Poison Oak’s Interlude

Thirteen years ago or so, I hiked up the eastern slope of Mount Tam with a friend. We were aiming for East Peak and had parked our car in Mill Valley. I was still new enough to California and to hiking etiquette that I did not know the perils. I tied a jacket around my waist. Pushed face-first past bushy tanoak. Caressed the seductive limb of a manzanita and otherwise used my hands to help me climb. Perhaps, bending down, I grasped an anonymous plant, crushed its red-tinged leaves between my fingers. Perhaps my jacket snagged on a stem and snapped it. We got to the top, so I recall. Beheld Tiburon, a green furred fist, Sausalito’s houseboats crawling into Richardson Bay. I saw Alcatraz, a rock in the blue-black water to our south. I knew the San Quentin prison was almost directly to our east, a concrete hexagon hidden from view.

San Quentin had most defined Marin for me to that point. I was a law school graduate, hired by an organization led by formerly incarcerated people that aimed to reduce rates of incarceration. It was a handful of years after Brown v. Plata, the Supreme Court case that ordered California to decrease its prison population by 30 percent, in order to address the prison system’s inability to provide a bare minimum of medical treatment inside, and I was working on a bill that would lower the age requirement for elderly parole from 60 to 50 years old. A person sentenced at 25 should have the chance to appear before a parole board earlier, we argued, to gauge what time had wrought. Disease and deprivation tendril behind prison walls at rates exponentially more damaging than people outside the system could fathom. Early versions of the bill did not pass that year, or the next. Once the state touches you, it does not like to let go.