Underbelly of the Urban Beast

Bike lanes connect the Mission District with Bayview/Hunters’ Point, the industrial and residential underbelly of San Francisco. Last week, I flew there on my bike, down Cesar Chavez Blvd. and the length of Evans Ave., swinging around the power plant and onto Inness Ave. to the office of Literacy for Environmental Justice (LEJ). This non-profit organization is the beneficiary of the sponsored half-marathon I’ll be running at the end of the month, and they wanted to take a photo of me flexing with a view of the bay behind me.

I toured the office, and Pam Calvert took me down to the community gardens at Candlestick Park, where the plots are on raised beds of healthy soil, as the land is still a Superfund site being remediated for nuclear materials and other toxics. It was decommissioned as a naval base and made into a park in 1977, when the park was founded. Military housing became residential, but a central business district never formed, and unemployment and gang culture is rife in these neighborhoods.

We walked to Heron’s Head Park, which boasts a unique vista on the Bay, and a great view of the city’s recycling plant and new solar-paneled roof. 1200 young students come here every year already for environmental education programs, and as the power plant closed last year, a new environmental education center is in the works for this area. It’s just beautiful here, in the same poignant, post-“drain-the-marshes”, recovery period beauty I know from my wandering in the Heinz National Wildlife Refuge in Philadelphia and the Hackensack Meadowlands in Jersey. In all these places, you see a diversity of estuarine reeds and grasses and birds in the foreground, heavy industry in the background, and a renaissance of urban canoeing, birding, environmental education that attempts to teach that nature is not somewhere else “out there”, but imminently here, a unique urban wilderness in the underbelly itself. We’re realizing that using a marsh’s natural capacity for filtration and recreation is much more valuable and safe than the additional filtration plant and pavement. Because these recovering wetlands are always adjacent to power plants and a city’s hardest-off residents, restoring these areas is a win for environment justice.

The LEJ office, Pam explained to me, is on neutral ground, in terms of gang territoriality at Hunter’s Point. This makes it easier for youth to come to the office for activities, and to buy the fresh, local produce they sell there. There is no supermarket in the neighborhood, only corner stores with little fresh produce, so LEJ has begun to receive direct shipments of produce from local farmers that they sell on Inness Ave. The youth they work with will soon learn to operate the truck and make home deliveries themselves. Pam described the need for public education on this front. “Once it’s less available, it loses its place in the meal, and when you see raw vegetables, you don’t even know what to do with them.”

On July 4, Mickey and I celebrated our nation’s independence by running our first-ever 12-mile run. I’m glad I’m going to be ready for this race. It's a comfort that there are activities with finish lines.

kinky friedman goes down but i thrive on tofu in houston

for all who wonder about my goings-on, i feel tonight that i have arrived.

unfortunately kinky friedman, the sunworn jewish cowboy running for texas governor did not. election day. getting older day. but i've learned already that age and wisdom fail to go hand in hand.

in my hands today-- coffee mug in the left, bleached georgia-pacific stacks sorted by the right-- i sat, back to the window, classifying reports on alternative fuels on the 40th floor conference room of 1100 louisiana ave., the suit-and-tie epicenter of the 4th largest city in the wealthiest country in the world.

my colleagues bought me birthday cards and cookies, mojitos and plaintain chips, and tonight i let my hair down to watch a trio play jazz standards at sambuca's on the main drag for white people. the cabbie asked if i was a messianic jew, and the georgia-pacific sales guys also at the four points sheraton tonight cracked relentless toilet paper jokes and believed me when i told them i just turned 18.

dad's on business in kolkata, kim's working in honduras, i'm filing papers in texas, and the rest of the family is where they ought to be. i got to speak hebrew to an israeli at the hotel bar, and spanish in the car on the way into town. i went on my annual birthday run, wrote my annual birthday poem, and ate cuban-style tofu and banana brulee. my life is still about cutting the most novel escape hatch from the corridor of routine. last year i drank tequila in beersheva, this year a smoother one in houston, next year...i will stop all this worldliness snobbery, i promise. i think it's an addiction with a genetic origin.

so, i hope my absentee ballot arrived on time in delaware county, pennsylvania, enough to count in this country, my country. if not, i cast my vote to the sky above the lone star state, gazing starward, beyond the flag, just as when i look groundward, my eyes seek beneath the bedrock to the aquifer. i am a true, born-and-bred american, always squinting beyond.

unpublished photos

These are important photos to view. Not because they represent the only reality, but because they portray moments equally a reality as what what you see published in newspapers. Well, a Reuters photographer was just fired today for doctoring photos that had been published, and that's why I believe proximity is extremely important for getting an accurate account. The farther you are from the scene, or from those people who's reports you can trust who have been there, the less reliable your information is, and you must accept that. Anyway, a relief from the bad news...

Black Country excursions

Two weeks ago, I spent the week at my cousins' house in a suburb of Birmingham, England. Every day, I went for a new walk in the Lickey Hills or another excursion to the places that are pictured below. The photos show: Tolkien's cottage in the area, the Cadbury factory, New College at Oxford, where Harry and I went to visit my friend Sarah, and a thatched-roof cottage from the Cotswolds area, where my uncle took my parents and me to a beautiful tourist town called Chippen.

The entire area surrounding the City of Birmingham is called the Black Country for the time during and following the Industrial Revolution when the entire sky was black with soot. Over the past generation, the city has been revitalized. Today, huge immigrant populations are changing the face of the city, notably those from India, Pakistan, China, and Jamaica, according to my observation over a week :) It is to say that it is a rainbow city, where you can find good, spicy food around every corner. A very different England even from that of my childhood!

capability blue (and white)

Israelis keep cool. They offer you tea and chocolate when you arrive out of nowhere to their safe room when yours is locked and your missing roommate has the key. They bring out "The Princess Bride" and "Narnia" for your viewing pleasure, serenade you with a guitar painted with flowers, translate the news for you, and help you learn your new vocab words. When you lie down on their bed, they ask, sincerely, "Are you tired or scared?" When you say, "Both," they say, "There's no reason to worry. Everything's fine." They advise you when you struggle with how to word the text to your parents. When you have a ride to a place outside of Haifa, they tell you to visit again soon (and it's not ironic :)

For two weeks, I hiked the Israel Trail from the northern border at Kiryat Shmona to the Arab village of Shilbi, at the base of Mt. Tabor. Over those two weeks, I counted the people who gave me vital help--filled my water bottles, offered me food or a bed for the night, gave me hiking tips while I was on the trail. Guess how many? 70. If that was two weeks, imagine how many people have hosted and toasted me over this year!

I am now being hosted at my cousin and her husband, Desiree and Yochanan's place on Kibbutz Maga'an Michael, for the next few days until I set my plan. Today I rested, swam with my 4-year-old cousin Adi and called all my expatriot American friends here in Israel to talk about all the deep, irrational feelings we have about being here at a difficult time.

Don't read the news too often, but if you can't help it, I recommend Ynet (www.ynetnews.com) or Haaretz (www.haaretz.com). Also, if you can't help but daydreaming about what a safe room is like, picture it with a lot of chocolate. It's the first thing both women and men think of when they enter. First chocolate, then whether there's any alcohol in the house.

This whole world is an accidentally huge party with the parents out of town for the weekend!

I'm safe here on the kibbutz, and I'll be home sooner than you know it.

Pray for peace,
Jenny

petra photos

Petra

i'll admit it, i didn't know what Petra was until I was standing in it. 'Petra' means "rock" in some Semitic language. and that's what there is. A lot of rock.

In 1994, Israel and Jordan signed the Arava Treaty, which was something good and peaceable. This treaty has made it possible for Israelis and others to visit since then. So, I took the bus south to Eilat, the southernmost tip of Israel, on the Red Sea.

Meanwhile, starting around 12th century BCE, tribes started migrating from SW Arabia/Yemen northward to the area now called Jordan. The Nabatean tribe (a name you may recognize from the Bible) arrived in the area of the Edom Mountains at the end of the 6th century BCE. They were nomadic herders, but built a settlement at Petra in the 4th century BCE as a burial ground.

The Greeks under Alexander tried to conquor it, without success. The Romans had their stay, and the Crusaders also built some fortresses nearby, but then it started to get covered with sand. There's quite a lot of sand, and wind to blow it over. But then, in 1812, a Swiss guy was walking around and started building a sandcastle, and noticed that the spot he was removing sand from was actually an ancient temple! Well, almost. Then in 1985, UNESCO declared it a World Heritage site, which enabled them to remove the indigenous Bedouins from the area and to fund other white men to come with their spades and paintbrushes to start building more sandcastles, um, I mean excavating.

The site is in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in the Ashwara Mountain Range, in the Petra mountains, in Wadi Musa (named for the prophet we know as Moses). This is thought to be the site where Moses' brother Aaron was buried. The mountains are sandstone and limestone, and with different mixes of minerals, form red or marblized rock.

We walked an hour, starting at the Visitors' Center, through the canyons, along the Roman aquaducts, with camels, mules, and horse-drawn carriages blasting or bumbling around us, offering rides to ease the burden of the ovenlike weather.

The red, marbalized limestone is reminiscent of Bryce Canyon or other red rock deserts of the American Southwest.

Then, as we turned a curve of the canyon, we glimpsed through the gap in the rocks an enormous temple chisled out of the rockface, and beyond it an entire city recently unearthed by a Brown University team of archeologists.