Camp Paradise

Moving into my hundred-year-old biology classroom at Santa Cruz High, I inherited a material timeline of life science pedagogy from previous teachers. The glass cabinets along one wall were crowded with hand-painted lantern slides, vials from a turn-of-the-century Santa Cruz pharmacy, a wax model of a paramecium, a teacher's scrapbook featuring 1920s-era "freaks" and "monsters from the sea," and a "Bio-Ray Gun."

That September, one of my biology students picked the lock on a supply cupboard near his desk and unearthed a human fetus curled in a puddle of formaldehyde at the bottom of a preserving jar. Stamped across its Rotex label was the name of the chemistry teacher, who had not yet retired. "Sick! What is this?" he yelled out, holding the container above his head. With the eyes of thirty-five other students riveted to the lump of lung-colored tissue, he added, "This is death science!"

"It's probably not real. Get back to work." I retrieved the jar and quickly deposited it in the cabinet, closing the glass door firmly. From that vantage, the fetus turned its half-formed eye upon my work, and became a classroom muse of sorts—a spur, at least, to livening my science lessons and permitting controversy.

By spring, we had scaled up the curriculum from the cell to ecology. Environmental education seemed like the obvious fix for my biology syllabus. We "read" the fossils in the cliff face at Scott Creek Beach, learned the names of the trees on campus, and trekked down to the levee on a few occasions with garbage bags or yardsticks. When the class couldn't be held outside, I collected seaweeds in the early morning for practice with dichotomous keys and holdfast dissection. I attended a conference on radical environmentalism at the Vets Hall that semester and returned to my classroom with leaflets on tree-sitting, every shade of direct action handbill from The Ruckus Society, and the addresses of activist-prisoners who wanted to receive mail.

Fetus-boy was still not engaged. In fact, his attendance had plummeted. Later that year, I ran into him at the video store where his mother worked, and he gave me a handbill of his own—an invitation to a "Save Camp Paradise" cookout and sleep-in. "I live there," he told me offhandedly. The greening of my curriculum seemed less and less benign; and environmentalism, it would turn out, often covered for class antagonism.

That Saturday I packed up my children, who were overjoyed at the prospect of following the cardboard signs in the forest to a place called paradise. We wound our way along the San Lorenzo River until we reached the first tents and trailers. (One, with a shingle for "bicycle repairs.") Larry Templeton, who had founded Paradise that January (2001), was standing in a central clearing, telling a small assembly about the Santa Cruz "sleeping ban" that threatened to close this homeless encampment. Neighbors had also pressured the city to take action; they claimed these outsiders would pollute the river and injure a protected species of plant. Who speaks for nature? A "volunteer environmental consultant" stepped up to explain that the campers themselves had undertaken various restoration projects, cleaning up what was once a "heroin alley."

My children and I poked around the garden and the goldfish pond, and mostly waded in the river. I would learn, the following winter, that the camp flooded out during the first storm—plants and people, the river community was fragile. As for my student, he never showed up that afternoon to "Save Camp Paradise."