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In Hawaii, legend tells about a green sea turtle, Kauila, who could change herself into a girl to watch over the children playing at Punalu'u Beach on the Big Island. When Kauila's mother dug her nest, a fresh water spring surged upward, quenching the children's thirst. Kauila is the "mythical mother" of all turtles, and perhaps of our children as well. |
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Rising (Again) Through Our Artifacts A
turned and hollowed vessel from
the wood of a town’s historic Camphor trees emerges from mud and rock
embedded with century-old bits and pieces of heavy-footed ghosts. Rising
(Again) Through Our Artifacts merges the saga of early California
development as told through its trash with the current tale of a historic
town’s lost Camphor trees. A small town packed with history and lots of ghosts.
Since 1847, the end of 1st Street in Benicia, California, was an important and evolving part of the developing West – a vital railroad station and port, businesses coming and going, and finally, tannery shacks built on piers over the Carquinez Straits, an ecologically critical waterway that takes the Sacramento River to San Francisco Bay.
As time evolved, life at the end of 1st Street dramatically changed, as it transformed into a ghost of the town it had been. However, the earlier industrial boon had left a heavy footprint on the land and waters, and time has only covered over much of the damage. In the last couple of decades, of the remaining ghosts included a renovated railroad station, more than 30 wind-swept Camphor trees (Cinnamomum camphora) lining both sides of an entire block where the old Tannery Building once stood, and the tons of artifacts from over a century of dumping the trash of 1st Street directly into the water.
The surviving artifacts, mostly of glass, bottles, and ceramic shards, are embedded deeply into the mud and rock of the Straits. Yet, with the tides, storms, and tectonic vibrations, the Earth continually burps things back up. And for years, the various generations of dogs and I have walked on the ghost’s footprints, collecting from the beach these relics and gathering snippets of the lives of long ago.
Everything must go somewhere. There is no "waste" in nature and there is no “away” to which things can be thrown. Barry Commoner 2nd Law of Ecology
In 2005, the city authorized a commercial/condominium complex to be built on top the old Tannery Building property. Unfortunately, they also authorized the removal of all the aged Camphor trees from the entire side of the block. It was a sad day to witness so much history and beauty being torn out with each tree. And although the trees were pulverized into mulch, I saved 15 trunks of the old guards from the shredder.
As I watched the destruction of these trees, I kept thinking of the lives before me that might have sat beneath them, perhaps drinking a cup of tea and enjoying the filtered light and the rustling canopy on a summer day. And although the trees were probably less than a hundred years in age, were the remnants of that teacup some of the artifacts gathered from the mud and rock?
For centuries people have blindly dumped their wastes anywhere so that it was out-of-sight, never considering the consequences. Have we learned anything from our ghosts? Or are we are still blindly throwing things out, not giving enough consideration to the consequences?
This site was last updated 08/10/07 |
06/08/08