![]() ![]() ![]() Lovers find space to let it all hang out.Ī few minutes walk from the Dutch Windmill, near the western edge of the Park, brought Hansen and I to a clearing where saplings had been planted and staked for support. Indeed, the Park boasts some of the best of civilization: a Japanese Tea Garden, the de Young, (a world class museum), the Shakespeare Garden, windmills and fields for soccer and lacrosse. It might seem odd to talk about a wilderness in the midst of a city the size of San Francisco, with roads cutting through the Park and major thoroughfares, including Lincoln Avenue and Fulton Street, on the periphery. Individual trees in Golden Gate Park-a five-minute walk from my front door- mean a great deal to me, as do trees in the aggregate: the woods and the wilderness. San Franciscans, whether nabobs, bohemians, Beats, hippies, dot.comers, cops, supervisors and the homeless have always had a lot of steam to release. In large part, the Park was meant to be a kind of “safety valve” where urban dwellers on the Barbary Coast, the Mission and elsewhere could let off steam, inhale clean air, stretch their legs, appreciate the beauty of nature and the diversity of the vegetation, including dozens of different varieties of trees, such as guava, horse chestnut, sequoia, redwoods, pepperwood, oak and more. Little-by-little, over the course of many years, the omniscient sand was beaten back, flowers bloomed, shrubs took root and trees climbed toward the sky. Drought-resistant vegetation was introduced and soil was created. A desert of sorts, it begged to be salvaged and developed. As late as 1868, soon after the end of our Civil War, the area that is now the Park was known as a “howling waste of sand.” No one lived there and almost nothing grew. The fact that the Park exists is a miracle of sorts and a testament to the human imagination, landscape planning and persistence. One of the workers told me, “People don’t realize the beauty of the Park that’s right under their noses and that takes them away from noise, traffic, and the problems of The City.” Evidence that workers with chainsaws had been at work and had cleaned up much, but not all the aftermath of the storms. We saw sliced and diced tree trunks, rounds way too big for a fireplace and sawdust scattered on the ground. Together we walked and saw fallen trees and the stumps of once mighty trees that had been uprooted, decapitated, split down the middle and shattered like toothpicks. She’ll photograph most anything and anybody and she rarely goes anywhere without a camera. Alternative Voices is the title of her book. Hansen made a name for herself documenting the lives of the punks in San Francisco in the 1980s. Photographer Jeanne Hansen and I drove around the Park to get the lay of the land and refresh our memories of a place we had visited many times. Hurray! With hundreds of downed trees, the City, it seemed, had taken yet another hit it didn’t need and couldn’t afford.Īs a tree hugger and a citizen of the city I had to see as many fallen trees as possible. In a city haunted by the homeless, druggies, unleased office space and criminals, citizens tend to forget about the trees and the woods at the heart of Golden Gate Park, an area that covers a thousand acres and that is the largest urban park in the US. No one seems to know precisely how many trees, but the figure 661 has been bandied about. Last winter, when winds up to 88-miles-per hour whipped San Francisco month-after-month, several hundred trees came down. Fortunately, too, I now live five-minutes on foot from the western edge of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park that boasts thousands of trees that are clustered so closely together in some place that they make me feel I’m in a wilderness. Fortunately, I enjoyed a second boyhood after I moved from Long Island to Northern California and fell in love with the redwood grove on the land where I planted fruit trees, harvested apples, peaches and plums. I am an inveterate tree hugger, a hugger of oak, fir, pine, eucalyptus, hickory and cedar which I first hugged as a boy growing up on the edge of a hardwood forest long gone to make room for suburbia. ![]()
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