Get dirty while cleaning up
The GGNRA's Volunteer Program is summer vacation for nature lovers.

By Liam O'Donoghue

IN DECEMBER 1995 an underground pipe running parallel to Lobos Creek in the southwest corner of the Presidio collapsed, burying the source of the park's drinking water under several hundred thousand cubic yards of sand. Raw sewage poured out of the damaged line, and the quagmire swallowed one of the million-dollar mansions on Lake Street. It was a mess though hardly a surprise, caused by movement among the constantly shifting dunes.

If that sewer had held its ground eight years ago, I might not have found myself hacking up clumps of exotic weeds like ripgut brome and farmer's foxtail last month along the grassy bank of the creek. At the time of the collapse, the area was an abandoned baseball field, with only a few dunes remaining. But the fees the city paid the park for access to the land during the pipe repair provided funding to jump-start a restoration project. Now a lush cover of rare and native plants spreads across the rolling valley of dunes as a devoted crew of volunteers helps reclaim this haven of natural beauty.

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When I was growing up, I would make a dramatic show of doing homework if I noticed my dad examining a stump or oiling his favorite chainsaw in the garage. My desk laden with textbooks, I would pretend to study – anything to avoid yard work. Despite my ruse, I spent countless afternoons with a weed wacker, screaming that my father's landscaping addiction was causing me to fail high school. So when a strange longing recently came over me as I watched a group of workers planting saplings in Golden Gate Park, it was something of a surprise. I wanted to grab a shovel off the back of their truck and join in. I missed yard work.

Apparently I'm not the only pavement pounder who misses the mud, because more than 16,000 people worked as volunteers in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area last year. The 368,288 hours they served made up 8 percent of wage-free work in the entire National Park system, making the GGNRA's by far the United States' most active park-volunteer program. More than 400 acres are being restored in the Presidio alone, at sites such as Baker Beach and Crissy Field, allowing volunteers the opportunity to spend a few hours doing anything from seed collecting or museum curating to harbor seal monitoring, raptor banding, or tending to plants in one of the GGNRA's five nurseries.

Volunteering in the GGNRA is kind of like a booty call, except it's OK to bring small children. You can just show up, get sweaty and maybe a little dirty, then take off. There's no commitment. You don't even have to call back. But if your experience is anything like mine, you probably will.

On a sunny Wednesday morning in April, I found myself congregating with a dozen or so other volunteers in the courtyard of the Park Stewardship's Presidio headquarters, a cluster of low, white buildings that were formerly the property of the U.S. Army. I felt like I'd traveled much farther than the two and a half miles between my narrow Fillmore abode and this spacious oasis on the northern tip of the San Francisco peninsula. Gulping the ocean breezes gusting across the blossoming fields, I forgot about the syringe I'd found lying on my porch that morning. Then Peter Brastow, who started volunteering in 1994 and now leads ecological restoration missions for the National Park Service, began handing out the pickaxes.

Among the drop-in crew there were dreads and braids, college students gathering research for projects and a legal processor working off parking tickets, some folks who couldn't waste another gorgeous day sending out résumés, a grandma from the neighborhood who'd been coming there for eight years, and a preschooler named Marcos Ruiz, age four. I asked Marcos if a sense of civic responsibility had brought him here or if he was part of a work release program. "I love my mommy," he replied.

I'd like to believe he was referring to Mother Earth.

We followed Brastow down a sandy, winding trail into the cradle of Lobos Creek Valley and gathered around as he explained the differences between invasive European annuals like the rattail fescue that we'd be yanking for the next three hours and such lovelier-sounding natives as the beach evening primrose. Like a kid at a birthday party who can't keep his fingers out of the cake, Brastow yanked weeds constantly as he delivered his tutorial. "In the '80s there were only 20 rare San Francisco lessingias in this area, and now there are over one million," he told us, motioning to one of the delicate, yellow-flowered annuals as he continued the weed genocide. "But there are still 15 rare plants in the Presidio and four endangered species – oh, here's one." The group huddled to examine the threatened flower, and I made a mental note never to do doughnuts in that field.

Finding a rare plant in the Presidio is about as difficult as finding a hipster in the Mission. They're everywhere – you just have to know what you're looking for. Yet despite the abundance, many of these rare plants and creatures are on the brink of vanishing. For some – like the Xerces blue butterfly, which disappeared from Lobos Creek Valley in the 1940s – it's too late. But while the rest of the city is developed and redeveloped, people like Brastow and little Marcos are turning back the clock on one of its last unpaved bastions.

When the army vacated the Presidio in 1994, it ended a 148-year military occupation. Volunteers still find bullet shells and machine gun components left over from the old cavalry range. Even relics of the area's Native American heritage, like obsidian arrowheads, are occasionally unearthed. But these former inhabitants – from the Yelamu, who harvested acorns when coast live oaks thrived around the bay 5,000 years ago, to the Ohlone, whom many Spaniards used as target practice when they were turning the dunes into a cattle ranch during the 1700s – left much less conspicuous garbage than, say, the unopened mustard gas canister discovered near Inspiration Point last year.

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Converting the 13-acre Lobos Creek Valley back to its pre-European habitat is a daunting task, even with Marcos on our side. Even with a pickax. However, a successful GGNRA volunteer project like the one over at Crissy Field proves that resources and resilience can make ecological time travel a reality. After the army removed 87,000 tons of hazardous material from the former airstrip, more than 3,000 volunteers helped plant 73 native species – some of which hadn't grown near San Francisco in decades – around the freshly dredged lagoon and throughout the burgeoning wetlands. Now families who want to spend a lazy afternoon lounging in the magnificent presence of the Golden Gate Bridge can recline on a windswept beach instead of a jagged pile of asphalt rubble.

"I don't see the weeds when I look out," said Erin Foley, a stewardship intern who came from Boston via Nepal to work in the GGNRA's Natural Resource Field Office. "I see the natives. I see all the progress we've made." I imagined myself shin-deep in shell casings, choking on mustard gas as a drill sergeant called me a pantywaist, and conceded her point.

At noon, as the group of volunteers descended on a snack table set up under the shade of a Monterey cypress, looking like red-tail hawks dive-bombing a honey-glazed field mouse, Foley was still uprooting a cluster of vulpia. "Come on, free food," I panted, briefly pausing in my doughnut swoop.

"I'll be there in a sec," she said, stuffing roots into a bag. "I'm addicted. I'm a weedaholic."

Two sweet rolls and a muffin later, I was trekking from Lobos Creek Valley to the afternoon drop-in program in one of the Presidio's main nurseries, where, in two 1,000-square-foot greenhouses, an average of 75,000 plants are propagated annually from hand-collected seeds. Here I met Michael Chassé, a natural resource specialist who programmed computers in his hometown of Bridgeport, Conn., before his life was consumed by nature addiction. If Foley is a "weedaholic," then Chassé, who coordinates the stewardship programs in the Presidio, is a full-blown nature junkie. He's the Sid Vicious of the NPS.

Chassé's gateway drug was the Peace Corps. After two years in Mongolia he was hooked. "When I went into my supervisor's office at the bank to give him my two-week notice," Chassé recalled, laughing, "he just gave me this look like 'If I could do it over again, I'd do the same thing.' "

"The guys who were my age thought I was crazy," he says. "There are moments when I'm out in the field, and the rain is pouring down, and it's easy to complain, but I would rather be braving the elements than back at my computer desk. I knew as soon as I started volunteering in the Presidio that there was no turning back."

As I left the Presidio, the distant rumble of bulldozers occasionally broke in over the chirping of western meadowlarks. The dense, boxy homes of the Richmond District lurked beyond the wall of cypress trees lining the perimeter of the park. On my knees in the sand, surrounded by a waving field of green and gold, it had been easy to forget about the outside world, the problems and suffering associated with it. Walking to my car, I decided that creeks swallowing mansions might not be such a bad thing after all.

For information on volunteer drop-in programs throughout the GGNRA call (415) 4R-PARKS or go to www.parksconservancy.org.