Garden Idyll Turns Suspenseful

Today I go on a cross-town expedition to Live Oak park where an arts and craft fair was held.

"In fact I bore the burden of life as contentedly as one sometimes bears a heavy load of sleep."
Saint Augustine

It was an agreeable 68 degrees, with the last shreds of cooling fog burning away on the hillsides. I cut diagonally across campus emerging at last at the Babylonian steps of the genetic engineering sector in the North-western corner. From here I could peer into the huge cavity where the public health library building used to be. A broad wall shored up the familiar grove of trees where I had spent many fond hours with take-away dinners from the now defunct Sun Hong Kong. It's a rambling excavation full of enormous generators and trailers, fenced right up to UC's front lawn on Oxford. They continue to slice the open space and wooded areas ever thinner, while trying to maintain a facade of the old sylvan campus.
On Walnut street, experimental agricultural lots grow frankenfoods and soylent green. I walked on past them and past the Bullwinkle gate of the gushing community garden. It is a site I will return to on this walk. But moving me ever on was the desire for my first coffee of the day. This was achieved at the Walnut Square Peet's at 3:00PM (after a 12:15 wake-up today). The girl at the counter had to make a new batch and I enjoyed watching the process which inv0lved a coffee-filter the size of a diaper. Consequently, the new batch first cup I got was quite strong. I sat outside in the cool shade with babies and dogs. A chess game and a guitar were being played on the sunny church steps opposite. It was a bay area day when you can sit in strong full sunlight of June and not feel over-heated.
Revivified, I walked the garden-laden sidewalks the rest of the way to the Park. I have little interest in jewelry and the housewares sold at such a fair. I come to sit and people watch, maybe take in the entertainment. There is a contentment looking at stuff knowing all the while you intend to take none of it home with you. It was a pleasant hour I spent doing this and occupying a shady bench.
One problem with this fair is that, although it has some non-profit/public benefit booths, it is essentially the temporary privatization of a pubic park for commercial purposes. The entertainment and kid attractions were puny. A large portion of the "arts and crafts" was jewelry. And since jewelers thieves go together, there was also a conspicuous security guard in bright yellow jacket. Who stood a hundred feet away letting me see he had an eye on me. Bored by the monotony of his job, he seemed to choose me as the most suspicious character of the moment. Here's a guy, who probably doesn't live in Berkeley, whose long Hispanic mustache made it likely he wasn't even born in this country, barely trained and just making it up as he goes along, deciding that someone who had lived thirty years in this town looks out of place in this public park. Was it my black beret and sunglasses?
And this goes to the talk I attended last night. Jeremy Scahill was at Moe's books speaking about his book exposing Blackwater and the vastly expanded private security now used at home and abroad. He indicted Dyncore, the Wal-mart of private security, that this guy probably works for. They are far more ready to ignore people' rights than even the cops are, and they do the bidding of whoever pays their low wages. I got a chance to shake Scahill's hand after the event. I told him, "At a time when the bully pulpit was barking, 'You're either with us or you're with the terrorists', you stood up. I admire you enormously." He was gracious and modest.

Eventually, I entered into a conversation with an bearded old-timer who sat next to me at the fair. He knew Scahill's work and when I mentioned a political writer I had just discovered James Petras, he said, "Yes, of course." There we were, two anachronistic hold-outs for our rights in the face of the sweeping coercion of the times-- tenacious Berkeleyites. He told me how in the 1950's he would drive from his hometown in Stockton to make the scene in Beat North Beach for the weekend, how it helped him stay sane. We discovered a mutual high regard for the well-turned phrase, for out-moded slang, and for humor served ironic and dry, particularly in dire times. We were both would-be Mencken of the internet, of which he was by far the more avid user--it tires me out more easily. As a semi-retired Surrealist I claim neurasthenia.
He said he was 82, and had lived in Germany--I sensed a good back story, perhaps I'll see him another time. His wife, Asian, younger and dressed in purple silk brocade, asked how old I was. She thought her husband and I talked like people the same age. I have always taken the long view of life, my parents were born nearly one hundred years ago, and I admit to being at heart a 20th Century person. I'm down with the youth too though, when they aren't shy or defensive.
It then seemed about the right time to boomerang back home. I stopped at a virtually open-air pissoir. To alert a Mom and kids a few feet away that it was occupied, I whistled while I went. Everybody was cool though-- is American society finally maturing or is it only in pockets like this one? It often is hard for me to gauge the difference between Berkeley and the rest of the country. I have been here or in San Francisco all but a few months of the last thirty years--you slowly lose touch.

On my way home I stopped a while to sit amid a lavender plant in which dozens of bees were working. It was a blessing, a moment of peace, as I was absorbed in the activity surrounding me, by the scents and the sunlight. How like a dream is the stream of life when you can forget your tribulations and relax in an open state of mind.

I was so intoxicated by the slow-passing afternoon, that I stopped again in the Community garden a few blocks later. Open to all on Sunday afternoon from one to five, the garden has a large colorful folk-art "Welcome" sign. I didn't think to ask the young couple tending some plants if I was cool with them. I figured I still had time before five and they would say something if it was otherwise. The girl came nearby the bench I occupied. When I tried unsuccessfully to say hello, I noticed what may have been a slight disapproving tone in her voice as she talked to her friend. A few minutes later they both circled by me, again eyes averted. She was clearly the one in charge. It soon got very quiet and I could no longer see them. I walked over a path to the sturdy gate. It had been fashioned with cartoon figures by well-known Oakland artist Bullwinkle, but it bore a less whimsical padlock at that moment.
Rather than call out to the person still inside to say that it was closing time, they merely locked me in--merely committed an unlawful imprisonment. They must have felt a little awkward to say anything, so they just said nothing and locked-up. What did they imagine I would do? Did they assume that I wanted to stow-away for the night, to fall asleep in the hay after a meal of raw broccoli?
I called out a few times in case they were nearby. My voice echoed in the quiet, unheeded in the deserted street. I tried to brush off the sand of the sinking feeling that I was trapped.
I might have been able to petition a passer-by with a cell phone to summon the police. Lucky for those thoughtless gardeners, I did not. I am too resourceful for that and too reluctant to deal with cops when I don't need to.
Instead, I looked around at the challenge. I saw it was going to require some effort to escape, but I was confident I would do so safely. A six foot chain-link fence surrounds the field-- the kind without much structural support and therefore quite hard to climb. They grow food here and it is surrounded by a lot of hungry people, hence the place is fairly secure. This again goes to how irresponsible it was for them to lock me in.
I saw my exit point-- the roof of a shed seven feet high. I found a plastic milk box which I set up on a chair to make my attempt. The roof was covered in vines that I was able to use to pull myself up onto it. Up I went and soon was standing on the vine-covered roof as the Berkeley hills spun back into place a split-second later, in my expanded view, in my dizziness. The vines also served to soften the dangerous top edge of the fence and I could hang on to them to lower myself onto the sidewalk. As I stood a moment on the roof, a girl in the land of I-pod passed below, she looked up slightly, not showing surprise or alarm. One must take the unexpected in stride in this town.

Then, after a breath, jump down I did, without harm. And the Flaneur, unruffled and free, continued on his way.



Post script
After discussion with others and after thinking it over again myself, I have had to revise the incident in my mind, to allow the possibility that the gardeners had somehow not seen me sitting on the garden bench.