Wednesday, June 4, 2008

A Walk to the Far End

My reverie leads me on to strange places among the known...

In the somewhat chilly, somehow perfect sunlit air of Memorial day, I had come as far as the East Asian Library on my walk. I examined the hugely space-consuming constructions fronting the entrance. They consist of an Escher-like warren of stairways and ramps with plexi-glass barriers. I noted that a ramp had been built on a level with the top of the hill that led up to the front entrance. It ended in a commanding view across memorial lawn to the stately University Library with the campanile looming beyond it. Presumably, the Chinese moneybags that hold the IOUs for the Iraq occupation can now roll up on Hearst, climb into gilded motorized rickshaws and be born over to grin at their collateral with interest. All with minimum effort expended, it would seem, before adjourning to an enormous banquet somewhere. This building has been made the de facto center of Campus even though most undergraduates at least would have little connection to it. Oh well, how long can it be before UC crams another building into its dwindling open space and spoils the view for the visiting mandarins?

I skirted this barn, walking around to the back. And that interesting passage by the creek, a place of contemplation for myself and others, has been transformed in a place that feels like the back of a building. Next door is a traditional building with cool Pegasus medallions on its facade. Around its opposite corner is a wooden ramp down to the creek area. In the chilly deep shade at the bend of the creek five large crows were drinking oblivious to me passing nearby. Crows have multiplied in the area in recent decades to the point at which a lot of people notice them, their squawky squabbles and acrobatic flights amid the tops of the tallest trees.
Recently on Bancroft near Dana, a few crows where whirling around the shady live oak on the corner. As I walked uphill, I passed a Native American (or First Nation as they say in Canada), a woman about 35. She was watching the crows too. "A lot of crows lately," I remarked." "It means changes coming," she replied. "Yeah, big ones," I said and we laughed knowingly. That particular oak tree itself doesn't appear in the architect's drawing of the six-story building proposed for that corner, one sadly notes.

A small bridge there leads to a stairway up the next little hill. From there you can spy into the Chancellor's private garden. It's almost always deserted unless a little elite garden party is in session-- raising funds for or blowing funds on champagne and petite fours for members of the chattering class. The grass is very well-watered as is most of campus. Sprinklers are set high and sidewalks are flooded during a Governor-declared drought. This is at night when enough big lights remain on in certain buildings or shine in front of them, that I'm sure UC is visible from space. Then there is the mini-Guantanamo with its punishing all-night klieg lights up at Memorial Oak Grove which I will address extensively in a future blog.
You can also just glimpse an attractive garden. Dense with flowers in Spring, it is unseen by uninvited eyes. A high fence separates this from the remains of the overgrown area that leads back up toward the central campus path, an area relegated from being a refuge to more of a waste lot by that new Library.

At the top of the stairs and to the right on a circular driveway is the grand facade of the Chancellor's house. This is where the UC Police shot to death a young girl some fifteen years ago. She was upset about development at People's Park and had come to threaten Chancellor Chang lin Tien, the namesake of that new Library. Warning shots and wing-shots are decidedly out of favor in contemporary police science when the well-to-do are arguably in jeopardy. But I have come not to see the pompous building but to see it's grounds' most pleasing feature--a topiary clock. Surrounded by a small circular hedge, two Gothic serrated metal hands emerge from the center ground. They keep time by pointing to the twelve topiary numbers fashioned out of the same dwarf hedges. These small numerical shrubs were perhaps imported from the land of Oz.
Distressingly it is not keeping the right time today. This is unusual and it may reflect a feeble attempt at energy-saving. In my ambulations, I am appalled at the number of public clocks that have stopped and are never fixed. A building at College and Alcatraz is called The Clocktower and its titular clock has never run, ever--mere crap decoration. Its symptomatic.

So back down the hill I went toward Life Science lawn. There was the penis-like base of a remarkable redwood--the incarnadine mighty shaft bursts up over two large testicular growths in a creek-side climax forest. Near a tranquil bench is another tree which I associate with the Blessed Mother and where I stop to say a Hail Mary. Its leaves turn a brilliant yellow in the Fall and a strange thick orange fungal growth fills a lacuna where the bark is gone--maybe where a branch split off. A little path led me toward home along Life Science lawn. A funky wooden bridge over the bright creek took me past an evocative hollow tree inside of which you can totally stand up.
It's a fairy-folk place in the ways of the wild things that live along the creek and go largely unnoticed. My intention is to notice and note as much of it as I can.

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