I arrive early at One Mile in Bidwell Park for my usual morning walk.  I park and lock my bike at the racks where the creek flows through Sycamore Pool.  At times the oaks and sycamores are mirrored in the water like an inverse image of an upright world.  It’s all so calm here where I, too, am sunk deep in the silent waters.  This landscape of tree and water flows through me, and all seems right with the world.  But all too soon, the mood is shattered by what comes next.  A friend once said to me, “The Park is good for everyone.”   I think that’s true, but not everyone is good for the Park.

Sycamore Pool

Sycamore Pool

One Mile Picnic Area

One Mile Snack Bar

Sycamores by the Pool

One Mile Dam

Whiskey Bottle at One Mile Dam

Broken glass on the fish ladder, One Mile Dam

Quote: “Please recycle this bag.”

Beer carton in Sycamore Pool

Beach balls in Sycamore Pool/One Mile Dam

And yet, I don’t despair.  There are plenty of people who are quite good for the park.  By the end of the day, the park maintenance crew had removed all of the glass, graffiti, and even the beach balls.  And then there are the volunteers who spend long hours helping to keep the park nice for the rest of us.  I’m grateful to all of them.

Friends of Bidwell Park sign

Friends of Bidwell Park volunteers removing Star Thistle

Friends of Bidwell Park volunteers removing Privet plants

California Conservation Corp workers removing invasive plants

Susan Mason, Friends of Bidwell Park Volunteer Coordinator

An unknown Sycamore Pool swimmer

Conversation At One Mile

       By Karen Laslo

It’s an ancient and aging Valley Oak.  It’s huge – three adults would be hard pressed to link hands around its massive trunk.  In the rain it’s dressed in a cloak of green moss.

In the Fall it drops a brown and gold mosaic of leaves on the pavement below where I pass on my morning walks approaching One Mile in Bidwell Park.  In Winter, a dark silhouette of bare tree branches stands out against the pale grey-blue of a winter morning sky, and a chill sun filters through, painting the limbs in alternate patterns of light and shadow. An artist friend of mine once told me that, in winter, the exposed branches of trees remind him of human veins, the way they twist and turn and taper toward the tip. 

One Spring morning, a patch of bright saffron-yellow on the side of the oak caught my eye.  When I stopped to look I saw that it was a bracket fungus emerging from a deep scar where the tree had once lost a limb. I knew that the fungus was a sign that this venerable old tree was deep into its decline. I noticed then how many of its limbs were broken, leaving jagged sore-looking ends.  Its thin scattering of leaves looked ragged and pathetic topping the great trunk of the tree that had once supported a thick and spreading crown. 

This same morning of the bracket fungus, a Nuttall’s Woodpecker flew up and clapped on to the side of the tree.  A Grey Squirrel yipped at me from an overhead branch.  A White-breasted Nuthatch walked upside down on its trunk looking for insects. The last few shreds of a nest, left over from a previous spring, clung to a twiggy concave in the branches overhead.

I closed my eyes then, and, forgetting where I was or who might be passing by, I pressed my palms and forehead against the trunk of the dying old oak. The bark was thick and deeply grooved. I felt slight and fleeting against the sheer mass of the tree. Then, suddenly embarrassed that I might’ve been seen, I turned my back on the tree, and relieved to find that no one was in sight, I went on as though I were merely passing by on my usual walk. That’s when the tree spoke to me. “I’m old,” it said, “and yet, still useful. Ask the woodpeckers, they like me better than ever.” “You’re old,” my heart replied, “and you’re beautiful.”