An Urban Geography of Hope
My wife and I took a walk at the Albany Bulb earlier this week. Jutting out from the waterfront in Albany, California, the Bulb is essentially a tangle of trails through thickets of blackberries and tall grasses on a peninsula surrounded by tidal flats. We followed one trail to a bench beneath a shady oak and stopped to watch the sun descend behind Mount Tamalpais, its light casting a texture of shadows over the choppy surface of the San Francisco Bay. Our dog’s ears perked at rustling bushes and shorebird calls.
I’ve grown to love this city park, where the wind carries the scent of the sea and where ospreys scan the mudflats for prey. Still, the Albany Bulb challenges my perceptions of nature. This place is man-made.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, the city dumped construction debris here in the shallow part of the bay, making up the main part of the Bulb until lawsuits brought the landfill to a close. The ground we walk on is clay packed on top of concrete slabs and rebar, some of which still protrudes from the grass along some trails. The blackberries, too, are what many would call “invasive,” implying they don’t truly belong.
“This is not a purist’s paradise,” wrote one local writer, who went on to describe the Bulb as not nature restored and protected but nature reclaimed, still imbued with “spirit and sublime beauty.” Between oaks and along trails, statues made from metal scraps and debris fit that theme of reclamation.
When I first moved to California, I was lured by the aesthetic of coastal redwoods, and the rivers and waterfalls of the Sierra. There’s much to celebrate when we can protect these truly wild places — the unlogged forests, the undrained marshlands, the unpolluted rivers. These landscapes — which Wallace Stegner famously called “the geography of hope” — are literally invaluable. But wildness can persist in places like the Albany Bulb, too. It’s a version of nature less pure, less “wild” perhaps, but nature nonetheless.
Would Stegner have considered this kind of nature as part of his geography hope? I’m not sure. But where songbirds fill the trees on a place once thoughtlessly trashed, what other word but “hope” comes to mind?
Austin Price
Contributing Editor, Earth Island Journal
Photo collage by ted / Flickr.
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