Tuesday, July 01, 2008

THE QUADRILUVIALITY OF CRISSY FIELD LAGOON

I’ve mentioned Crissy Field here a few times before; permit me to enhance your mental picture if I may.  Yes, I’m going to elucidate - right here on the internet, in front of everybody.  I have, indeed, no shame. 

Crissy Field is 100 acres or so of landfill just inside the Golden Gate, a high-profile slice of the shoreline of the Presidio of San Francisco. (Trivia: it was named after an army officer named Dana Crissy.  In military terms, that is a “double-girly” name.  I am not clear where I am going with this but I considered it noteworthy.) It stretches two miles or so, from the parking lots opposite the Palace of Fine Arts, westward to Ft Point.  For quite a while, it was also a working airfield.  The old grassy meadow at its center is still ringed with old hangars and warehouses, now converted to maintenance sheds, studios, and workspaces, with a few frankly left derelict and “environmental” - in that they evoke the untidy “environment” and heavyhanded treatment the region received at the army’s hands. 

CF hasn’t seen an airplance since 1974.  It was left by the army as a blasted hull of nature, a toxic swamp abutting acres of poorly maintained blacktop.  It was dead. 

I am pleased, therefore, to report that the fort is now a park, and CF has been entirely resuscitated.  It’s now a thriving biosphere and a peaceful setting and a true reclaimation success story.  The whole area is worth visiting but I’m really focused for today on the lagoon.  The old toxic swamp got drained, dredged, cleaned, rebalanced, replanted, and left alone.  Turns out we’ve been mistaken about it - neither toxic nor swamplike, the now 20-acre lagoon is a tidal pond of of varying depths, forming islands and inlets and then consuming them twice daily as water flows in and out.  An inlet steram about fifteen feet wide runs from the lagoon, under a small ped bridge, and across the beach out to the ocean.  Occasionally this inlet runs dry and landlocks the lagoon, but mostly there’s some flow one way or the other.  The tide rises and water rolls up the inlet into the lagoon, inexorably filling it.  When the ocean tide drops the flow begins to shift; water stops running up the inlet and starts returning to the sea and the graceful lake begins to drain.  Meantime, herons and egrets fish in the shallows; from the bridge you can easily see the sandy floor of the lake riddled with thousands of little craters made by burrowing clams.  The lagoon teems with life and it pulses like a heart. 

At the outer part of the inlet, if you follow me, a streambed channels the tidal flow across the beach to the ocean itself.  Sometimes it’s a trickle; sometimes it’s twenty feet wide and three feet deep.  It’s not what I’d call a “wild” watercourse, but it is part of a working wetland.  It’s usually shallow and tame enough that little kids can play in it, and on a freakishly hot afternoon not too long ago we took Zach out to do just that.  Anyway, he was my excuse, but I’m glad I had one because it was a great day at the beach.  In particular, over the couse of half an hour or so I got to experience four very different aspects of the water, each of them a pleasure in its own right, and all of them together representing a range of senasation I still find startling.  So of course I’ll share it all with you:

THE QUADRILUVIALITY OF CRISSY FIELD LAGOON

Inlet mouth, inner edge: Crystal clear and riffled with cheerful spangles in the bright afternoon, a delicious contrast to the sun baking my back and a counter to the slightly singed feeling lingering on the bottom of my feet from walking across the hot sand.  The water does not reach even to my ankles, coursing fast over black-streaked sand.  It is chilly enough to get my attention but remains an amusingly innocuous sensation.  Before me lies a flat expanse of shiny shallow water.  I can’t see where it drops off at the center of the channel but I know it’s not too far out there. 

Inlet mouth, midstream or a little better: The water flowing past my knees is a living thing, celestial azure on its reflective face but a deep wise protoplasmic hue at my feet where the inflow is the purest, fresh ocean water filling the huge pool beyond, rich with life yet cheerlessly chilly and sucking out my breath from the backs of my knees.  It doesn’t get any deeper but what there is of it here is a true vein of some coldblooded oceanic organism.  I feel it moving around me, pseudosentient.  Even shrunken and tamed as it is here, it commands respect.  Before me are the tumbled concrete blocks that shore up the deeper western side of the channel; water insinuates steadily amid them, its mostly-glassy surface periodically disrupted by the lips of tiny wavelets skittering inland, falling infinetesimally up into the lagoon. 

Center of the inlet - halfway across, halfway back: Zach and I stand together and his small hand in mine is the focus of my attention.  The water, cool and soothing, caresses my lower calves; my feet dig comfortably into the sandy bed.  The water is spread fairly widely and uniformly across the full width of the streambed, wending its way back into the lagoon.  The sandy bank to the left carves sharply down to the water, echoing the angle of the massive blocks of scrap concrete that constitute the right bank.  The flow is steady and smooth; the water is calm and already slightly warmed - cool, but not cold anymore.  Zach is giggling.  So am I.  Before me is a wide stretch of quietly streaming water, and then the pedestrian bridge that separates me from the maze of cut-offs and oxbows now swelling up into the serene fullness of the lagoon in full flush.  I can’t see the watercourse’s reach any further than the low sweeping cement arch in front of me, but I can feel its pull.  Zach is grinning unrestrainedly up at me.  The water flows with nurturance. 

Up on the beach, down in a hole: A few young girls have dug some pits, deep enough to reach the water table so that each pit captures a puddle of sand-seeped tidewater, broad enough to let two or three small people soak their butts at the same time.  The water in the pits is three to six inches deep, cut off from the ocean, limpid and jewel-like.  The light beeze does not ruffle their subterranean surface.  The sun blazes off them with electrum brightness. The water feels warmer than the air temp - the dark sand is absorbing sunlight and warrms the pools very efficiently, tiny hot tubs filled with feral tidewater, filtered clean yet still vibrant and vital.  I can only fit one foot at a time in them as I stand watching Z playing a few feet from the inland rush of the bore up the inlet.  I now wish I’d had the presence of mind to dig a big old pit for myself and just taken a leisurely dip in it.  Those sunbaked soaking pools were some damn fine water.  And this I tell you, as one who may be prone occasionally to excessive attention to such matters.