Once Upon A Bay

There are so many ways of seeing the Bay, so many stories to tell: stories of natural history, human history, built environments, industry, recreation transportation, diverse cultures, the arts. I’d love to talk about the migration of birds and salmon, the migration of people and ideas.   I’d love to talk of the military presence in the Bay, of how airfields, defense installations, forts and naval bases have shaped land usage, often paradoxically for the better. I’d love to talk of the variety of fish and the variety of boats; of the islands in the Bay and the ports; of how some wildlife has adapted to the loss of natural habitat — peregrine falcons nesting on the Bay Bridge, for example or barnacles, sea stars and anemones clinging to pier pilings.   I’d love to talk about the transformation of garbage dumps into parks, of wastewater treatment plants, of airports such as Oakland, SFO, Crissy Field, Moffitt Field, of forgotten towns like Ravenswood, Alviso, Drawbridge, China Camp and other. Of course I’d love to talk of bridges — the bigness of the vision behind their creation, the brilliance of their design and the daring of their engineering, how they’re used, what influence they’ve had on residential development, their physical grace.   I’d love to talk about the restoration of salmon and steelhead in the creeks and the promise of transforming salt ponds into marshes. I’d love to talk about ancient Indian villages, of thousands of years of habituation, and of the traceries of the Indian world we can see embedded in the land. I’d love to talk about bygone industries such as whaling stations, shrimp camps, the ports of Brooklyn (now Oakland) and Redwood City from which redwood lumber was shipped out, the dynamite manufacturing at Point Pinole and the coal mining at Mount Diablo. I’d love to talk of current industrial uses, the ports, the rail yards that connect to them, the creation of an industrial landscape & economic engine. I see views of the Bay that range from satellite photos to microscopic close-ups of the 40,000 living organisms that can be found in one cubic inch of the tidal mud. – Malcolm Margolin Malcolm Margolin is the author of The Ohlone Way and 7 other books, founder and publisher of Heyday Books, and – as founder of California Institute of Community, Arts & Nature – a friend and cheerleader to Once Upon A Bay. He sent us a letter naming all the ways that he sees San Francisco Bay, and it outlines our proposed episodes so perfectly that we have reproduced it here in full. Thank you, Malcolm, from one Bay lover to another.