Respite in San Diego

Upon arriving in San Diego Bay we planned on staying a few weeks but all told, we ended up spending over a month on the hook. During this time, we got to know the city quite well and were able to make a few new friends. A few of us took the time to travel by land back up to San Francisco for a visit but most of all we mostly just relaxed. After our big bang departure from SF and the months of work that led up to it we were a bit worn out but hadn’t really taken the time to decompress, staying busy on our travels down the coast.

Although a bit of cleaning was in order and we had a few small boat projects to address, we hardly even did much work on the boat itself: a major gear shift from our sedentary time in Berkeley. We borrowed another bike and spent much of our time exploring and hanging out around the town and on the boat itself. We spent a lot of time in the large Balboa Park, riding bicycles and relaxing on the grass, and some of us even made a trip to the zoo. We all took the trolley to Tijuana for the day, a short scouting mission into Mexico for fun and dental work, and had time for doing things like finding mushrooms in the park and identifying them.

The cruising anchorage was just fine, well protected and safe in all regards. The drawbacks to the spot were the long row (15 minutes or so) to the dinghy dock and the noise of the place. Loudest and most constant was the San Diego airport, located on shore just over a waterside road. Throughout the day, the air was filled with the sound of jets landing and taking off. If that wasn’t enough, helicopters took off and landed at the Coast Guard Station several time daily. San Diego Bay is, of course, home to an enormous naval base and the nature of the highly militarized harbor had us feeling uneasy. Harbor Police boats would pass by frequently just added to the feeling of the place, although they probably helped to keep things mellow on the bay. What’s more navy personnel were out in large skiffs slowly motoring around calm anchorage as they worked with specially-trained Navy dolphins and sea lions. Very weird!

We were fortunate to have a few connections in San Diego, mostly through Lowell’s dear friend Pria, who he befriended in India many years ago. We spent a fair amount of time at her place and with her housemates, taking showers, using the computers, and getting to know everybody. After spending so long in the familiar San Francisco Bay, we couldn’t help but feel that San Diego was a bit of a social desert and we were happy to have a few friends.

Of great interest to me was a trip made with Pria to the International Rescue Committee’s refugee garden. Pria has been coordinating the garden for several months and we were happy to come on a volunteer day to see the place and help out with a few projects. The garden is a couple of acres a few miles east of downtown that is divided into many plots that are tended by refugees from around the world.

Some plots serve the function of a home garden while others are used to grow food for sale at farmer’s markets around town. Some of the refugees had even been contracted to grow mint by a local chocolate company interested in sourcing local ingredients.

The diversity of types of gardens and ethnicities of gardeners made for quite the collage of plots, styles, and plants. There were beautiful, intensively-cultivated beds of water spinach and other greens next to plots of more perennial-heavy, wild-looking home gardens. Of special interest were several large perennial eggplant bushes covered with hundreds of berry-like eggplants. Incredible!

We spent the morning reorganizing the collective composting system in preparation for a large operation that would accept compost from several local grocery stores, mulching bananas, spreading wood chips, and talking with a few of the other volunteers before heading off to the farmer’s market. After the market we wandered down the street and got a chance to have a look at a nursery and aquaponics system in nearby City Heights, also affiliated with the IRC. We were all quite impressed by the clean, organized, and abundant operation. Thanks to Antonio for taking the time to show us around and congratulations to the IRC for running a garden program that is obviously extremely valuable to farming people from around the world who are dropped into an apartment in the concrete jungle of San Diego. As Pria explained though, the need for gardening space greatly outweighs the space available in refugee communities. It seems the same is true for all people in places like San Diego!

We whiled away the rest of our time in San Diego doing much of the same. I had great success busking (playing banjo and singing) up in Balboa Park and had a lot of fun while making a pile of dollar bills over the course of our last few weeks in town. Although it was nice to relax, we all began to get a little restless in the setting of San Diego and so a few of us decided to head east to see what adventure awaits us in the mountains and beyond.

Fo more pictures visit our Picasa site at: https://picasaweb.google.com/103461058936929561161/SanDiego