Free The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit Page B

National Laboratory. The park is unusual because it’s a large amount of open space—almost 75,000 acres—in one of the major metropolitan areas in the country. It’s also unusual because its focus is neither historical nor natural but an uneasy melding of the two. The history is rarely examined, though its evidence is everywhere in the chunks of concrete embedded throughout the landscape of the park. These are the dozens of bunkers and related structures, crumbling souvenirs of the wars that never were, or that were elsewhere. And yet, war is here in a thousand ways. Even in the headlands there is war.
    Dowley spoke in Building 944, a spacious military barracks built in 1907, when the Headlands was an extension of the Pacific headquarters ofthe U.S. Army across the Golden Gate at San Francisco’s Presidio and Fort Mason. From those headquarters U.S. military action was directed, from the Indian Wars to the Korean and Vietnam Wars; during the Second World War alone, more than a million soldiers were said to have embarked from Fort Mason for the Pacific theater of war. The barracks and the other handsome buildings arrayed in a horseshoe tucked into a valley in the Headlands were used for housing and training soldiers who’d be deployed elsewhere. The Bay Area has always been militarized, always involved with wars, though the actual wars have been, since the 1860s, fought elsewhere.
    If you walk down Building 944’s worn, handsome wooden staircase and out the big doors and head west, past the old bowling alley and chapel, the eucalyptuses and the Monterey cypresses, you come to the Nike missile launch site tucked into a depression that the road curves around. It was designed to fire nuclear-tipped weapons at incoming missiles, but by that time the targets were imagined as incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles fired from overseas. In the 1950s the threat was thought to be Russia, but by the late 1960s the nuclear war fantasies that generated the preventative architecture and weapons included China, and the idea that a missile could take out a missile was itself something of a fantasy. There was no particular reason to situate missile depots directly on the coast. The Marin County Planning Department put together a staff report in 1969 (probably written by my father) that wondered “whether the probable risk of accident isn’t greater than the probable risk from the kind of attack these missiles are supposed to defend against.” Fortunately, neither accident nor attack ever came before the warheads were taken away. What remains are industrial structures surrounded by cyclone fencing.
    So ignore the Nike facility and keep walking. You can take the narrow, uneven trail that takes you through tall green banks of willows, coyote bush, brambles, and poison oak, on past the lagoon that the pelicans, ducks, seagulls and other birds frequent, to the sand of Rodeo Beach, the cove beyond the lagoon, and between two high shoulders of coastline. If you go left, or south, you’ll come to the bunkers. If you go north, you’ll pass the many buildings of Fort Cronkhite and arrive at the old road that leads to more bunkers. They are embedded in the landscape like shrapnelor buckshot in a body, the ruins of old fears and old versions of war, the architecture of a violence that was first of all a violence against the earth, with concrete poured dozens of feet deep into slopes that were also home to rare species and prone to erosion when disrupted.
    These welts of concrete have shifted, cracked, crumbled, and in some cases slid down eroded hillsides into the surf, but the majority of them are still in place. If you imagine them as an assault on the earth, then the earth has fought back, with foliage that has half-hidden and choked some of them, with the forces of water and temperature that forced cracks in the massive structures, with erosion that has dislodged and tilted some at crazy angles. But they have a harsh beauty of their