Tag Archives: San Rafael

This morning it’s dark enough at 5:35 am that it makes sense for me to have a little candle at my writing desk, which makes it feel more like I’m up with the “holy dark.”  It’d be quiet outside in my little San Rafael neighborhood if not for the loud industrial garbage truck, chewing and hollering its way through the early morning.

There’s a creek that I pass on the way to the bus stop in the mornings, it’s a block away, loaded down and over-banked with trees, and the water’s clearish enough that I can see that there are no fish there, very little apparently living in the water.  The mallards like the small sand bar.  It’s a tidal creek, which is something I continue to appreciate about so many of the bodies of water around here — the idea that they’re breathing with the bigger tides, are connected that way. Lake Merritt’s like that, would be shallower some mornings on my way to BART, and other mornings would be full up around the legs of egrets and herons.

Yesterday there was a turtle floating in the water, floating horizontal, head just poking out up into the air. I’d been looking for, hoping for turtles, wanted the little sand bars and side-of-the-stream rocks and logs to get cluttered with their roundness on hot days.  This is the first one I’ve seen, but I think I’m hopeful (could I be hopeful, do I want to be, after reading Derrick Jensen yesterday)? I think I’m gratified, I think I’m just glad. Glad that something’s living in the water, the water’s not dead.

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