Trespassing

Go to the problem.  It’s basic leadership.  You can read about the problem, look at a picture of the problem, and have the problem described to you.  But there’s nothing like going to the problem to understand it.  See it, hear it, feel it.  Smell and taste it if you have to.  Except if the problem is cauliflower, because that’s just nasty.

What’s not nasty are the sandy highlands of Seaside looking over Monterey Bay that used to be Fort Ord.  Lichen-enveloped coast live oaks, birds singing, people biking, people hiking, dogs in rodent-chasing heaven, vistas as far as the eye can see.   It’s a nice place to spend a few hours, and people do.  They look past the power line towers, the graffiti on the barracks awaiting demolition and the fifty-year old Army latrines, decomposing in the drought-tindered scrub.  They tend to look past the warning signs of unexploded ordinance too, perhaps over-confident in their ability to not step on stuff, since any casual walk is a near constant exercise in avoiding what the dogs leave behind.

Uncle Sam left the vistas, barracks, unexploded ordinance and decomposing latrines behind in 1994, as Fort Ord closed.  Tens of thousands of soldiers, their families and their paychecks left, and if you weren’t living the trust fund good life in Monterey or Carmel, you were impacted.  Folks from the safe-haven tourist traps show up and implore Seaside to keep Fort Ord Wild, generally ignoring how a city of 35,000 can afford to do what the federal government (you remember? - the one that prints money) could no longer afford, two decades ago.  The trust funders like things as they are, and employ lawyers with the swiftness and sting of a Javy Baez tag to keep them that way.   

It’s not all trust funders on the trails, of course.  All nice folks, trending toward retirement age, but CSUMB students and families with youngsters in tow, too.  A pleasant walk or a spirited bike ride on another perfect climate day; what’s not to like.  It’s free, it’s close.  It’s someone else’s property.

It reminds me of the free, close and someone else’s property of my junior high and high school days.  It was called “Tree Island”, and I’m comforted to find you can Google “Tree Island Grayslake” and get a result.  I’m not comforted the result is an oldies memory story, or that the property was swallowed into subdivisions.  I knew the part of it vanishing into subdivisions because years ago I took a small detour to see if it was still there.  I was not surprised to find it gone.  Private property rights.  First you steal it from Native Americans.  Then you protect who ends up with it with the takings clause of the Constitution.  It’s quite a racket.      

Tree Island was the open land between where I lived and the high school I attended when there wasn’t anything better to do.  There usually was something better to do, and it was often at Tree Island.  Nobody really went for hikes, but it was the place where young kids rode their BMX bikes, slightly older kids raced motocross motorcycles and slightly older kids with licenses got their Jeeps stuck.  It was the place you smoked pot if that was your thing, you trained for cross-country if that was your thing, or you worked on your RM / YZ / CR / KX whips (“cross-ups”, back in the day)  if that was your thing.  The EPA hadn’t killed two-stroke engines yet.  It was quite the racket.     

The two-stroke racket thing was my thing, and the muscle memory of berms, ruts, turns and jumps is still with me.  I don’t even have to close my eyes to be sailing through the air over “The Plateau” (we weren’t yet introduced to metaphors), about to land at the hairpin left berm, with the cottonwood that served as the aiming point going up the jump.  The high school truant version of Bill Weigle, I meticulously crafted the definitive map of each Tree Island trail, and overlayed them with the famous motocross tracks of the era.  It was just about the only meticulous thing I did from seventh grade to not graduating with my high school class. 

All of which is to say, I get the importance of place.    

The unexploded ordinance, canine fecal landmines and decomposing latrines notwithstanding, Seaside’s version of Tree Island is called “Happy Trails”.  A place where men trained for - and returned from – the horrors of war is called Happy Trails.  I’m not sure if that’s a small victory or not.  I’ll say it is, just because I’m an optimist.  But local economies aren't solely built on convenient places to not pick up after your dog.  There's a Base Reuse Plan that delineates comparatively small parts of what was the enormous Fort Ord for development and Happy Trails is one of those small parts.  Very small part of former Fort Ord.  Big part of Seaside.  That's a conundrum.  So too, the sides of the fight.  Most anywhere else, horse lovers and tree lovers occupy a Venn diagram that looks like a single circle.  Not so much, here.   

Optimistically - and thinking I can shape a land-use controversy to some shared consensus - I’ve gone out to Happy Trails a few dozens of times to watch how it is utilized.  Optimistically – and thinking I can shape the prospective developer’s appreciation for contextual design – I’ve been here, there and most everywhere that may serve as design inspiration, at least in the compressed time I’ve been occupying the city manager’s chair in Seaside.  Arriving near the end of a six year planning process is less than optimal, but that’s where I’ve arrived.

At the problem.