“Last Dance On San Bruno Mountain”

One of the more bizarre ideas for filling in San Francisco Bay would no doubt have wreaked immeasurable and irreversible damage to the Bay’s ecosystems:  Scraping off the top of San Bruno Mountain and depositing it into the shallow waters of the Bay.  Not a bad idea of you wanted to create more buildable flat land at the foot of the mountains and hills that descend, steeply in places, into the largest estuary on the West Coast of United States.  Not a bad idea if you are willing to turn a vibrant body of water teeming with life into a “River That Runs Through It”, the “It” being a man-made world of dubious value to man and beast alike.

The 1959 Swanson Plan was touted as being highly beneficial to one “species” of flying “creature” --- the airplane. It was claimed that cutting the mountain “down to size” would have reduced the odds that crew and passengers aboard aircraft attempting a landing at fog-bound San Francisco International Airport would “de-plane” a in cataclysmic eruption of fire and smoke after failing to clear the mountain’s crest. But other, “less valuable” winged denizens of the sky --- the San Bruno elfin, Mission blue, and Callippe silverspot butterflies --- would have had their homes “foreclosed upon” in by chopping off the peak.
When we hike the trails of Marin in the spring, the air can be filled with the soundless flight of various species of butterflies.  In the “Last Dance on San Bruno Mountain”, novelist and poet Linda Watanabe McFerrin describes her trek among these most colorful and entrancing aviators of the insect world as she traversed the Summit Loop Trail atop San Bruno Mountain.  Linda’s very personal and moving essay appears in the Tenth Anniversary Issue of Bay Nature magazine.

(Dick Jordan learned about the Swan Plan while working as a tour guide at the Bay Model Visitor Center in Sausalito.  He met Linda Watanabe McFerrin in 1999 when he was a very unpromising student in a travel writing class which she taught at the Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera.  They became reacquainted after Dick’s first travel story was published in the San Francisco Chronicle on Mother’s Day, 2009, and he accepted her invitation to join Left Coast Writers, a literary salon which she leads at the store each month.

Linda’s latest novel, Dead Love, is about a creature that we Meanderers could identify with at the end of particularly long, arduous hikes in extremely hot, wet, or cold weather:  Zombies, the walking dead.  Linda would fit right in with our hiking group: In her Bay Nature essay she says “When I was six, a small girl in England in a country landscape that was rich in flora and fauna, I filled glass jars with the interesting little creatures that slithered and crawled in the fields around my home. I collected creepy things: snails, slugs, beetles, spiders, and beautifully colored, magnificently furred caterpillars…”

There two other Bay Nature connections to we who meander in Marin:  Former Meanderer, Sue Rosenthal, is a Contributing Editor to the magazine; a photo of Pinnacles National Monument taken by Wendy’s husband, Bill. graced the cover of the magazine’s October-December 2010 issue.)