Speaking Tributaries began as a project to investigate the possibilities of place and community. This phrase describes nothing, as possibilities are, ostensibly, endless, and place is a slippery, subjective thing, and community could be anything and include anyone. This left us with the loosest of frameworks to navigate within. We began with a place; a tunnel in Dimond Canyon, constructed by the WPA to direct and shape the flow of Sausal Creek. The acoustics of this tunnel are such that sound is absorbed by the water running underfoot. The most clearly audible sound is that of the human voice. This is a real place but is not named or locatable on a map. It is findable but not accessible. This tunnel is situated within the urban landscape but reads as “nature". The creek flows with rainfall, but its boundaries are manmade.
In my own work, I had been hewing toward thresholds. Places like the tunnel at Sausal Creek as transitory meeting points for a paradox. Natural and man-made, for instance, or life and death. States of being that are apparently ends unto themselves. Death is a certain kind of definitive end, beyond which lies a perfect unknown. One of my favorite images of death comes from Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir Speak Memory. He describes life as a moment caught between the “identical twins” of the prenatal and the postmortem. In this way, the double unknowns of the past and the future are differentiated only in our perception, with only one representing the unique terror of extinguishment. According to this metaphor, life itself is the threshold, or the brief moment between one kind of non-existence and another. Life itself is the paradox.
Since September of 2014, I have worked closely each day with elders, many of whom viscerally and daily confront the complex loss of personal memory. Also confronted is death, both in reality and metaphor. I have, en route to the elevator, passed a carefully prepared gurney covered in serviceable forest green cloth. One of my residents asked me recently, “what is on the other side?” and then requested that I accompany her there. Surely it is no accident that souls of the newly dead should cross a river to enter the underworld. Surely it is no accident that the first being met on this journey is a ferryman.
A history of the Port of Oakland prepared in 1934 and sponsored by the Oakland Board of Port Commissioners, filed as The State Emergency Relief Administration Project #3-F2-85 1934 gives the following account of Oakland’s first transbay ferry:
When at night the tide was extremely low, wharfinger Andy Moon would row down the bar, near what is now Peralta Street, and place a lantern on a piling to direct the captain of the ferry up the channel. Often, in spite of this precaution, the boat would be stranded on the bar and its landing delayed for hours. Meanwhile the wharfinger would patiently await the arrival of the boat, which was announced by blasts of its whistle, summoning those expecting the return of members of their family who had gone to “the city.”
A boat stranded on a bar; a carriage rocking above an abyss; water either standing or running or rushing through a tunnel; a gurney covered in green cloth.
