Temescal Creek Park Review

“In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.” Those are the first lines of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, a novel about a spirit that can’t decide if it wants to be born into the absurdity of human life, a shameless rip-off of Amos Tutuola’s even more shameless rip-off of Yoruba folktales, and a great book about whether life is worth living and whether children should want to be adults. I read it once and have almost completely forgotten it.

When you walk into Temescal Creek Park, you follow a path that once was a creek. Old maps will tell you that this was all once a willow grove, which means a matrix of roots once held the soil to keep it from being washed away by the forward motion of the water. Willow trees are associated with death and grieving; they like water, but they also like keeping the water from washing away the soil. When willow talismans have power, they seem to have this kind of power, not to solve the problem of death, the problem that time only moves forward, but to manage it, keep it from being too destructive. Water, too, likes to move, but it also likes the earth to hold it into place, to give it habits and consistency. Without earth to give it shape, water is just molecules; earth makes it rivers and streams.

Instead of willow roots, today, concrete is used to shunt the water flowing down from the hills into the bay through underground culverts. It rushes forward unseen, underground. Instead of rambling and playing wherever gravity takes it, the water always goes to the same places, now; the concrete paths take you to a fenced-in playground, next to a fenced-in dog park, where the space tells you how to move.  

The way the twins and I habitually enter the park starts with a pair of benches, which they like to play on—they run back and forth, laying down on them in defiance of their anti-homeless construction and yell “good night” at each other—and there’s a nearby pillar, whose stones they call “cunk,” their word for cracker. They run around and around the pillar, singing a song about los pollitos whose general theme is that the pollitos run around and around. After a few minutes of this, they continue along the pathway past an “ice cream cone” or “birthday cake,” which is what they delightedly call the little monument someone has built there, that I’ve never examined too closely, that I always tell the babies not to touch.

They greet it, cheerfully, before running on. I hope whoever is being memorialized likes children. I think spirits do; I think it’s adults they know not to trust. There was once a basketball lying around here, and they remember that, and sometimes remind me. Basketball! Mostly they just rush forward, yelling corre corre corre.

The playground has doors they can open, and do, and they enjoy holding the doors open for others to enter and depart. In the hot summer evenings, a great tree shades the park very nicely, with its slides and swings and tunnel and various things to climb on. The turf is rubber and there tend to be wagons and carts and cars to ride and play with; lately, there has been a kind of aircraft carrier, and some plastic railroad pieces they can connect together. For some reason, it seems like we see a lot of airplanes here, and also the moon.

A great tree used to shade the park in the morning, on the other side of the park, but at some point, it was felled. Now it’s a stump. There is a concrete wall that wrapped around that tree, that they like to balance on and run back and forth on, and there’s something about how that concrete wall became a path, how it once wrapped around a tree, but now it wraps around a stump.

Someone told me she remembered when they cut that tree down. How come? I asked. She didn’t know. The past is vague like that, because we’re facing the other direction. I found a scrap of text online from a Deborah Devney, “one of the people who fought for 10 years to get that park in place.” She says she “Didn’t expect people to run with it like that. That used to just be a drywash were people dumped stuff and kids rode their bikes.” 

We came here once when the babies were too small for any of it, when it seemed like a big kids’ park; now they are big kids, and they ramble and play wherever they please. Time rushes on when you’re not looking. The park has lights at night, which is good now that it gets dark so early. There’s a pizza place nearby, if you’re hungry.