California Coast & Ocean

Road Work Ahead
Little by little, the future is being coaxed into sight. Most vacant buildings on Mare Island are now slated for either demolition or reuse. About 2,000 people work on the island, including those on cleanup operations. The U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Regional headquarters is here, as is a field station for the U.S. Geological Survey. About 36 businesses have set up shop on the island. The only retail operation, however, is a taco truck. On Mare Island Strait, 12 artists have studios in a cavernous concrete building.

Myrna Hayes, co-chair of the Restoration Advisory Board for 14 years, meets monthly with representatives of the Navy, City, federal and state agencies, and Lennar to talk about about the environmental cleanup and other issues. Not only Mare Island but the entire city of Vallejo is in transition, as she sees it. In the past its economy was based on serving Navy personnel, she said, but now it is moving into the entrepreneurial mode. Because the City is in such dire financial straits at present, “whatever happens at Mare Island will come from the people, not exclusively from government.” She would like to see a Mare Island Trust established, something like the Presidio Trust in San Francisco, or a partnership such as that between the National Park Service and the nonprofit Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, which raised the funds and led the way in the transformation of Crissy Field and some other areas in San Francisco’s Presidio.

Meanwhile, Hayes and others are working to put Mare Island’s natural and historic heritage on Bay Area residents’ mental map. The annual Flyway Festival, which Hayes co-founded in 1996, brings thousands in for guided wildlife tours for three days in winter. Arc Ecology offers monthly outings, to watch birds, view the moon, paint the landscape, learn about history. The Sierra Club and Audubon Society also offer hikes. Next August 8 and 9, during the annual Mare Faire, the Port Chicago tragedy will be commemorated.

On July 17, 1944, 320 Navy men, 202 of them African-American, were killed in a series of giant ammunition explosions at nearby Port Chicago. Afterwards, while their surviving white officers were given leave to recover from the trauma, 258 African-American sailors at the segregated naval base were ordered to resume loading bombs and ammunition aboard ships. They refused to be ferried over to Mare Island for that purpose and were arrested in Vallejo, according to Jim Kern, curator and executive director of Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum. Fifty were tried by court martial and found guilty of mutiny; 208 were discharged for bad conduct.

That story is part of the shipyard’s history, along with many that are less disturbing to remember. In the future, visitors will be able to hear many of them when they come to Mare Island. They might also learn that Miwok-Costanoan people were here for at least 2,000 years before the first Europeans saw the place, and that current inhabitants include a population of the endangered saltmarsh harvest mouse, which lives in pickleweed along the shore.

“My own personal dream,” Hayes said, “is of year-round daily public access to nature and heritage sites on Mare Island, of the regional park linked to trails and interpretive centers, of nature and heritage tourism that benefits not only the tourists but also the City and the region.”

Current human residents will have to wait for that dream--or even a community--to materialize here. The City’s and its master developer’s bankruptcies are big new bumps on the road ahead. Nevertheless, Mare Island has the potential to make that wait worthwhile.