Hayward Shoreline

April 15, 2007

For those more inclined to verse than prose: In Search of Mt. Trashmore

An astringent April day with a stiff chill wind. The sun shines ineffectually, as if somehow the light doesn’t quite arrive to the shoreline, as if the wind and the dark water of the bay subtract it from the air.

Birds are talking, flying stationary into the breeze, then falling down and back into swift, wind-driven swoops. Grey birds like watered silk, barely there against the glistening mud, probe the depths with their cartoonish bills. With nearly weightless feet, they write a brief history of long habit and slow time in the forgiving mud, as they race along and probe again, in apparent randomness. A goose hides in the concrete rubble.

The shoreline trail follows the seam where towns are stitched onto the bay, a sliver of infirm land no longer fit for profit, so embattled, so degraded, so invaded, it’s hard to root for, despite the avian multitudes. One sign warns against contact with water that many birds are floating on. Invading moisture bobbles the surface of another sign, underlining the tone of desperation with which it explains the battle invasive spartina, the alien marsh grass that is slowly choking the diversity out of the wetlands. The salt ponds lie abandoned. A smell of rot blows off the blooming algae. Beyond the crystal scurf and broken gear, whitecaps curl on the dark dishwater bay.

The San Mateo bridge makes a little grin of toothpicks in the distance, reaching across to the receding grey-scale skyline of the opposite shore. From my low vantage point at water’s edge, it seems much further away than it usually does. On a different day, with a gentler breeze, the place might seem inviting, perhaps even sublime—so much still space at the heart of a throbbing, strung-out metropolis—so much windswept vista—such resilience despite environmental insult.

But today it offers nothing but intimations of mortality, a sad commentary on our heedless, headlong march to ever higher planes of wealth, a hint of doom reinforced by the looming presence at trail’s end: Mt. Trashmore.

The things we have disowned are laid to rest here in indecent burial, making for a vast apocalyptic anticlimax, without the fire or the horsemen. Just a huge heap of nothing that looks more like a fat pancake than a mountain, stubbled, stodgy, sullen, slumped over the original wetlands like a coverlet of trash, a communal quilt of filth, embarrassed and embarrassing.

Marijke Rijsberman