where a river create a for yourself to sit.

Visualize a party of community members (of various degrees of sentience).

With the community members in mind, begin to allow yourself some movements just your body keeping good company, like an unspoken hello... a companion dance...keep going as long as you like.

The San Joaquin softens into the Sacramento River and then enters the Bay through the Carquinez Straight. This is a mixing place and meeting spot for rivers, oceans, commerce & geological remains.

Underwater in the San Francisco Bay, 33 foot tall sand dunes speak of old San Francisco, the peninsula that was once fully covered by a rolling range of sand dunes, glacially carved from the Sierra plateau during the Pleisteocene. San Francisco can be seen as an ancient downriver deposit in the shape of a windy dune-scaped peninsula in the fog.

Still eddying around the San Francisco Bay, a grain might get caught and swept up in another story. On the north side of Alcatraz Island are the sand mines operated by Hansen Corporation. These fluid, often unseeable mines exist below the water’s surface. Occasionally a dredger signals extraction, but often these everyday mines are hiding in plain sight.

If I follow the grains I might get caught in the sucking vortex of a dredger and be heaped on a barge, taken 6 miles south down the bay to Pier 96 -- to the concretelandia of Bayview’s Cargo Way. I might follow a concrete truck carrying a slurry of sand, water, lime, gravel and cement, en route to a construction site downtown or, I might fall through to the depths of an underwater range of sandy dunes and eventually get swept to sea to become the beach at the city’s edge.

Concrete is the language of the built environment itself a storied and geological layer.

I talked with Erica Maharg, the Managing Attorney from San Francisco Baykeeper, an environmental organization dedicated to defending the Bay from environmental threats. Maharg was the lead lawyer on a case which filed a lawsuit against the State Lands Commision for their leasing of San Francisco Bay sand to the concrete production company Hansen. Hansen has been operating a sand dredging mine near Alcatraz and Angel Islands in the San Francisco Bay since the 1960s.

Maharg points to the city skyline behind us and says: “Sand is a pivotal part of our urban environment and the way that it looks, because it goes into concrete, so all of the high-rises that we see, everything, all the roads - sand is there.” Sand and gravel make up 60-80% of concrete.

The lawsuit, lead by Maharg, has been back and forth, in and out of the court of appeals 3 times as of Fall 2018. This back and forth is based on various interpretations of the Public Trust Doctrine. Maharg shared that the Public Trust Doctrine is common law in the US and originally came from Roman Law. The Doctrine tries to define land use, which places and ecosystems cannot be owned, and the responsibilities that a government has to its people. Of course, it’s all very up for interpretation.

Maharg paraphrases a piece from the Public Trust Doctrine that she is turning to in this case saying that “the water and the land underneath the water are public trust resources and when the government makes decisions that impact those public trust resources they can’t do it in a way that alienates or prohibits the public from being able to use and benefit from that resource.”

While the State Lands Commission does not believe that leasing sand violates this Trust, Baykeeper would argue that sand is too slow-to-renew and that leasing it is actually just the selling off of coastal land wholesale. This is one of the main causes for the extreme coastal erosion seen off of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach.

What could be more alienating than the literal loss of (home)land?

Personally, Maharg doesn’t expect sand mining to stop entirely, recognizing the need for building materials, housing, and roads, but through her legal work she is pushing for mining at sustainable levels, more transparency in mining activity, and corporate responsibilty towards the geologically scaled impacts of human industry.

The sand is our meshy transition zone and without it Maharg worries that rising sea levels may flood our landfilled edges. She also points out that these environmental troubles typically impact the most economically vulnerable frontline communities the hardest.

Erosion patterns here are literal and metaphorical, at once loud and frightening, while still being hidden, underwater.

Erosion patterns as a sign of home?

Take a slow walk by concrete factories mountains & machine sounds, vibrations, and workers, resilient plants, animals or humans, buzzing, humming, beating vibrations. inhale / exhale / your body crossfading to stone with each breath. In bits, crumbles & cracks, eroding & disintegrating.

Cargo Way at Pier 94, Bayview, San Francisco, CA is a possibility.

Surrounded by just your body, it helps to let your eyes get soft. Ask them to scan the scene -- like a camera panning and absorbing light & shadow & being & movement to memory.

What’s there/who’s there/how’s there? Take notice as you will.

Let the movements, scales, speeds & impressions of the place enter your eyes & body.

Find a place to stop & rest atop a concrete place : a pile, a slab, the side of the road itself (not the concrete moutains, they landslide dangerously.)

3 breaths for feeling your skin loosen into billions of separate particles... solidity shimmers apart - cracks, fissures open slow in a timelapse.

Let your breath sink down and down into yourbelly and down into the concrete you’re paused on. Let your breath sink and trickle down - a crack in the crust to the soil/sand/land below the concrete layer. With each breath the mountain becomes your lungs. Hardened. Concrete particles swirling invisibly within. Concrete particles - sand, granite, Sierra Nevada.

Allow your breath to flow around down there through the cracks & fissures, below your body -- a small sandy slide of your body streaming.

Close your eyes and listen to the geology beneath the concrete. Cracking, tumbling, shifting of pebbles, of land, of water, of sand.

The bottoms of your feet break down into a dust, disintegrating layers shimmer off you, and like your breath before, trickle downward through cracks & fissures in the concrete. As a dispersed layer of sand you’ve avalanched down & down to the sand/soil/land.

Breathe into a disintegration past the humanmade layer. Your whole body is attached to a downward drift. You are going. A million tiny bits slipping through cracks, fissures, & on into the beneath -- well past the concrete crust. Little particles sifting through larger boulders.

Notice what’s there below.

Let the movements, scales, speeds & impressions enter your body

: sand, granite, mud, bay salt on your tongue, snails, stingrays, an Ohlone boat, toxic radiation, a forgotten seed bank, Suaeda californica, coyote bush, pickle weed, avocet bones, the stinky health of a mudflatall floating, dispersed in a gooey mud with you.

Spend as long as you like drifting around down there, maybe a minute or two: listening, smelling, seeing.

3 deep breaths and gather your disintegrated self. Solidify and mineralize.

The soles of your feet cap you back complete and together and you are standing on the concrete you embarked from.

Slowly open your eyes. Breathing, seeing: urban, industrial mountainy, sentinal.

The Concrete factories along Cargo Way in Bayview, San Francisco are whirring by dusk, spinning a dull and steady deep base - the low hum of working all the time. Giant sand mountains are built as the barged-in sand is sorted from stones, bay mud, and other parts not needed. Conveyor belts and sort nets make separate piles for each particulate size.

You can get close to this and see the industrial back stage because the Audubon Society has secured a small strip of land behind the CEMEX factory and is working it as a restoration site. The land is secretive and unmarked. When I visit I always feel like a trespasser through private and contested industrial territory. Jumpy nerves accompany me. In the darkening dusk the sand sorters whir on and the sun sets behind Twin Peaks and the shorebirds coo and a seal looks at me looking at the machines. The toxin sponging pickleweed is thick here, the gumplant and coyote bush too, the endangered California sea blite (Suaeda californica) - all planted to help restore a wetland. A wetland as another edge space, a skin, a muddy membrane, that critically ensures that land stays land and that it doesn’t become an eroded slurry lost at sea.

I visit again by daylight. I look into the factories, wanting to know how it all functions. The workers are here by day and they watch me back from stopped bulldozer cabs when my gaze gets too long, too direct. One day, I spend 3 hours on this little strip of land filming and observing, a duration which eventually prompts the approach of a CEMEX ambassador of sorts. As he walks over to me I feel uncertain, like a trespasser, yet on public lands. I think about the sensitivities and politics of this very contested industry, the local lawsuit, and the global-scaled civil wars and violent sand mafias all fighting for sand (to produce concrete) in countries like Morocco, Malasia, India, Indonesia, and more quietly, here.

The ambassador is friendly but probing. He wonders what I see in this muddy flat and why I’ve spent so much time there today. I talk about sand, my curiosity about its story. He mentions that sometimes people come around here to protest against the sandmining, or to collect information for a lawsuit that’s going. “Everybody uses concrete, you know?” he says, shaking his head.

Eventually, he tells me his name (we’ll call him Eduardo,) and he tells me that he is the “Sandman” around here, solely responsible for unloading the sand off the barges recently mined up from the bay and settling it into mountainous piles. I ask him how he got his job and he says he taught himself how to be an auto mechanic and worked his way up to bulldozer operation from there.

I ask if he lives in the Bay Area. He just laughs. He says he can’t believe the cost of housing. He has saved up his bit to buy a house in Modesto; where he grew up, where his family lives, where he too lives when he is off from work.

“You commute?” I ask. “No” he laughs, “I crash with a friend in Alameda when I’m on duty and then go back to my house, my family, my kids for weekends.” He assures me that his sandman pay is good in comparison to anything available in Modesto.

We talk more about housing strangeness in the Bay Area, the pride he takes in his work and his kids. We shake hands and part ways. I can’t help but think of the mythos of the Sandman - sprinkling sand as fairy dust onto the sleeping eyes of innocents with a dream.

This particular fairy dust is a mining operation that so wholly erodes health, habit and homeland but it is the work available. It is economically viable here and now.

Walking out on Cargo Way the concrete trucks parade all day - to and from the factories, out to construction sites, relentlessly. The city is in a boom of building. The road rumbles and shakes all the time. The air is clouded with toxic dusts and particles.

No one is walking here with their mere bodies.

There are cracks in any sidewalk and life finds a way through. One of the concrete factories is Recology’s Sustainable Crushing facility. They take in the remains of demolished buildings from the Bay Area and process them back down into aggregate parts of sand, gravel and particles just the right size to re-make concrete with - a possible path that doesn’t rely on extracting new resources, in recognition of the limits of sand.

The director of the site tells me that there is a flock of Canadian geese that overwinter here in the gravel hills, coyotes roam the valley floor by dusk to hunt garter snakes and gophers, a red tailed hawk lands on the manmade cliff face as we talk. A herd of domesticated goats (who work for hire around the city clearing properties of bramble and weeds) lives just behind the site and sometimes wander through, he says. He loves to bring his dog here when the bulldozers are done for the day, to run big circles around composed mountains, chasing geese and little mice. Resilient urban ecologies emerge and find a way toward liveliness.

Further south just around the bay’s bend, still in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, is Literacy for Environmental Justice where Anthony Khalil is an Environmental Scientist and the Community Engagement Director.

We are sitting on the old San Francisco 49ers tailgating lots of Candlestick Park (now a State Park by the same name) amidst summer-dead fennel, bristling August grasses and another concrete recycling facility churning behind us. He points to one stand of flowering grass, tall and bent, spiking wheat-like flowers. “This one here is native Creeping Wild Rye (Leymus triticoides),” he says and adds that its being here on this compacted, impacted old parking lot tells us that the bay water line was once much closer to where we’re standing now. This one, this grass, is adapted to living in salty, moist soils often at the water’s edge. From where we are the waterline now is hundreds of feet away.

Creeping Wild Rye forms solid and dense underground root systems which allow it to live stable lives, close to the water’s mercurial edge all while securing slippery banks from soil erosion. The resilience of this long stalking blade, really there is so much to learn about the lives of other species and how they provide for my own. Creeping Wild Rye is not really a sand dwelling native plant, adapated as it is to dense, wet, nondraining wetland soils, but this particular slender stem of Wild Rye is bound up with our sandy place most certainly, as it has watched its home ecosystem shift and change with the times from a wetland to solid concrete fill, which we know to be sandy in origin.

From the perspective of roots: Anthony guides me through the changes - this small strip of bay coastline has been until now: open Bay waters, transitional tidal wetlands, a rolling range of sand dunes drifting all the way over from San Francisco’s Pacific side, an Ohlone home place & territory taken by white settlers. Today this bay edge, a former wetland, is solid filled land which houses Candlestick State Park, the Bayview and Hunters Point neighborhoods - historically black & under-resourced, polluted by a deeply radioactive former naval shipyard, and the only seat of the city’s heavy and polluting industries.

This Creeping Wild Rye is living from a bedrock of landfilled concrete, made of sand, but frozen midshift. This Creeping Wild Rye is living on open waters - the former bay filled in to make more land, a rod through the spine - not a critically flexible transitional place at all.

This Creeping Wild Rye grows through the cracks, in a concreted earth, while watching the progress of sand-dependant industries and concrete dependant “urban revitalization” of the sort that often spells displacement for Bayview’s neighbors. Anthony points out that the burdens of industry and development really only happen in certain areas. “Citywide, when the concrete comes from CEMEX and Bodie and they deliver it, they’re coming only from this neighborhood.”

Sand is everywhere here, in unnatural aggregations. Anthony says : “I’m thinking too a little about development and how this is a real epicenter of all the building that’s happening in SF. All the coming in of resouces and then resources that are here that are being extracted from the bay and processed here in our backyard and then inhaled by residents in swarms of particulate matter.”

Bayview experiences the environmental injustice of continually high levels of PM 2.5 particulate air pollution. Asthma rates are 4 times higher here than in the rest of the city.

Sand is for land, not meant for air or breath.

I am still trying to follow grains of sand from source to sea and at this point I might find myself: a skyscraper demolished to dust caught in the lung.

It’s getting harder and harder to trace all these possible pathways for our tumbling decaying saltating grains: mountain dusts, (an atmospheric condition) a cloud in quartz, feldspar, mica.

Anthony tells me about how much he pays attention to “the smallest things in life” (like sand) and how they affect us. He says that sand was once a principle engineer of our city. Now sand seems to be the principly engineered. I like the idea of non-human engineers. What would that look like?

Anthony says that the living shoreline approach is what makes sense to him. He mentions that beyond sand mining, historically there have been times when loads of bay sediment were dredged up to deepen our shallow bay for the non-stop international shipping it supports. This dredged up sediment is often carelessly disposed of in deep oceanic places that don’t need it. He wonders how we might invest that dredged sediment into a thoughtful living shoreline - a thriving ecosystem of the kind that also has the potential to create thriving social landscapes.

“Those of us that take stewardship into our own hands, we can mimic some of these natural forces, to not to destroy habitat, but to create habitat.”

Anthony reminds me of the ABCs of a healthy environment. It means simultaneously tending to the abiotic (non-living), the biotic (living) and the cultural (human-made, social.) He wonders at how people can create a culture of balanced collaboration with the A’s and the B’s, since everyday the A’s and the B’s support us and our living.

He points to breathing as just one simple and crucial example that I know I ignore daily. “The phytoplankton and the zooplankton and the bacteria and the plants that are present in these [wetland] ecosystems .... contribute to 1 in every 3 breaths and at the same time, other breaths might be impacted by the flip side of that which is particulate matter 2.5, particulate matter 10, and all the indoor air pollutants and combustible matter that come from industry and our cars.”

Right. Plants are why we can breathe at all and in a place with industrially compromised air quality and paved over wetlands, restoring wild plant communities is an act of caring for our abiotic and biotic neighbors, as well as being practical survival.

For Anthony, working to restore habitat around Bayview means restoring oxygen, soil, and bodies to health, but also restoring “all the connections and all the cultural histories surrounding each plant.” Ultimately, it means restoring a human sense of belonging to the ecosystems that house us.

Anthony’s talk of the small things brings me back to the various species of sand loving buckwheats that host the endangered Lange’s Metalmark Butterfly in Antioch. San Francisco has a version of this story too with the Green Hairstreak butterfly whose host plant is also a native buckwheat. With the loss of sand dune habitat in San Francisco, buckwheat populations declined and the Green Hairstreak was for a time thought extinct. The more I look at it, the more I see that butterfly counts are an indicator of broader species endangerment, the unseen effects of sand mining, and subsequently our own health and air quality in real time.

In roundabout but deeply connected ways, the presence (or not) of these two tiny species of butterflies is an indicator of stabilized sand-lands which have direct ties to our ability to breathe.

I begin to see my entanglement with butterflies more clearly and understand what their health and population say also about mine.

West I go toward the Ocean, butterflies and breath leading me on to the Inner Sunset neighborhood. On a continuous line of bluffs that used to be sand dunes there is a corridor of habitat built for the endangered and endemic Green Hairstreak butterfly. This corridor is a project led by Nature in the City, an organization that creates gardens and native plant habitats in medians, public parks, stairwells, and reclaimed sand dune ecosystems. The Green Hairstreak Corridor is a network of medians and parklets restored with native California coast buckwheat and seaside daisy which both act as the host plants for the larvae and adult stages of the Green Hairstreak butterfly.

On an aggressively windy February morning, I see coast buckwheat and seaside daisy, but also dune tansy, California poppy, lizard tail, coyote bush, bush lupine, California sagebrush, polypody ferns, stonecrop and phaecelia.

Despite this inviting floral home, I can’t imagine seeing a bright green, nickel-sized butterfly, like a slip of paper, against this windstorm of a day.

It makes me think that I’d like to practice feeling as vulnerable as I actually am, an animal who forgot. I might do well to practice thinking like a butterfly too.

I want to plant a sand garden and watch the reverberating effects. I am starting by tending to a wild spreading of endangered & native California Dune Tansy (Tanacetum camphoratum) in my backyard. The spreading and sprawling by way of wiley rhizomes and a taproot seeking back in time with every inch grown - deep time, deep place searching. The root finds memory of my backyard as not land, but instead as the bed of a pre-colonial lake; fish and tadpoles swarming, the squeaky bass of pacific chorus frogs filling a valley, and then an abrupt stoppage as the lake was filled with local sands, compacted, turned to “land” to make way for development yearnings and property lust.

My landlady, who has lived in this building since the 1980s, tells me there used to be a lake 1 block away from where we live. She tells me it’s filled with sand now, of course. She tells me we live in a liquefaction zone in earthquake country.

Planting a sand garden on landfill, a liqufaction zone, and hoping for the very best seems the very spirit of this place. If the earth quakes here it will want to reclaim my backyard from its imaginary solidity. The root of the dune tansy seeks back in time absorbing montane minerals to build strong cell walls, and then, through its very being, knows the origin story: the Pleistocene-era Sierra Nevada were bodies being made - carved and sculpted in timelapse by active glaciers in flow. Mass submountains of sediment were confetti-ed into being - sand and silt, by river and wind and time. These particulate piles shifted - a drifting blanket laid bit by bit over Yelamu/ Yerba Buena/ San Francisco. Until it was a rolling range of dunes composed of mountain dusts, arrived en masse during a time of glacial timelapse.

I am living on sand and ghosts of water. This wasn’t supposed to be land and as follows, the land buzzes with the energy of impermanance, restlessness, and propels me to my feet. I can’t sit still here. I can’t believe it’s my place, that I’ll be allowed to belong. So, I invest in a practice of tending to taproots, as an attempt to stay put.

My dune tansy colony started on a coastal hill in San Francisco’s Presidio. My friend, Ildiko Polony, the Native Plant Nursery manager at Literacy for Environmental Justice, propogated a small ensemble from these cross-town neighbors.

This plant is native to San Francisco sand dunes and is now endangered given San Francisco’s historic sand dune erasure. The dunes that do remain at Ocean Beach are so overrun with other dune tamers gone invasive (like South African Iceplant) that dune tansy are rarely spotted and namely on restorationist-led life support.

Dune Tansy sports a friendly yellow pom pom flower with feathery leaves and it smells of camphor and sage. It grows happily in soils many agriculturally-oriented minds call “poor.” But “poor soil” is just another word for sand, and calling sand poor is just another way of devaluing the kind of land this place is made from.