Pull up a wooden chair at the front counter of Mama’s Café Royal, close your eyes, and this is what you’ll hear:

The bubbling rise and fall of dozens of conversations. The slam of the register. Staff calling hellos to familiar customers. The sizzle of fat in the kitchen. The swoosh and creak of swinging doors. And Etta James, occasionally eclipsed by crashing plates, singing “At Last.”

It’s Wednesday morning, 9 a.m. The hump of the rush is nearly over, though customers still trickle in for coffee poured out of the pot near the register.  To sit at the red topped, metal-rimmed counter is to give up the right to remain silent.  The unspoken social rules that keep people quiet—those rules have no place at this counter.

Within seconds, Mary, the manager, will most certainly call you “Hon.”

Everyone knows everyone and those that don’t will.  Benjamin, a young server with a red baseball hat, starts in immediately.

“Hi—hey, nice car. What model is it?”

It’s an Audi S4.

Benjamin, it seems, doesn’t miss a thing. “I know that model—I used to work in a car shop. That’s one of the most popular. Is it Tiptronic or six-speed?”

It’s Tiptronic.

As Benjamin reveals an impressive depth of car knowledge, the restaurant buzzes around him.  The front door opens and closes, servers swoop by so fast they generate air turbulence, customers in the corner signal for the check.

Coffee is poured and coffee is poured and coffee is poured.

After a few minutes, Benjamin is at the end of his car talk and customers along the line turn to each other.  It’s a friendly, open conversation—the kind of snapshot biographies strangers exchange on planes.

“I’ve been coming here for 32 years,” says an older woman with a blue silk scarf around her head. “I’ve seen it through all the owners. Mary,” she says, pointing at the manager, “I’ve known Mary since she was this high.”  She places her hand just above hip height.  Mama’s is convenient, she says, because she works at a laundromat just down the block.

“I keep trying to retire from that darn laundromat, but they just won’t let me,” she says laughing. “That’s where we met.”

She motions the young man next to her into the conversation. He’s in his twenties, slim, large honey-brown eyes. “Yeah, I used to work for her, but I’m going to Boalt Law School now,” he says, shaking his head.

Hard?

“Oh man. You KNOW it is. I never see anyone anymore.”

The older woman nods.

It’s 9:20 now and the high of the rush is shouldering. The air lightens, almost like a long exhale. The swinging of the kitchen doors lingers longer, servers at the counter lean on one elbow while taking orders, Benjamin takes some sips out of a coffee cup.  Etta, suddenly louder, fills the room.

Snippets of conversation separate from the background and become distinct:

“I was nearly hit on my bike this morning by a lady driving on her cell phone. She didn’t see me at all.”

“Stanford looks like it’s trying to be legit this year.”

“I’m a taxi driver.” “Where?” “San Francisco.”

Servers in black long-sleeve shirts glide through the café.  The juice machine squeezes oranges into liquid in the corner.

At 9:40 a middle-aged woman with curly hair rises from the counter and roller skates to the register. She pays and glides out into the bright blue day.

Benjamin talks to everyone.  “I used to work in the military,” he says, “and I’m trained as a cook. But I’d rather make minimum wage here where I can talk to people, chat up the customers, relax and enjoy myself than make $16 and hour someplace where everyone has egos and I have to be stiff.”

A tall male customer down the counter agrees.  He’s wearing red and blue flannel and shoes splattered with paint.

“I worked a six-figure salary when I was younger,” he says, “but you know what it got me? The same stuff—only more expensive. And then you have to hire people to watch your stuff.  Naw. I don’t need that.”

The customer shakes his head and then stares out the broad plate glass window for a several minutes before finishing his coffee.  A server gets some food from the kitchen, sits at the end of the counter, and begins eating.  More people now leave through the front door than come in.

By 10:00, empty seats at the counter end the jubilant exchange. Customers withdraw inward: They eat, drink, pay, and, with a wave, leave. Staff turn their attention to each other, standing in bunches quietly talking and glancing occasionally out to their tables. A couple of servers still circle, coffee pots in hand, topping off the few customers seated at tables in the back of the restaurant.

The man in the red flannel is the only one left at the counter. Soon he too pays and exits.

The kitchen doors stand still now and Etta, growing ever more bold, croons “Sunday Kind of Love” to a field of empty chairs and tables topped with crumpled sections of the Chronicle.  At just past 10, even the persistent clamor of the kitchen dies down, the last to surrender to the gravity of late morning.

Some families hand down dishware and handmade quilts. Other families hand down aliases, casino luck, and hip-smashing, hard-hitting, skirt-rocking roller sports.  Jane Hammer’s family falls into the second category.

Team captain and coach for The Oakland Outlaws roller derby team, Hammer got her skates, alias, and red-ringleted curls from her grandmother–the original “Jane Hammer.” She also inherited the grit and focus necessary for today’s all-female sport, which is a far cry from the last century’s roller derby.

“People think of roller derby and they think, ‘Oh, how cute,’” says Hammer, 32, who in her civilian life is named Jen Atherley.  “But  then they come out and see us on the track–and they step  back.”

In its first incarnation, roller derby was a co-ed spectacle  on wheels.  Originating in Chicago during the 1930’s as depression-era entertainment disguised as endurance sport, it featured contestants “skating  across the country” by clocking up to 4,000 miles around a banked circular track. Derby founder Jerry Selzer added staged  fights and falls to keep audiences intrigued and, with the rise of television, the choreographed race enjoyed a love affair with Americans through the ’40s and ’50s.  By the 1970’s derby had morphed into a hard-hitting team sport in which the goal had shifted from simply  winning a race to actively using one’s torso to physically bump opposing players off the track or hem them in. A New York Times article from 1972, headlined “Roller Derby Women Have Ups and Downs” opened with: “You don’t have to love violence to be a woman Roller Derby skater, but it helps.”

If it helped to like violence in the seventies, skaters in today’s tough, athletic version of the sport have to crave it. After diving underground for a couple of decades, roller derby rose again in new form–women only, and raced on an unbanked oval track–in 2004 with the formation of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association. This version plays like a mash-up between rugby and a flat-out skate race. Teams play offensively and defensively at the same time, skating side by side in the same direction as fast and hard as they can, with each side fielding a “jammer” whose job it is to push past the other team’s players and complete a lap. Each lap scores a point. The rest of the team jockeys to help their own jammer advance while simultaneously thwarting the other team’s scorer. This often involves slamming directly, and with considerable force, into skaters from the other team.

Hammer, left, skates behind her team during warm up

“It’s a very physical sport.” Atherley says. “It has actually become a movement, in terms of women’s full-contact sports.”

Atherley’s road to derby queen began in her hometown of Las Vegas, where she skated mainly at friends’ birthday parties. Her childhood of casual skating changed, however, when she was nine and her grandmother hit the $35,000 jackpot at The Horseshoe Casino.

“My grandmother loved two things–wrestling and roller derby,” Hammer says.  Her grandmother, whose real name was Margaret Scoogle Tribbey, was a bill collector who like many collectors used an alias to protect herself from angry debtors. The alias she used was “Jane Hammer.”

First thing after winning it big, Tribbey took her granddaughter down to the Crystal Palace roller rink and bought her a pair of toothpaste-white speed skates with bright orange wheels.

“They were beautiful,” Atherley says. “They were low on the ankle, which made them cool, and they had really stiff leather and were three sizes too big. I loved them. They gave me blisters for years and I had to wear three pairs of socks and stuff tissue into the toes, but I loved them. I cleaned the wheels every time I wore them. They were an absolute vision to me.”

Nine-year-old Atherley joined the Crystal Palace roller rink’s speed skating team and quickly became addicted.

“I would lay in bed at night and dream of skating,” she says. “Skating was my life.”

Outlaws bench with Hammer, #777, on the right

Speed skating is a race on wheels. Individuals  compete as part of a team against other individuals and  teams, the way a track runner might compete individually in the 100-meter dash as part of a school team. The Crystal Palace had a particularly good coach, and even though Atherley never made it to the regional or national level, she learned a good deal of technique for whipping around a track.

She raced until a “super traumatic” fall at 11 left her with three broken teeth and a split chin.  Her parents encouraged her to continue skating, but the hours spent in a dentist’s chair were too much for her. She quit the speed skating team and instead took up Jam Skating which she describes as “break dancing on wheels.”

Atherley didn’t come across women’s flat-track roller derby until she moved to San Francisco in 2007.  After years in the restaurant industry, she was holding her first day job as an office manager at an engineering firm, which left her nights free to skate. She joined a newbie derby class.

“When I walked in, the home teams were scrimmaging,” she says, “and women were flying across the track. I mean through the air. Flying.” Flashbacks of broken teeth and split chin flooded her mind. “I had to go into the bathroom immediately to collect myself.”

Despite the dentist flashbacks, Atherley left the bathroom and continued with the class. Even with her background in skating, she describes the class as incredibly hard. After the class came try-outs and, once she made the team, she needed to choose a roller derby name and number. Atherley adopted her grandmother’s collecting name and chose her winning jackpot number: 777.

Outlaws practice blocking

On the official, nationwide skating name website, “Jane  Hammer” looks tame beside the likes of “Everlasting  Broadstopper” and “Bloodweiser.” On the track, however, Hammer is anything but. “The Hammer” is the team’s  lead scorer, inspiration and coach.

“I totally had a little derby crush on her,” says Nicole  Makris, aka Tramplesteelskin (or, less formally, Trample). Unlike Atherley, Makris first learned to roller skate on the derby track. She skated along the wall, using it for support, for several weeks during the training class last  year.

“I was really struggling,” Makris says. “I remember one time Hammer gave  me this huge whip that I just wasn’t ready for”–in a “whip” one player grabs the forearm of another who pivots her body to swing the teammate around and propel her forward– “and I  completely face-planted. I got up saying, ‘Sorry, sorry,’ and she just said ‘Good recovery, great job. Way to get back on your feet.’ I was super embarrassed, and kept thinking ‘I just fell on my face in front of the coach of The Outlaws,’but she was so nice and cool about it.”

Skating skills are great, Atherley says, but they’re not what lands a skater a coveted position on the Oakland Outlaws.

“Tenacity,” she says. “Tenacity, fire and drive is what we look for. Trample broke her wrist in our beginner newbie class, and she came back with a cast to finish the class and tried out for the league. I mean, there’s no way we could not put her on the league. She clearly wants it.  You can tell.”

Wanting it pays dividends on the track.

A late October championship match-up at Herbst pavilion in Fort Mason between The Outlaws and the Richmond Wrecking Belles was an adrenaline-fueled, floodlight washed, punk-music backed battle between the league’s two toughest teams. A record 1,400 fans packed the house for the end of season nail-biter.

Fans gather in Herbst Pavillion

Roller derby rules go something like this: Each team fields three skaters known as “blockers,” plus a “pivot” who  serves as a goalie or last line of defense.  Pivots and blockers from both teams skate in an eight person “pack”.  Several yards behind the pack are  two  “jammers”  who try to break through the opposing team’s pack and then skate around the track in order to score points.  Each lap scores a point. The pack uses every imaginable torso slam–no forearm, hand, foot or lower leg blocks allowed– to prevent opposing jammers from breaking through while simultaneously using their bodies to create holes for their own jammer to skate safely through.

Games, called “bouts”, are played in two halves, and the team with the most points at the end of the second half wins.

The Outlaws and the Wrecking Belles traded leads back and forth for a while, with Hammer using strong fast strides to barrel through Belles and score for Oakland.  When she was off the track Hammer coached from the sidelines, welcoming roughed-up players back to the bench or yelling to her players over the stadium-throbbing music.  Because she believes in getting everyone in the game, Oakland sent a rookie blocker in for a couple of rounds.  But the Richmond team hit hard, the newbie was flung around on the track, and by the time she came back, Hammer used the word “annihilated” and let her rest. At the half it was Belles 40, Outlaws 35.  In derby, like basketball, that’s pretty much neck and neck.

Hammer coaches from sidelines

The second half started ugly–”utility failures,” Hammer calls them. Rough House Rhonda, for example, kept losing a wheel that disrupted play as it wobbled across the track. The Belles ratcheted up.  Maybe they smelled blood.  Hits in the second half came thick and fast. Hammer plugged the gaps as fast as she could off the track and continued to score when she was on, but Richmond was too strong. With thirteen minutes left , it was Richmond 94- Oakland 44.

Hammer yelled from the sidelines, huddled her team in vigorous pep talks, challenged penalty calls from the refs. But in the end it wasn’t good enough–the Wrecking Belles beat the Oakland Outlaws, 118 to 74.

Hammer was philosophical in a veteran coach manner.  “As far as dealing with the unexpected,” Atherley said afterward, “as far as applying duct tape and glue to keep wheels on and keep the machine running until the end, I think I did a good job.”

She’s harder on herself when it comes to her commitment to get everyone off the bench and into the game.

“It was so physical that I was afraid we’d see massive injuries, like broken necks, if we put people out there who weren’t used to being hit that hard,” Atherley says. “There was a lot of fear out there. I was also yelling.  So from a coaching perspective, I didn’t really meet the standard I set for myself.”

The standards Atherley sets for team play are high. When she joined the Outlaws, the team was led by a few superstars who got all the track time while many players never left the bench. Atherley helped change that by making room for everyone and by working hard in service of both the team and the league.

“Her leadership is very apparent,” Makris says. “She doesn’t hit you over the head with it. I wasn’t surprised when I found out she was an office manager, because I consistently saw her just taking care of business with things that needed to happen in the league or motivating people to go out and do this flyering event or organize that fundraiser.”

The Bay Area Derby Girls (B.A.D) is an all-volunteer league that consists of the Outlaws, the Belles, the San Francisco ShEvil Dead and the B.A.D. All-stars–a nationally competitive team made up of the top players from each of the locals. The teams do everything themselves, from gathering the sponsors to promoting the bouts to spending all day taping out the tracks and setting up the bleachers.

“Whatever money comes from the bout and from the beer sales goes back to paying our rent and being able to rent out the pavilion,” says Makris.  “The idea that the league consists of 80 women coming together to basically run an organization is just as key as how athletic the sport actually is. We’re running this organization by ourselves because we want to skate.”

Oakland's Outlaws take a lap

Although she works full time as an office manager, now at a software company,  Atherley still devotes a good deal of time to the team and to the  league. The night before the championship bout, she  flyered at two events, including a roller disco, and then  spent most of game day gathering donated kegs, bleachers  and scoreboards scattered throughout the city.

She does it, she says, because roller derby is more than a  sport. It is the place outside ordinary day-to-day life where  she is consistently tested and bumps up against her  strength and limitations.

“Even the position I play is a metaphor for my life,” she  says. “I’m the jammer, the one burling down through the  pack trying to make it happen. Everyone wants to kick my  butt, so I need to find what it takes to barrel through.”

In the afternoons before each game, Atherley lies on her bed, turns off the lights, closes her eyes and carefully envisions how the bout will go.

“I just replay, replay, replay everything in my head,” she says. “When I picture the perfect jam, I line up at the starting line and I get my breathing going. I look ahead at my pack and they’re all looking at each other.  Then, at exactly the same time, they turn around and look at me. There’s a swagger they have, a don’t-even-mess-with-me kind of a look. Then the whistle blows and, as I burl forward, I can see every single hole because my blockers are pushing everyone aside at the perfect moments. Its like swiss cheese out there and I skate through each hole. Then, the pivot tries to get me and I completely lay her out.”

Hammer at the starting line

And, of course, the announcers yell “Jane Hammer!!” through the loudspeaker, as she whizzes round the track.

Atherley’s derby name keeps close at hand the original Jane Hammer who hit it big at The Horseshoe a couple decades ago.

“It’s tremendous when you take on someone else’s name,” Atherley says. “It’s a tremendous responsibility. My grandma was such an awesome lady. This name was a part of her and she worked so hard and did such a great job. It inspires me to try to be the same.”

Her grandmother, Atherley says, stood apart from other bill collectors because she got to know debtors and was nice to them instead of simply using threats. She got the job done, but did it in a more genteel way.

Decades later, Atherley made it onto a regional Bay Area Derby Girls All-star team that competed well nationally, but the team was often booed for unsportsmanlike conduct . Along with a several other skaters, Atherley helped turn that culture around. The skaters even went so far as to launch what Atherley laughingly calls a  “We’re Nice” campaign: transforming the internal dynamic of the team. So, everyone got off the bench, developed a more sportsmanlike approach to other teams, and, importantly, wore headbands at competitions that said “We’re nice”. It was all part of following in her grandmother’s footsteps.

“I went to my mom first,” Atherley says of her decision to take on her grandmother’s name. “I said ‘Do you think it would be OK if I took grandma’s name as my skate name?’ and she said, ‘Absolutely. I think she’d be so proud to know that was your choice.’ I think she’s right because now I feel safe when I go out skating. Like she’s up there and I have a guardian angel.”

There’s a catch in her voice that she swallows before continuing.

“You know, it gives me pride when I meet someone and they ask me, ‘Who are you?’” Atherley says.   “And I say: ‘I’m Jane Hammer.’”

Veterans and their families from throughout the East Bay gathered aboard the USS Hornet on November 11th, 2009 to celebrate Veterans Day.  They celebrated the freedoms fought for by America’s armed forces, honored the fallen with a moment of silence and–with a single bugle playing Taps–remembered those killed at Fort Hood the prior week.

Interactive Feature

Place cursor on slider to manually navigate through slideshow

Roll your cursor over states to find current laws on civil unions and gay marriage.

Sources:

Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “States with Constitutional Amendments Banning Gay Marriage” July 2009

NPR, “State by State: The Legal Battle Over Gay Marriage” September 1, 2009

Reuters, “Factbox: U.S. laws on gay marriage, civil unions” November 4, 2009

National Conference of State Legislatures, “Same Sex Marriage, Civil Unions and Domestic Partnerships” October, 2009

The proposal to create a bike route along 40th St allowing bikers to access the MacArthur BART station and connect north-south bike lanes went over swimmingly last week in Mosswood. But when Jason Patton, City of Oakland Bicycle and Pedestrian Program Manager, explained the plan to Longfellow residents last night, he was facing a much tougher crowd.

Well over 50 North Oakland residents packed the house at the North Oakland Community Charter School in Longfellow to express varying shades of disgruntlement at the concept that Patton laid out before them.

The proposal, which took a decade to refine and thirty minutes to lay out, would create two east-west bike corridors–one on West MacArthur Blvd and the other on 40th/41st streets. These corridors pass the MacArthur BART station on either side and the 40th street bike lane connect Piedmont to Emeryville, eventually ending up at the yet-to-be-constructed Bay Bridge bicycle onramp.

The idea is part of a comprehensive transit plan designed to create links between cycling and public transportation. The east-west routes plug many gaps: they connect the north-south routes, connect cyclists to BART and facilitate bike-bus-BART transportation.

The city first considered making room for the 40th street bike lane by eliminating a traffic lane, but AC transit objected. 40th is a major bus corridor and AC transit fears that traffic created by bringing 40th down to one lane would discourage bus use. Slowing busses also adds expense since more busses will be added to keep the lines running on time. Patton said the idea of shutting down a traffic lane was taken off the table because the city didn’t want to discourage bus use in their efforts to promote cycling.

Instead, the current proposal calls for removing some medians and reducing the width of the traffic lanes to make room for the bike lane. In order to work, the plan would also move streetlights from medians to sidewalks and rework some concrete gutters. These, plus other costs, bring the cost to a gasp-eliciting $1 million.

Once the plan was laid out—complete with blown up aerial photographs—the floor was opened to questions.

Hands shot up.

The opening volley was led by Ahmed, a sinewy cyclist and real estate agent. He began his comments carefully, making sure that Patton understood how much he appreciated city government considering cycling and public transportation in such comprehensive terms. Then he described what, for many in the room, was the crux of the issue.

Over the past few years, neighbors and community members have come together to green medians and embankments up and down 40th and along MacArthur as part of a civic engagement process that has gained substantial momentum. An area of Oakland that was once fractured and disconnected, and therefore more vulnerable to crime, was suddenly banding together to reclaim their neighborhoods by taking control of barren landscapes and injecting them with life. This isn’t just beautification, Ahmed said—this is how neighbors become involved with each other and begin to take pride in the place they live. He said  ripping out the medians to create bike lanes at this moment would rob the community of momentum and deflate its  spirit.

He likened the neighborhood to a bride on her wedding day. The plan to remove medians, he said, is going “to take her dress, smear her make up, shave her head and pare her down to a tank top.”

The audience, which had held itself back during the formal presentation, burst into applause. It was as though the room was a shaken soda and the top had just been cracked.

Several speakers spoke next about the importance of keeping the community planted spaces and raised concerns about the wisdom of putting a bike lane on such a busy street. Then a tall red-haired fellow floated an alternative “road diet” proposal that would remove a lane of traffic, put in the bike lane and widen the sidewalk. The idea, he said, is that restricting car lanes can encourage alternative transportation habits and actually reduce the number of people in cars and might keep busses moving at a normal speed.

A kerfuffle ensued as people expressed agreement and reservations.

Another proposal was floated to look to Auckland’s system of implementing shared bike/bus lanes. While it might sound counterintuitive, she said, the system works well, since buses are fast-tracked and pay more attention to cyclists.

By the final minutes of the meeting, the room was a mixture of frustration and energy. Waves had moved through the assembly as it moved from the broad troughs of thoughtful arguments to the crests of people yelling over each other to be heard.

Towards the end, a young woman from outside the neighborhood ventured a reminder that she could sense would not go over well. She’s not from Longfellow, she said, and she doesn’t live on 40th. But she rides up and down 40th to commute and just wanted the crowd to remember that a bike route that connects other bike routes and links to BART will affect Bay Area residents outside the room.

She reminded the group that, while the needs and concerns of the neighborhood were valid, there were commuters from outside Longfellow to consider.

“There are also our trees to consider,” someone countered with a whisper-shout.

She paused for a second before continuing. “The road diet,” she said, “seems to be the middle ground.”

“Show of hands for who likes the road diet idea,” the facilitator asked and the room became a lawn of hands.

Jason looked weary. The median gardeners looked hopeful.

“Sign up on the sheet in the back,” Jason said, “and I’ll be going back to look at alternatives to do a pros and cons for the next meeting.”

With that, neighbors rose from chairs into standing bunches and from bunches out into the night.

At Fruitvale BART station on Wednesday morning riders were reluctant to share their thoughts on the change of venue in the Mehserle trial. While many shared detailed and passionate opinions off-camera, most wouldn’t venture in front due to the touchy subject matter. Here are a few brave souls who decided to speak their minds.

Tony Anziano’s office is in a trailer just off West Grand Avenue near the Bay Bridge toll plaza. An unmanned guard station squats in the middle of the lot entrance where white trucks with orange stripes come and go, kicking up small puffs of dirt. To an outsider, the mix of buildings and trailers, concrete and dirt, give the place an appearance of indecision, as though this Caltrans field office is teetering between being a temporary command center and settling in for a long, hard slog.

On the inside, Anziano’s office is simple: a few chairs and a desk engulfed by large binders, books and thousands of sheets of paper. He is the Toll Bridge Program Manager for Caltrans and oversees a significant portion of the Bay Bridge retrofit now in its eleventh year. Because of the construction’s location in the heart of major migration routes for birds, fish and marine mammals, the retrofit has raised a host of environmental questions, many of which remain unanswered today.

Twenty years ago this week, the Loma Prieta earthquake pancaked a section of the Bay Bridge, killing a motorist and launching the long, and often troubled, retrofit project. The first decade saw so much squabbling between Bay Area cities, the state and the Navy over design, features, location and cost of the new eastern span that the White House facilitated negotiations in 1999 to break through the stalemate.

The retrofit’s environmental review process wasn’t much easier. The final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was released in May 2001 after four years of consultation and struggle between Caltrans and regulatory agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), the California Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the SF Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. “We touch on everything,” Anziano says, “which is why we are probably the most regulated entity in the country.”

Caltrans Field Office

Concerns at the time ranged from whether dredging the ocean floor would stir up toxics hazardous to marine life to debates about the extent of Caltrans’ responsibility for cleaning up oily stormwater runoff to the effects of construction sediment on the eelgrass beds that form the habitat and food for many bay-dwelling species.

Now, eight years after the impact statement was released, some of the ecological concerns raised early on have fallen away while other unforeseen problems have sprung up, prompting Caltrans to develop some innovative solutions. The agency is now building a very unusual garden to deal with the problem of stormwater runoff and constructing an entire island to mitigate the retrofit’s encroachment on fading bird habitat.

It also turned to novel new technology to handle one surprise that popped up in 2000 just before construction was set to begin on the new eastern span. The surprise was exploding fish.

The Bubble Curtain

The exploding fish problem had its origins in the sheer size of the pilings needed for the new suspension bridge that will eventually connect Oakland to Treasure Island.

Pilings for the original 1936 Bay Bridge were crafted out of solid rounds of Douglas Fir and driven 170 feet into the top mud layers of the ocean floor. In contrast, the piles for the new eastern span are 365 ton 8 1/2 foot diameter steel rods driven up to 300 feet into bedrock.

Because this was the first time pilings of this magnitude were driven in an urban environment, Caltrans conducted a Piling Impact Demonstration Project in October 2000. They tested the rods by driving three of them into the seafloor.

“These pilings were huge,” says National Marine Fisheries Service biologist David Woodbury, who joined the project in 2000 to monitor its impact on endangered fish species. “They brought in the world’s second largest hammer to deal with them. You take a big hollow steel pole and hit it with the world’s second largest hammer and it’s like an enormous wind chime. The pressure waves were enormous.”

Fisheries expert Bud Abbott was running his own consulting firm when he found out about the demonstration project. He called Caltrans to warn that the pressure waves from such powerful blows could harm, or even kill, fish and marine mammals in the bay.

Caltrans proceeded with the test anyway, which, according to the agency’s web site, struck each pile with the force of a car meeting a brick wall at 365 miles per hour. Enormous pressure waves radiated out and fish began surfacing belly up. Some exploded with such force, Abbott says, that their guts spilled out.

What happened? It turns out that many fish species possess a sac of gas called a swim bladder that helps them regulate buoyancy. When the pressure part of a sound wave contacts the bladder it compresses, and when low-pressure part follows, it quickly expands.

“The expansion,” Abbott says, “is rifle-shot fast. The tissue can’t accommodate such rapid changes. It happens in milliseconds and the tissue in the swim bladder breaks. The fish literally explodes.”

The exact number of fish was hard to determine, says Woodbury, since seagulls ate the kills much faster than biologists could maneuver their boats to collect them. “I would not be surprised if it were thousands of fish,” he says, “considering that the bay is a nursery ground and very small fish are numerous.” Small fish typically travel in dense schools and are highly sensitive to injury from sound pressure. Woodbury says their small size also makes them more vulnerable to currents so they might be unwillingly pushed into areas with dangerously strong sound.

The Bay Bridge is just to the south of a major migration route for young fish, including endangered salmon and steelhead, who make their way from their spawning grounds in the Central Valley out the Golden Gate and into the open ocean.

Caltrans needed to figure out how to hammer in the pilings without killing these protected species, so the agency called Abbott to autopsy what he describes as “ice chests of dead fish,” and to make recommendations about how to avoid future fish casualties.

“I opened up the fish and saw that they’d erupted,” he says. “They were full of blood and their swim bladders had ruptured.”

Abbott suggested using an underwater wall of air called a “bubble curtain” to attenuate, or dampen down, the sound waves produced by pile driving. The explosives industry, he says, had previously used blankets of bubbles to attenuate underwater noise with some positive results. To their credit, Abbott says, Caltrans started the process of designing and implementing the curtain right away.

Bridge construction just east of Treasure Island

James Reyff, a hyroacoustics expert with Illingworth and Rodkin, a Petaluma-based firm hired to consult on the project, says a bubble curtain works by exploiting the enormous density difference between air and water. Though it may sound counter-intuitive, air slows sound far more effectively than water. In fact, sound waves travel 4.4 times slower through air than through water.

Furthermore, Reyff says, “Air and water have what scientists and engineers call an impedance mismatch.” This mismatch means that sound loses pressure when the waves cross the boundary from water into air, or vice-versa. So the curtain works two ways: The air itself reduces the strength of sound waves, while the process of traveling between mediums further erodes them.

To create a bubble curtain, the piling to be driven is placed within a perforated tube at the bottom of a large cylinder. Compressed air is then pumped through the tube creating a thick wall of bubbles surrounding the pile. After careful study of existing designs, particularly ones used in Canada and Hong Kong, Caltrans decided to improve the process by adding an additional bubble-producing ring slightly above the bottom one.

In December, 2002, the agency tested its version by driving more piles, some within the curtain and some without. While the range of attenuation varied considerably, Caltrans found that the curtain reduced sound levels by up to 20 decibels — a pressure drop of 90 percent.

“It’s the difference,” says Woodbury, “between fish floating to the surface with exploded swim bladders and not.”

The curtain was a revelation for the Bay Bridge retrofit process and for Caltrans’ other underwater construction projects. Environmental teams at both the Benecia-Martinez bridge and the Richmond-San Rafael bridge had initially failed to use the curtain and, as a result, also ended up killing fish. The curtain’s success on the Bay Bridge project paved the way for its later use on those bridges and throughout California.

Because each curtain does not always attenuate the same amount of sound to the same degree, both NOAA and Caltrans are still monitoring how well they work. ”We are collecting data on every single project throughout the state,” says Anziano. “We don’t just look at peak noise. We look at how the accumulation of sound affects fish behavior.”

In 2004 Caltrans worked with the NOAA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Oregon Department of Transportation, the California Department of Fish and Game, and the U.S. Federal Highway Administration to form the West Coast Fisheries Hydroacoustic Working Group. Together they investigated how spikes in sound affect fish, the factors that influence bubble curtain operation and appropriate noise limits for underwater construction sound. Noise limits were formally proposed in June 2008 and since then, says Galvez-Abadia, Caltrans has held to these standards.

“Caltrans now leads the West Coast in bubble curtain technology,” says Abbott. “In Oregon there are over 400 major bridges that need to be replaced. They’re using California and Washington standards and they’re using bubble curtains.”

The work pioneered on the Bay Bridge project is also piquing the interest of scientists abroad. For example, Danish work crews building wind farms were bumping against similar underwater sound questions. In 2004, they convened a gathering of scientists to pool knowledge on the subject. Woodbury served on the hydroacoustic working group and traveled to the conference.

“My intention in attending the conference was to learn how others were dealing with this issue,” he says. “Interestingly, I found out that we were on the cutting edge. We ended up sending several attendees much of what we had learned on the West Coast.”

Meanwhile, above the water line, Caltrans was undertaking a second environmental engineering pilot project. This one uses an innovative garden to treat oil- and grease-laden stormwater runoff that would otherwise end up in the bay.

The Rainwater Garden

Stefan Galvez-Abadia, Caltrans’ Environmental Compliance Manager for the Bay Bridge retrofit, drives along a side road just off the eastbound lanes of 580 in the no man’s land between the toll plaza, Emeryville and the loading docks of Oakland. Freeway overpasses shout overhead like a quarterback’s count: 580, 80, 880.

He pulls through a chain-link fence, parks and steps out into a large field punctuated by four-foot high earthen embankments surrounding a series of basins. The swimming pool-sized basins resemble small drained lakes, each hosting a variety of shrubs and reeds with a foot-wide concrete canal system winding between them. California blackberry, oatgrass, salt grass, coyote brush and monkey flower appear to scatter randomly across the landscape, but the plants are here for a reason. Their roots to help maintain an open soil structure that water can percolate through. In addition, microbes on the roots may help break down some of the toxins in the stormwater runoff that flows off of the surrounding freeways every time it rains.

Galvez-Abadia peers down a drain in the rainwater garden

Galvez-Abadia dons his yellow safety vest and white helmet, and hops between embankments as he describes the project in an elegant Spanish accent.

“This is a $16.5 to $17 million garden,” he says, “and that’s just the capital costs. It doesn’t include design.”

Combined, the basins and plants form the beginnings of a pilot project that, Galvez-Abadia says, will treat nearly 150 acres of urban stormwater runoff without the use of chemicals. The basins shallowly pool the water for up to 48 hours. This thin spread allows for maximum surface area as the water makes its way through the layers of mulch and sand that form the garden’s primary filter.

While rainwater gardens are not particularly new, this project is noteworthy for its sheer size. Keith Lichten, Senior Water Resource Control Engineer for the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, calls the garden “an innovation.”

He also says that Caltrans resisted building it.

New Clean Water Act regulations went into effect at the dawn of the retrofit project requiring Caltrans to capture, store and treat stormwater runoff across all its freeway projects state-wide. “Caltrans didn’t want to comply,” Lichten says.

According to Anziano, Caltrans was not against stormwater treatment in principle, but the additional weight of capturing and holding tons of water across the bridge would throw off the engineering and potentially demand an entirely new design.

Lichten, who enforces permit violations for the water board, says that Caltrans ducked the issue by simply designing the bridge without a stormwater system. “So at the eleventh hour we found ourselves in a bind,” he says. The water board could not overlook a major violation, but it was reluctant to further delay an important seismic retrofit that had taken over a decade to break ground.

Caltrans, meanwhile, was caught between a major permit violation and redesigning the bridge. The two parties sat down and hammered out a solution.

The area around and immediately east of the toll plaza was of primary concern to the water board because stop-and-go traffic along the freeways and toll plaza spill more oil, grease and brake fluid than traffic flowing across the bridge. Ultimately, Caltrans agreed to focus its stormwater collection and treatment efforts in that area instead of redesigning the bridge.

The rainwater garden pilot project broke ground in April 2006 and is notable not only for its size, but also because it marked a change in how Caltrans approaches the state’s clean water requirements. Anziano says that the agreement was the first time the agency worked to meet a permit requirement by looking at the bigger picture and negotiating an outside-of-the-box solution. “Now it’s part of regular practice,” he says.

Rain garden basin near MacArthur Maze

The garden was finished last year, but the monitoring is ongoing and the results of how effectively it filters toxins from stormwater are not in, says Galvez-Abadia. “It might not filter out 100% of everything,” he says, “which is why we’ll continue monitoring it.”

The new garden could have some pleasant side-effects though, he says. “Over there is where the bike path will come in,” he says, pointing to the southeast corner of the basin system. “There will be a viewing station over there where people can see the project.” If the plants and pools provide a habitat for birds, “Well,” he says, “then that would be ok too.”

The reference is a bit of a wink. While the garden is specifically designed to treat stormwater, Galvez-Abadia knows that any bird habitat in the area around the MacArthur Maze is a good thing.

In fact, making sure that birds have a place to roost near the retrofit is one of Caltrans’ newest environmental projects.

Bird Island

Across the highway from the basins is the natural wetlands habitat called “the Emeryville Crescent,” or simply, “the crescent.” Former Golden Gate Audubon Director Arthur Feinstein says the area is such rare and critical habitat for birds that in the late 1990s, the organization partnered with The Sierra Club to sue Caltrans over the expansion of I-880 into the crescent.

According to Feinstein, the crescent is one of the most important bird habitats in the Bay Area. “Sixty to seventy percent of migrating birds use the Albany Mudflats and the Emeryville Crescent,” he says. Migratory birds can lose up to forty percent of their body weight in the journey from the arctic to South America. According to Feinstein, they rely on the crescent as a crucial fattening-up point. “They’re here to rest and to eat,” he says.

Increasing shoreline development, however, means birds are running out of places to stay. “Birds don’t have places to go at high tide because we’ve built up all around it,” he says. “Biologists have seen shorebirds standing on top of shorebirds at high tide.”

In their desperation to find roosting habitat, migrating birds began occupying old duck blinds abandoned by hunters. These blinds are dilapidated, however, and are slowly sinking into the bay.

Although the bridge retrofit is not expected have an enormous impact on the crescent,  given the area’s fragile state, bird advocates asked Caltrans for mitigation measures.

The Emeryville Crescent just off the I-80 Toll Plaza

“The bridge project,” Galvez-Abadia says, “doesn’t result in significant reduction of roosts, but the Audubon said ‘Wait a minute’ so we sat down with them to try to address their concerns. We came up with seven or eight different options.”

Eventually, he says, Caltrans took a really novel approach: The agency designed an island constructed of large rocks to serve as an alternative bird hangout.  The plan calls for a trapezoidal-shaped mound of boulders with 500 square feet of roosting area at high tide. The project is expected to break ground next month.

Mike Lynes, Conservation Director for the Golden Gate Audubon Society, thinks birds will probably take to this artificial resting spot. “I can’t tell you if birds are going to use it, but I think they will,” he says. “I think birds in the bay crave any place they can roost.”

Caltrans does not have a back-up plan if the birds do not take to the man-made island, however, and does not plan to maintain the island after building it. It is also unclear who will monitor the efficacy of the island after construction.

“Agencies recognize that there’s no success criteria,” Galvez-Abadia says. “You can’t say you will have X number of birds per year. Once we’ve built it, that’s it.”

The ultimate success of Caltrans’ other environmental innovations also remains blurry. With at least four years of the retrofit project left to go, the final balance of its ecological impact remains to be weighed. Right now, Galvez-Abadia says, the most the agency can do is monitor the construction’s impacts, gather data and attempt to mitigate environmental consequences.

“No one has the answers right now,” he says. “No one knows that X plus Y equals Z. There are a lot of factors in these things and the only way to know is to monitor. Then more innovations come.”

Eight choirs. One night. Fifteen thousand fans. Watch the singers of Oakland’s Genesis Worship Center as they take the stage in the “Best Choir in America” competition.

Frank Snapp walks up 40^th Street, just east of Broadway, with a wheelbarrow full of plants and a plastic green garden hose slung in rounds over his shoulder. His olive sunhat shades denim blue eyes. It’s a 78-degree day in North Oakland and the heat rising off the asphalt makes it seem even hotter, but the fair-skinned, red-haired Snapp is in his element.

He is a gardener like many gardeners, but three things set him apart: He has a remarkable depth of knowledge about native and drought-resistant plants. He can talk about them non-stop with apparently little need for breath. And the gardens he tends are, technically, illegal, built into abandoned city medians and embankments.

“I guess I am a guerrilla gardener,” Snapp says, as he drops the hose and plants in a shady, verdant spot in the embankment. He wipes his glistening brow before heading back down 40^th Street, away from the embankment, towards Opal Street.  As he walks, he describes the plants he’s nursed for over seven years as well as the soil they’re planted in. “Both the embankment and the median were saturated in Roundup,” he says, referring to the Monsanto-manufactured weed-killer much loathed by organic gardeners.  “For the embankment, I actually had to bring soil in. All that soil you see there was either trucked in or else I borrowed a friend’s truck to bring it in myself.”

Snapp uses abandoned public spaces to create demonstration gardens of what he calls “appropriate plants.”  These are nearly all drought-resistant and non-invasive varieties that, to the trained eye, reveal a storied landscape rich in Oakland’s past, present and potential future.  Some are here because they thrived in this landscape prior to human habitation, others because they are suited to this climate, but face extinction in their original home.                                                                                

Snapp cultivates his two publicly-owned gardens with the patience of a plant scientist and the cultural memory of an artist. This median came first. He planted it in the winter of 2002 just after moving to Oakland from New York State. He had begun guerrilla gardening in Rochester, but his non-permitted gardens on public property were torn out. He has had better luck in Oakland where the city’s sunnier attitude towards tended gardens on public land have so far allowed his middle-of-the-road habitats to stand. The city has a long turned a blind eye to gardens on public lands, but city budget cuts have actually created a real need for public engagement in Oakland’s green spaces.

Brooke Levin is the assistant director of facilities and the environment within Oakland’s Public Works Agency. She says the city had to make some “pretty major staff reductions in 2008” which affected not only parks, but the greenery on streets, sidewalks and medians. The staff decreases slashed the acreage the department could maintain and the situation was made even worse by last July’s additional cuts. Her department sat down with the parks department’s director “to put our heads together and come up with solutions,” she says.

The first thing they did was triage Oakland’s landscapes. They drew up a list of which green spaces were absolutely necessary to maintain and which would be allowed to fallow. The places the city decided to preserve, Levin says, “included playing fields, areas where the city had invested in capital improvements within the last five years, the grounds of city-owned buildings and parks and recreation facilities.”

The total number of absolutely essential grounds came to approximately 112, leaving the puzzle of what to do with the remaining 200 locations. “We designated these as ‘No routine maintenance locations,’ which means that we’ll mow the ones that need to be mowed, but that’s it,” she says.  “We established some crews to deal with complaints, but they’re really only responding to complaints and really egregious situations.”

They developed signs requesting that volunteers help keep the area free of litter and graffiti. It also lists a complaint hot line. “We’re really hoping that neighborhoods will engage and support these locations,” she says. “But without money, that’s the best we can do.”

Snapp’s original project, the median at the corner of 40^th and Opal, was not driven by budget cuts or a deep sense of civic responsibility. Instead he was motivated by “the free open space and the reality that no one cared about plants or crazy gardeners in medians.”

“I wanted to see what I could get away with,” he says. “This first median was to show people that diversity is possible in urban landscapes. Typically, when people plant in cities it’s in these big repeating patterns,” he says, leaning his head slightly forward while sharpening his gaze. He wants to make sure his meaning is understood. “That is not okay. Patterns like that are not biodiverse and they’re not good for bees,” he says.

Not all guerrilla gardeners are driven by the same motives as Snapp. In recent years, rogue planting has blossomed into an international phenomenon as groups from London, Zurich, New York, Berlin, Australia, Los Angeles and Oakland have planted daisies in newspaper boxes and crafted “seed-bombs” inside biodegradable cardboard grenades. The goals of these kinds of guerrilla gardeners range from rekindling an individual’s connection with city land to feeding the urban poor through food cultivation to, as “Anarkismo” puts it, “an effort to become independent from market economy.” Groups around the globe post videos, blogs and instruction manuals online chronicling their latest exploits or illustrating how to make a shoes that release seeds as a person walks.

While Snapp identifies as a guerrilla gardener, he is unlikely to make it to any meetings. He grows, he says, because he has to grow, because it’s the thing he loves and he does it completely outside any political organization. “I’m a Taurus with a Scorpio moon and a Scorpio rising,” he says by way of explanation. Then, to clarify: “That means I’m not a group person.” 

He is driven to “re-wild” sections of Oakland in a methodical and long-term way, not for idealistic reasons or even political ones. He is patiently developing a biodiversity corridor up and down 40^th Street that will host native bees, hummingbirds and plants.  Each tree, bush and grass here is a step in that direction and, as such, contains both story and purpose.        

Snapp, in cascades of precise and descriptive language, outlines the purpose behind a few: The red-barked Catalina Ironwood at the west end of the median comes from the Channel Islands of Southern California where it adapted to strong Pacific winds. It shields the rest of the plant community from the diurnal winds blowing up 40th Street off the ocean. The long feathered tule grass grows along the banks of Central California rivers and helped to create the region’s ancient lush top soil. Here, tule grass might advance the soil building under layers of thick mulch. The Dr. Seuss-like proteas from South Africa and Australia survived previous global warming and   sulfuric rain events and, Snapp says, will likely live through the coming decades.

Snapp chose this particular median at 40^th and Opal because it is close to his home, and because the sandy, gravelly soil structure lends itself to drought tolerant plants. He walks through the median very slowly, constantly in contact with the plants as he talks about them. “This pellergorium,” he says, his hands erupting in flutter, “is a scented geranium from South Africa and is an incredible bee attractor.” The plant is about five feet tall but otherwise looks like an ordinary potted geranium. “It’s the biodiversity of nectar sources and the distance between them that matters when creating a biodiversity corridor.”

He picks another leaf, this time off a round-leafed bush with vivid blue flowers, and crushes it between his thumb and forefinger before bringing it to his nose and inhaling the scent. “This one is a Ceonothus. It’s a California native that produces both resins and scented essential oils, when stressed by drought,” he says. “The scents released mean that they’re less likely to be eaten by deer and other browsers.”

He overflows with boyish exuberance as he moves from plant to plant and his talk is thick with information and Latin names. His words fly like seeds scattering and his quick blue eyes search the listener’s eyes to determine whether any have caught purchase. “Ceonothus is only one of many examples of herbaceous and woody plants that produce scent,” he says. “I’ve planted several here as examples of drought tolerant plants that also create a scent garden.”

Cars blow by. Then an ambulance with no siren, but lights on. A few school buses full of kids head home from school. Here, in the middle of the road with Frank Snapp, time slows down.  This median is on another timescale and, even though he is as energetic as a hive of bees, he’s also deeply attuned to the metronome of this place. As his words tumble out in rich waves, Snapp bends into the middle of the median, his thick fingers gingerly holding the seedpods of grasses and reeds as they bend in the late afternoon wind.

Snapp squats on his haunches and picks up some material from an exposed area of his median. “The rubble and dirt substrate is a holdover of the Key cable car route that used to run all up and down 40^th,” he says. In the first part of the twentieth century, the Key System followed 40th Street, crossed Howe Street and merged into Piedmont Avenue before the green and white streetcars were taken out of commission in 1948. “Everything has a past,” Snapp says. “I didn’t choose this median because it had that past, but I nearly choked when I found out.”

This immediate connection with the past seems appropriate. Snapp designs with past and future in mind, mingling grasses native to Oakland’s original oak and  grasslands with members of plant communities that used to inhabit more southerly climates. “Ecosystems,” he says, “are moving north due to global warming. Certain Southern California plants are already appropriate here. I don’t look forward to catastrophic warming, but I do look forward to planting Boojum and fero cactus.”

The median buzzes with bees, butterflies, moths and ants.  Snapp reaches down beneath the woodchip mulch and pulls out a small, leafy scabiosa flowering plant whose roots are covered in a white covering of mycorrhizae, signaling a healthy symbiotic relationship between roots and fungus that helps the plant absorb water and nutrients.

“I got this mulch from beneath a freeway overpass,” Snapp says, turning the plant over in his hands. “The freeway kept it dry so it stayed alive and this fungus is here due to the breakdown of the mulch.”

Mulch and hand watering, he says, are the key to gardening with nature and with community.  “I’m completely against irrigation systems,” he says. “You should water infrequently and deeply. You should water by hand because gardening shouldn’t be about beautification. It should be about biodiversity and developing a relationship to the plant.”

Snapp says his neighbors come out and help him hand water the median, an activity which has actually brought the neighborhood a bit closer. Yoav Tzur, a neighborhood resident and one of the median’s many plant donors, pulls his car over and has a brief conversation with Snapp before taking off again. Another man yells hello from the other side of the street.

“I have a neighbor who comes out and prunes the pear tree on the neighboring median,” Snapp says. “It’s not my median, and a pear tree is completely inappropriate, but she takes care of it and she waters it by hand.”

Brook Levin explains that maintenance is the key to plant-based civic engagement.  Guerrilla gardening, it seems, is loosely tolerated by the city if it comes with a long-term commitment. “We’re supportive of anything a community group can engage in and maintain,” she says. “Some people go out and plant and then call up the city to maintain it. Sometimes we can do that, but often we can’t. If you’re interested in planting in public areas, call us. Have a conversation with us.”

The city, Snapp says, has never gotten in his way but he is aware that the situation could change. “It’s the support of the community and of vocal activists that ensure these gardens stay in place,” he says. But, for the most part, he says, he has been able to do his work unfettered.

“There was one time though towards the beginning of the median project when somebody stole my Euphorbia canariensis which was about three feet tall,” he says, referring to a cactus-like succulent. “I was upset, but eventually forgot all about it. Then, years later, after the rest of this had started to grow in, I came back and there it was! It just reappeared right in the middle of the median. I think whoever it was just realized what was happening here and brought it back.”

Snapp smiles for a bit and, for a little while at least, falls silent.