San Pablo Bay (Reach)

In Oregon, where I grew up, wild emptiness was never far away. It might mean standing on a puzzle-like ridge-top in Coast Range, or it might mean being out among the reeds and grasses of the lower Columbia River, but it’s always there, always present in the mind, always an option. Heck, even the sheer number of Portland parks—almost 280 of them in just Portland proper—offers a sense of the natural.

The San Francisco Bay region, however, has more than seven million residents. Seen from the air—as I have experienced many times flying to or from SFO or Oakland airport—it appears to be a vast carpet of buildings surrounding a big blue lake. Calmness? Tranquility? These are not qualities I associate with the area. Rather I think of stuffed BART trains at rush hour, or the sound of car horns outside my window on Telegraph Avenue at 7:30 am, or the gaggles of tourists who block my path on any given San Francisco sidewalk. While there are many beautiful places—stand at Land’s End out by the Legion of Honor and just look around you!—there’s very little sense of the wild.

This may be why my encounter with San Pablo Bay was so memorable. Years ago, just before my move to the area, a friend took me down a narrow road just short of the Richmond bridge, out past the old wine and ammunition depots of abandoned Winehaven, out past the tank farms of Chevron, out even past the end of pavement and down into a weird bowl of land that hid in the northern shadows of Point San Pablo. Descending into it was a twisty little road, public but perforce of limited benefit maintained by the hand shovel of a private party at its end. There, a tiny marina sat, imperiously named the “Point San Pablo Yacht Harbor.” In fact it was home to a few good houseboats and several bad, a number of mildew sailboats and motorboats, and several unidentifiable hulls that had probably sunk at their moorings when Reagan was still president. Beyond a sand-inundated and disused railroad track stood a double-wide that was the harbor’s yacht club, its doors open and unlocked, its lights dimmed, its pool tables unattended to. Behind a formica bar sat a cooler case with beer—some of it swill, some of it good—and a cardboard sign: “$2, put cash in jar.”

Outside on the deck, beers in hand, I and my friend looked out at the twilight of San Pablo Bay. There we finally found the club’s one resident, more a keeper than a member, and learned a bit about the Sisyphean task of cutting up the jilted boats, of keeping the road’s potholes half-filled, of running off the floating meth labs that once haunted the docks. But mostly we were quiet, driven to this silence by the place itself, for out on the water there were no lights. In this one place—just on the other side of a hill from a freeway and a refinery and all that entailed—was a view of absolutely nothing. Water, sky, a thin strand of land on the opposite shore of the lower reaches of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers: that was all there was. Not until the sun had finally set was the dim glow of Vallejo visible in the sky to the east, and even then, only barely. We were surrounded by 7.8 million people, but all that reached us was the gathering night.

San Pablo Bay. Watercolor on paper, 7x10 inches, 2016.