiosity leads me to post a little essay I wrote a few weeks ago about the short walk from the trans-bay terminal to my office – a walk that has always been noteworthy for me, but which is now changing on a daily basis.

I don’t know what my posting schedule will be like when I’m home wrangling the infant.  I’ll try to keep up with y’all, but if the spirit moves you, drop me a line and harass me.  I’ll take it in the spirit in which it’s intended.  Meantime, I’ve got to suit up for the home stretch.  Have a good Friday, a great weekend, and an uplifting walk around the block. 

Do you remember Earth Day?  I sure don’t.  And if I did, I definitely wouldn’t remember Earth Day 1998.  Dude, I was busy.  I figure, I’d only remember ED’98 if I’d been out painting murals for Enron.

The murals I have in mind were on big wooden panels that lined one side of a vacant lot across from the bus terminal downtown.  My daily commute takes me past that lot every day, and, despite the occasional presence of an itinerant florist there, the area was indisputably not a garden spot.  Actually, it was more of a public latrine and improvised solid waste transfer facility.  In a precinct of tall shiny new buildings, four blocks from the waterfront at a critical intersection in this gleaming sucker-free city, across from Bechtel and cattycorner from PG&E, lay this gaping hole in the architecture.  The bus station attracted any number of undesirable characters – not just homeless, but homeless minus: minus hygiene, minus self-respect, minus sobriety, minus teeth, minus health.  When you kick out the dregs, they go to the bus station, and when the bus station kicks them out again, they’d go to this stretch of this particular block.  They’d sleep in the doorways of the adjacent moribund old office building, the one with the columned porticos and the thick sticky residue on the pavement, and they’d spend their days scattering garbage and wallowing in their own filth on the sidewalk next to the vacant lot. 

Let this not be read as an indictment of the homeless.  I know better than to think of this crew of motley vagrants as representative of our burgeoning underclass.  These were, rather, those who could not manage participation in the homeless community – the marginalized of the marginalized.  You could see it in their hunted furtive eyes and their broken postures. The garbage in which they burrowed looked almost clean by comparison.  Forget scraping the bottom of the barrel - try kicking the barrel over and looking under it, the moldy sub-basement of the barrel.  That’s where those guys hung out. 

I never liked walking that stretch of Mission Street.  I like to look up and around as I move through the city, to see the buildings and weather and traffic and such.  Here, I had to keep my eyes down.  There was always something I wanted to make sure I didn’t step in.  What they left behind in the ruins of their nocturnal encampments and daily sequestrations was absolutely noxious, made all the more distasteful for being strewn and smeared and dribbled and violently disgorged right under those lovely Earth Day murals.

It seems that in 1998 there had been some sort of project in which schoolkids created and painted “green earth” murals to block views of the vacant lot.  Instead of an acre of brownfields, we got simple colorful images of smiling children picking up litter and riding bikes, and images of ruined urban wastelands contrasted against gleaming utopian visions of a possible future.  There were four or five of these murals, six feet square, with the creator’s name and school listed as well as a small notation identifying the project sponsor – Enron. 

Yes, Enron: famed for gouging energy prices, raiding employee pensions, and other distasteful shenanigans.  But back in ’98, Enron hadn’t yet gained this reputation.  It was just another megacorporation, tossing a few dollars to the local schools for urban beautification.  The mural project was mounted, the legends told us, on Earth Day 1998, a day on which we were to focus on everything this vacant lot was not.  Enron was a forward-looking company and bankrolled the project, for the general improvement of the world in which I live.  There was no tarnished corporate image for them to rehabilitate.  They were just a name on a wall, nothing more – and, to many whose journey ended at that wall, considerably less.

Well, those cheerfully clumsy murals stood for more than six long years.  They witnessed the dot-com bust, the end of the Clinton era, the downfall of their very sponsor, and untold indignities and excrescences committed in their very shadow right there on some of the nastiest sidewalk in town.  Regardless of the news, the politics, the national mood or the weather, those bright murals shone their crude smiles down on us. 

This area is now officially in transition.  Fresh hurricane fencing has been erected around the perimeter, with an opaque netting that partly masks what’s going on behind it – earthmoving, piledriving, and other efforts in anticipation of a big construction project.  The old colonnaded office building has been taken down to a foundation full of rubble, and they’re digging that up too.  The whole block is a big hole, except for a fringe of sidewalk running around its edges.  And those murals?  Peer down through that green netting, down to the floor of the pit, where twisted girders and rebar nestle with rusty beer cans and battered shopping carts and wads of stained newsprint, and you can make out the scraps and shreds of ruined pieces of those murals.  Lovingly painted in the last century, they are now mere flashes of color amidst the mud and muck of construction.  The children’s Earth Day message, their exhortations toward an ecosensitive community, are officially trash. 

And wouldn’t you know it: with all the construction in the early mornings, all the traffic and attention, the vagrants who populated this area have moved on to some other place, under an offramp or behind a warehouse or I know not where.  And honestly, I don’t really much care.  All I know for sure is that the sidewalk on my way to work has never been cleaner.