Walk About Martinez -- Lake Merritt

This week we took another city walk, Oakland’s, Lake Merritt.  My sister Sharon, my friend Lisa and I, took Bart to the Lake Merritt Station, walked through Laney College, just across the street and from there around the lake.  The 3.1 mile, level, shoreline path takes you through neighborhoods and parks, past historic sites and lovely, classic colonnades, beautiful Victorian mansions, and old boating facilities.  The birdlife was spectacular.

Wikipedia reports that the lake started out as a large tidal lagoon, where several streams met before entering the Bay.  Ohlone Indians lived, hunted and fished for millennia on its shore.  Lake Merritt's historic significance in modern times began in 1870, when it was designated as the first United States Wildlife Refuge.  At that time the lake was being used as a sewer, but the surrounding marshes still teemed with migratory birds.  They attracted so many hunters and so much gunfire close to Downtown Oakland, that the mayor, Samuel Merritt, who incidentally owned some of its shoreline, proposed that it be designated a wildlife refuge.  The State Legislature voted it into law, and it became the first in all of North America. 

Today the path is well used by joggers, families out for a stroll, people practicing Tai Chi.  It offers some of the most beautiful views to be had in Oakland.  The day we walked was supposed to be the beginning of last week’s wind storm, but it never materialized.  The water shimmered under brilliant blue skies and the surrounding greens and parkways set off the classic old buildings and city scape all along the route.  

A real highlight of the walk was the birdlife along its perimeter.  Snowy Egrets strutted their brilliant plumage a few feet from the path, and weren’t bothered in the least by the constant stream of people walking so near.  Mud hens paddled nonchalantly in large flocks, and grebes dove in pairs and swam great distances.  Cormorants lined up in masses on logs floating a bit further from shore, and a great pelican motored along as we walked by.  

We walked counter clockwise and as we made it to the corner backed by the Grand Lake Theatre, a spectacular old movie house with a Wurlitzer, it was time for lunch.  There were lots of options, but we stepped into Yang Chow, a modest little Chinese restaurant directly across the street from the Grand Lake, and by the end of lunch realized we had stumbled onto a real gem.  Nothing special here, just really good food, friendly staff, huge portions and rock bottom prices.  Lunch specials were between four and five dollars and the dish we ordered for the table, Chinese greens, was gigantic and delicious.  Best of all, several of us don’t eat flour or sugar, and one mention of this and our waiter said, “You mean no gravy” and it was done just the way we wanted.  They even had brown rice!  

After lunch our walk took us past the Catholic Cathedral of Christ the Light.  We entered just in time to hear the end of a service and the echoing notes of a solitary voice, floating high above the congregation.  The building, which is not cruciform in shape as most traditional cathedrals, resembles a bishops miter.  Built almost entirely of glass, the brilliance of the light is softened inside by large wooden baffles, giant Venetian blinds that create changing patterns of line and light as you walk through the interior.   Without the warmth of the wood it would resemble a giant greenhouse.  Instead, the light is muted and the experience becomes more inward. 

Centered between the organ pipes is a giant image of Christ created by thousands of different sized holes in the paneling at the far end of the nave, each allowing a differing amount of sunlight through.  This pixilated image is modern Pointillism.  It’s quite impressive and looks like the Pop Art of Roy Lichtenstein done on a classic image of Christ, a hugely blown up comic strip created in the old way with tiny dots.  If it was Lichtenstein, the statement would be tongue-in-cheek, here it’s serious, maybe a bit overly pious.   But the whole is beautiful, and the sound was marvelous.  I’ll be coming back for an organ concert.

We completed our loop of the lake at the Oakland Museum of California, a place worth visiting for its permanent collection, but we were here to see the John Muir Exhibit.  It closes on Jan 22, 2011, and is worth the drive or Bart out to see.  Beginning with gorgeous wraparound photos of the places Muir is most associated with, you can smell the forest scents, listen to its sounds, touch the roughness of its rock and look into it in a way not possible with a flat photo.  These huge curved landscapes seem to expand in front of you, extending through your full field of vision.  Lisa commented that this was what it really looks like in the wild and what we could never quite capture in our own photos.  

These great landscapes, and many more throughout the exhibit, are the work of renowned, local nature photographer, Stephen Joseph.  His photos at the exhibit are reason enough for coming.  He’s been photographing our East Bay hills for decades.  If you’re looking for an ideal Holiday gift for the wilderness lover in your family it’s his book, Mount Diablo, the Extraordinary Life and Landscapes of a California Treasure.  It is one of the biggest and most beautiful books of photography I own.  The result of over twenty years of work on the mountain, it is the closest you’ll come to a visual love affair with our principal peak.  After spending time with the panoramic four page foldouts, I felt like I was seeing our oaks and rolling, savannah hills for the first time and feeling the spray of the waterfalls on North Peak.  It is the quintessential work of art devoted to our mountain.

The Muir Exhibit is particularly lovely in its use of Joseph’s photographic blowups of plants Muir collected and dried, which are displayed next to the actual specimens themselves.  Often these are tiny brown weeds that when looked at large, and in exquisite focus, become works of art in themselves.  Muir’s science turns to beauty in the hands of a photographer as gifted as Joseph.  These are the plants and photographs that were the subject of a major exhibit in Walnut Creek last year, and are presented in the book, Nature’s Beloved Son, Rediscovering John Muir’s Botanical Legacy.  It too is a beautiful book worth owning if you have any love of nature or Muir’s legacy.

The Muir Exhibit needs half a day at least.  It includes a mock up of his cabin in Yosemite with skylights and windows giving views of Half Dome and Yosemite Falls, and has many of his illustrated journals.  Some are almost like Persian Miniatures, minute detailing of the places he was exploring, all surrounded by his tiny, chicken scratch hand writing.  

One of my favorite displays was a digital, animated picture of the High Sierra which lets you follow his explorations and read from the actual journals he wrote at each of his camp sites.  It takes you up Mt. Whitney and Ritter and other great peaks. At the click of a link the computer superimposes his actual drawing of a landscape on the digital image.  I could have spent all day on that screen.  It gives a breathtaking ride up the great, glacial canyons and over the peaks of the Sierra.  

After the walk around the lake, a great lunch and several hours at the exhibit, we were bushed and welcomed the seat on Bart on the way home.  We didn’t even get to start on the regular exhibits, so I guess we’ll have to go back and do it all again soon.  

If you plan to walk Lake Merritt in the next two weekends -- beginning on December 9 -- you could make a full day of it by adding in a matinee performance at the Christmas Revels in the beautiful, old Scottish Rite Temple, on the lake.  It's only a few blocks down from the Oakland Museum.  This wonderful Christmas/Solstice show highlights a different culture and a different historical period each year, in song, dance and story telling.  We’ve been to Scandinavia, Ireland, Scotland, Renaissance Italy, Russia, pre-Columbian Mexico, England, Canada and the Appalachian Mountains, with the Revels. 

We began by taking our daughter Sarah’s Girl Scout Troop many years ago.  Most of the girls were students at John Muir Elementary at the time, and when their music teacher, Gina Graziano took a look, she got the entire fifth grade class involved in creating their own Revels performance that year, based on the story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses.  We did a group seating for over 220 people, many of the families from the fifth grade at John Muir Elementary.  Some of those families still continue the tradition with us.  

This year the culture is Medieval England and the story that of the Arthurian Round Table and the legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  This is a tale that harkens back to pagan England and a knight who died and rose again on a yearly basis.  Much like the natural world they worshipped at the time.  All of those early stories were eventually Christianized and became part of the mythical Arthurian Kingdom of Camelot.   And of course there will be Merlin and plenty of magic. 

With their year round choir, spectacular costumes, large full company dances, Morris and sword dancers, the show is always a delight.  My bet is for the best Medieval Polyphony of the season. 

At the darkest turning of the year, it’s time to Revel as our ancestors did and, 

                                                       Welcome Yule!  

“With inexpressible delight you wade out into the grassy sun-lake, feeling yourself contained on one of Nature's most sacred chambers, withdrawn from the sterner influences of the mountains, secure from all intrusion, secure from yourself, free in the universal beauty. And notwithstanding the scene is so impressively spiritual, and you seem dissolved in it yet everything about you is beating with warm, terrestrial human love, delightfully substantial and familiar.”
- John Muir, " The Glacier Meadows" Scribner's Monthly, February, 1879