The Midnight Walk

Looking again toward the points of restoration and salvation, I describe here the essential walk comprised of the idea of many separate late night walks...

Usually not earlier than 11 o'clock PM and as sometimes as late as 2AM, I set on a fairly established course. Unless I am hitting the mail box up Bancroft, I generally cut right across to lower Sproul plaza and cross it diagonally while picking up speed. The revelry at student drinking hole can vary from a skeleton crew of lonely drinkers to a mob in alcoholic mating mode. Their celebrations are given the lie by the lost souls who seem to spend the night huddled on the unforgiving benches across the plaza. I proceed to the creek and turn up the walkway to cross it at Sather Gate-- a structure topped with glass globes that throw a warm colored illumination on some abutting red woods. Several plaques attached to the Gate show plump rather sensuous nudes and were in fact only returned there after years of sequestration in some prudish dungeon. Unlike the stylized stone phallus broken from the angel over Oscar Wilde's grave and hidden in a furtive conservateur's office in a cemetery in Paris, they were returned to public view during more open times. They can perhaps be expected to disappear again shortly.

My own extremities intact, I walk across on a marble border stone runner to save me feet. Tonight a strange structure has arisen on the walkway. It began as a row of perpendicular wooden beams set on end and surrounded by a chain-link fence. Now they are covered in sheeting and look solid. It constitutes yet another intrusion into pedestrian space.*
Lone students or small groups pass on the dark concourse sometimes a little guardedly. There is usually a silent giant with red hair who sleeps there along with a general assumption of his harmlessness. If he hasn't turned in yet he stands around the mound of his back pack, observing what there is to observe I suppose. Then he sacks out along the sidewalk without any apparent attempt at concealment. He is one of the longest-running street people these days, a very familiar sight no doubt tolerated by the rather profuse campus cops.
I think the cops have gotten to recognize me as well, as the guy who takes an exercise walk on campus year-round, rain or star shine. They certainly make themselves seen at this time of night. One night as I rounded a sidewalk in front of the Chan Shen auditorium, a police car hurled around the corner on the sidewalk at a pretty fast clip. I had to scoot out of the way onto the grass at the last minute. Most vehicular activity by the UC police is conducted at similar reckless rates of speed-and they get demonstrably pissed if anything forces them to slow down.
Think of the type of person who becomes a cop, then turn him loose in a vehicle on a boring patrol--all police unions fights any attempt to have cops walk around on a beat, only the most effective way to reduce crime.
Last Spring the UC police were having a mini-jamboree in this area (as opposed to their all-out oppression and occupation of the Oak Grove). A lone tree-sitter had first occupied a tree on the creek opposite Wheeler hall, then had moved to a very central oak tree a little downhill. Despite the low branches and lack of perching spots, he managed to evade the cops for a month or two. He turned out to be twice a hero as one of the last hold-outs in the Oaks tree-sit as well--they call him "Shem". I'll return to tell that tale.
The cops grabbed his sleeping bag and food at one point and tried to prevent others from supplying him with food and water. These techniques and their implied ideology were adopted from the Oak Grove tree-sit punishment squad the way the Abu Ghraib perpetrators adopted the theory and practices tested-out at Guantanamo.

I push on through. As I walk on down slopes I repeatedly join my hands behind my head and bring them forward like a baseball pitcher's warm-up motion. An incline begins on the central campus walk around the point of the ornamental wayside clock that keeps good time and audibly jumps a Roman numeral as I pass. This gets me ready to round my turn in front of the library and start up a somewhat greater incline My heart is beating encouragingly as I don't slow down. Students are often scattered about under the tremendous -visible-from-space lighting that is is on all night in this vicinity turning the staely building's facade blinding white at night.

Last night I was met by what would be a surprise if anything surprised me any more. Richard Brautigan wrote the final surprise is that nothing surprises you anymore. A large temporary pavilion covered in white plastic had been erected on one of the last surviving open lawns--one vital to campus social life I might also suggest. His of course is typical of the "Highway 61 Revisited" crash-and-burn for short-term results mentality of contemporary American capitalism. Golden barges for departing administrators as they raise costs for students and think nothing of subjecting them to four-years of construction during their education. The arbors and open spaces that make the campus looks so good in promotional brochures are apparently available to be withheld to accommodate semi-privatized expansion.

But I shall not be stymied by the doing of the short-sighted. I persevered on to my plateau of return. I climbed the stairs leading to the Campanile and continued on that way, touching the granite orb as my part of my ritual of return. Next a brief rest at the steps that lead down from the Campanile, as I looked out at the Golden Gate reckoning the weather by what I see--the lights of the bridge seen in clarity mean no cold fog is on its way in. I looked up at the clock and noted as many of the planets and stars as I could.
Then with a nod to the carotid of old Honest Abe Lincoln, I shuddered a little at the knowledge that many levels of the Campanile are used to store skulls and bones--in case "we" need them again. Sometimes love-birds perch on the facing bench with it's trumpet vine bush adding to its decorative effect.
As always I proceeded to the sun dial and climbed the base of whose pedestal. It's like a lectern or a pulpit. When I looked up at the Campanile I saw the lights trained on it form a cross in the sky---made more visible last night by the mists. I crossed myself then said the Lord's Prayer. Then squinting up at the structure I see how it resembles an icon of the Virgin Mary, and say a Hail Mary for my Mother. Sometime passers-by notice me there praying, I bless them silently as well.
At this stage I felt very good as I usually do on my walk. I start down the way home doing an upper body motion, sort of like making a heart shape with my arms, seventy-five times. And I finished by crossing lower Sproul with my hands on my head in what I call my "perp walk." I crossed the incandescent boulevard with its round-the-clock traffic and intrigue. Then I climbed the precipitous staircase for a good night's sleep.