The Old School Path
Nestled between a quiet neighborhood and a regional park, following the crest of the Hayward ridge, there’s a small looping path shaded by Quercus agrifolia, its edges crowded with poison oak, cow parsley, and California bee plant. These days the path is most frequented by dogs and their walkers, but its name belies its original intended usage: a safe traverse for neighborhood children headed to the Hilltop School, which still educates students in grades K-5.
It’s also a hunting ground for coyotes and great blue herons, red-shouldered hawks, kites, and other raptors. It provides nesting and caching sites and feeding opportunities for pygmy nuthatches, chickadees, towheees and warblers and jays of various persuasions, among many other birds. Eastern fox squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, and skunks all visit the path, and woodrats build castles on the hillside below it. Some days the animal residents of Tilden’s Little Farm can be heard lowing and baa-ing to the excited shrieks of children from down in Wildcat Canyon, or a chorus of coyote yips, the loud gossip of crows, or the low, distant hum of the Bayshore Highway cuts through the quiet.
Humans live here, and live with the risk, too. These hills have not burned in over a century, and the valley to the east is crowded with eucalyptus, a powder keg just waiting to blow. Fuel management is an ongoing concern and coordinated by a collection of agencies with overlapping jurisdictions, helped along by local “elves” (as some of the neighborhood volunteers call themselves). If you live in the WUI – the wildland-urban interface – maybe you get more familiar with your mower, or cut down some trees around your property for clearance. Or maybe not – the hills run on hope as much as anything, although interventions by the fire goats who come to graze every summer seem to be welcomed by most residents.
My walks to the path always included time on surface streets on the way there and back, past gardens filled with bottlebrush trees beloved by hummingbirds, haunted by outside cats, tended by both green-thumb homeowners and talented day laborers. Sometimes escaped dogs walk miles from their homes and end up on the Old School Path, no doubt following a familiar scent from some recent walk. Although I no longer live in the area, I still escape my own garden and show up there, too.
