++ Artwork: San Francisco looking out to the Bay, 1,000 years ago, by Laura Cunningham ++
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the stories beneath the asphalt here in the little suburban neighborhood in northern California where I grew up. It happens sometimes like this that my inner eye tilts far beneath, and suddenly when I’m walking I’m half here — with the jasmine still blooming over front garden fences, and the people out like me walking their dogs, and the climbing roses in pink profusion, and fruit tree petals falling— and half there, down below, wondering about before.
Before, when these neighborhoods were marshland winding dreamily inland from the Bay, thick and damp with tule and cattail and sedge and the ten-thousand waterbirds. Before, when just up the road and down again (over what was once a small hill dotted with live oaks and blue-eyed grass) alongside the creek sat the thriving Coast Miwok village called Anamas, where in 1781 a man called Chief Marin was born. Huicmuse was his birth name in his own language, but he was forcibly baptized as Marino at Mission Dolores in San Francisco in 1801.
There’s a plaque for him on the sidewalk, half hidden now under a boxwood in front of a very manicured house and lawn. A daylighted portion of one of Mill Valley’s big creeks runs through its cement channel in their front garden. I’ve taken to standing on the little bridge looking down at the water, thinking of what it remembers. Trying to imagine what it looked like, right here, when Huicmuse was born, the man whose Spanish-baptized name would become the namesake of the county, though he fought his whole adult life to keep his people’s culture and language free and thriving.
After I stand looking at the water trying to hold what is around me with what is under the cement wanting to burst through, I try to brush the fallen leaves off the plaque so people can actually see it. I’m considering going out in the night with a bucket of paint to embellish the sidewalk around it so you can’t miss it. I wish I could paint the whole street with a mural of Anamas, saying—right here there was a thriving village! Remember remember remember.
Right here where the creek is choked but has never stopped flowing, a little boy named Huicmuse grew up. Here by the same creek I played in as a girl, in the places where it was daylighted and the fennel and blackberries grew over the chain link fence and my brother and I would muck around and race sticks and get scratched by the brambles and look for tadpoles and skip rocks. The same creek I remember rushing out to put my feet and hands in the day I got my first period when I was eleven, terrified that suddenly I was no longer a little girl. I remember making a house for hedgehogs (which we don’t have in California) out of mud and sticks that day. I did so with unusual dedication, stubbornness even. It was elaborate. I think it actually might have been a whole castle, with a moat. But I remember that I felt sad as I made it. Self-conscious in a new way. I looked down at my legs half submerged in the creek and they didn’t look the same to me as before. Something new was happening to me. It was like I was putting all the final innocence of childhood in my mud creations that day, knowing that I was already different.
These musings by the creek about the lost village of Anamas that rests beneath the world I grew up in inspired me to revisit a story of mine called The Midwife of Temescal. I wrote it in honor of the Temescal Creek almost exactly ten years ago, after moving to the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland. This story was one of my Gray Fox Epistles, a collection of rewilded fairytales I wrote over 13 moons, and it won the 2014 James D. Phelan Literary Award through the San Francisco Foundation. It’s based on a northern European oral story known as the “Midwife to the Fairies” which was especially popular in the Irish, Scottish, English and Scandinavian traditions. (I recommend this paper for more information about the original: Midwife to the Fairies (ML 5070): The Irish Variants in Their Scottish and Scandinavian Perspective, by Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh.)
In my version, instead of fairies, who are very rooted to me in the ecologies of Britain, I imagined creek-spirit beings who fit into this ecosystem.
What I love most about this story is the idea that sometimes, otherworldly beings need human midwives. That the wild ones, and the wild land, long for us as much as we long for them. That every buried creek is longing to be born again. That we can midwife far more than we know, and that somewhere, none of the stories are ever lost.
NOTE: Both Coast Miwok and Ohlone indigenous tribes of this region of California are still here. This land is still their land.
So, without further ado, here’s my Midwife of Temescal, with an audio recording.