Hemingway

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.” – Ernest Hemingway

More from China Camp

This is a X post from Songotheday, a killer website that is worth checking out. www.songotheday.com.

I left my house on Sunday afternoon to spin the single speed around China Camp with no particular goal other than to be outside for a few hours. Beautiful windy day. Over the course of a few hours I made my way to the top of the park and spent some time checking out the view. Tam perfectly clear in one direction, San Pablo bay and the Big Rock open space area in the other. No one around. I was feeling lazy but pretty stoked to be outside.

I decided to try and find this trail I had read about in the IJ a few months before. Apparently a commando trail builder got busted building it and it dropped from around where I was to the neighborhood I grew up in, pretty much on my way home. I was on the rigid single speed, the wrong bike for gnarly trail exploration but I figured I’d walk if I needed to, I was in no rush and I had nowhere to go.

I slowly crept down the fire road I thought the trail would start from looking for the stacked dead bush piles that are usually used to hide the entrance to poach trails. Eventually I found it, clearly a bike trail but clearly long out of use. I hiked down it a little bit and it looked somewhat ride-able so I went back to the trailhead, got my bike and slowly dropped in. The trail was ok at first but was descending quickly and starting to get steeper and steeper. I was listening to a mix on my ipod and right as the trail dropped from a sunny hillside into a Manzanita and Oak forest this Leonard Cohen song cued.

The trail kept descending, now barely visible and so steep my stomach was behind my seat so I could keep traction. Like butt bumping on the rear tire I was so far back on the bike and I was still sliding. The surrounding woods had become really dense and felt more and more isolated. It was late in the day and almost dark under the trees. A little Blair Witch like…..and I was starting to get a little creepy.

A few miles into the trail I came across this old tree fort that was broken down and littered with really old beer cans. It was probably really cool in 1970 but the proof of human presence (at some point) and the disarray of the old fort was unnerving. Leonard Cohen’s slowly drawn out voice over the low accordion was resonating in both ears and with late afternoon sun trickling through the dense trees and brush was very surreal and in a not so good way.

I must have gotten distracted and missed a turn somewhere. The “trail” I was on ended abruptly and I was in this super thick grove of Manzanita. I couldn’t figure out how to continue on but I could see a little bit of a house down below me a few hundred yards and there was a big gnarly sign that said No Trespassing, Beware of Dog. The music was disorienting me and I was starting to get that, “oh shit I’m lost” feeling. I turned off the Ipod, set my bike down and started to hike around to see if I could find a trail out. Worst case scenario I figured I could hike back up the way I came down, but even that trail wasn’t obvious any longer. I had pretty much been sliding down the hill, dodging trees for at least a half a mile. Everything looked the same.

I left the bike laying on the ground and starting pushing through the bushes following a deer trail that seemed to head in the correct direction. I was almost on my hands and knees in spots, being super careful not to get a branch in the eye or to touch any poison oak. I came into a little clearing in the brush and stood up. It was really super quiet, I couldn’t see my bike any longer. I was in the middle of nowhere. Then I heard this really gnarly noise. Like some mix of a growl and a scream. Like kind of human and kind of animal. It wasn’t that loud but it sounded like it was coming from the direction I had left my bike and pretty close. Dude….I started freaking out. The deer trail I had been following had dead ended. There was nowhere to go forward unless I just started full on hacking through bushes and even then I was moving away from the houses down below……and my bike was back there.

My heart was pounding and I was trying not to panic. I was crouched down, just kind of waiting and breathing and then “eeeeeeiiiiieeeeeeuuuuuuhhhhh” that freakin noise again, really high pitched and louder, definitely back in the direction of my bike. It’s hard to describe the noise, like a wounded animal maybe but waay more human. I was legitimately scared now but I kept telling myself that nothing could happen to me in Glenwood, that these were my hills. I started moving back towards my bike. Really slowly, trying to be super quiet. Eventually I got to where I could see the red frame in the distance and I hadn’t heard that noise again, it has been at least a few minutes. I started to calm down a little bit. Maybe I imagined it? I got to the bike and was ready to get the fuck out of there so I decided that I was going to just barrel through the bushes to the house I saw below and that I’d deal with whatever dog or pissed off person I had to when I got there.

Right as I picked up the bike I heard the noise again, way louder and it felt like right behind me. Definitely not human but not like any animal I’ve ever heard. I didn’t even turn around this time, I just bolted down hill through the bushes. Full on commando charge style, yanking the bike through the underbrush as I went. The bike kept snagging and it felt like it took forever but I was getting closer to the house. Like 5 minutes later I popped through, onto the top of a long driveway with no one around….and no dog. I jumped on my bike and took off…….When I got down to the street there were kids around and people washing cars and shit. It was really sunny and peaceful out. I sat down on the curb, heart racing and covered in grime and sweat…….man.

3rd Grove

The boy sat on the ridge of the hillside facing west. The sun caught him directly in the face and he squinted. In the distance the pieces of water that were not shadowed by cloud glimmered with sunlight.

It had been wet the past days and the ground he sat on was still moist. He could feel the moisture dampening the seat of his pants and he knew that if he did not move in the next few minutes the wet would soak through his boxers and his return walk would be cold. There were still a few hours of daylight left but he had been gone since morning and his people would begin to miss him shortly.

“That will teach them” he thought, and adjusted his position slightly.

He wasn’t far from home, four or five miles, but looking down over the valley with the trees above and behind him he felt distant and small. He didn’t want to stay out any longer. The land, while familiar, was eerily quiet and he knew that he would be scared when it was dark.

The band of glimmering water in the distance was wider now, nearly as wide as his range of vision. “I have probably misjudged the time” he thought. “It will probably be dark in an hour, maybe less.”

He stood quickly and felt his backside, but was unable to tell whether it was wet or cold from the cold ground. He looked over his shoulder and could see the outline of moisture on his bottom. Behind and above him a breeze ran through the tree grove. The rustling of the leaves increased the hollowing feeling growing inside him.

He turned back toward the water and again the glimmering band seemed to widen. Only a few minutes had past but it felt like he had been on the west-facing hillside for hours. He was sure then that he had misjudged the sunlight. “It is going to be dark any minute” he thought and felt an uneasiness rise at the base of his throat. His movements quickened and he fought off an impulse to run.

“Nothing has changed” he told himself, now speaking quietly but out loud. “Nothing has changed.” But he knew that it wasn’t true. Everything had changed. He had misjudged the daylight. It would be dark any minute and he was miles from home. His pants were wet and he was cold.

His mind flashed to his home, his backyard, and the ease he felt there late in the day. He remembered the details of the space, the smell, the refracted sunlight that lingered in the upper corners of the yard before dark settled. The arguing from the night before was not a consideration now. He could not remember why he had come out here alone, what he was trying to prove.

He looked down to his bag which had slid down of the worn hill face and come to a rest some 30 yards below. It looked out of place against the brown green ground. He thought back to the morning, in his room, stuffing the bag with tee shirts and books. He had been angry then.

He looked back up the hill to the Eucalyptus above him. Through the swaying branches he could see pieces of moving blue sky. He took a deep breathe and moved down the hill to where his bag rested. He picked it up and again turned back toward the horizon. "I can come back," he thought. "This will be here," and he began deliberately ascending the hill.

In the distance, through the bare tree trunks he could see the path he had come by. It was shaded but he knew that around the corner it would be covered in light.

China Camp is Haunted

I have known China Camp was haunted for a long time. It's pretty tough to prove, or really even explain, but that place has creeped me out for years and I know the hill very well. I have been exploring China Camp my whole life and have spent as much time out there as anyone could have, barring the Rangers (and the ghosts) over the past ten years. I have been in nearly every part of the park, at nearly every part of the day and night either on foot or on my bike. I have spent countless hours running up and down barely discernible deer tracks, taking wrong turns and inevitably ending up in someones back yard. China Camp is one of my favorite places in the world......but the place is freaking haunted......particularly the San Rafael side.

I'll start with the less tangible. There are a couple of abandoned radio towers at the top of China Camp. Whenever I have been up there, whether it's been a perfect sunny Saturday afternoon or an ominous rainy evening there has always been a strange unsettled feeling around those towers. For those of you familiar with China Camp I'm not talking about the Nike Site drop ins. These towers are closer to Glenwood. It' s hard to describe but the feeling is tangible. It is just creepy up there, like there are people around when you know there aren't.

I also know a family who recently built a house on that side of the hill, a big house, when they began expanding Glenwood upwards around 2000. The couple almost put the house on the market because of ghost problems. Seriously. And this is a reasonable, very successful older couple who have lived in Glenwood for 20+. There contractors basically quit because so many strange things happened. They ultimately had a Miwok Indian priest bless the house although I don't know if it helped. Really weird stuff was going on, straight out of Poltergeist, and recently. I am not the only one that things China Camp is haunted.

Now a quick history:

China Camp has been a working state park since the late 70's. It was "purchased" for $2.70 and is about 1,600 acres. It connects to Harry Barbier park which is not a state park but rather owned by the city of San Rafael. China Camp was a Chinese Camp for many years and a fishing village. It primarily accommodated Chinese migrant workers who worked for the McNear family in their quarry which is located nearby. The quarry is still functioning btw, despite a huge amount of protest from local residents.

In the early 1900's legislation stopped shrimping in the bay (as well as increasing sediment levels in the bay) and the Chinese village broke up and slowly moved away.

Before the Chinese and before the settlement of San Rafael it was Coastal Miwok Indian Land. The hills of China Camp were the tribes hunting lands and were also the used as a site of burial and worship.

In the years between the Chinese village breaking up and the incorporation of the state park China Camp was accessible by car and a great spot for local high school kids to party. This explains the three old cars (that I am aware of) that are rusting away at the bottom of valleys up there. I know at least one of these crashes resulted in two dead teenagers. Whoah.

Final incident......China Camp was briefly made famous in 1975 by a occult influenced double murder popularly coined "the barbecue murders." A 19 year old dork from Terra Linda HS and his 16 year old girl friend killed both of her parents in a TL suburb, wrapped then in a carpet, doused it in lighter fluid and burned them in a fire pit in China Camp. There was a book written on the murders called Bad Blood.

Ok, so quick summary. China Camp land was initially Miwok Indian land. Countless Miwok Indians died of disease when San Rafael was being settled. Then it was Chinese land until the Chinese were forced out by changing laws and lack of food/sustenance from the Bay. At least two kids were killed up there in car crashes and it was the scene of a infamous occult double murder. It's also creepy as hell. I'd say that is a pretty strong case for a small, local state park.

Quick Story:

Last night about an hour after dark I was riding up on the far western side of China Camp with two friends. We were in a fairly isolated part of the park and randomly came across an older guy walking down a fire trail with no lights, no dog, nothing. Just walking out of the hills in the pitch dark, at least an hour after sunset. There wasn't even really a moon. Very strang.

Two of us ride past him with a quick nod of the head. Our third rider says hello and what does he respond with? "Don't get killed up there." Seriously.......

Ode to Blackberrys

Oh, Blackberry. You purple finger, prick me in the arm little fucker.
You summer sun, baseball gone forever in your tangles.

You, tart and alluring. You, sweet and evasive. You pay to play son of a bitch.
Half wild, half domestic, tribute to resilience.
Grow where you please, blackberry jam, total suburban indifference.
Give me my baseball back.