1. Cole Haddock
1. Bushy Dell Creek Soundwalk
2. Pinole Creek Soundwalk
I think Pinole probably sounds better when we’re not there.
The concrete and the brown and the highway - I bet all of it comes alive when it rains. When the weeds grow so fast you can practically hear them groaning as they stretch out towards the sun. When the creek fills and is alive again, pushing and pulsing and rushing to make it out to the bay. When some determined runner slips and falls into the wet clay and everyone starts laughing. I bet it gets loud when school gets out- when people pull joints out of their back pocket and pass around Coors from somebody’s uncle's stash and someone gets kissed for the first time beneath the highway. I bet that sometimes when the sky is clear the North Star winks at the dirt and suddenly it is lost in remembering what it used to be. Remembering the people that used to fish in the creek and live on the banks and the flowers that used to grow just to give the ground something to smile at.
I think that Pinole is quiet on purpose. It’s quiet to teach us that the world is post-apocalyptic, that some put this creek into a concrete channel and the world ended when the indigenous people left and there’s random college kids trampling on what’s left of the pickleweed. I think it’s quiet to trick the people who don’t listen carefully enough. It’s quiet to hide the kids and the memories and the tadpoles from all of the people who accept them to be gone.
