Rock on Garbage: Bayfront Park

27 January 2005

Bayfront Park at Marsh Road in Menlo Park is a high and unusually shaped hill—an overgrown clay mound that looks like it has been moulded by the roads laid out in graceful curves fom the narrow entrance to the highest hill at the far end. Garbage dump morphology.

There is no overt sign that gives the game away, but the shape is unmistakable to the practiced eye, and only converted dumps have so much machinery. This one is overgrown with grass and some modest trees and strewn with boulders that seem strangely out of place—until you realize that they are out of place.

Stone Poetry
A helpful leaflet explains the mystery: those boulders are not boulders but stone poetry about the Great Spirit Path, the rocks, raw and unhewn, arranged in "American Indian Pictographs." As if Native Americans would write poetry on top of a trash heap in rocks trucked in from Sonoma and from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

As literature, the effort has the ring of refrigerator poetry (the magnetic kind) and brings to mind Samuel Johnson's dictum on women preaching. It's a miracle, not because it means anything profound, but because it means anything at all. The first two stanzas may serve as illustration:

Evening pool
weather clear with stars
I walk with the wind behind me
inspired, with glad heart.

Come,
discover many animals,
grass, sun, canyons, and earth.
No hunger, war, no fear,
making peace and strong brothers.

The bit about canyons is an overstatement, by the way, but there is a decommissioned sewage treatment plant and a methane recovery facility way in the back, surrounded by some jewel-toned ponds of sludge, each set in a border of brightly glinting scum. A few small sheds contain the machinery that converts the methane to electricity, but nothing will contain the noise—a heavy pounding that reaches even farther than the smell.

I think I recognize a pattern: to turn a garbage dump into a park, you must embellish it with ambiguous art work that attempts to acknowledge the true nature of the place but can't quite bring itself to say the word garbage. So we get this: "It is the artist's intention here to illustrate a reverence for the evolutionary methods of both man and nature in combination with a message of hope." I will want to remember to refer to my garbage in future as "the evolutionary method of man." Undoubtedly, something will evolve from it eventually.

For right now, the dump presents a significant engineering challenge: it contains 200 feet of garbage, much of it now in a liquid state and ready to burst its bonds. Although it was closed some time in the 1980s, the garbage hasn't nearly settled yet. It sinks in places and forms ponds, a situation that must be prevented because any standing water is likely to become contaminated.

In the meantime, restoration activities have begun on the salt ponds immediately south of the park. Baywater is pumped into the ponds to reduce the salinity. For now, the plan appears to be to incorporate the area into the salt marshes as parkland, but commercial or residential development are still options.

Sunrise
The stone poetry is right about the animals, though. One July morning at sunrise I scared up seven hares, their ears so tall they looked like antlers in the early light, and a tiny black rabbit. The rabbit was more cagey than the hares, running a ways (but not flat out) and then hiding quietly behind some grasses to see if he had lost me. Hares just take off in a total panic any time it looks like you might get within 100 feet of them.

Sunrise is the best time to go. Garbage or no, the park is lovely and intensely quiet at that hour in the morning. If you're lucky, the day breaks with a radiance multiplied by the waters of the bay and even the crusty white of the salt ponds.

Marijke Rijsberman

More Information
See Alien Art: Byxbee Park for another example of garbage dump art.

Scott Haefner's Aerial Photographs
Bay Front Park (see if you can find a reference to the fact that it was a garbage dump)
Bay Front Park Trail Information