Commentary : In Mourning Over the Loss of a Small, Untamed Place of Serenity

Bulldozers are changing the configuration of the lumpy mounds alongside my road. So I know the end is near.

I never see the rabbits anymore. After the bulldozers arrived, the rabbits would stand in the middle of the road, looking disoriented and bewildered, as if the bulldozers had already turned over their burrows. Now they’re gone altogether. I don’t see the gigantic heron anymore either, but I worry less about him. He seemed only a few giant wing flaps away from whatever new home he wanted to choose.

I call it my road but it really isn’t. It’s the haunt of runners, fisherfolk, dog walkers and solitary, pensive types. But, as one of its most devoted admirers, it falls to me to write the eulogy for the road with no name.

It’s not even a road, really. It’s a wide swath of dirt at the edge of Mission Bay, running from near the entrance to Fiesta Island out to the backside of Sea World. I first set foot on it 20 years or so ago while making a running loop around the bay. I was captivated immediately by the unpruned, untidy, untamed feel of the place. I began frequenting it and learning its moods. At dusk on my road, eye-filling sunsets bathe the bay in luscious orange light, or sometimes play peek-a-boo from behind massive sea-scented fog banks. That’s heading west. Turning around out at Sea World and heading back east, I’d see the moon rising up from behind the museum in Presidio Park and glowing over the hills and the now-twinkling valley. In such a setting, serenity can’t help but set in.

There have been early mornings of biting winds, dusty middays and becalmed times when the splash of jumping fish was all that shattered the stillness. I’ve recuperated from a ruptured appendix there, untangled endless puzzling problems and collected myself in sundry ways over the years on that road.

Now the road is being bulldozed out of existence. As I see it, my loss is incalculable. City officials would, I’m sure, console me by pointing out that no shopping mall is being installed there. Rather, of all things, it will be a park for the people. Sunsets, moonrises and fog banks will still be available. Whatever is the problem then?

Well, for starters, it will no longer be a place to go and be scruffy. One will have to be a presentable member of the community. And the grounds will be presentable. There were never even any grounds out there before. Just misshapen humps and bumps, cracked and eroded by the magnificent elements.

Mostly, it will no longer be a place to be alone, to find peace. Kites, maybe. But not peace.

This may sound picky, crabbing about our city being the recipient of a beautiful, manicured new park. But solitary places are vanishing from our city at an alarming rate. And something dire happens to the human spirit when all the secret places people go to, to sort things out and put them back together again, are bulldozed into oblivion (or commercial prosperity). The desecration of Mission Valley will be complete when the last visual refuge of greenness there, the Stardust Golf Course, is “upgraded” to a happy commercial place for the townfolk to stroll in and part with their cash.

My mourning for the lost road is my mourning, regardless of any city planner’s however valid justifications. It is too special a road to vanish un-memorialized. The rabbits’ disappearance should not go unrecorded. And not just the rabbits’ habitat was lost here. Our habitat was lost here. As our wild places diminish, we are diminished.