Back in California, where only the ghosts of grizzlies roam, I visited the shopping mall near my childhood home in the East Bay. Decades had passed since I visited the place. Everything had changed, I saw, as I walked between ornamental parking lot islands and new café franchises, dress-for-less stores, and pet supply centers, all built in a style that might be called desert Tuscan. I stood on ground I had walked on as a child, the parking lot where I had learned to drive, and yet only the view of Albany Hill and the bayshore remained somewhat similar to my memories.
I had always been fascinated by the floras and faunas of past epochs, evolving landforms, and what the gathered fossils of a place might reveal. Not so long ago, strange animals had wandered the shores of this landscape and communities had thrived that we, using the slim evidence remaining, can only speculate about. I contemplated the possibility of grizzly bears digging tubers in this plaza ground—difficult to imagine. But paleontology was my hobby and chosen topic of study, and paleoart would help me imagine these past environments and journey back in time, to try to learn from the past.
At the nursery where my sister Margot works, I talked with a volunteer who was busy potting seedlings.
“All the shopping plazas look alike now,” I commented.
Gordon responded, “Yeah, and I remember playing in El Cerrito Plaza when it was all fields.”
This was the mall I had just revisited. I was caught by surprise as I found a living link to the history of a place I had only known as blacktop.
He told us stories of how, as a boy in the 1940s, he had collected frogs and stickleback fish in the creek that ran through the fields and taken them home in jars. “The creek was loaded with pollywogs back then,” he said.
I was amazed—I could actually interact with an extinct landscape through this man’s memories. I asked him questions.
“Were there any wildflowers in the fields?”
“Well,” he answered, “I was just a kid, and I didn’t know botany, of course. But there were oaks, big oaks.”
He described tall, shapely oaks that he thought were valley oaks, as well as coast live oaks hung with lichens, and arroyo willows lining the creek. A low, swampy spot existed towards the bay nearby. Margot and I listened to the only oral history we had ever heard of the area.
“They started to build the old mall in the 1950s—built the parking lot right up to the old creek.”
Armed with this newfound knowledge of the local plaza, I was determined to dig deeper into the past. I went back and “field walked” the area as an archaeologist would, looking for artifacts. Sure enough, there were relicts. An old, spreading live oak grew out of the courtyard of a dentist’s office; the creek still ran there, out of a pipe now, with houses on the other bank and English ivy lining my side. A few willows held onto their dirt-bank existence. I even found sticklebacks in a pool farther west, near the bayshore, freeways arching overhead.
The next phase was to search for empty lots in the surrounding suburbs. Within a mile of the plaza I found relict native plants in weedy squares of property between homes: California poppies, a small lupine, and bunches of native California oatgrass. A valley oak, rare on the coast, towered out of a backyard residence to the south, in Berkeley. Old photographs in the library showed that the area was once a nearly treeless grassland.
***
Three or four hundred years ago, bears might be uppermost in my mind if I could walk across the field that once occupied the parking lot—I might see well-worn bear trails across the bunchgrass flat, leading to a massive oak where bears would gorge on acorns. The oak trunk might be rubbed by bears, and I would find rounded, sunken areas in the wildrye under the willows along the creek, day beds for bears escaping the midday sun. Settlers in Orange County described finding claw marks on alder and maple trunks years after grizzlies were gone from the region, and worn trails winding through the brush of canyons. Now, all hints that grizzlies once dominated the El Cerrito landscape have been erased. Picturing large bears around the neighborhood was difficult, and I wished to know more about this hidden world beyond living memory.
***
Reprinted by permission from Heyday Books.
Read more of this in Ensemble Anthology no. 1
