Between the ages of 3 and 19, I lived at the dead end of a city street. The pavement stopped just past my house. Beyond, a dirt road continued for three additional lots. And then there were woods that, to my childhood frame of reference, went on forever. In winter, a skeleton wall of maple branch and oak trunk, empty chokeberry and dogwood. In spring, the wall grew soft green leaves that became so dense by summer, it seemed I could disappear into another world beyond. There, I was unseen by my older brother and sister waiting on the dirt road, unknown by the adults inside their houses, happy to yell at us, once discovered, to get off their property. My older brother brought my sister and me into these woods—really, no more than a few acres of land between my street and the next—when he babysat us. We spent hours playing adventure scenarios in our private garden.
The Human Animal
A quarterly column from local fiction writer and lawyer Endria Richardson on the intersection of people and nature in the Bay Area. Find the rest of her columns here.
I am a city-dweller, and I have come to love nature through small spaces like these. Where else? The backyard. The side yard. The patch of grass and child-size boulder in front of my dad’s university office. The bushes outside my mom’s apartment building. At 7 or 8, I climbed between their leaves and squatted, queasy with delight and deception, hidden until my mom passed right by for the fifth or sixth time, calling for me with increasing desperation.
Now, I’m pregnant with my own first child. Because of nerve compression in my leg, I don’t walk very far or very fast. While I miss the grandeur of Redwood Regional and the long views at Sibley, I have enjoyed taking short walks through my neighborhood, looking for nature. I discovered the delightful Glen Echo Park, a roughly two-block green corridor that follows Glen Echo Creek where it pops briefly aboveground parallel to Piedmont Avenue during its journey to Lake Merritt. Someone in the neighborhood set out a couple of Adirondack chairs to be used, presumably, by anyone who would like to sit and rest beneath the oaks. And I have rediscovered the Morcom Rose Garden, nearly eight acres of rosebushes—thousands of roses! With names like “Fourth of July” and “Pride of Oakland.” The roses are arranged in pleasing terraces along stone cascades and around a reflecting pool in which sits a model of a duck that I always am convinced is alive.
In the late spring, what will become a profusion of creamy pinks and whites, yellows and reds, now appears as greenish white buds on spindly brown plants. The roses come from everywhere around the world. They are tended, in part, by volunteer gardeners who weed and prune.
I had not visited this garden more than a handful of times since the pandemic, when I would bring a book and brave Gerald the Turkey. Now, it’s one of the few places I’ve visited regularly over the past months. One day, telling myself—nauseous, exhausted, irritable—that a short walk around the block would make me feel better, I made it to the garden and rested on one of its many benches. An older couple posed for photos with their labradoodle. A child wandered up and down the cascades, touching a plant here and there—notedly, not trailed by a parent or holding a phone. Someone had brought a yoga mat and was doing asanas on the small stone dais by the garden’s south entrance.
I am reminded of the magic of small, outdoor spaces. Sprawling blackberry brambles grow along many of the winding paths that lead from street level into the bowl of the garden. Within this perfect hiding spot for creatures smaller than human children, I see what might be a red-breasted nuthatch. Later, a small, bright yellow warbler. I spy the slim brown body of a Norway rat darting beneath the brambles’ dark cover. Crows, of course, are everywhere, as are red-cheeked eastern fox squirrels.
That the garden is not hundreds of acres (which would do the work of immersion for you), that above the tree line rise cement apartment-building porches from which neighbors can peer, is the point of city spaces like this. It invites, and requires, a certain amount of imagination. You do not need much to be transported, meaning, really, to become aware of what a city can be, in between its apartment buildings and sidewalks and storefronts. A collaboration between the common and the extraordinary. An invitation to change one’s perspective. A tree—if you stand close enough—is a forest; a blackberry bramble—if you wait—a portal through which a world can emerge.
