Mexico

Photo credit see below

Tuesday Paloma and I flew to Mexico City. By this time it's a familiar place to both of us. Twenty years ago I met Araceli Rocha. She came up to Los Angeles from Mexico to work at California Commerce Bank,a subsidiary of her employer Banamex, where I had just started working the year before. She was nearly engaged to Raul Gomes and I was nearly engaged to Susan. Araceli and I became good friends, a brother sister relationship. I have three sisters. I like women. I find them attractive but I also enjoy them as equals, though I've come to realize women are often our superiors in many ways, as Araceli and my sisters would quickly agree. Araceli is an attractive woman but our relationship has always been that of friends.

I became friends with Raul and Araceli became friends with Susan and that continued after her marriage and mine. There were visits to Mexico and return visits to us in the United States.

I love Mexico and after 1995 any visits to Mexico always included a few days in Mexico City which I learned to call D.F., day efeh. When Araceli was in Los Angeles she learned to speak English and I was learning to speak Spanish. We became each other's teachers. In 2001 I attended Araceli's daughter's baptism and became the godfather, one of two, an official Mexican padrino and myself the padrino norteamericano.

Fianna eventually attended bilingual school. I attended her graduation from escuela primeria. She gave the English address. This time we are here to attend her graduation from escuela secundaria, middle school.

This year Araceli and Raul are estranged. Susan and I are divorced and I am married to Suzette. Suzette and I have visited here together as well. Two years ago Paloma and I stayed a month with the Gomes Rochas. Paloma was four. Now Paloma attends a bilingual school. This year we are here again.

“Yes come down, of course. It makes no difference.” Araceli uses “of course” a lot. I'm not sure what my overworked Spanish phrases are. I'm sure I have them. Of course. Suzette my wife is staying in Oakland. We're not estranged. She can't take a whole month off work and will join us for the last two weeks.

From our arrival at the airport it is obvious that the relationship between Araceli and me will stay the same as it has been. Raul is still living in the back room separated from the house. Raul and I are still friends. Later Araceli tells me with excitement that she is talking to an old boyfriend from Guadalajara.

Thank god, I like having Araceli as a friend, una amiga mia. My life is not simple but at least this part is not too complicated.

Mexico. The immigration officer looked at the address on my visa application and said, “¿Queda con su familia?” You're staying with family. Si, yes we are. We drive across town, the Rochas live in Atizapan de Zaragoza on the west side of D.F. in the state of Mexico. The airport is on the east side. Tia Pilar is the driver. As compadre I am part of Araceli's family, so I know her sisters, Pilar, Delores, Axochitli, and Yatzil and her brother Roberto, her mother Conchita. In the car I call Pilar Delores. I know she is the dentista, the one sister I easily recognize but I mix the names and with the others the faces.

Mexico is a big city and it takes an hour to get across it. We go to Conchita's house and pick up Fianna my goddaughter and Conchita and we all go to Bisquets, Paloma's favorite place from our visit before. It is a coffee shop and the food is as good as Denny's in a Mexican way, the simple standards and sandwiches, malteds, coffee with milk, a specialty.

I'm not sure it's still Paloma's favorite. Our next time out to eat, Fianna, Paloma and I find a place on our own in La Condessa, the hippest neighborhood in all of Mexico City, while Araceli has lunch with her life coach across the way. At six Paloma is very proud that she likes sushi, a taste she acquired having lunch with me at my regular Japanese place near Lake Merritt in Oakland. She had a California roll which for her is sushi. So we go to Mushi Mushi, her choice, a Mexican sushi bar. They have a conveyor belt with sushi on it that goes between the tables, like a Japanese Mexican Dim Sum. Paloma is delighted and has California roll again. Afterwards at Cassava Roots, a new Mexican chain, we have tapioca bubble tea drinks, I have coffee.



Photo from http://www.atractivosturisticos.com.mx/tag/ciudad-de-mexico/

The Mission, San Francisco

I went to the Mission today. I rode my bike down to the BART Fruitvale Station, left my bike at the free bike valet service and rode the BART in to the City. Even at 9am the BART is crowded, no seats left, the cars are old and tired and it's expensive. The BART was good 50 years ago, but it badly needs updating today.

The Mission is an amazing place. I first visited the Mission 21 years ago, a barrio in the heart of San Francisco, a dense hub of all things latin. It was a cool place to live even then, teeming with vitality and history. Friends there were cool people living in old Victorians. A few years later I first noticed gentrification starting on Valencia Street, fancy restaurants, bars and cafes that were cool and expensive. Since I retired and moved to the East Bay I haven't been to the City much and hardly at all to the Mission. In the time I've been gone gentrification has attacked the Mission with a vengeance. Gentrification is pushing east from Valencia which is now full of boutiques, cafes, bookstores, galleries and clothing stores. Apparently gentry shop for clothes a lot.

Now the gentrification is striking at the heart of the Mission itself, taking over Mission Avenue and gobbling homes and lots on the backstreets, renovating some, new construction on others. The local color, the shops, the restaurants are still there but the rents are going up and what's there and been there is being squeezed out.

I'm not opposed to gentrification outright. Everyone needs a place to live. Subsidized housing and set asides are bromides for the lucky few who get it, while the rest of the poor are just pushed out and people with ordinary jobs can't even think about living in the City. In my opinion the whole system needs revamping, how people earn a living, how we pay people, how housing is built and how it's financed. In the meantime we let the market make all these decisions for us and claim there's little that can be done to stop it and then we do even less.

Even East Oakland is feeling the pressures of the market, the poor are being pushed further out and ordinary working people can barely afford to live here. Suzette and I have a comfortable house we squeezed into last year and we look forward to the improvements that gentrification will slowly make in our neighborhood. All things remaining equal, – let's not think or do anything about global warming or solve our social problems with real changes, – and after 10, 15, 20 years we'll be able to sell our house for an outrageous sum and move out of the city.

I had lunch with my friend John who has non-Hodgkin lymphoma in his lungs. He had radiation and just this week learned that the treatment got most of it, that there is something still there, it may just be scar tissue or it may be cancer. The type of cancer is very slow moving and in six months they'll check again, scar tissue and things are good, cancer, more treatment.

John is an amazingly strong person. He's a philosopher and a songwriter and incredibly well read. He looks almost down and out, never has taken much interest in his own appearance, but he reads the classics and knows writers some but not all of whom I have heard of. A few I've read excerpts or paragraphs from. He claims to have read Tacitus in the original Latin and understood it. I'm skeptical of anyone reading Latin but in John's case it could be true. After all he's Italian.

John and I used to smoke cigars together. With John I'd smoke Parodis, those little stumpy Italian cigars that look like something you might find on a city sidewalk. If I had a fatal prognosis I'd start smoking cigars again. John agrees. We didn't smoke any cigars today.

I like churches.  I love the variety of architecture and I love the variety of churches.  It seems in Richmond we have more churches than any other place I've ever been.  The Latter Rain Church of God in Christ is one of my favorites.  

I think if Jesus were here today or if he came back he would preach in a church like this.   

Latter Rain Church of God in Christ
474 Spring Street
Richmond

Or maybe here at the Iglesia Apostolica Nuevo Plumaje where there are free coffee and donut on Sunday before the service.  

Iglesia Apostolica Nuevo Plumaje
2959 Cutting Boulevard
Richmond

Mt. Olive Church of God in Christ
445 South 25 Street
Richmond

Southside Church of Christ
1501 Florida Avenue
Richmond

Our Lady of Mercy
301 W. Richmond Avenue
Point Richmond

Random Thoughts December 15th

I'm changing my blog and what it's all about. For a couple of years now since I finished my biography, posted on this blog, I've tried to start a regimen of writing thoughtful essays, columns as it were on weighty subjects. I was going to write something about Feguson. But it just seems too difficult to get started, all the things I think about don't coalesce when I try to put them down in an essay.

And about Feguson. When it first happened I was pretty much on the side of the cop, though the town and local police forces didn't do themselves any honor. More information came in and it looked confusing. Feguson became a national cause. Did I say I'm a retired cop – I've been there when I don't know what the suspect is going to do, my gun drawn, and the wrong move and I'm going to fire. Yes, to do the job, we tell ourselves it's important to be willing to be in situations like that and we tell ourselves returning home is important to our families and if that means making a life and death decision quickly and then being wrong, well that's the risk of the job.

I know cops don't go out looking for people to shoot and they don't shoot people because of their race. But I do know that there are some cops that make bad decisions out there. Sometimes they don't know when to back off or they don't know how to approach a suspect without jacking them up or getting jacked up themselves. Maybe they stereotype too much forget that everyone is an individual.

And I know that black kids are more likely to get shot than white kids. Feguson definitely could use some Black cops, but who voted for an all white city council? In my opinion exercising voting rights is the best way to protest injustice.

And then I think about the recent elections in Richmond. Because they were off year elections turnout was low. Chevron tried to buy the election, funding a slate of candidates favorable to their agenda. They lost. They lost because turnout was low and the African American precincts with majorities for the Chevron candidates were overwhelmed by the other voters. The head of the Chevron slate was a well known Black councilmember. In America we have democracy and the mess that we have in Federal and state governments is what we voted for.

So today I was driving up San Pablo Avenue and just before Miller Drive saw the flashing lights of a fire truck in the middle of the street, a Sheriff's car was coming up beside the traffic and it was obvious there had been an accident at the intersection of Miller and San Pablo, It was raining heavily. This is our second series of storms in a few days, the roads were slick and wet, running with water. More fire engines and paramedics were pulling up as we crawled up the hill, two Richmond Police were coming down the hill Code 3, lights flashing, sirens screaming.

The accident was only one car, a Volvo straddling the center parkway, its front axle broken and the car was dented and banged up as if it had rolled. There was a woman sitting in the driver's seat and on the other side someone was holding an umbrella over the passenger side. The firefighters were moving with that deliberate slowness that indicated the situation was serious. In the distance I could hear the wail of an ambulance on its way to the scene.

We're getting ready for Christmas, the tree is up. I've bought gifts for Suzette and still have to buy Paloma gifts. She got a big girl's bicycle for her birthday, so Christmas will be a nail painting set, puzzles, and probably I'll relent and get a Barbie doll.

“How many Barbie dolls do you have?”

“Six.”

“You need another one?”

“Yes.”

Later Paloma informed us that Emily has 15 Barbie dolls. We countered that maybe she got some of them from her older sister, a freshman at Cal. That argument didn't impress Paloma. I think she thought she needed an older sister who would go to Cal and leave Barbies behind.

And I think about that Volvo and the woman in the front seat who was probably on her way down the hill on an errand like we were coming back from. And I think about the passenger shielded from the rain and what their injuries might have been. How old are they? Was it a child?

Instead of dinner and VCR recordings of Wild Kratts, the background noise to writing this, they're probably at a hospital or maybe worse.

Life is fragile. In a moment it can be turned upside down or even ended. And the rest of us go on.

50th Reunion

I went to my high school's 50^th reunion this weekend. It was not easy. I don't think it was easy for a lot of us there. It was a good weekend but for me there was a lot of stress in just showing up to see people I hadn't seen in 50 years. I spent a lot of time prior to this event just thinking how I would appear to my old classmates.

This event had been on my mind for months if not years.  I was embarrassed by my own inner dialogue.  It seemed so petty that in my head I was justifying myself and explaining how successful I really was instead of the way I thought I might appear to them.

From the very start it turned out to be an exercise in maintaining my self esteem while keeping my ego in check. What I learned at my high school 50^th reunion was that my classmates, mostly people I barely knew in high school, were really nice people. As a group John Doherty observed we were men of substance, respectable members of our community. As I met people I was struck over and over again what good guys they were. And their wives were nice too.

There was only one classmate from my circle of friends there. Seeing Bob again was a real pleasure. The last time I saw him he was getting ready to ship out to Vietnam as a Navy medic. The best part of seeing him was to celebrate that he had survived. One of our classmates was badly wounded in Vietnam, shortly after arriving there as I understand it. He was in long recovery that started touch and go. He was the war hero that everyone seemed to be particularly aware of. I guess John was the sacrificial lamb for people and they had to express their admiration and awe for his sacrifice and certainly gratitude for his recovery.

As a veteran, I didn't have to go to Vietnam, I admired John for going and I'm sure his recovery required courage and heart. John like many others was wounded in the first few weeks in Vietnam probably before he learned to duck. 

(After writing this I learned John had been a medic in Vietnam.  Anybody who was a medic in my world automatically is a hero.  Sometimes it doesn't pay to write honestly how I feel, particularly when I'm wrong.)

No one seemed to notice Bob the way they did John. If anyone was a war hero I thought it was Bob. On direct questioning he admitted he had been a medic with the Special Forces and jumped out of a few helicopters. I'm sure he saved many lives and saw many young men die. No one seemed to be aware of that except me. Today Bob is a heart surgeon. I sat next to him for a few minutes and we exchanged information. Bob talked on about things I didn't have much interest in. We don't really have much in common any more, but sitting next to him I had a real feeling of affection and joy in his presence, just to see him and I could feel the same from him. Without thinking about it we patted each other on the arm a few times. We were there together. The words didn't matter.

When I was in high school I thought I was one of the bright kids and a lot of the others were kind of dumb. Since then I've learned that some of the others became doctors, veterinarians, county administrators, financiers, lawyers, newspaper reporters, bartenders, artists and stock brokers. For me my own career pales when I compare it. I was smart. I'm still smart, but not smart enough to have earned much money or prestige. I remind myself I never really worked very hard to earn money. Of course, I'm selling two successful careers short, but when I started comparing myself to my classmates,

My struggle was to be mindful that we had all done well including me while at the same time trying to resist telling stories that made my own experience sound like more than it really was. Most of us were pretty interesting when we got to talking about the things we loved. Many of us had kids and had been good parents, most of us were grandparents and proud and excited about the offspring of our offspring.

One of my classmates was a doctor, who was living and practicing in the same town he had gone to after residency. He said he was married to a wonderful wife and had wonderful children and as we exchanged stories, we hadn't really been friends in high school, he said something about being envious of the excitement in my life. I've been a banker, a juvenile hall counselor and a Park Ranger. His admiration surprised me when it was his life I was envying, his stability and solid accomplishments.

I heard one of our classmates had been in auto accident as an undergraduate at USC and suffered severe brain damage in the frontal lobe and while still alive was badly debilitated. Steve had been a bright guy, he was good looking kid and though he hadn't found himself in high school, I'm pretty sure he would have been successful in life but for the accident. No one else said anything about Steve. Maybe it wasn't true. Maybe I got it wrong. I hope so.

With another classmate I speculated that probably 10 of our classmates had passed on, ten out of 95. One of them had been my closest friend in high school. He died in 2011 of a heart attack a year after my own heart attack. Another had died of some mysterious infection or illness but as the story was explained it seemed the underlying cause was acute alcoholism.

Two of us were sober in AA. The other AA member avoided me every time I tried to talk to him. I'm not sure what the problem was. He was someone I had felt kinship with in high school. I had been looking forward to seeing him. After chasing him the first evening of the reunion, I gave up, and noticed the next night he carefully kept his distance. There was something wrong between us but I had no idea what it was.

Three of us had been commercial bankers, probably the only three in the room who knew that banking can be interesting, at least before bankers become securities brokers instead of lenders.

The school hadn't changed much. The reunion was all around a football game Friday night. When I attended St. Francis the school was all about football. Then Saturday evening there was a Mass before the dinner. It wasn't mandatory and the attendance was light. Father Tony the new principal preached a sermon based on the workers in the vineyard parable. The moral I got from his homily was that even though our lives up until then may not have earned us a place in heaven, that we could still secure a place in heaven at this late date. It occurred to me that one way we might secure our eternal reward was by donating a large sum of money to the school. I'm prone to being too cynical about intentions in the Church.

Later when I cornered Father Tony he seemed to be in a hurry to move on and talk to someone else. We might have had a lot in common.  Before he became a priest he was a banker in downtown LA,  He was quick to deny I might know anyone he knew.  Like a politician looking for voting blocks or donations, he didn't have time to waste with pointless questions. He made a good impression on everyone else.  For myself maybe I'm a little jaundiced on bankers and priests.

I thought about the priest who taught us English the last two years at St. Francis.  He taught us by reading out loud from the introductions to the pieces in our anthology. His interest wasn't really in teaching, he seemed to be more interested in administering to the spiritual needs of the rich.

Of course, some of us needed to tell people who we were, to explain to our classmates our success as if we were still 17 years old. I don't think anyone was doing it intentionally but it was the gist of some conversations that night. It was something that came out, something we needed to say. Having been bullied most of my youth from early on through high school, I was telling people that I could stand up for myself. I had been a cop. One classmate who had been a poor student told me, one of the smart kids he reminded me, that he was really smart and had been very successful and was very well off in spite of having been classed with the dummies.

Some if not most of our classmates seemed to be comfortable with who they were. All of us I think were trying to portray ourselves as successful, as happy with our lives. No one seemed unhappy. And it was true we were successes, we had done well.

I was interested in how we were aging and what that was like for others. I wasn't the only one who had had heart trouble already. I was asked, “How many colonoscopies have you had?” Someone I talked to had had a hip replacement. All of us are in our late 60's and we looked it except for one of us. Rick did look much younger than the rest of us. At first I didn't think he belonged to our group. I heard another classmate remark that he must be drinking formaldehyde on a regular basis. Our wives looked our age as well, the homecoming queen, the comfortable housewives.

I sat at the stag table, those of us from out of town, the bachelors or the divorced. It was a Catholic school so there was no talk of first, second or even third wives, no divorces or worse. No one was openly gay. One classmate wasn't there because he was in prison in Arizona or had been. I thought it was for financial fraud, but learned later it had been for burglary.

I was interested in who was retired and how they handled that and who wasn't. One classmate had retired for a year and half and said, he couldn't take it and went back to work as an insurance broker. About half the class seemed to be retired and happy with being done with it all and the other half were still working. Being in the retired group my bias is that those who are still working are refusing to give in to the aging process, to give up their work bound identity and just be. It wasn't so much that people were still working but as they told it they were working hard and they told me how much they were still valued in their jobs. We all do what we need to do, I was just happy I don't have to work anymore.

I was glad I had been there. In the end I had to admit to myself that while I wasn't rich, that my life hadn't followed a predictable path to success and prestige, but I had what I needed. I was saddened to know that Steve had been debilitated early in life. It was disappointing that most of the people I knew well in high school weren't there, a couple had passed away, others were out of contact and some just couldn't make it. I felt fortunate that I had survived and that after 68 years I wasn't embittered, that I wasn't a fool, and that like most of my classmates I was OK. We had done well.

Israel Gaza

Last week was the 69^th anniversaries of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I've never struggled much with the morality of dropping the bomb. Less than a week after Nagasaki Japan surrendered and the War in the Pacific was over. In March before the bombing nearly 7,000 Americans lost their lives in the invasion of Iwo Jima, a small island east of Japan. It is said that the invasion of Japan would have cost 100,000 American GI lives. Between 130,000 and 250,000 were killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, without doubt almost completely civilian, non-combatants. There was no point to the bombing except to kill as many citizens of Japan as possible in order to convince Japan to surrender and it worked.

Last week in a discussion about Israel Gaza with Jewish friends, men of moderation I respect and like, the argument was made that killing Palestinian civilians while not intended, collateral to killing Hamas leaders, would convince the Palestinians to give up Hamas and terrorism. My belief is that the death of three Israeli civilians does not justify an invasion that killed 1800 people mostly civilians.

The argument that is strongest for me is my firm belief that violence begets violence, that the abuse of the Palestinians stokes hate on both sides and strengthens the hand of Hamas and any group that resists Israel, and that the State of Israel cannot survive by killing as many Palestinians as possible and depriving the survivors of any human rights.

I have to admit it is not a rational argument that moves me against the State of Israel, it is visceral. My visceral reaction is based on the memory of the USS Liberty and the 34 American GIs killed in the Israeli attack on the US Navy vessel monitoring the Six Day War in 1967. My job in the Air Force one year later was the same as the sailors, we monitored everybody, and I identified closely with the Liberty sailors.

Around the same time I was in the UK when the Troubles started in Northern Ireland in 1968. As an Irishman I identified with the Palestinian victims of colonialism in an insoluble problem similar to Northern Ireland. I grew up in the American spirit of support of the new state of Israel and the hope it held for the Jews of the world to finally have a homeland again. Later seeing the brutality of the Zionists against the Arabs in the West Bank converted me to a dissident to the Jewish occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. I stopped short of supporting the Palestinians, the PLO, the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. I sent my check, the only thing I could do, to Yesh Gvul, a group of Israeli soldiers resisting service in the occupied territory.

The violence that created Israel was as much Arab as it was Jewish, fundamentalists and nationalists on both sides justified brutality in an intransigence that ended in stalemate that continues to this day. But if the violence in Israel is to end it's the Israelis who have to end it. Unfortunately there is no Palestinian Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King.

Things I know, judgments about right or wrong, the rights of return for Israelis or Palestinians are not the basis of a solution. While a large number of Americans acknowledge that the land grab and genocide against the Indians was wrong, no one is considering giving back anything our ancestors fought so hard to attain. They may have been wrong but they are still heroes of the American imagination.

I know that a one state solution, where Jews would eventually be a minority, is impossible for Israel to accept. I know that peace between the two parties as they currently stand is impossible.

I believe if peace is ever going to happen between the Palestinians and the Israelis, that the aggressive settlement of the West Bank by Israelis has to stop. I believe that the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza have to be treated with respect and their basic human rights respected. Important first steps would be fair water rights for everyone in the West Bank and freedom from harassment and violence. The Palestinians will have to accept that Israel can protect the border of Israel Palestine and stop the inflow of weapons to be used against Israel.

I believe the United State should stop supporting Israeli aggression and stop all military aid to Israel; and Egypt and Saudi Arabia while we're at it.

I don't know how the conflict between Arabs and Israelis in Israel can ever be ended. But I do know that bombing and killing civilians is the problem and not the solution. I also know that civilian casualties on either side do not justify killing civilians in revenge.

Both sides need to stop the senseless killing, stop the revenge for past wrongs. Is it going to happen soon? No, but we need to condemn the murder of civilians by both sides and stop our unquestioning support for Israel to murder civilians. It's ironic that there is more criticism of the Israeli government in Israel than there is in the United States. In the United States we need to discuss our support for Israel.

I think if Israel stays on its current path led by Netanyahu and the Likud Government world opinion will eventually turn against Israel, may have already done so, and Israel's brutality more than anything else threatens the continued survival of Israel.

I started this essay with Hiroshima and Nagasaki because my argument is against violence but I have to admit to not having the same problem in a far worse killing of civilians.  I think we have to acknowledge that we have different points of view even within ourselves and that this is not an easy topic to discuss.  It is a discussion we have to have because what is happening now is not leading toward peace and the United States is an active partner in the problem.

The Angel Island Fire

On October the 12^th, 2008, after the last ferry left, I finished my shift. It was around 5:30 or 6:00 in the evening.  It had been a long day, Sunday of a three day weekend and Fleet Week, more than the usual visitors coming over to the island to see the air show from the island's south side. End of shift, I went home to my house on Ayala Cove and settled in for the night. At 8 o'clock I got a call out. The dispatcher said an employee was reporting a bonfire in Campsite 1.

I got back into my uniform, put on my POPE gear, the acronym we use in Parks to describe our gun and all the other stuff on our belt. We always wore the full gear for a call out. At Mt. Diablo I had been called out one night on something sounding innocuous that ended with an arrest after a camper high on drugs had threatened us with a knife. After that I never thought twice about wearing my POPE gear. It was easier to have it on than it was to go back and get it.

The weather was warm. Humidity was low. There was a light but steady breeze blowing out of the northeast. Mount Tam and the larger parks were on fire alert. At Angel Island, wood fires were never allowed though campers could use charcoal. From my house in Ayala Cove I drove to the northeast side of the island where Campsites 1, 2 and 3 were clustered about 200 feet above the shoreline on a spur off the fire road .

I drove my truck to the turnoff above the campsites. I didn't see any fire. I got out and walked back to the campsites and started with the young adults in Campsite 3. They seemed relaxed and surprised to see me. Campsite 2 and 1 were four fathers and a large group of young girls, about 10 years old. There were small bikes, mostly pink parked all around the campsites. As I did in 3, I checked the to see if there was a campfire or wood burning anywhere and I didn’t see anything to be concerned about.

Everything seemed to be as it should be. The girls were running around, shouting, having a good time. I talked to the men and told them I was checking for fires and they assured me they didn’t have a campfire. I told them it was a serious problem and people needed to be careful. They said they understood my concern. I walked back to my truck and headed for Campsites 7, 8 and 9. Some employees can be pretty unreliable reporters, new employees with no experience and people who just overreact. Like any reporters they get their facts jumbled up. I called in to dispatch that I was leaving Campsite 1 and heading for 7,8,9. I got a phone call on my cellphone. It was Gerald O’Reilly our maintenance chief. He was the reporting employee.  Gerald is a reliable source and he had been driving on the fire road and had personally seen a large fire at Campsite 1.

I was halfway to the other campsites. I turned around and drove back and left my truck at the junction of the fire road and the campsite road. I walked down into the campsite. The girls were still running around and I walked up to the barbecue stand and there were coals in it but also chips of wood that had been gathered from the site after I left the first time. I gave the men a stiff lecture and told them, no fire was allowed, no wood at all should be put on the charcoal and that if there was another report of a fire that they would be ticketed. I warned them it was a heavy fine. One of the girls asked what a ticket was and I gently explained it to her. I had not been gentle with the men.

I walked back up to my truck and as I got close to it, I saw a column of white smoke rising up beside the reservoir nearby. My heart jumped with a shot of adrenalin and I hurried to my truck and called in a fire and requested assistance from dispatch. I knew Tiburon Fire would be moving immediately and they would be there soon. That alone made me feel better.

I drove quickly toward the smoke swallowing the panic I felt and began planning what I needed to do. I got up to the smoke where there was an old retaining wall below the reservoir. The fire was on a patch of grass behind the wall sloping up the hill. It was a small grass just starting right at the wall. I got a shovel out of my truck and got up beside it, I knew enough not to put myself in front of the fire but to go to the side and try to work around it. I shoveled dirt on the fire and it kept broadening and advancing. Gerald arrived in his pickup truck with a small water tank and pumper in it. It took a minute or two to get the pumper going and we attacked the fire with the small water hose from the truck. Still the fire kept creeping up the hill and expanding and we weren’t getting control of it. Mike Holste arrived with the island's fire truck, a pumper, and we got that going, but by the time we began pouring water on the fire, it had jumped to a pile of dead branches and then into a dead tree and from there the fire took off up the hill.

The Angel Island crew were amazing that day. They had proved themselves before in medical emergencies and crises. Now with a fire they showed up and immediately started doing what was needed. As each one arrived and pitched in, I felt less and less alone. We were working together. Park people everywhere are good, but the Angel Island people are the best.

The whole time we were fighting it, the fire kept growing just out of reach. It seemed if we had been just a little better, a little faster or just had more water or more people we might have been able to stop it. At each stage it was just a little more than we could handle. When I first got there it was only two yards square and then it was the whole draw and working up the hill. Casey Lee our chief interpreter arrived on the scene and she began evacuating the campers. Kelli Holste was in her truck evacuating campers. Tiburon Fire came across on their fire boat and arrived in one of the vans we kept in the cove. Ed Lynch, the Tiburon Fire Battalion Chief, greeted me with a smile and began moving his crew along side the fire. Ed and his crew were in charge. I don't think I've ever been so relieved. The fire was theirs now.

Time seemed to compact itself. The first concern was campers and the Park employees evacuated them and made sure we had everybody. They loaded people into their trucks and vans and searched the island thoroughly. Rangers from the mainland arrived and more firefighters. We helped the new firefighters figure out the lay of the island. We evacuated the visitors to Camp Reynolds and the Quartermaster Building which was on the southwest side of the island, all the way across from where the fire started.

By the time Dan Villanueva, a Ranger from China Camp, arrived the only vehicle left in the cove was one of the small electrics we used. Dan used it until it ran out of juice in an area that was later overrun by the fire. All night Dan worried that he was responsible for a puddle of plastic on the hillside. It wasn't the worst thing that could have happend he felt bad about it. In the morning, we learned one of the firefighters had moved it. Even the electric cart had been saved.

The fire quickly reached the top of the island and began coming down the southwest side. We decided to evacuate the visitors completely off the island and the employees and their families to Ayala Cove on the northwest side of the island. I went to Camp Reynolds where the campers were gathered. Some were calm but some were frantic. We assured them they were safe and I had to tell one woman she was not going back to her campsite to get something she needed. By that time the fire was already heading down the south side of the island through Campsites 4, 5, and 6. Later we saw that the firefighters had set a backfire behind Officer Row protecting the employee houses on the east side of the island.

Before we loaded all of the campers in our various vehicles I pulled aside the four men who had been in Campsite 1. They wanted to explain, to talk, and I told them I really didn’t have time, I just wanted names, addresses and phone numbers. We would talk about it later. They were pretty chastened.

Maggie McDonogh, captain and owner of the Angel Island Ferry, met us at the docks. She had come when she saw there was a fire. She evacuated the campers and began bringing firefighters across the strait to the island. Her boat held about 300 people and she brought us firefighters as they arrived in Tiburon. By early morning we had 375 firefighters, all the local companies and CalFire crews.

Dave Matthews the superintendent arrived on the island. I was assigned to the docks to help the firefighters and equipment coming in.

Rich Ables a maintenance worker was operating the Ayala, a crew boat. Allyn Shaffer, our boat operator, and his son Nick were operating the LCM, landing craft mechanical, a boat of about 80 feet, able to carry a large truck and land it on a ramp.  Western Marine showed up with another LCM and began transporting fire trucks to the island. The Coast Guard showed up with their Life Boat and asked if they could help. By that time everything was covered and there wasn't much for them to do. They left and came back with pallets of bottled water and cartons of Cliff Bars which turned out to be a wonderful contribution. After that they patrolled the strait with a cutter ready to assist us if we needed it.

It was a hectic night. 375 firefighters fought the fire. 15 Fire Trucks were brought on the island. The docks were a busy place all night long. I helped unload the ferry and LCMs and oriented the firefighters to the island. I could see smoke coming over the top of the hill but I couldn't see the fire from the cove. I had a second radio with the firefighters band on it and I heard the constant stream of reports and commands back and forth between the firefighters.

I heard them staging to fight the fire on the southwest corner of the island and all along the south side. The fire came over the hill and they held it at the fire road. At one point I went up to my house and the night and the trees changed the perspective and the fire looked like it was in my backyard when in fact it was better than three quarters of the way up the island. The residents of the island from the east side who were staying at my house didn't like the look of it, but with an effort they managed to stay calm.

Before dawn four helicopters staged themselves in the air above Tiburon and Belvedere across from the island. At 5:30 am it was determined there was enough light for them to begin their runs and they came over the island and dropped loads of water, a couple from belly tanks and a couple from large buckets suspended by cables. They made another run and another run, pulling water up from the lakes nearby on the mainland. Within the hour the fire was under control. The hotspots which had been held at the Fire Road by the firefighters were doused.

After that all the tension was gone. Cal Fire arranges for food for firefighters and the caterers arrived in the morning. Breakfast signaled the end of the fight. After that it was cleanup. Everyone’s mood shifted. It became a friendly and relaxed gathering of first responders, stories to be told, work to be done. No buildings had been lost, no firefighters injured. There was no one else on the island, just us. A wonderful air of satisfaction settled over the island, lots of work to do, but the worst part was over.

At three o’clock in the afternoon I left the docks and was off duty. Suzette met me on the main land and we had a late lunch at Il Fornaio in Corte Madera. It was a strange feeling after the preceding 18 hours to be sitting in a nice restaurant and enjoying a nice meal. It was wonderful like stepping through a curtain.

Later that afternoon I came back to work and showed the County Fire Marshall around the island to the scene of the campsite and where the fire started. At the campsite we saw beer cans littering the ground and in the trash. There were wine bottles in the trash as well.  It had been quite a party before the fire broke out. We heard from other campers and some of the girls that the girls had been putting sticks into the charcoals and burning wood debris and running around the area waving their burning sticks like sparklers.

It had been a bad combination of unsupervised children, an illegal fire, and red flag fire weather.

The next day two investigators from Cal Fire arrived. George and George, they said there was good George and bad George but they wouldn’t say which one was which. They were incredibly professional, combing the spot for evidence inch by inch where the fire started. They were both Fire Captains trained as investigative police officers. They were in civilian clothes but they wore pistols, magazines and handcuffs on their belts, serious looking men.

Our own district biologists and the County Forester visited the island. Quickly the conclusion was the fire had not been bad for the island. No buildings were lost. The valuable historical sites were unharmed, Camp Reynolds had been saved. The chaparral in California is fire compatible and the environmental effect of the fire was to clear invasive weeds and revitalize the cycle of the local plants which are able to withstand fire and regenerate themselves. As one naturalist said, it couldn’t have been better if it had been a controlled burn.

Our superintendent was always one to assume control of the situation and he began a struggle with Cal Fire over who was in charge of the investigation. There was never a question that it was Cal Fire but the effect was they stopped talking to us and as is normal in these cases, we never learned about the results and the whole incident just faded into the past.

They quickly determined the cause of the fire was human, that it was negligent not criminal. Before they stopped talking to us I asked what happens in these cases. They said the responsible parties pay the cost of the fire. The initial estimate put the cost of the fire at over a million dollars. I said, if it were me, I just didn’t have the money, what do they do then? They said the judge determines what the responsible parties can afford and they make payments for the rest of their lives. That sounded fair.

I was never able to learn what happened after the first few weeks but it was a solid case against the campers and I’m guessing that the State of California reached a settlement with them before it went to court and they are paying for their negligence. They didn’t seem to be bad people, they just did something very dumb and it seemed fair they should be held accountable for it.

At the fire scene in the beginning there was a little girl who was very distraught and had to be calmed down. Of course, no one admitted what had happened. I was sure her parents were going to fight legally any responsibility but I hope they stepped outside of the legal issues and get the little girl the help she needs to understand she wasn't responsible. The guilt she might feel seemed to me to be the worst potential damage of the fire.

The fire was exciting but like all the other events in Parks, within a surprisingly short period of time everything returned to normal. Visitors came, the island renewed itself, and the Park went on.


The photograph is from:
http://www.chriswage.com/2009/08/07/angel-island-on-fire/