Chris Colin Archives - ��ԹϺ�� Online

Can the Outdoors Save Guys from Themselves?

jversteegh — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

O tender child of but six years: may this massive motocross-style helmet, complete with 14 intake vents, fit and protect you, for I understand not the ways of the online sizing chart.

I clicked purchase, and two weeks later my son, Casper, and I were roaring across a high sage desert, darkness falling, canyons plunging, chunky rocks looming, frigid wind howling, expensive epic of cinematic masculinity unfolding.

What in the end does a father want for his child? I wanted Casper to not get pneumonia on the first fucking day of our trip. But in his infinite wisdom, the god of the utility terrain vehicle (or UTV) forsook windshields, windows, climate control, and, for that matter, an effective muffler. I draped my coat across the boy’s little lap.

“Don’t let this blow away!” I yelled.

“W�󲹳�?”

“Don’t let this blow away!”

“W�󲹳�?”��

Our conversation might’ve continued in this vein had I not been so caught up in staying upright. I’d been driving this bizarre vehicle—essentially a small, high-octane dune buggy—for an hour now and was steadily getting worse at it. We were in northwest Arizona, sloshing along a canyon somewhere between the Colorado Plateau and the Mojave Desert. Yucca and scrub oak blurred past as we fishtailed wildly across gravelly BLM two-track. The natural thing to do would be to slow down, but the light was fading, and we had another hour, or maybe five, until we reached camp. So I gunned it, swerving into the lonesome western landscape, hunched dementedly over the wheel, an off-road, neon-helmeted Neal Cassady.

The post Can the Outdoors Save Guys from Themselves? appeared first on ��ԹϺ�� Online.

Communing with the Forest Bathers

jversteegh — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Under a nimbus of eucalyptus and cypress boughs, in the pale waning light of a San Francisco afternoon, I watched the maraca of compulsory gratitude draw nearer. “Calm,” the peaceful-looking young blond woman said, then passed the shaker to her left. “Centered,” the young guy beside her said, then passed the shaker to his left. “Grounded,” a shorter but also peaceful-looking blond woman said. The maraca had almost reached me. “Creeping unease,” I thought.

An hour earlier, I’d felt only excitement, having finally made it to one of these forest bathing gatherings . The activity originated in Japan in the 1980s as shinrin-yoku, sometimes translated as nature bathing. The idea, more or less: Go be in nature, a little more deliberately than usual. Open your senses. Inhale some pine. Caress an acacia. Sound pleasant? Good, because it has caught on stateside.

You forest bathe for all the reasons you already know: our busyness, our email overload, our general disconnect from nature. A 2001 EPA-sponsored reported that Americans spend 87 percent of their time inside, plus another 6 percent in an enclosed vehicle. Whatever bureaucrat had to call a car an enclosed vehicle surely needs a forest bath as much as anyone.

Good news, EPA worker: Dedicated nature time doesn’t just feel good, it is good. Shinrin-yoku first took root after research showed it to have actual proven health benefits. found that forests “promote lower concentrations of cortisol, lower pulse rate, lower blood pressure, greater parasympathetic nerve activity, and lower sympathetic nerve activity than do city environments.” found significantly decreased levels of hostility and depression among subjects who spent a regular amount of time in forests.

One Meetup registration, an online questionnaire, and $30 later,��I was officially ready to try this outdoors business.

The 30th gathering of the San Francisco–based occurred on a Sunday afternoon in the Presidio, the city’s gorgeous 1,500-acre military post turned national park. The group first convened in 2015 and has lately ramped up to four or five events each month. I arrived at the meeting spot to find two dozen mostly young professional-seeming people assembled. They’d found the club through Meetup and a group called Kismet, which offers “a series of high-vibe workshops for curious, creative, open-minded individuals.” Meanwhile, Julia Plevin, founder of the Forest Bathing Club, offered to glitter people’s faces. “Amazing,” one of the glittered women said. Other things I’d hear called amazing over the next two hours: the trees, a breeze, the view, a different set of trees.

Plevin is a wonderfully kind, perma-smiling woman who wears multiple necklaces and appealingly complex hippie moccasins. Her path to forestpreneur was the wandering sort: a weeklong training with the , some shamanic Reiki study, and time with a Maori forest guide in New Zealand, a Shugendo Buddhist monk in Japan, and Mayan elders in Guatemala. (“I’ve also logged hundreds of hours with my best teacher—the forest herself!” she told me.) In March, Ten Speed Press will publish Plevin’s first book, . Assisting Plevin was a young man named Sam—“chief boyfriend”—and he, too, was lovely. The bathers themselves, mostly newbies like me, were friendly and open to a one. And then we were off—into a series of brief exercises that left me relaxed and a little troubled.

Is nature becoming just another buzzworthy experience we pay to be curated?

We began in a broad clearing, with Plevin inviting us to form a circle and remove our shoes—bare feet reduce pain and inflammation, she told us.

“Bring your eyes to closed,” she said. I brought my eyes to closed.

Next, she asked us to turn, breathe in, and open our eyes. I did this, too. There were tall trees behind me, just as I’d suspected. We did some yogic movements, bending down, reaching for the ground, standing up, reaching for the sky. We sat and Plevin asked everyone to supply a word for how we were feeling.

“Jaguar is the day’s animal. It means fortitude,” Plevin told us as we moved on to the next activity. “Pick a partner. Discuss your need for fortitude.” A friendly woman and I meandered down a narrow trail and did as instructed. Then it was time to split up and spend time near a tree of our choosing. I found a wide redwood and pressed my hand into spongy bark. We’d been given a handful of corn kernels to ritually cast off when the moment felt right. It can be hard, knowing when to cast off one’s corn kernels, but I went for it, and we reconvened for more sharing. Calm, peace, gratitude.

So went the bath, a mix of established forest bathing techniques and Plevin’s personal interpretation. At one point, I bathed alongside a slender Monterey cypress, watching moody whitecaps form on the bay to my north. At another I searched for my “wak’a,” a totem of sorts that Plevin said would speak to us from the forest. (“Is that…Japanese?” I asked. “I think it’s from the Amazon,” she replied.) Time for more reflection. We were asked: What does nature give to us and what do we give to nature? Later, we all brought different objects—a leaf, a stick, a branch—to a clearing and, with much ceremony, placed them on a pile: an alter to our own appetite for solemn, culturally nebulous ritual.

Was any of this bad? Of course not. Nature and reflection are good! But something was eating at me—not the bathing itself so much as our need for it. What does it say when our species requires a spiritual docent for visits to the woods, when we must issue regular reports on how we’re feeling? We may have been offline, but the scent of social media hung in the air—the frequent status updates we were asked to supply, the Instagram-like amazingness of everything. Is nature becoming just another buzzworthy experience we pay to be curated?

It was dusk when we gathered in our last circle for some healthy snacks and tiny cups of cacao. Cacao “opens your heart,” Plevin informed us. We were pivoting back to real life. She invited us to take a pin, branded with the club’s name. If we wished, we could also apply to the club’s first-ever Nature Accelerator program: three days of intensive forest bathing for those keen to “discover the medicine you have to offer to this world.” (“We believe that people who are deeply attuned to the Earth make the greatest entrepreneurs,” the club’s website reads.) And that was a wrap. Before we left, we were given some small crystals and palo santo sticks, which presumably meant something interesting to whatever culture they’d been borrowed from.

Had shinrin-yoku improved my health? Who knows—I just felt like me, though maybe that itself is a small victory these days. In the weeks to come, I watched my inbox fill with notices from the Forest Bathing Club: ads for upcoming gatherings, a query on the state of my fire, links to articles I might like, lest I wished to spend more time at my computer but wasn’t sure how. Well, fine. As humanity flocks more and more to cities, I support anything that nudges us out of them periodically, and, hell, I support anything that reduces pain and inflammation.

But I also like plain old trees and bushes and dirt, the kind requiring no escort and promising no results. You just clomp around, and you sit on an uncomfortable rock, and a nuthatch pecks at some pine seeds, and that’s enough—off you go in your enclosed vehicle until next time.

The post Communing with the Forest Bathers appeared first on ��ԹϺ�� Online.

Drawing a Line in the Sand Over River Rights

uchrobak — Wed, 30 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is a classic story of greed, nature, fear, change, large dogs, and violent golfing, but I didn’t know that when it began. Nor did I know that I’d get sucked into the thing myself. All I knew was John Harreld walking to the water’s edge on a summer morning in 2015 in Guerneville, California.

For neighbors in Harreld’s quiet river community, 90 minutes northwest of San Francisco, the image of the then 43-year-old starting his day in the sand had become a regular, if provocative, sight. Several times a week, he’d plant himself in a folding chair overlooking a gentle bend in the mellow Russian River. Sometimes a buddy joined him; other times he sat alone. The job was simple: Enjoy the beach. Sip coffee. Maybe spot an otter slithering up the lazy current. Most of all, do these things in clear view of the camera hidden in the trees.

The man who’d hung the camera believed that Harreld was trespassing. Harreld believed he was reclaiming land that belonged to the people. On a literal level, that’s all the two were fighting about: just 20 feet of gravelly beach.

Download the for your iPhone to listen to more longform titles.

But at the heart of the fight swirled bigger and fundamentally contradictory ideas. Remarkably basic questions about America itself were woven through their dispute. There would be no bloodshed—the same could not be said elsewhere—but the level of fury would nevertheless become shocking for the once friendly neighbors.

Harreld and his wife, Judith, live in a one-story home a short stroll from the river, with sunflowers and a tomato garden out front. He’s slim and youthful, with crinkly Paul Rudd eyes and a jovial, laid-back air. When he’s not working as a medical device analyst, he tends to be diving, rock climbing, investigating shipwrecks, or showing elaborate Lego creations he made in his home’s dedicated Lego studio. He’s a detail guy. One of these creations is a scale model of Chichén Itzá so meticulously accurate that when you shine a flashlight on the balustrade, it mimics the equinox effect at the actual temple.

John Harreld (Justin Kaneps)

On this June day, as he walked down the dirt path to the beach for morning sentry duty, he was pursuing his newest hobby: being the Rosa Parks of obscure riparian law.

Fifty yards or so above this quiet stretch of the river is a vacation home owned by Mark O’Flynn, a lawyer from San Francisco. Nearly four years ago, O’Flynn posted his first NO TRESPASSING sign. Like many property owners, he had come to equate public access with broken glass, poop in the bushes, and bad music blaring from drunk strangers’ speakers.

The problem, as Harreld saw it: the sign stood in flagrant violation of federal law. As he would explain to anyone who’d listen, the beach was subject to a public easement below a line called the ordinary high-water mark—a calculation roughly analogous to the average high tide. In 1981, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed in that this easement trumps private ownership in navigable rivers.

As he walked down the dirt path to the beach for morning sentry duty, he was pursuing his newest hobby: being the Rosa Parks of obscure riparian law.

Navigability, in turn, is established by proving that the river has qualified as a “highway of commerce,” used by ferries carrying tourists, say, or loggers floating felled trees downstream, both of which happened on the Russian River.

In other words, Harreld believed, that gravelly beach was everyone’s to enjoy, regardless of what signs were posted.

Harreld had known O’Flynn socially. His house is a minute’s walk away, and Harreld and his wife had been over for dinner. When he saw the sign, he e-mailed Mark to ask if it was his. Indeed, Mark replied.

There would be no more neighborly meals. Over the years that followed, a full-on cold war blossomed. Someone would run a shin-high line of wire across the path. One of Harreld’s allies would remove it. O’Flynn would hang cameras in the trees. Someone would paint over the latest NO TRESPASSING sign.

And now, on this Thursday morning in 2015, Harreld and some friends approached the beach only to find the path blocked by “cut bamboo, tree branches and matts of algae,” according to the June 18 entry in a detailed journal he’s been keeping since the conflict started. The next day, the group began removing the makeshift barricade, and O’Flynn ran out of his house.

What ensued borders on slapstick, with O’Flynn, according to Harreld, “pulling the bamboo out of my hands, then dashing over to pull some out of my friend’s hands, then dashing back to me.” (I don’t have O’Flynn’s account; he won’t discuss the dispute in detail.) Soon two sheriff’s deputies arrived, but they declined to take action.

Perhaps at this point you’re marveling at the amount of free time that middle-aged white men have. I marveled, too. But as I got deeper into the dispute, I came to see that this picayune squabble wasn’t all that it seemed. Behind the folly of turf wars and the arcana of river law, a larger conflict was playing out, one rooted in a profound disagreement over how we think about nature and how we divide it.

All over the country, that disagreement has become a feature of the landscape. I wanted to see it up close—and to see what happens when someone tries shifting the status quo in a small way. Like many rivers around the country, the Russian is full of vacation homes and resorts claiming private beaches, ordinary high-water mark be damned. It seemed some civil disobedience was in order—or, rather, civil obedience, if John Harreld was correct. So I gathered together three friends and some boats.

“How do property owners feel about boaters landing on the beaches in front of their land?” I asked the woman at the canoe-rental place in Forestville, the next town over from Guerneville. It was June 2017, the beginning of the season for her operation.

She cocked her head kindly, the way you do when talking to an idiot.

“T��’s mucho public beaches to enjoy,” she said. “I imagine canoeists wouldn’t want to go up on anyone’s private beach, would they?”

Au contraire. Remember “The Swimmer,” that where the lush decides to swim his way across all the pools in his county? That was my plan, except that instead of swimming pools, I would hit as many putatively private beaches along the Russian River as possible—first on a ten-mile stretch with my buddies, then on another four miles or so during a handful of smaller excursions. Instead of whiskey, we’d be fueled by a cocktail of righteousness and florid legalese.

(Justin Kaneps)

“Public ownership of physically navigable rivers, including the land up to the ordinary high-water mark, pre-dates property deeds. What the property deed says or doesn’t say about the river is irrelevant.” So reads a river-law primer on the National Organization for Rivers website. And as the Supreme Court ruled, private ownership of the beds and banks of navigable rivers is “always subject to the public right of navigation.”

My friends and I paddled into the gentle current to see if that felt true.

The modest little towns of the Russian River Valley—Forestville, Rio Nido, Guerneville, Monte Rio—are wonderful and complex places, tight-knit blue-collar communities that mix unevenly with Bay Area weekenders. There’s an artsy scene and a gay scene and an ex-hippie scene and a homeless scene.

On the water, meanwhile, it’s pure Platonic river. From the languid sway of the bay laurel trees to the disco shimmer of the quaking aspens to the Dude-like serenity of the redwoods, a vague drugginess wafts over the place. The water beckons all types. One minute you’re chatting with a binocular-toting naturalist, the next with occupants of a 12-person raft built to look like a giant pizza. It’s a communal vibe, which makes the idea of an exclusive riverbank all the more jarring.

PRIVATE BEACH NO CANOES, a sign read. Yes canoes, we decided.

My friends and I spent the first hour pulling up on every no-trespassing beach we could find, though knowing we were within our rights didn’t make it less awkward. Imagine learning that punching someone in the face was actually legal—it would still be sort of tough to feel OK about it. But not a soul came running out to scowl at us. “Maybe nobody will say anything to you. It’d be totally different if you were black or brown and sidled up on someone’s property,” an African American friend had pointed out before the trip.

But by hour two, everything began to change. A broad gravel bar opened out into the river, cordoned off behind a length of rope and some buoys. PRIVATE BEACH NO CANOES, a sign read. Yes canoes, we decided. Three minutes later we were enjoying a fine game of bocce. Ten minutes after that came the first bellow.

A shirtless man in his sixties or seventies was standing on his deck 100 yards or so up from the river. He had a pair of binoculars trained on us and was yelling something I couldn’t quite hear.

“W�󲹳�?” I called.

“I said read the fucking sign in front of you!”

He was deeply tanned, with a leathery chest and long, thinning hair. He proceeded to unload. He was sick of people from God-knows-where marching all over his private oasis. As he yelled—now on the lawn in front of me—I did my best to politely represent the law. It bounced off. “How would you feel if I hung out in your fucking backyard?” he asked.

“There isn’t an easement on my backyard.”

He waved his hand. “If someone breaks their leg on this beach, I’m liable,” he said. I told him this wasn’t so—the state is liable, per the public easement.

“You don’t get it,” he replied. “I pay taxes on this beach.”

“Everyone does,” I said gently.

It went on like this. I thought that if we could just keep talking, we’d find some common ground, even if we never agreed that his ground was common. He thought otherwise and told me to fuck off again before ultimately walking away.

Over the next few hours, at a dozen ostensibly private beaches, my friends and I would encounter better and worse. At one beach, a friendly young couple lolled on a pair of inner tubes a few feet from shore. They were renters in a small community that claimed this particular beach as its own, but as far as they were concerned, anyone could use it if they cleaned up their mess. Half a mile away, we ran into a group at another beach that had been claimed by a community association, the Odd Fellows Recreation Club. “Your law is wrong,” one woman said when I explained my position. At another private club, a woman shook her head and told me, “It’s always been this way and always will be.”

Throughout my journey, I heard a common refrain from homeowners: that they weren’t trying to keep neighbors away, just outsiders. The species of outsider varied. Sometimes they were oblivious city folk, sometimes trashy teens and their hip-hop. Other times they were from Santa Rosa—said, occasionally, as code for Mexican. In each case, the alleged trespassing was ruining the river, disrespecting its traditions, polluting its beauty.

There’s a long history of racism and xenophobia wrapping themselves in the cloth of conservation, from Hitler to the early eugenics days of the Sierra Club; concepts like purity and cleanliness proved darkly malleable. I certainly don’t purport to know the hearts of anyone I spoke with. But the level of hostility toward interlopers was striking.

Two-thirds of the way into our trip, we came upon a pirate flag flapping above a small spit of sand. I hollered up a guileless hello to the two men standing nearby. In response, one disappeared into some trees. He returned with two large dogs, which he led down to us.

Clearly we were meant to be frightened away. But I wasn’t ready to leave, so I tried to de-escalate the situation with chatter: a mindless remark about dog breeds, then an explanation of what the hell we were doing there.

“I know about the goddamn high-water mark,” the man spat at us.

All this time, his friend had been holding something. I saw now that it was a golf club. He stepped up to a makeshift tee and squared his shoulders. Before I could register it, he was winding up and blasting a ball in our direction.

He missed us by a good 15 feet. But now he was teeing up again, clobbering another poor Titleist at us. This one came close enough that we heard a ffffffttt as it shot over our heads. Five minutes after pulling up on this beach, we were hauling away at top speed. Already I was thinking about the next leg of my expedition, where the locals were said to be far less friendly.

One gray August morning in San Francisco, I climbed some stairs in a building in the Cow Hollow neighborhood to meet ��Mark O’Flynn in his small law office.

In person, O’Flynn calls to mind a football coach—close-cropped hair, stern but courteous bearing, minimal chitchat. He wouldn’t let me record our conversation, so I scribbled notes while he discussed the nuances of public-trust doctrine, the history of California statehood, and the like. In 2015 that he doesn’t object to the idea of a public easement. He told me he believes that his particular property is exempt, having originally been sold before the California Constitution provided for that easement in 1879—in other words, he claims he was grandfathered in.

It became clear that O’Flynn felt like the victim in the saga. He just wanted his nice river home, without having to deal with trash and skinny-dippers and other people’s music.

O’Flynn framed his argument in granular legal terms, but it’s not hard to imagine—or sympathize with—the underlying sentiment: the world gives you years of peaceful picnics here on this sand, and then suddenly someone wants to flip the script on you.

“In much of the country, you don’t have national forests or state parks—rivers are some of the only recreational places,” said Eric Leaper, executive director at the National Organization for Rivers, a 40-year-old group dedicated to defending public rights on rivers. But they’re also a finite resource, he added, and people get territorial.

That’s what happened one afternoon in July 2013, on Missouri’s Meramec River. As with the Russian, summer brings a steady stream of canoeists, rafters, and inner tubers to the river, and tension between boaters and locals was running high. A landowner named James Crocker fell into an argument with a man named Paul Dart Jr. Dart was canoeing down the river with friends when they stopped on a gravel bar that Crocker believed was his. The two men yelled, Dart claimed it was his right to be there, and Crocker pulled out a nine-millimeter pistol. He . Later it would come out that they were more than 100 yards from Crocker’s property.

(Justin Kaneps)

Dart’s death drew support to the cause, and within the niche community of public-access enthusiasts, Crocker’s ultimate murder conviction played as vindication. For while federal law may be plain, getting states to honor it—or even know it—is another matter. A parallel legal universe exists at the local level, with this sheriff tolerating a length of barbed wire across a river and that state thumbing its nose at the Supreme Court ruling. In Colorado, for instance, courts have essentially ruled that merely letting rivers flow across their land is basically all that property owners owe the public.

The public-access folks have certainly had victories. In a significant ruling last November, the Utah Supreme Court upheld the right of anglers and others to use the banks and beds along a stretch of the Weber River.

Cullen Battle, a retired private attorney in Salt Lake City, represented the Utah Stream Access Coalition in the Weber River suit. A lifelong fly-fisherman, Battle has watched states cede untold acreage to the property-rights movement.

“The public attitude used to be that rivers are public highways. But in the 1950s it started to change,” Battle told me. Land-owners started claiming rivers and riverbanks as private property—and, particularly in the western states, they started to get away with it. Defending public access requires expensive legal efforts and a deciphering of 19th-century court rulings that, as Battle says, “is like interpreting scripture.” More often than not, communities simply defer to those NO TRESPASSING signs. “If you keep saying it over and over again,” he said, “people start believing you.”

A millennium and a half ago, the Roman emperor Justinian declared that the public’s access to all navigable waterways was inalienable. “By the law of nature these things are common to all mankind; the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the shores of the sea,” the Code of Justinian states. It paved the way for the public-trust doctrine, a guiding principle compelling governments to hold the most vital natural resources for the collective good. To this day, “navigable in fact” rivers remain the property of all. But not everyone reads their Byzantine legal texts anymore. And so it’s a short leap to coating your PRIVATE PROPERTY signs with lubricating oil, as Harreld alleged he observed on one occasion, thereby making them harder to remove.

By June 2015, the beach war was boiling over. Complaints on both sides were lodged with the county’s permit office, the California State Lands Commission, the sheriff, and just about anyone with a dot-gov e-mail address. At one point, according to Harreld, O’Flynn erected a robust cinder-block and lumber bench in the middle of the beach trail, attaching to it a CERTIFIED WILDLIFE HABITAT sign—“the kind anyone can order online,” Harreld noted. Harreld attached his own sign, which declared O’Flynn’s sign false and unlawful. This was promptly taken down—and then replaced again by evening. The next day, Harreld received a cease and desist notice from O’Flynn.

And that was all in three days. For the better part of two years, each side hoped the California State Lands Commission would step in and issue a ruling to end the madness.

Harreld concedes that convenience had stoked his indignation as much as anything—in an era when the guys with the power are off in Washington, he said, above the law, here was one right down the street. But then a funny thing happened: his actual concern for the river caught up with his theatrical defense of it.

“It got under my skin,” Harreld said. “All those hours of measuring tides, taking photos, sitting in the sand—I found that I really loved it.”

According to Don McEnhill, executive director of a local nonprofit called , that is precisely why the public should care about squabbles like this one. From access comes stewardship.

“If people don’t use the river, they won’t care about it, and it turns into a toilet,” he said.

In the property-rights movement, McEnhill sees owners as people who “want to intimidate, harass, and bully the public into vacating their rights.” He said the Russian River situation was open and shut. “Beaches are unequivocally in the public domain, and the state and federal Supreme Court have said so.”

When I told Harreld about the final stop on my occupy-the-beaches experiment, he insisted on coming. We set off in kayaks on a hot morning in Guerneville, heading west toward Monte Rio. We portaged around a dam and wound past a small island, and soon the only sound was the purling beneath our paddles and starlings nipping around dementedly against a Simpsons blue sky. ��

Suddenly I felt a surge of sympathy for Team Homeowner. Beneath their anger was a simple human truth: when you’ve got something good, it’s hard to let go. On an ever dirtying planet, these folks had the fortune to occupy a lovely sliver. Maybe McEnhill is right and sharing that sliver will invest the public in keeping it clean. But maybe you give the beaches to the people and the people toss Budweiser cans onto them.

Doesn’t matter, Harreld said as we paddled—the law is the law. So we zeroed in on a spot a couple of miles downstream from O’Flynn’s beach. For more than a century, the exclusive Bohemian Club has held its annual encampment here, on a 2,700-acre parcel along the river. The event is both a groovy arts mixer and a highly secretive gathering for establishment elites; every Republican president since Coolidge has reportedly shown up, alongside your Kissingers and Rockefellers and corporate executives. The exclusive nature of it has led countless journalists and activists to try sneaking past the intense security.

The club’s intense security apparatus is legendary. I’d heard rumors of snipers in the trees, the Secret Service lurking about, and trespassers being hauled straight to jail.

I didn’t want to sneak in. I just wanted to throw a Frisbee on their pretty beach.

We arrived to find a stretch of rocky sand, with a dock and a bullpen-like shade structure at the end. We pulled up and sat in the baking sun. The club’s intense security apparatus is legendary. I’d heard rumors of snipers in the trees, the Secret Service lurking about, and trespassers being hauled straight to jail. Be careful, the community-services officer from the sheriff’s office had told me. You don’t want to get on one of their lists.

I was contemplating all this when a big and vaguely Wilford Brimley–ish man emerged from the woods.

“Time to be on your way, boys,” he said. He wore khakis, a gray mustache, and what appeared to be a security badge around his neck.

I replied that we intended to stay a while longer, per the public easement, but had no intention of going beyond—

“I don’t care about high-water marks,” he said bluntly. “What’s your name?”

I told him, and he smirked. “Here to write one of your articles?”

Had the sheriff’s office told them who I was? Did the establishment elites have even greater snooping technology than I had imagined possible?

Harreld and I spent the next few minutes trying to discuss the matter with him. We were calm and friendly. At one point, I invited him to throw the Frisbee with us. But inside, something had flipped in me. It didn’t make sense. Nobody else was using the beach. Why not let others on it? If they made a mess, sure, fine them or whatever, but otherwise, who cares?

Evidently, the security guy. He told us he’d be calling the sheriff to arrest us if we didn’t leave immediately.

Harreld said he’d happily chat with the sheriff, and for the next two hours we skipped stones, swam, and waited. The sheriff never came—the sheriff’s department later told me that it had received no calls—and at last we climbed into our boats and paddled back to where we’d begun: O’Flynn’s beach.

Harreld and I parted ways, and I got in my car, deflated. How far we’d drifted from old Justinian’s vision. I could think of only one thing to do: go to a different beach, an emphatically public one where I could find at least a semblance of harmony.

It was late on a Sunday afternoon when I arrived, but the sand was still packed—dudes grilling, teens lounging, parents urging kids to accept one more smear of sunscreen. I wandered from one end to the other. And then: there it was.

“Hey! Private beach!”

I recognized the growl instantly. It was the shirtless man I’d encountered on the first leg of my journey, shirtless again, drinking beer with friends under a scattering of umbrellas. Apparently I’d strayed into the private section.

The friends were in their sixties and seventies. “Sweet Melissa” was playing from a radio; it was someone’s birthday. The shirtless man and his friends didn’t want me there, but they deigned to let me stay a moment so they could vent about all the changes to the river and the country in general. “It’s just too many people,” he said. “It didn’t use to be. Then they started coming.” He shot me a meaningful look. Later I asked for everyone’s contact info, for fact-checking purposes.

“If you think I’m giving you my information, you’re out of your mind,” one of them said.

“Fake news!” shouted another. “You’re all fake news!”

As I walked away, I found myself thinking about that last comment more than anything. In a weird way, it felt as true as anything I’d bumped up against on the river. O’Flynn, Harreld, the Bohemian Club, these guys, me—for everyone, the river was a realm of competing narratives. As in the fake-news paradigm, truth has become subjective and reality is shaped accordingly. For some this is the place to fight back against interlopers and bad manners. For others it’s a venue for fighting greed. Legal confusion, meanwhile, hovers over it all.

“All it takes is a guy with a NO TRESPASSING sign, and if you don’t know better, that’s the law,” said Dave Steindorf, executive director of the river-stewardship nonprofit American Whitewater. “The sheriffs often act as the local private-security force for property owners. Without the public knowing it, our access to rivers gets eroded.”

The exclusive Bohemian Grove, whose security is legendary. (Justin Kaneps)

Last year the California State Lands Commission issued a report declaring that the area up to O’Flynn’s grass lies below the ordinary high-water mark and therefore is public-trust land. Harreld was right: nobody can block the public from enjoying the river. The bench barricade, ironically, had already been swept away by high water during winter flooding.

Triumphant after the ruling, Harreld spoke of O’Flynn with a new note of grace. He was sympathetic about finding a solution to the litter problem. And regarding the security cameras, he suggested using them to prosecute anyone who might pollute the beach, rather than to deter people from going there in the first place. “I would 100 percent support this,” Harreld said. O’Flynn still declines to speak in detail about the case.

As of this writing, a new sign, lovingly handmade, stands by the water: HELP RESTORE THE RIPARIAN COORIDOR—PLEASE LAUNCH WATERCRAFT UP RIVER.��

Update:��(November��6, 2020) Two years after this story was published, the California State Lands Commission changed its determination of the ordinary high-water mark. It now rests below the beach in question, meaning the beach is not currently considered public-trust land. A representative from the Commission emphasized that these marks are ambulatory and subject to move in the future.

The post Drawing a Line in the Sand Over River Rights appeared first on ��ԹϺ�� Online.

I’m Very Inflexible. So I Got Stretched Out By a Pro.

cthompson — Fri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The nice lady folded my left leg just north of my right ear. My hip flexors wept. When at last she let up, relief surged through my hamstring and calf and several other muscle groups I hadn’t been aware of before today. Something else I was made aware of: my body is largely defective.

Defective isn’t the word that the nice lady, Diane Waye of , used. She was more tactful and technical, explaining the deficiency of my myofascial structures. But the point stands. My self-care regimen had long prioritized strength and cardio, while flexibility limped along as an afterthought. As an otherwise fit 42-year-old, I had the range of motion of a sycamore.

Waye’s appointments start at $160 per hour and can run as long as ten hours. I made her repeat that last number. “Professional athletes,” she said.

Enter the stretching studio. Practitioner-assisted stretching, as it’s sometimes called, is a growing craze in the fitness cosmos. The thinking goes like this: all of us, from serious runners to hunched desk jockeys, have neglected our fascia (the thin veneer of tissue that encases various muscles and organs), our joints, and a whole slew of other problem areas that even yoga can miss. Between in Los Angeles and franchises like , , and with locations around the country, a growing army of stretching coaches and flexologists (they’re really called that) have assembled to bend us into better health.

In recent years, research has increasingly questioned the virtue of static stretching—passively holding a position for an extended period—before exercise. “When muscles are cold, static stretching isn’t that effective,” says Meir Magal, a fellow at the American College of Sports Medicine. The growing consensus suggests that it doesn’t prepare our bodies for whatever we’re about to do, and in some cases it’s even counterproductive.

As the chatter around static stretching has intensified, an array of alternatives have emerged, such as mobility training—a more targeted attempt to increase range of motion—and something called proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation, a regimen designed for high-level rehabilitation that’s popular among athletes. Flexologists, for their part, have appeared on the scene to replace our bad old stretches with controlled, and repeated motions—some focused on fascia, others tailored to select muscles—with the added benefit of professional assessment and guidance.

“It’s often injury that brings my clients through the door,” Waye said recently at her studio in downtown San Francisco. “Then they realize that stretching is a preventative practice. Make a habit of it and you save your knees and shoulders, and you get that elasticity you thought only young people have.”

I didn’t know what to expect when she went to work on me. The vibe at Stretching by the Bay was a combination of chiropractic appointment, massage, and personalized yoga class. I was mostly sprawled across a table, but at times during the 90-minute session, the amount of movement I was doing—shoulder bends this way, hip rotations that way—felt like a workout. Waye’s appointments start at $160 per hour and can run as long as ten hours. I made her repeat that last number. “Professional athletes,” she said.

A few blocks away at , certified fascial stretch therapist Kelsey Wiedenhoefer also sees her share of athletes, including several professional football players. “It’s something, lifting a 100-pound leg,” Wiedenhoefer said. As she raised my under-100-pound leg, she discussed the benefits of regularly and properly stretching the connective tissue around our joints and bones. “The idea is to move beyond merely lengthening tight muscles,” she said.

Just how effective it can be is another matter. The benefits of fascial therapy, a type of dynamic stretching that targets chronically tight muscles, are still being debated by the medical community, and the burgeoning field has its skeptics. Regarding dynamic stretching in general, the International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy has echoed a gathering consensus that, unlike static stretching, it tends to improve jumping and running performance, as well as power output. Other studies have shown that it increases agility and acceleration, promotes recovery, and helps prevent injury.

As for me, a bit of my old stiffness returned as my stretching sessions wore off. But now that I’ve been bent in ways a fellow doesn’t easily forget, I might be inclined to repeat.

The post I’m Very Inflexible. So I Got Stretched Out By a Pro. appeared first on ��ԹϺ�� Online.

A Bay Area Gym Wants You to Get Sweaty and Stoned

jversteegh — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

To understand what inspires Jim McAlpine, a fit and exuberant 46-year-old, you must conjure an image of the American stoner. Are you picturing someone heavy-lidded, couch-bound, and struggling to make an animated GIF of that Big Lebowski scene without knocking his bong off the coffee table? That stereotype drives McAlpine crazy, and he’s made it his mission to change it. This spring, the surfer, skier, and weed lover will open the world’s first cannabis fitness center in San Francisco.

will be a premier gym, McAlpine says, not just a hangout for potheads. Though, to be clear, there will be weed. He’s still hammering out the details, but McAlpine envisions offering cannabis performance assessments, in which trainers help determine how the plant can help an athlete work out before guiding them through weed-assisted fitness plans. In addition, McAlpine hopes, members will be free to buy and consume cannabis on site, including Power Plant’s own line of edibles, which he says are “made for pre-workout focus and post-workout recovery.”

The American stoner��stereotype drives��McAlpine��crazy, and he’s made it his mission to change it.

McAlpine believes that fitness will increasingly be a pillar of the ever exploding cannabis industry. “If you use it right,” he says, “cannabis takes the things you love and lets you love them more. With fitness that can help get you into the zone, into eye-of-the-tiger mode.”

The vision isn’t completely far-fetched. While studies dating back to the 1970s have shown that marijuana use slows reaction time and diminishes motor skills, more recent research suggests that the chemical compounds in cannabis can help increase your pain threshold, reduce anxiety, and combat inflammation.
��
McAlpine says he’s seen enough proof—both in his own workouts and in fellow athletes—to press ahead. He partnered with former NFL running back Ricky Williams to get seed money for the first Power Plant Fitness gym, scheduled to open in May in San Francisco’s Mission District. And plans are under way to add locations in Los Angeles, San Jose, Seattle, Denver, and Portland, Oregon.

Now that (including California) and Washington, D.C., have legalized recreational marijuana, hopes for an all-new approach to fitness are high.

The post A Bay Area Gym Wants You to Get Sweaty and Stoned appeared first on ��ԹϺ�� Online.

Chris Colin Archives - �����ԹϺ��� Online