short circuit

This post is for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic Energy of Place:

A few miles from the mild hills where I live, on a finger of land with spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, 613 men, sentenced to death, wait. Some while away their time playing chess and doing crossword puzzles. Others spit at their lot in life, as if the saliva, like holy water, like fire water ... or whatever magical potion, could wash away, if not their sins, their surroundings. These are the men on death row in San Quentin prison, which was opened in 1852. A fortress with walls the color of vanilla ice cream, this prison is visible to all who pass through Central Marin on US 101.

Every year or so, one of the men on death row is executed. Lengthy appeals have kept the machinery of death barely in operation, while the population on death row has been growing. When all appeals have been exhausted and there is an execution at the prison, those who oppose the death penalty turn out in great numbers at the gates. Relatives of the victims of the crimes committed by the condemned men also turn out. The relatives come seeking closure, or whatever else they hope will finally release them from their torment.

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When I was a new mother, still raw from the hormonal rollercoaster, we lived in a house that gave us an unparalleled view of San Quentin prison and the San Rafael-Richmond bridge. I saw many a dawn break over the water and illuminate the prison walls as I tried to calm and comfort my crying infant.

Sometime during the first months that we lived in that house, there was an execution at San Quentin. I had this fear, this odd notion, that the soul of the man whose life was going to be taken so precisely and according to regulation that night, would rush forth from the walls, rip across the water and rush up the hill looking for a place to alight.

I could not fathom that soul’s intention: healing or revenge? I was simply seized by this belief that the condemned man’s soul would wonder into my small world in which, at that time, everything was at it should have been. I was enmeshed in my dream of suburban bliss: a husband who went off to work in the morning and whose return I awaited with dinner on the table, an infant who was a bundle of promises of a bright future. I wanted to stop time ... put it behind bars. I wanted a peculiar stay of execution of my own.

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Every year about 30 more men join the others already on death row in San Quentin. Outside the prison walls, ferries take well-heeled commuters back and forth, the river of cars ebbs and flows with people on their way to or fro from the East Bay, windsurfers sail past the aging walls ... all is in motion around the place, whether powered by wind, water or oil. Inside the walls might as well be another country.

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Every now and then, there is an execution at San Quentin, and a cold shiver goes through me, but it doesn’t seize me like it did that first time. For a few days, after an execution, it seems to me that there is bad energy everywhere. People seem more aggressive on the roads, angrier in stores – a bit uglier, too, in spite of all the flattering light that this part of the world has plenty to spare. But then, I tell myself that I am imagining things.

I have asked others around me if they found it odd living in this place of plenty – excesses, really – with the largest death row prison so much in view (but so rarely in sight) as they go about their daily business. They (at least those I asked) said that they didn’t find it strange. It’s just the way things are. It’s all part of what makes this place what it is.

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You would think that after living so close to death row I would know a little more about San Quentin and the death penalty. The prison is in my sight nearly every day still ... and yet, I barely notice it. It has become a part of the landscape.

Posted by maria at October 30, 2004 06:40 PM | TrackBack