Chapter Forty-Six
Sensitive stuff…
“When matters and manners
seem to dig you in even
deeper, look to the skies.”
“…And when I slipped out of Afghanistan…”
“Here we go…”
“Literally just before the Taliban overran…”
“Bet you never got any further than Kabul…probably never left Langley.”
Trucked in presumably for the EcoGlobe exhibit, three Porta-Toities, blue as the sea, were skidded atop a wood-plank platform on the leeward edge of that shoreline tree cluster. A wind gust slammed shut the sprung plastic door behind me as I re-emerged, relieved beyond belief, nostrils full of deodorizer and worse, to a breathtaking 360-degree view of the bay.
Some wooden benches fat as railroad ties lined the upper beach, within sniffing distance of the crappers. After doing the same, Reese Paulen sat on the edge of the nearest, speaking into his earphone, barely over the idyll conversation of this loose-cut ‘Company’ retiree and a shaggier Marina done-nothing contrarian who had been seen vegging around Chestnut Street for years on end. Once a dreamy, art school couple vacated the less odious perch one bench over, there I lighted for a spell.
“More like the tribal regions…but I can’t really talk about it…”
“Classified, huh—like with Guantanamo. You ex-CIA types are a real hoot.”
“Seen my share of unrest, I’m tellin’ you. And something fishy’s goin’ on around here. Something’s not right…”
Whatever, I turned my back in no time on this pseudo-conspiratorial exchange. Similarly, these leaning Cypress trees lent a measure of shade and shelter from the Gate winds, benches situated as they were under umbrella arching limbs. Still, the bay before us was in fact showing signs of the rising afternoon tide.
“My unorthodox little survey has covered that gamut, so to speak. Indeed, your hypothesis still rings true. Yes, of course—we should be out there before long…got to go…” (CLICK). “Herbert…”
“Me? I can hardly stand as it is—why should I have a stand?,” I asked, a spate of range anxiety seeping in as Paulen approached. Really, were they actually saying something about him back at CU…or? “Want we should turn back, it’s getting kinda nastier out here…”
“That’s for you to know and me to find out, my friend,” Reese Paulen replied, zipping up to his jawbone. “Come now, these conditions are all the more amenable to our pressing ahead toward a Liverpool Lil’s repast.”
“Kinda roundabout scenic route, wouldn’t you say?” I followed him back toward the Crissy Promenade. “Yeah, well, what’s in a name anyway…”
“You mean as in Zion, Israel—even Judea while we’re at on the subject.”
“I keep getting hungrier and thirstier just thinking about it.”
“Persevere, Herbert. Just consider the appetites we’re working up out here, you’ll see.”
Gritty beach sand began filling in earlier footprints, the surf now lapping more soundly along the shoreline. Skiffs, sloops and schooners alike were heeling sharply, battling currents and crosswind gusts like the big boaters, from Raccoon Straits over to Richardson Bay.
Windsurfers sacked up to the max as they wrestled mightily with their clear sails, zig-zag darting in from the Gate at a speedway clip, flitting about, so many gnats circling a porch light. Harnessed kiteboarders clung to their reins and control bars for life-or-death grip survival, colorful bat-wing sails folding high above them like misfortune cookies in ships’ channel winds mid-bay. Closer to home, the nearest, shakiest of those three Porta-Toities looked to be nearing the sanitarial tipping point.
“Yeesh, okay then—where did Judea come in?” I replied, otherwise buttoning up.
“Actually all three were in play during 1947-48,” Paulen squeezed my twinging elbow. Whether it was his long-winded oratory or shortness of sea-level breath, he had looked to be drawing from his bench strength, pressing ahead with conviction. “Judea was particularly championed by settlers in the lower regions, once the southern part of the Kingdom of Israel in biblical times: then the heart of Judaism, culture and religion.”
“A victor’s choice, huh?” I replied, as we merged with the outbound flow, half speed, at best. “And that left door number three?”
“It left namely where we remain today…”
“How so?” I searched the fogging skies for cues and clues, avoiding over-the-shoulder glances at any trailing tailwinds.
“Simple, Herbert, it largely came down to a matter of territorial versus universal perspectives back then.”
“So who decided that?” I tripped over, then picked up an errant Frisbee from across the tidal marsh’s western edge.
“No less than the likes of founder, David Ben Gurion. And let me tell you why,” Doc peered up as we approached the flat rise of the historic Crissy Airfield’s reclaimed Great Meadow expanse. “You might say it was spirit versus statecraft, dreamers versus doers. However the negotiations went deeper than that—alas, would it had stopped there.”
Fog that had been lipping over coastal ridges burgeoned into a cold, misty curtain winched in through the Golden Gate, pulled along by overheated inland air. Not unlike time-lapse videography, this alabaster froth gradually rolled in between us and the East Fort Baker compound on the Marin side of the bay, then Sausalito’s slope side cottages, Tiburon’s ferry landing and SF Yacht Club—the broad sweep of the Belvuron hills.
Short and fishboard surfers nearly swam out of their neoprene and solar mesh thermal body gloves to reach clearer waters. Yellow-capped triathlete trainers breast-stroked past bobbing sea otters and feeding harbor seals, navigating invasive mussels and bacterial waste on their way back to the safety of East Crissy Beach. Soon, Angel Island vanished in the deepening milky shroud, Alcatraz fading fast. Quickening the pace of this bay-wide evacuation was the ghostly ships’ channel onslaught of a blue-hulled Maersk Line freighter blare horning in. 
“Six of one, half-dozen,” I sideways flung the disk back to some dissing Deadheads on the meadow. “What’s the real difference?”
“A null hypothesis, Herbert,” Doc tapped my sagging shoulder for emphasis. “For there were defining qualities and forces, nameworthy contenders in their own distinct ways.”
“And means? With the locals and all that?” I tripped over a rough edged trail rock.
“Hmph, more to the point, Zion was an idea, a hopeful ideal and poetic symbol of the Jewish yearning for a spiritual homeland. Aspirations that grew into a powerful political movement.”
“Like you said, rooted in King David’s hilltop citadel, right?” I nodded, wiping sand from my aching eyes, then noticing that West Bluff’s treeline up ahead was being fog erased as thoroughly as the razed Crissy barracks had been several years before. “Protecting the King and his loyal subjects…Uriah, Bathsheba and such?”
“Tsk, if you please,” Paulen shrugged, while peering further out the trail, glancing up at a picnicking couple up on the green’s chest-high riser line, especially the halter-topped distaff side of the equation. “Whereas the name Israel was considered more all-encompassing, directly dating back some 3,000 years to the Northern Kingdom so named in the Hebrew Bible.” 
“Meaning Zion wasn’t for everybody by 1948, or what?” I said, wondering if Doc pondered when all the army barracks that used to stand at attention here had so irreversibly surrendered ground.
“Let’s just say ‘Israel’ better represented the collective Jewish people more broadly than merely Jerusalem southward,” Paulen replied, shivering himself at the sight of some hardy hard-core kiters braving force-fours in but Limoland jackets and Thrashin mesh shorts. “While Ben Gurion called for national and historical continuity.”
“Sounds a bit like our post-Civil War dickering and horse trading over Reconstruction,” I groused, shuddering in kind, concluding those effaced WWII-era billets weren’t top of the professor’s mind.
“Nonsense, Herbert, nothing of the sort! The noble Zion resolve became realized political sovereignty over symbolism alone—embracing the entirety of Jewish people: connoting global legitimacy and connecting across the Diaspora worldwide.”
“Notion to nation, from hopes and prayers to nuts and bolts, huh?”
“That’s your truism, not mine…”
On the long, narrow beach before us, skinny swim suited juvies scampered in all ashiver from chillier waters, fantasmic sand sculptures dissolved in a now pounding surf, sunbathers’ lean-tos folding like so much origami. Solitary runners in rubber feet high-stepped past inbound, crossing paths with loose water mutts, leash swinging old masters bundled up not far behind, go-for-broker on the gold customer service cell phone line.
A pair of young Scandia lovers hurriedly snapped one another’s digipix against the Golden Gate backdrop whilst they still could, before dashing off to the Fort Mason hostel and some hot-house vegan stew. Eyeing the pink ‘Bjork for Alltid’ pullovered blonde, an old salt in ‘Niner gear tripped over a tangle of driftwood, his long-reach metal detector sent flying, beeping as if it had just unearthed a trove of buried doubloons…small bleepin’ consolation. 
“So where did that leave Zion?”
“Why, Jews descended en masse upong post-Mandate Palestine from all four corners,” Paulen replied, again peering uptrail toward the mounding fogbank. “However predominantly Europeans, from France and Germany early on.”
“The Ashkies, am I right?”
“Ashkenazis, if you please—so decimated though they were by then—desperately seeking safety and security in an ancestral homeland of their own,” Paulen snapped, now catching a stop-action glimpse of that retreating pink Scandi pullover himself.
“Then you mean kinda like Exodus Revisited…” I eased, attempting to translate that Bjork silk-screened tagline on the fly. Otherwise, however lamely, I was earnestly trying to relate.
Obstacles on due course: If it wasn’t beach driftwood, it was large, half-buried rocks where even harsher winter surf had thrust them. Further evidence of nature’s wave forces was torn branches and splintered limbs strewn about these benches, uprooted tree trunks that had been chain-sawed into relatively harmless log lengths for wilderness effect. Affecting me more directly was this soggy elephant gray Mastiff that had slobbered over, cut loosely by his mastress in her black ‘Dogs, Not Dudes’ sweatshirt, dropping something petrified at our feet, drooling my way in search of just rewards.
”I should expect you to argue that, only it came with even tragically more baggage…”
“Whoa, not arguing—only trying to wrap my mind…” Aww, why the hell am I still putting up with this out here? It isn’t getting me anywhere anymore, just feeling the contstricting pressure crowning the back and top of my head at tthe posterior cingulate cortex. At the supramarginal and fusiform angular gyrus of the superior parietal lobe, further fogging my visual awareness—this time something fierce…
“At any rate, emigrate, they did: salvation and determination on their minds and blessed Zion in their hearts.”
So maybe try this more medial tack, push those buttons before your fingers freeze off. “Guess you could call them Zioneers then, huh?”
“Your blaspheme, not mine…”
Seemed once again, a case of my Seamus’s canine revenge: I had nothing for the Mastiff beast: I knew it, he knew it, too—and yet he kept drooling and staring me down. Got so I had to look elsewhere—up, out, any damn where, trying to keep it all cool, not to mention my freight train of thought. I keyed instead on a squadron of westbound pelicans bucking a hellacious header, soaring straight up in tight formation, as though hitting a headwind wall—one flap forward, two flaps back.
Behind them, the ‘world’s largest airship’ luffed full-bore to maintain its 40 m.p.h. sightseeing speed, a thousand or so feet above the bay. At five bills a pop, even more for the rearview love seats, those winey dozen deluxe tourists up there would brook no turning around. Besides, the cloud white dirigible sported some 250 feet of floating billboard for an upcoming Pixar flick, and this highly leveraged zeppelin venture wasn’t about to job the Disney empire over a little fog-laced resistance.
Echoes of the Graf LZ 129 Hindenburg, all right—and it got me to scanning the filmy skies for any sign of Saturn’s flaming red blimp—some sort of an encore swing or victory lap. By then, the Mastiff had blinked and begged off, albeit with a slobbering growl. That was when I first spotted the turbo choppers. No denying, something fishy was going on out here…
“Just a little conversational shorthand, Doc, only trying to boil things down—get a handle on the backstory, separating the history from any histrionics—you know, academically.”
“Hmph, be that as it may, Diaspora Jews of all bloodlines arrived into nascent Israel to fashion a so-called secular state with a broader array of lofty goals,” Paulen said, over the roar of two Coast Guard helicopters, converging, circling above.
“Uh-huh, Zioneering…like who and how so?” I watched them spin off toward the bridge, dodging the charge, in a purblind sort of way.
“Again, spare me the trite bynames, Herbert. Seriously, you must know as well as I about fulfilling one’s profound hopes and dreams. Are you prepared to tell me you don’t deep-down harbor varied feelings that might impact your personal relationships?” Paulen exhorted. “Howbeit, in this case, that honor fell to Israel’s founding fathers…”
“But what about the Golden Gal herself?” I fought back some empty breadbasket cravings and refluxing acid to bore on in. “Do I detect a smidgin of chauvinism there?”
“Look, Golda Meir’s heroic leadership goes without saying. Corrrespondingly, Zion Project objectives centered around establishing a sovereign identity and safe haven enduring for the Jewish people, no matter what.”
“So why call it a project?”
“Because this was someting of a grand progressive experiment at the time, with visions of a collective community as a source and wellspring of Jewish prided and identity, of shared history and heritage,” Paulen reflected, similarly taking note of the helicopters circling above the shroughding Golden Gate. “While controlling and defending its very own economy and culture, of course.”
“Sounds like a brave new rarefied world alright,” I shrugged, picking up on a Coast Guard rescue chopper and several news station whirlybirds hovering about. What the hell was all this foofaraw about anyway?
“Puleeze, Israel was to be an actualized liberal democracy with a bagrisn mat out for all Jews the world over. A fount for inclusive social justice, equality and human rights.”
“You mean like Zionist mensches, white hats, kibbutzim? I do remember spunky and plucky good guys back in the ’70s, like after Munich—Dylan, Newman to David Bromberg singing Israel’s praises and all the rest of it…”
“I suppose in a manner of speaking, more broadly a movement of political Jewishness dedicated to moral teaching, citizen rights for Palestinian Arabs as well—earnestly pursuing land for peace, working for a two-state solution—holding Judaism is not a race but a peoplehood.”
“In all idyllic, huh? You might say a regular Jewtopia…”
“Rubbish! I mean to say a progressively secular state with a focus on national building rather than strict adherence to God and Torah Law,” Doc huffed. “Seeing God as a collective Jewish community…”
“Secular, worldly, new kid on the block, everybody’s darling…” Whoa, finally there’s a trace of that temper–now we are getting down to it. More Anger Steam on tap, Doc, make those cheesy bacon steakburgers at Lil’s! Still, this is getting to me, and it is all I could do to keep my concentration and track it all in the intensifying wind and fog…
“So then what’s not to like, right?”
“Let’s just say Israel also vowed a good neighbor policy, but their neighbors just wouldn’t leave it be,” Doc sighed. “Nor did all Jews buy into that Zionist Projectorate from day one…”
“Zioneers were too sexular for them, or…” I couldn’t help but notice that some winded trail traffic ahead of us was beginning to turn back toward the parking lot and Marina Green, whereas I remained riveted dead ahead, perhaps advisedly so.
“Very funny, Herbert—funny as a Shoah kaddish.”
“A what?”
“You are still something of a social scientist, look it up, why don’t you…”
Care for more?
Chapter Forty-Seven. A turn in the Bay Trail,
with a bit of a curve thrown in: surfacing is
one gender-specific paper trail left behind…