Monday, November 18, 2024

Old Forts

All around San Francisco Bay are the remnants of forts and bunkers built decades ago to secure the area from the foreign invaders who never arrived.

In recent decades, most of these facilities have been returned from the government to the public and now they are parks and recreational areas. One is Fort Baker, nestled near the Golden Gate Bridge on the northern side of the channel connecting the Bay with the Pacific Ocean, just around the corner from Sausalito.

One chilly night recently a group of us went there to set traps for crabs along the old wooden pier. As a large moon rose in the east, we caught quite a few in our traps. Many were Dungeness crabs, which you cannot keep in this season at this location, so we released them.

But others were browns and reds, and those large enough to fit the legal limit (four inches wide) went straight into the pail we later carried home to bake into crab cakes.

Like many of the nooks and crannies around Northern California, Fort Baker contains a set of particular memories for me. In the early 1990's it was one of the venues for the movie "Jack the Bear," starring Danny DeVito. My older three kids and I were extras in that movie, and I remember the shoot at this location vividly.

There was a lone public phone booth at the former fort, and during a break in the shoot I needed to use it for a work call. (This was before cellphones.) I had to wait in line behind a person who seemed to be intent on talking forever.

When he finally finished and I was proceeding to the booth, I suddenly recognized him -- Bruce Gilbert, the Hollywood producer of the movie I'd helped create a decade earlier for Jane Fonda called "Rollover."

Bruce was producing this movie as well. The phone booth is no longer there.

But my kids enjoyed being part of a feature film set on that occasion, with costumes, makeup, lights, and actors like DeVito (who was friendly) and whom they recognized from other films.

The kids were underaged workers at the time, so I had to secure work permits from the City of San Francisco, which probably cost more than the "wages" they earned that day, but who cared.

The West Coast has long been home to such experiences. Hollywood sets are common enough that they rarely cause you to turn your head. But they also are a reminder that all life can be seen as a movie and we're all actors in our own dramas.

So back to that recent night at Fort Baker. Shivering from the breeze whipping in through the Golden Gate, hearing the fog horns blaring, seeing the container ships leaving for Asia and the harvest moon lighting the scene, I tried to explain these particular sets of memories to my grandchildren while they rushed trap-to-trap to pull up the next load of crabs.

They listened politely to their grandfather sitting in the folding chair they’d thoughtfully set up on that old wooden pier, but a more urgent task clearly was at hand. Was that crab a Dungeness, or a keeper?

(I wrote the first version of this essay four years ago. My grandchildren have since returned to Fort Baker and caught more crabs, but I have not.)

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