A SURPRISE AND A FEW TEARS

Somewhere or other, I forget exactly, Trish and I heard about a place called the Presidio; that it was a good place to hike and not too far from the city.  We didn’t really know much about it except that it originally had something to do with the military and that now it was a National Monument; the equivalent of a National Park in Canada.  We got up one day and walked into the part of San Francisco next to our marina and caught an Uber ride to the park.   Our driver was a man named Hugo who had emigrated from Guatemala a few years ago and we were grateful to be able to converse in Spanish a bit.

We arrived at what we soon realized was a pretty unique space.  The original builders of the base, the U.S. Army, implemented the largest landscaping project ever completed by the military.  From 1886 to 1900 they planted thousands of trees in a huge serpentine pattern in order to make the space seem larger than it was and to abate the relentless cool winds which blew over what was originally a huge tract of sand dunes.  Yes, they destroyed the original dune ecosystem, which we now know to be fragile and in danger, but their intentions were good at the time and the end result is an amazing place to spend an afternoon hiking.

Hugo let us off at the edge of the original parade grounds next to a wonderful cool, moist pine forest. As we walked up an incline on the trail, we began to see row after row of headstones through the trees.

We realized that this part of the Presidio was a military graveyard, and soon the enormity what was slowly being revealed through the trees settled over us as we began to comprehend the scale of it. We found a sign which said that the graveyard was dedicated in 1884 and was the first National Cemetery on the West Coast.  It contains the remains of 30,000 mostly young men who were sent to fight for causes which can seem awfully far away when sitting on the hill overlooking all that carved marble.  30,000 people who never married, never had children, never got to live the life that the people who sent them there held so dear.

Trish and I each found a spot to sit and ponder and to shed some tears for this terrible waste.

The poetry engraved in stone in this picture is from The Young Dead Soldiers by Archibald McLeish.

The Young Dead Soldiers

The young dead soldiers do not speak.

Nevertheless, they are heard in the still
houses:  Who has not heard them?

They have a silence that speaks for them
at night and when the clock counts.

They say:  We were young.  We have died.
Remember us.

They say:  We have done what we could
but until it is finished it is not done.

They say:  We have given our lives but
until it is finished no one can know what
our lives gave.

They say:  Our deaths are not ours; they
are yours; they will mean what you
make of them.

They say:  Whether our lives and our
deaths were for peace and a new hope or
for nothing we cannot say; it is you who
must say this.

They say:  We leave you our deaths. 
Give them their meaning.

We were young, they say.  We have
died.  Remember us.

Archibald McLeish

We were both quite overcome with emotion, especially since we had stumbled on this solemn place quite unexpectedly.

After a while, we continued on our hike and enjoyed quite a few hours of wandering along paths and narrow winding lanes, all the while cradled in forests of hundred and thirty year old trees.  We were both feeling like the forest was welcoming us back to a more northern part of the world.  Conifers rather than cactus, coolness rather than heat, pine needles rather than sand.  We both were starting to feel that we were not so much on our way home any more, but rather on the home stretch.

After coming to the end of the trail and visiting the orderly brick officer’s barracks buildings, we crossed the parade grounds with their incredibly perfect lawns and headed back into the city, grateful to be alive.




Peace.

Jim