California beginnings, one of many. from the early notebooks.

The Mudflats of Yerba Buena.

Walk along the mudflat along Yerba Buena at night in the 1840’s. You could be walking a barely filled space, a track of boards and sand and trash, a length of “street” would suddenly disappear into a hole, and so would you, a short swift drop into the cold bay waters. Fifty six drowned that way- at least.

That is our explanade, our promenade, our embarcadero, in the time of arrival.

Now, sadly, I walk at night, on the concrete, far out into the former bay.

I actually miss the mud I heard so much about, and the trash, the piled up loads of ships, and the greasy lantern light in the dark out by the Plaza, a dignified term for the little ramp by the post office, with the drunks falling out, and the wind whipping the first sparks that might set the whole town aflame.

The bay is too shallow for all but a rowboat or a filthy plank, and the ships are all gone, but the dark waters still reflect a little greasy light at night, a reflecting glow, off into stillness of those drowned islands in the night: Goat, Wood, Alcatraz, to utter darkness of the endless bay beyond.

There was plenty of darkness in the nights of whale oil time, plenty of murder and mayhem punctuated by the occasional public hangings, duels and assasinations.

Out in Happy Valley, Market Street’s workers’ district, there were no lights, but fires, and noise and brawls, and working people and shanties and boilers. The crude medieval industries of early San Francisco: fish smells and foundries, smithies and boat repair, so at night: Darkness, aforementioned fire, shouts and nails and knives and more trash to trip over. Danger everywhere in a quiet stroll.

Beached ships and boats in the mud and at night it would be hard to find the water’s edge. Rats run on a plank to your saloon ship. And no way home, even if you had one, which you do not.

City of the homeless, all the way back to its beginnings.

And darkness also owned the various peaks- that was wilderness up there. Who is ever going to go up there?- with the cruel wind blowing walls of sand in your face, making a mockery of your efforts at civilization.

But there you see: banked on the vertical hillsides, the famed illuminated tents and sails of Yerba Buena.

Other than that one cannot see a goddamn thing.

The nearest cemetery is less than seven modern blocks away on a hill of sand next to a dune of sand with sand still blowing in your face, sand to sand, and your market district is a pueblo, nothing more.

So when and if they haul your corpse out off the baymud, there you’d be, in your impermanent resting place. In the center of a Spanish town made of dirt, with a plank road out those three miles to the Mission of the Crying Lady of the Sorrows by the Laguna of Tears and a creek and a marsh- and where is solid land, again?- and another cemetery of the first inhabitants, your neighbors, they too lie in ground that grows nothing, in ten thousand year old Sierra sands longing for the sea to wash it all away here in 1846.

“Dear Mother, we have just arrived. We saw a grizzly bear chained to a tree. The land abounds in opportunity, I have no doubt I shall succeed at last.”