These “climber screens” are the first line of defense, where things like rags and sticks are taken out.

Once through the door and into the innards of the Oceanside Water Pollution Control plant, our guide Catania showed us the “influent gates” where the first big chunks are removed, and from there on to a series of vast, almost Home Depot-size rooms where alien activities took place.

One was the basement level of the 70-foot-tall, 750,000-gallon “digesters” where the solid waste is mixed with bacteria and, over the process of two weeks or so, turned into “biosolids.” This transformation emits loads of heat, which is harnessed to supply almost half the plant’s power.

The bottom of a digester looks like a concrete stalactite.

Where does all that stuff end up? About 60 percent of solid waste in the United States is turned into fertilizer. In San Francisco about a quarter of what goes down the drain and the toilet ends up tilled into the farms of Sonoma County.

Will I be able to forge this the next time I breathe in the aroma of a Sonoma cabernet?

To be continued…

The Wastewater Chronicles, Part III is a post from: The Ferris Files

I put down my bag and immediately got on the neighboring elliptical trainer. Elliptical trainers are kind of dumb, but with the most inspiring presidential candidate since Bill Clinton at my elbow, I could deal. Obama watched TV and listened to an iPod. He looked tired and had that serious expression on his face. I acted like I was working out real hard, whew.

Obama poses with me and two other breathless admirers.

The Illinois senator has the lean physique of his Kenyan forebears and a pretty good running stride, though his footstrike’s a little heavy if you ask me. He finished up on the treadmill and walked across to the stationary bike and then to a Stairmaster, which was on the other side of my elliptical machine. He kept sweating and I kept pretending I wasn’t paying attention.

Hovering around the room were three handsome and muscular black men in workout clothes, which is more black people than I have ever seen in one place in Mill Valley. Probably Secret Service. They went through the motions of hefting iron but their eyes darted this way and that, sizing up everyone who walked through the door.

Two green Chevy Tahoes were parked in the lot and through the glass I could see well-dressed people talking on cellphones. Obama, I have learned since, is in town attending fundraisers and visiting the Google offices down on the Peninsula.

I got wind that the Man might do a photo op when his workout was done. As people arrived for spin class, Obama and his henchmen headed for the exit and I followed right along with my camera. An agent took this photo and I shook the candidate’s hand, which was surprisingly delicate and soft.

I hope that 40 years from now I will show this photo to my grandkids, and that by then the event will have been so thoroughly embellished that I’ll tell them, “Yep, here’s me with my friend Barack Obama. That’s right, the president. This was waaaaay back in 2007. Barack and grandpa had a good workout together that day.”

Run, Obama, Run! is a post from: The Ferris Files

image source: www.hopeforgaia.com

At least one morning every week I run around Strawberry Point in Mill Valley, but on Monday the view of the San Francisco skyline across the Bay was marred by a spread of McDonald’s trash on the ground next to a garbage can. It was being dined on by an enterprising crow.
Normally I would have run right by. I clean up after myself and you can worry about your own mess, thank you. Trash is an eyesore but I’ll save my fretting for bigger fry, like global warming.

But as I ran on I recalled the article I read about the Pacific Garbage Patch, a stew of plastic and other castoff garbage that is floating in the middle of the ocean. It is twice the size of Texas and keeps on growing.

The pile of fast-food detritus I was trying to ignore stood right next to the Bay. I imagined it blowing a few feet west into the water and from there out of the Golden Gate, and then it would be on its way to join the giant cesspool of our creation.

So I doubled back, shooed off the crow, and picked the mess up, every last bit of shredded bag, quarter-pounder wrapper and ketchup packet, and stuffed it in the garbage can firmly.
And off I ran, feeling I’d done a good deed. But man did that crow glare at me.

Trashing the Ocean is a post from: The Ferris Files

Photo Credit: dipsea.org

I have trained too little; I have eaten too much; it is beastly hot; I woke up tired. Also, this race is stupid, so who cares. The list is so complete and satisfying that I silently congratulate myself for thinking so clearly under duress.

Other runners are streaming past me at a steady rate as I climb the 672 steps of the Dipsea Steps and continue up to Highway 1 and then down toward Muir Woods.

Ain’t no big, I say to myself, and go back to rehearsing my excuses. This time I imagine I am telling them to, of all people, my client Cindy. My body is pounding down Highway 1 but in my mind I am saying to Cindy “it was soooo hot out there.” Cindy nods sympathetically.

The Dipsea Race is an easy place to make excuses if one is so inclined. The course is 7.1 miles long and pretty much straight up, or straight down. It is the second-oldest footrace in the country after the Boston Marathon. Since 1904, people have been hobbling up the trails with pained expressions and throwing themselves down the steeps like lemmings bent on suicide.

We do it…well, no one can adequately explain why we submit ourselves to such torture, but Marin runners can’t get enough of the Dipsea. People wait in long lines to grab one of the 1,500 spots and then lay out race-day strategies as intricate as Napoleon’s.

My comfortable reverie of excuses is uninterrupted after I plod up an endless and relentlessly sunny section of uphill called Hogsback and  enter a stand of trees and their shade. Shade. I can handle this race if it’s cool. And I start running harder, just like that.

I am flying.  Forget about excuses; there are too many runners to pass. “On your left!” I breathe into the ear of a hapless woman in a pink baseball cap.

I end up finishing the race, at a little park on Stinson Beach in front of a cheering crowd, in one hour 13 minutes 21 seconds, more than five minutes slower than last year. I lurk around the finish line suspecting my showing is so poor that I will not make Invitational (the top 750 runners are invited back to race again).

But as it happens I place 464th, dropping just 74 spots from last year. It seems everyone wilted in the heat. Instead of entirely sucking I was just a little off.

Somehow this is a bit of a letdown. It only seems fair that this great list of excuses I compiled should be shared, enjoyed, even emulated. So, what do you think?

The Art of Making Excuses is a post from: The Ferris Files

I plodded like a slug. My Uncle Ken and Aunt Nancy had put me up the night before at their house on Bainbridge Island, and all day I had been eating. At lunch they served a huge pot of clam chowder. Now I had all the pep of a shellfish, with pure cream in my veins. 

“The great thing about Seattle,” Ken had announced, as he launched into the fifth great thing about Seattle, “is you can do all the things you could possibly do in the Bay Area in a week, and do them in one day.”

I ran past gardens where rhododenrons and magnolias pulsed in pink and purple, down streets of mossy asphalt, and through a wood choked with ferns and broad-leaf plants. I passed a sign to the Nordic Heritage Museum and down the steep steps to Golden Gardens Park, a pebbly beach on Puget Sound.

Nothing golden at the Gardens that day. The sky was iron gray and the Olympic Mountains, which I knew to lie just across the Sound, were buried in rain. Here it was dry, however, and the park was full of merry people grilling and chatting around bonfires and playing volleyball in flannel shirts and long underwear. The sun may not have been out but they acted as if it was.

The next day the sun did come out and Seattle was transformed. We visited the Museum of Glass (pictured) and sunned ourselves on the beach at Point Defiance. We walked through Pike Place Market and admired the freshly-washed buildings of downtown, the shiny skyscrapers and the stately brick facades, and the bustling port in the middle of it all. When the sun is out, Seattle is one of the most beautiful cities anywhere.

But this day the gray would not lift, and I trudged on home. I took off my Montrail shoes, covered in the dark brown mud, mixed with rotted vegetation, that is the signature of the Northwest woods. It was nearly nighttime, and I wanted coffee.

Sluggish in Seattle is a post from: The Ferris Files

Photo Credit: bajan.wordpress.com

On Monday it actually happened, and I got to find out.

My client Melissa and I ran through Golden Gate Park carrying heavy backpacks. This seems silly until you learn that Melissa, a pert Brit, is training for a 350-mile adventure race across the Baja Peninsula. Silly in itself, but there you have it.

I called a halt on a sunny path so we could talk technique for a moment and slung my backpack into the grass, where it landed with a thud, appropriate to its contents, which were sixteen pounds of dumbbells. I left it there in the grass, innocent fool that I am, as Melissa and I strolled a minute and talked about body alignment.

Then we turned back. “Your pack is gone,” Melissa said.

I stared dumbly at the tuft of grass where my pack wasn’t. As I absorbed this disturbing information, Melissa added, “I think that guy has it.”

She pointed to a heavyset man in jeans and a sweatshirt jogging steadily away, already a good 75 yards off, but close enough that I could see my gray and red Camelbak on his shoulders.

Without a thought I sprinted after him. He was not moving fast; he was, after all, freighted with an extra 16-plus pounds. As my breath came fast and my heart started pounding, a plan snapped into place. I would sneak up in silence and surprise him.

The chase took somewhere between 30 seconds and an hour – can’t quite remember – and when I closed in, he was traversing a crosswalk and had no idea what was coming.

“Hey Buddy! Drop the pack!” I yelled in what I hoped was a leonine roar, and grabbed a strap before he could turn around. Not a bad strategy, it turned out, as he appeared shocked to be in the grips of a man six inches taller and 10 years younger than he. He struggled for just a moment and wriggled free. “I didn’t know it belonged to anybody!” he whined.

I turned back toward the sidewalk and past all the motorists pie-eyed in their cars. A guy walking by said, “He doesn’t look like a thief.”

All’s well that ends well. My pack is full and my fantasy is fulfilled. Melissa is still chuckling about the unfortunate thief, burdened by a payload of iron, who had to outrun a running coach.

To Chase a Thief is a post from: The Ferris Files