9/22/2004
I left my bicycle and walked to the train today. Sometimes I do that for a change of view, a change of heart, a change of mind. The moon, that half circle cut of ice crystal I’d seen on my bike the night before, had already set, and the sun was just up. The lake shimmered quicksilver. I cut through some park areas near the lake along a dusty trail carpeted with pine needles. There’s a hidden Hooverville in there, a homeless encampment in the pine and redwood trees along the estuary. Some days when I pass, sullen and dirty-skinned men and women smoke cigarettes squatting by the trail and looking at me in my tie. They have a kitten that bounds and bounces about. With new eyes I try hard to see them as men and women, human beings not human garbage, not forgotten invisible people. You find the skeletons of their campfires in the dirt. They’ve been living, tucked up there in the trees where few people ever pass, for as long as I’ve been going through that way. The police must know they are there, but leave them alone.
This morning they were not up yet, and the reason was not hard to see. About twenty empty cans — big cans — of King Cobra malt liquor lay bent and crumpled all around their space, spilling out onto the trail. Probably they drank a whole case. The chrome cans were as shiny as the sublime shimmering estuary. Across the river a fuzzy black bunny sniffed and hopped in the cropped grass. I felt pain and sympathy for these people, drowning out their lives so wretchedly in such a beautiful place. Last night my roommate and I were talking and he was saying “Man, 18 to 21 were my best years! I wish I was that age again! Now I’m 33 and fat and out of shape. Back then I could drink and not have a hangover for long.”

And as I walked this morning in the moon dust on the trail, the evergreens evoking Colorado and Montana childhood in me, I heard a bubbling tenor cry across the water. And there, balanced on a bough extending over the water, was a slate blue kingfisher with a white collar ring and big crest. Halcyon, the Greeks named it, from which we get our halcyon days. The hemerai alkuonides were the days when the kingfishers built their nests, and the sea was calm. You could say, in Latin, “carmen halcyonis audiebam,” or “I heard the song of the halcyon. This morning, I did.