Jul 27 2010
Elephants Needed
Things are changing in the marina.
If you weren’t from around here, or hadn’t been here in a while, you’d never know. There’s construction of new, lovely docks, there’s a new fuel and pumpout dock, new shower and laundry facility, and some pretty good stuff in the impromptu library in the laundry room.
It’s subtler than that. Little stuff. Like, the guys who think it’s funny to take a dump in the toilets and not flush. Like the person who was so enraged that I’d taken their dry clothes out of the dryer to make room for my own stuff, that they opened both my dryers and threw my wet stuff out onto the floor. Like the people who don’t believe their dogs should be on leashes, so they let them run, and don’t understand how hard it is to really clean dogshit off the docks, so they just sort of leave it there. Like the neighbor of mine who is slowly losing his mind, probably due to too many drugs, and has taken to verbally attacking everyone around him for everything and nothing.
My neighbor Beverly, who’s been here longer than me, and I, were talking about it this morning. And we decided that the answer was elephants.
See, if juvenile elephants are left alone, they start engaging in thuggery. They rip up trees, they stomp on houses, they generally create havoc. And if you put just one mature male elephant in their territory, they suddenly mellow out, as if someone was there holding them accountable.
There are a lot of fabulous characters here, don’t get me wrong. But all of the larger-than-life, alpha-male types have moved on. The guys who would charge in and set things right, the guys who knew everyone, the guys who were capable of sitting on the troublesome, the guys who knew when to call the cops, and when to call the hospital. They’ve all gone, leaving us with a lot of very quiet, but not very dominating, guys. And that’s leaving a vacuum socially, that’s allowing the mice to act like rats.
I’m sure a new social order will reassert itself. I’m just hoping that it’s cordial. And, y’know, involves elephants.
February 2010 – Baykeeper successfully settled our lawsuit against the City of San Carlos for its thousands of gallons of raw sewage spills in violation of the Clean Water Act. The City has agreed to spend tens of millions of dollars to make collection system improvements and undertake a study to identify capacity problems. The City will also invest $200,000 in funding for projects to help restore the water quality of the San Francisco Bay watershed.
In 2008 and 2009, Baykeeper successfully settled lawsuits against the City of Burlingame and its satellite cities of Hillsborough and Burlingame Hills for sewage spills in violation of the Clean Water Act.

