Leslie Carol Roberts - Here is Where I Walk: Episodes From a Life in the Forest

Nature is what we seethe hill, the afternoon, squirrel, eclipse, the bumblebee. Nay, nature is heaven. Nature is what we hear...

Emily Dickinson

There are reports in the esteemed journal Nature that scientists have discovered what is called the Wood Wide Web, a revelation that trees and fungi converse, sharing across species information about their needs and alerting each other to predation threats. Living in the midst of one of Americas great historic forestsa forest with the same designation as historic human-built structures, these discoveries confirmed what I believe so many of us walkers-of-woods have long sensed. For what is a walk in a forest if not a chance to fully and deeply celebrate the sauntering and reflective mind? The brain hopping like some nimble coyote over rocks bridging a river? Legs astride. Arms lifting a drink of cool water to lips, water dripping down chin. Minty floral scent of the eucalyptus tree, indifferent and slightly smug robins hopping on the trailside.The woods hold in abeyance the battering ram of time and the pressures and exigencies of modern life, they summon with reckless vigor memories of people alive and dead, loved and despised. The woods are not a quiet place, we walkers of the forest know, and it is this cacophony we seek in this nature we love. We should all be at the barricades lobbying for these places of solace and interiority, these places complex and cruel, these places that need and dont need us that can be obliterated by grasping gangrenous developers, these places that will yet exist as memory and whose pieces as seed and spore will return or relocate or represent in new ways. And so the forest is a place of blind, muscular hope.

The Presidio of San Francisco is a heavily forested and densely historical urban national park, and each walk and vista offers a performance of place almost noisy with varied voicesboth of the woods and not. There is the backdrop of Army architecture and some moments where design aesthetics were privileged over military bureaucracy, and these buildings have a particular resonance. First human activities date back 10,000 years, and archeologists have unearthed evidence that the Ohlone people lived here as early as 740 AD. Fringe marshlands were home to small villages of seasonal and more permanent settlements, which ended when the Spanish military, civilians, and a single Franciscan priest arrived in 1776 to set up a presidio, or garrison.

They arrived by land, 193 civilians, 1,000 head of cattle, traveling from Sonora, Mexico. There were presidios erected across what is now called California, and the San Francisco Bay encampment faced particular challenges in the lack of arable land, the inhospitable winds and sand, and the fast habitat destruction brought on by cattle grazing.

The Presidio was controlled from 1776 until 1822 by the Spanish and then by Mexico until the United States took over in 1846. In 1972, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area was created, and includes the Presidio, Alcatraz, and Muir Woods in its 76,500 acres, making it one of the largest urban national parks in the world. There are 800 acres of open spacein the Presidio, or 54 percent of its total, and 145 acres support remnant native plant communities ranging from wildflowers to oak woodlands. Sixteen rare plant species make their home here, including five protected by the Endangered Species Act. In 1996 Congress created the Presidio Trust, transferring eighty percent of the former military post to its jurisdiction (the National Park Service manages the shoreline perimeters.) A board was set up, appointed by the president of the United States, and the Presidio charter was written dictating that the Presidio had to preserve what was in its jurisdiction and also figure out how to build and maintain non-federal financial support. If they failed to do so, the Presidio could be sold off as excess land. This meant that the buildings and sites needed to be repurposed to bring in tenantsnonprofits and for-profits, residents and tourists. This was an experiment of sortsthe first park with an economic mission to support itself without government aid. (The Presidio hit this goal in 2013, by the way.)

The Presidio forest is mature trees and these days a wave of younger treespart of a forest-replenishment planeucalyptus, pines, cypress, planted from the 1880s through the 1940s by the US Army and slowly aging out. During the 218 years the Presidio was an Army post, tree planting was a way to shield both from the wind and weather and a way to create theaterthe grand and mysterious might of a militarized Presidio masked from civilian view by dense woods. The forest today is surrounded by major roadways, including Highway 101, which tunnel through and bisect and frame it on two sides. Several of the famed stands of trees have been entirely removed and replanted because crowding had left the mature trees unhealthy and weak, prone to falling during winter wind storms. You can easily spy the sick trees on a walk in these woods: They have very long, scrawny trunks and a thin, wide canopya desperate reach in a dense wood towards light needed to survive. They have the same affect as starving humans, elongated and sinewy, forms folding in peculiar ways.

There is a resonance and sense of awe in these woods, the forests determined survival against the odds: how the treesdefine the 1,480 acres of park, trees laced with hiking trails, ringed by sandy beaches and soaring cliffs and vistas, trees tucked into the northern corner of San Francisco, patrolled by coyotes, skunks, and raptors, banana slugs slouching amidst scraps of euc leaves. Even as humans redesign the place to make it suited to modern recreation and corporate life and the artspeople in tight cycling kits roar around on road bikes, heaving plates of artisan tacos served with agave liquors, a museum celebrating the cartoons of Walt Disney; a corporate headquarters for the Star Wars artists complete with Yoda statue; the majestic forest dominates it all.

My family and I moved to the Presidio in 2005. We were coming home to San Francisco and our former neighborhood in the Mission had lost its charm for me. My mother-lens saw in high-relief how trash accumulated on sidewalks and around curbs, how on weekends crosswalks jammed with drunks in search of bacon-leavened donuts, mussels and fries or whatever the latest food craze might bewas no place for me to rear young children.