The Sun Sludge

A smoldering San Francisco sun hardens the slushy waste into a cement paste, bubbling thick with mutant moss and oily rubber scraps. These chunky waters never expected a sun so sweltering, the microwaved air sticking to my skin like hot molasses, absorbed heavily into my dusty bones. Typically a cool wind sways over the gray sludge, washing away the sweating aroma of caked combustion and lingering sewage, allowing the fog to refreshingly bathe your body in its soft mist.

But today, the horizontal rays of the white sun beam down onto the egg yoke interior of the sludge, boiling up the forgotten junk to its surface, heralding in the sad ascension of industrial waste and foreboding weaponry. The seconds stretch like rubber bands, bound to give in and break at any moment. An auspicious beginning and a lonely end.

A rusty shopping cart lies on its side floating atop the water’s brownish puss slightly higher than its brother showing the wrinkled age of the elements, sinking into the slime like a juiced up needle into bumpy flesh, its plastic melting away, drying hard, and then melting once again in a trudging cycle. They surely belonged to wandering nomads, pitching tented homes in the near vicinity, and then pushed out to continue their eternal odyssey by the patrolling authorities, hardly marred by the nauseating stink of this place, a perfume that tells stories of the distant land known as home.

A sinuous aorta cuts across the land, trickling lightly with an oily grin, splitting off into narrower tributaries by a sun bleached construction cone that still wears the pinkish remnants of its loud orange past. Even the barbed wire and chain fence constructed to ward off visitors have decayed and fallen into the pit, catching greasy feathers and blackened twigs in their iron spikes, decomposing calmly under the pitiless sun and screeching herons.

The seagulls sit on the sun pocked boulders that form the boundaries of the cove – cradling the corroded timber columns that once held up a bustling pier ushering in cargo ships to the bursting industry, the glorious Port of San Francisco – then waft over the crumbling concrete land buttressed by eroding steel platforms dripping with its liquid rust, only to make a hungry return to the cascading rocks.

They call it Warm Water Cove, a land where bright graffiti murals painted with swirling letters once littered the warehouse walls and the cement factory fences, now buffed over by a long abandoned feces grey that mirrors the mossy sewage of the sludge waters. The waters hardly resemble the substance of H20, while the cove is nothing but a dank abyss underneath the crumbling concrete, serving as shelter for some of the more feral life of these lands. Newly installed surveillance cameras mark the territory, patrolled from some unseen headquarters, ensuring the territory only for the lives of animals and waste. The specter of human activity lingers annoyingly in the mud.

They also call it Tire Park, baptized with good reason by the uncanny sight during low tide of a truck tire cemetery on the southern side of the bay. Soaked in the gooey paste, the tires clamor towards the shimmering asphalt rocks, planted by the rippling tides into the beach like gravestones of some mysterious sea creatures, or a foreign ritual, an industrial sacrifice in hopes of a moment of serenity.

What will come forth out of this oily sludge, concocting what sort of potion out of scrap metal, discarded rubber tires, the stilling ammonia of feces and slime? Will the heat of the sun give birth to a modern Aphrodite out of this castrated port, floating towards shore atop a rotating tire spinning vigorously like a dervish, inspired by a crazed mission of urban redemption? Or will the slithery serpentine paint spread its draconic fingertips across the totality of the cove, slathering narrow concrete paths and weedy flowers with a smudged layer of cultivated dullness?