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Aug. 26th, 2002 02:32 amAs a geek, bachelor and generally laid-back person, I am about as uninvolved with city politics and buearocracy as possible. Concepts like neighborhood watches, attending city council meetings or fighting town hall over where a library or park is going to be settled are very foreign to me. They're the kinds of things you see on TV in small-town sitcoms or mentioned on the news. The extent of my contact is putting the trash out for city trash services, and going to the DMV every few years when I forget to renew my driver's license by mail.
The closest I came was when I spent a few months trying to figure out how to get up to the old Almaden Radar Station, more affectionately known as "the can". Perched on Mt. Umunhum, overlooking the entire southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area, I've seen The Can every commuting day for the last 8 years of living in this house. It's a landmark that's incredibly close and yet unvisitable, sequestered away behind private property gates and Tho Shalt Not barriers with official city logos on them. During my numerous visits to nearby Sierra Azul I've longed to get the rest of the way up to the top of the hill, but met a barrier each time. I even snuck past a few, only to find worse ones farther up, along with nasty 'Git Orf Mah Proh-pah-tay!' anti-humanity types prowling what look like public roads.
I finally got fed up with this and tried the official route. Some web-digging produced contact information for a group known as the "Mid-peninsula Regional Open Space District," the reponsible party for management of places like Sierra Azul and Mt. Umnuhum. Those who had emails, I sent very polite letters to. Those who were snail-mail only, I crafted the first non-electronic letters I'd written in most of a decade. In those letters, I presented myself as an amateur photographer who wanted the opportunity to visit the site and document it in pictures. Months later, I got a snail-mail back, telling me I'd be contacted soon by a member of the MROSD about the 'status of my request'. A day after, the contact happened, in email.
( Read more... )
The closest I came was when I spent a few months trying to figure out how to get up to the old Almaden Radar Station, more affectionately known as "the can". Perched on Mt. Umunhum, overlooking the entire southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area, I've seen The Can every commuting day for the last 8 years of living in this house. It's a landmark that's incredibly close and yet unvisitable, sequestered away behind private property gates and Tho Shalt Not barriers with official city logos on them. During my numerous visits to nearby Sierra Azul I've longed to get the rest of the way up to the top of the hill, but met a barrier each time. I even snuck past a few, only to find worse ones farther up, along with nasty 'Git Orf Mah Proh-pah-tay!' anti-humanity types prowling what look like public roads.
I finally got fed up with this and tried the official route. Some web-digging produced contact information for a group known as the "Mid-peninsula Regional Open Space District," the reponsible party for management of places like Sierra Azul and Mt. Umnuhum. Those who had emails, I sent very polite letters to. Those who were snail-mail only, I crafted the first non-electronic letters I'd written in most of a decade. In those letters, I presented myself as an amateur photographer who wanted the opportunity to visit the site and document it in pictures. Months later, I got a snail-mail back, telling me I'd be contacted soon by a member of the MROSD about the 'status of my request'. A day after, the contact happened, in email.
( Read more... )
