Bair Island Blues

By Sam Tolmasoff

When you find yourself on the side of the majority, It is time to pause and reflect.
-Mark Twain

There are California places that strongly suggest the Blues. Funky roadhouses outside of Fresno on Highway 99 are obvious. Perhaps certain Oakland corners, the atmosphere thick with the smoke of melancholia and echoing three line stanzas. However, you wouldn’t expect a flatted third while tripping around the dog path on uncertain old Bair Island. Not audible Blues, you understand, just a sensed lamentation.

It is a haunting place. More often than not, when I think to walk there, it is a gray day which visually accentuates its size. It is something like twenty-six hundred acres of what one can’t help but notice is prime real estate right on the shore of San Francisco Bay.

Small wonder that it makes developers salivate. It has endured a pair of near misses, but citizens resisted. Today, it is safe in the hands of caring people. It will remain marsh.

I like to imagine that it is as it was when the first Californians, the Native Americans, crossed the tidal flat to scratch clams and oysters from the shore. This is a stretch, as it involves ignoring the serious developments visible on three sides. The sad history of later times is there to literally trip you as well, the dikes and levees of the salt evaporation ponds. This was the time of Leslie Salt, those red round boxes that we all remember from childhood’s market shelves.

It is legitimate history that should be remembered, as unfortunate as it was. Some never-to-function-again parts of the ponds should be left as a tribute to the miracle that anything grows in this place at all.

I would have thought that such high concentrations of salt for so long a time would have killed everything, thoroughly and forever. Yet, here are grasses and pickle weed.
There are a number of small creatures like the salt marsh harvest mouse and the California clapper rail making it their home. It is a functioning part of the Bay ecology and hopefully it will be further restored. These various tiny struggles are a part of the blues.

The dikes need to be raked away so that the waters of the Bay can once again move in and out with the tide. Footbridges need to be constructed. And trails need to be improved. Still, the very best that can be accomplished is a wondrous approximation. That can be celebrated. It can never again be what it was two centuries ago. The clam scratchers are gone and they aren’t coming back.

Perhaps Pete’s Harbor ought to be written as a separate blues, but in spite of the removal of the footbridge that once linked the two places, they are permanently intertwined and apart of the same song.

With the defeat of County Measure 2 last election, the overpass will not yet be built and public access will remain limited. Pete’s Harbor will remain as it is for a time.
There is something in me that is pleased that it will be as it is for awhile. I truly love Pete’s Harbor. It is a place that could be immediately identified as part of California by a young John Steinbeck. The blues of this place are almost tangible. An invisible Blues festival is always silently in progress. But the music can’t go on forever.

I understand the fervor of the opponents of Measure Q (not that there weren’t pro-Q people fighting every bit as hard). They demonstrated great spirit and I tremendously admired their stamina in the pre-election days, standing up to their elected officials and then one or another of them standing at Jefferson and El Camino or some other busy corner, holding homemade signs and waving at passing cars.

They should justifiably be proud of themselves, but it leaves some very important things up in the air. The need for housing in this area is almost painful. There are things in the works that might be better for the site, and the idea of high-rise seems to be off the table, but couldn’t some talented architects arrive at a scheme to maximize the number of housing units? With the new ferry service and some clever patterning, couldn’t the traffic be minimized? Isn’t there some existing rail that could be utilized for passenger service? Would the proposed overpass help? I like to think that the age of telecommuting is upon us as well; wouldn’t this be a factor?

Traffic will increase. There is not much of a point in just pushing potential problem areas up and down the Peninsula. They will still be there. We are eventually going to have to plant our feet and get people out of their God damned cars!

Everyone that knows it loves Pete’s Harbor, but why couldn’t a development be designed that would hold the texture and flavor of the marvelous old site. I would call your attention to San Jose’s Santanna Row as a design in that direction. Of course, I see no reason that the various boats moored there could not be kept.

I think that we cannot get caught up in one mind-set or another.
Compromise has to be a factor in planning. The energies that went into fighting and promoting Measure Q should be channeled into controlling the situation.
There really needs to be housing created and a decent percentage of it should be available to working people. Skyscrapers should be forbidden at all costs, but we don’t have to be tied down to ground level (doesn’t anyone else remember the height of those horrible salt hills?). Better public access to the area has to be created. A way to get residents in and out reasonably with a minimum impact on the 101 mess. Bair Island has to remain a protected tidal salt marsh and the essence of Pete’s Harbor has to be captured and written into the future song.