Trees along Sky Trail.
Photo by Stephen Altschuler
August 2004 | Dock of the Bay
Home Path
When a doctor told Stephen Altschuler that the best medicine for his high blood pressure was taking 10,000 steps a day, the Sebastopol writer didn’t have to swallow hard. Altschuler is a man who walks his talk: for more than 20 years, he’s been hiking the Sky Trail along the northern span of Point Reyes National Sea Shore. “The trail,” he writes in his latest book, The Mindful Hiker, “is caretaker of my soul....a place where I trust myself.”
Sky Trail and its environs are home to falcons, ospreys, spotted owls, bobcats, cougars, foxes, deer, and the California huckleberry. The realization that he will never be as much a part of the trail as its lupine, fence lizards, and stink beetles is but one insight the “Teacher Trail” has brought Altschuler in learning to be less of a burden to himself.
Walking and berrying are two of Altschuler’s passions, and both are part of the meditation practices he has been improvising ever since the 1970s when he spent several seasons living alone in a converted New Hampshire tool shed (”$25 a month not counting utilities because there were none,” he recalls).
Sometime around his 50th birthday, Althschuler watched his path and much of the ridge it traversed consumed by “a firestorm so intense that it created its own wind, which fanned its own fire.”
That October 1995 conflagration obliterated one of the West Coast’s last wild Bishop Pine stands along with just about everything else growing on the Inverness Ridge. Berrying there only days before, Altschuler records the fire’s natural and mortal drama from the vantage point of a modern-day Thoreau. The prose has comparable qualities: its finely hewn detail, authenticity, and Zen-like insights echo Walden Pond’s cranky Yankee, the archetypical apostle of sustainability. Altschuler pays a wry homage to the master, “the greatest proponent of huckleberries.” The Yankee variety, he notes, unlike its California namesake (a kind of blueberry), “was a true huckleberry.”
Althschuler, who has worked as a counselor for the homeless and disabled, now teaches Tai Chi at Santa Rosa Junior College. He will be reading in San Francisco at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books (August 12th, 7 pm, 601 Van Ness Ave.) To learn more, call (415) 441-6670 or visit his website: www.mindfulhiker.com
— Carl Nagin
Free Speech,
San Anselmo-style
American dissidents are used paying a price for speaking out, but in Marin Attorney Ford Greene’s case, it’s costing $7 per letter. “Free speech isn’t free,” Greene grins, “but it’s worth it.” Greene is the fellow behind (literally) the eye-catching canvas-and-Velcro banner gracing a building in the 700 block of Sir Francis Drake. The front windows of Greene’s law office also stand out: they feature large papier-mâché heads of John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld and an enlargement of Rumsfeld’s recently declassified December 2, 2002 “Torture Memo.” But it’s Greene’s billboard-sized broadsides that have raised cheers, hackles and headlines.
It all started last October when Greene placed posters for the Fairfax city council race on the side of his building only to discover that local police, using a cherry-picker, had removed them in the dead of night. Turns out, Greene had run afoul of a secret San Anselmo sign ordinance passed in the wake of the 9/11 attack. He then filed a civil rights lawsuit, and a judge invalidated half of the secret sign law. When San Anselmo rewrote the law to restrict outdoor signs to six square feet, Greene upped the ante by hoisting a 96-square-foot canvas billboard. He laboriously spells out political messages using Velcro-backed letters costing $7 each. So far, he hasn’t run out of letters although he does confess, “It would be nice to have a question mark.”
On June 28, an anonymous caller left a message for Greene: “It’s a great day for you and the terrorists!” Greene’s answering machine traced the call to Fairfax Councilman Mike Ghiringhelli. When the Ross Valley Reporter contacted Ghiringhelli, he protested that his message was not “mean-spirited.” He then declared: “I’m sick of [Greene’s] liberal agenda and hate speech. He’s a communist and a terrorist supporter.... He’s a twerp.”
Greene is undeterred. “The banner has helped me [purge] my feelings of frustration at seeing our democracy going further down the toilet under Bush.” Greene hopes to win a free-speech variance so he can continue to canvass the neighborhood.
— Gar Smith
Join the Checkbook Rebellion
A number of Bay Area residents have joined a growing national movement to declare Financial Independence from the Big Money Multinationals (Citibank, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase). On July 4, they began withdrawing their assets from commercial banks and investing the money in local, community-friendly banks and nonprofit credit unions. While this gesture may not give Wall Street night-sweats, Catherine Austin Fitts, the former Managing Director of Wall Street’s Dillion, Read & Co., Inc. notes that “even a tiny shift in customers from big banks to local banks can cause a dramatic shift in political and economic power.” Don’t underestimate the power of a well-pinched penny. Remember: it was an investment boycott that helped topple apartheid in South Africa.
While banks are commercial enterprises designed to make profits for private shareholders, financial cooperatives are democratic, member-owned, federally chartered nonprofits created to serve local communities. Coops offer a life-affirming alternative to growth-addicted, profit-driven, stockholder-beholden corporations.
More than 700 million people in 80 countries belong to coops. More than 70 million Americans belong to 12,000 US credit unions with combined assets topping $300 billion! Since coops are nonprofit operations, members enjoy lower rates on loans, higher rates on savings, and fewer service fees. “The world has seen how corporations affect the Earth,” Green Party member Keith Wright observes in Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought. “The profit motive is not necessary for human achievement. It is incumbent upon people committed to social change to build countervailing institutions. What better way to show the illegitimacy of the corporation than with a positive alternative that increases the quality of life?”
—GS
National Association of Federal Credit Unions: www.nafcunet.org
World Council of Credit Unions: www.woccu.org
Credit Unions Online: www.creditunions.com
For the nearest Coop Credit Union in your state: www.ncua.gov/other/custate
Watch Your Vote
Voter-purges, touch-screen voting, and a disillusioned public suffering under a corrupt, messianic ‘leadership.’ Sounds like a textbook case of a banana republic in need of Jimmy Carter and his merry band of monitors, right? But this time, it’s US — the United States — that needs help.
The good news is that Global Exchange, the San Francisco-based human rights organization, is making a preemptive strike to protect our democracy by inviting international election monitors to watchdog November’s elections.
The presence of non-governmental observers can help boost public confidence in the electoral process,” says Global Exchange’s Fair Elections chief Ted Lewis. The very day Global Exchange unveiled its initiative, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) and 12 other congressmembers called for U.N. monitoring of the U.S. election. As Lee explained at a Washington D.C. press conference: “If we attempt to ensure free and fair elections for other countries, why wouldn’t we do the same for our own elections? ... As we have been recently reminded by Fahrenheit 9/11, there are very good reasons why we need election monitors.”
Global Exchange’s campaign began on July 8 with an opinion piece titled “American Democracy Needs Help” that appeared in Dublin’s Irish Independent, Tokyo’s Asashi Shimbun and Mexico City’s La Jornada. The campaign was even featured on Voice of America. Global Exchange believes that it is important to assure the world that there is a vibrant political democracy movement in the US — Fox News to the contrary.
How will it work? A 20-person team of monitors will visit California, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio and Washington D.C. in mid-September and make recommendations for strengthening electoral democracy. A week before the election, a second team will return to oversee on-the-spot monitoring. Global Exchange hopes to recruit around 100 experienced observers to monitor the elections in critical states.
The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, with many voters responding with hoots, hollers and shouts of “About time!” Some of the more jaded political reporters have been heard to say: “Is this what we have come to?” Apparently so.
For more ballot-watching information, see: www.fairelection.us.
—Eds.
MMOBsters Stirring
Next time you see Hillary Clinton on C-Span, check out her wrist. As an accessory to her power suit and understated golden ear bobs, she’s likely to be wearing a rather garish, rhinestone bracelet sparkling with the word “VOTE.”
Hillary is not competing with her husband’s more flamboyant mistresses; she’s wearing the bracelet in support of the MMOB — Mainstreet Moms Opposed to Bush — a grassroots organization that has grown from neighborhood get-togethers in Bolinas to a nationwide movement. Its aim is to register as many of the 20 million women who did not vote in 2000 as possible before November.
Founded by Megan Matson, the MMOB didn’t start out to make jewelry, but enlisted artist Arthur Okamura, (an honorary Bolinas mom), who was making all this very dark, anti-Bush art as well as some happier Howard Dean necklaces (when Dean was still in the running). Once Okamura became a MMOBSTER, he started making “Vote” necklaces.” Soon jeweler Diana Lerwick started designing Vote jewelry for sale by the MMOB as well.
Matson, a Yale graduate and former marketing director for an outdoor gear company, believes that the word “VOTE” can achieve the same cultural icon status as “PEACE” or “LOVE”. It can also unify the various factions who may not agree on anything except the need to solidly trounce George Bush in November.
Clinton got her bracelet right off Matson’s wrist when both attended a Barbara Boxer event in San Francisco last June. Matson has now taken to wearing more than one piece of the MMOB’s vote jewelry when she leaves the house. “They just fly off your body,” she said. People stop her and say, “Wow, where can we get that?”
They — and you — can get vote jewelry at the MMOB’s website, www.themmob.com
Buyers beware: You must be registered to wear it.
— Tricia Cambron
Hoedown in Heaven
Ready for a 100% sustainable, bluegrass and building festival? Sustainable Grassfest 2004, a benefit to educate communities about sustainable living, will feature local bluegrass bands and artists including the Mike Marshall Duo, Leftover Salmon, Psychograss, the Hot Buttered Rum String Band, Shanti Groove, Willy Porter, and the Snake Oil Medicine Show, performing on two solar and bio-diesel powered stages. Speakers, demonstrations, and workshops will explore straw bale building techniques, solar power, permaculture, eco-communities, yoga, Reiki, and, yes, bluegrass. There’s even a bluegrass camp for kids hosted by Barefoot Bluegrass. The tribes will gather August 13-15 at the Kirkwood Mountain Resort (near S. Lake Tahoe). For more info, visit www.grassfest.org
These folks are so green even their postcards are printed on hemp!
—CN
Recommend this page to a friend
Top Ten pages recommended to friends:
