Island Home Companion: A History of Incompetence

But the history of islanders doing crazy things well pre-dates Ralph Mastick turning the entire northern half of the island into a miniature Venice. We have to go well before the days of the settlement of Alameda in 1854 when the Ohlone Indians utilized the entirety of Fernside Island for a multitude of purposes. It was sometime in the mid eighteenth century when the first Spanish Franciscan missionaries arrived from the southern half of California and finally started to settle what is now called the Bay Area. They first had established a mission near San Jose, eventually one in San Francisco which we know was Mission Dolores and another in Sonoma somewhere, I can’t remember quite exactly where it was, but it’s of no concern to this part of Fernside history. What is generally forgotten in the early history of California is the story of Mission de la Fuertes. This was the planned fourth mission that was to be settled into what little bedrock made up Fernside. Alameda would have been a more ideal location since at least only half of it was made up of swamp (as opposed to eighty percent) but Father Jorge Ignacio Vicente Maria Luis de Santiago insisted on what he thought was going to be a firm footing for his mission on a patch of dry earth on Fernside.

Construction began according to the records held by Hank Leupp in the Fernside Island historical society, on March l6th, 1799. It apparently was slow going for them. The land (or back then whatever you could call land) was hardly arable and while fine in supporting the weight of Father Vicente, he had not experimented with having any livestock walk about to see if the terra firma was firm enough. But, he was a man on a mission to build a mission.

Well, the stone for the foundation had to come from somewhere, and much of that came Alameda. Within a week, Father Vicente with his assistants as well as the help of several dozen tribesmen had managed to lay out a very attractive footprint for their church. They had decided to celebrate on the Saturday before the Sabbath and there was much chanting, and moving about in circles. It seems that olden time celebrations usually involved moving about in circles of increasing diameter, but that’s how they chose to celebrate. That same evening, the tribesmen went back to their village and the Franciscans settled their evening in their makeshift camp.

Remember how it was mentioned a little earlier that the weight of a cow could barely be held up? Well, imagine a gigantic platform of various stones rotated about to provide the flattest surface to start the foundation. Now, the part of the stone that rotated into the earth usually is a wedge shape of sorts so overnight, when the Franciscans woke the next morning to say the morning hominy, they had what was more along the lines of sunken patio. But they persisted, being the missionaries that they were and that no act of god was going to keep them from getting the natives closer to god. Besides, barbecue hadn’t quite been invented yet in the recreational sense so there was no point in keeping a patio. So they filled it in with a crude adobe floor and started to build the walls up and pretty soon, they had a very nice half wall by early June.

Again, the venture would prove to be on shaky ground when the added weight of the walls caused the building to sag in various ways. It almost resembled an ancient rollercoaster manufactured entirely of Adobe. They kept going, levelling the walls each time but it really was not much use because the next morning, they’d find that they’d have to keep continually doing the same sort of compensating. The real problem occurred at windows. If they started the previous day with a nice square hole, the day of would be a rather handsome rhombus or in some cases, chevron shaped. Well, they kept on going. Finally, enough had sunk that they could finally put a roof on the mission. This they did rapidly to have the weight evenly distributed. Even a few brothers from Mission Dolores had come out to assist. By eventide, the roof was up and the younger friars were passing up tiles to cover up the roof with. It was finally a handsome place of prayer and service for the East Bay. Father Vicente sent out the order forms for statuary and as a congratulations, Fr. Angelo from the Santa Clara mission sent over a pair of gilt candle holders, Fr. Heitor from Dolores sent a beautiful red silk altar cover and Fr. Alberto from Sonoma provided four handmade pews from their personal workshops. Mission Fuertes was certainly well on its way to becoming a full time mission.

Tragedy struck (as it usually does in our case, otherwise it wouldn’t be humor) when the entire congregation had gone out to Mission Dolores to listen to a sermon there as well as an important message from the alcade who was beginning to grow concerned by the amount of lack improvement of roads in the area. When their boat nudged into the soft sand, the shirted Indians pulled the boat well into the shore before the Franciscans alighted. What they saw when they got back could have only been willed by a merciful god. The entire building had sunk again but this time, the rafter tails were resting on the ground. The building was gone in its entirety. The contents were still in the building albeit pressed up against the ceiling inside. How Father Vicente reacted could only really be described as melancholy mixed with a tinge of glee. Somehow, he found humor in the situation and reacted as any man should and went to the Father President of the missions, turned in is sashes and according to the last records anyone could find his name mentioned, he was listed as a vaquero for the Peralta land grant dying in 1828.

With the mission gone as well as a few of the cattle that somehow made their way into unfirm ground, the tribesmen left the ruins which eventually disappeared. The footprint of the mission props up Charlie Ancona’s Café, the Mission Statement. But it isn’t to say that work of the missionaries didn’t leave a lasting impression. Before the entire project could take seed, Fr. Angelo Carlos Rael de Balboa had managed to cover the entire island in almond tree seeds which he planted at six foot intervals. By the time Alameda became incorporated in 1854, Fernside had become somewhat stabilized with these ancient almonds making a neat grid that would later help make up the structure of our streets. So we still have god to thank for those in any case. Well, at least his shepherds.

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The story of incompetence on a grand scale doesn’t just stop at Father Vicente’s abandoned dreams. It seems to shake its way into the core of all Fernsider’s ancestry. The first surveyor who came to the island shortly after the forming of the city of Alameda had good intentions of helping to lay out the first city streets. Bear in mind, the island is long and narrow, but somehow his cross street measurements came out wrong and instead of being a quarter of a mile wide, an error on his paper would say that Fernside was a mile and a half wide. Not even Alameda has a luxury like that! Thinking about all potential land sales he could make as he sat in the surveyor’s office in San Francisco, he put an advertisement in the San Francisco Call. It read something along the lines of:

For Sale!

Land Plots on Island off

ALAMEDA

Parcels begin at $4/quarter acre

Now, when land is abundant, it can come cheap. That surveyor literally oversold Fernside. When the first investors arrived on the island, each one clenching in one fist a piece of paper with the exact coordinates and sizes of their land and in the other fist, rods and chains. The surveyor’s assistant stood on the makeshift dock that was hastily put up to welcome the first ferry barge of investors. This young man whose name was Theobald Higgins merely stood there and before he could say “Welcome” he was knocked over by a wave of men, rods and chains. Theobald managed to stand up just barely after the last person cleared the ferry. At the end of the dock was a stone marker that had a surveyor’s way marker hammered into it and everyone stood squabbling around it.

Finally, a tall bearded man in a tall top hat which added far too much to his already enormous stature managed to control the crowd and organize them in a way to see who would own land within the length of the first chain, then they would break into groups in the different directions they would be going. Now, a little math. A mile is 5280 feet. A mile is made up of 80 chains of 66 feet each. An acre is equal to ten square chains or, a rectangle that is one chain in length by one furlong. Now, that would mean according to the surveyor’s excellent map, he could easily sell everything from the ferry dock 120 chains out. Now, remember his error? You sell for 120 chains when in reality you have 20 chains worth of land, something might have to give.

Well very quickly, people within those first 20 chains staked and marked their land from the ferry dock the people moving north and south were claiming their land as well. But there are those extra people which we might have to term an accounting error. One Frenchman by the name of Rampeau who had bought three acres at the supposed eastern end of the island very quickly found that he still had to continue measuring until he reached the sandy beach looking at the western shore of Alameda island. He somehow managed to hire a rowboat and he continued to measure chains out into the channel until he found his apparent allotment. In the middle of a tidal canal between Fernside and Alameda Islands. Now a few things go through a fellow’s mind when he makes the connection that he might have bought up a dud, he begins to seek vengeance. Especially during this early period in the State’s history where there were bloody conflicts over laundry.

When Rampeau reached the shore again, he was met with several other people who had all apparently bought land that was supposedly in the channel. They met and conversed for a bit. Had they bought land that was only visible at low tide? A Mr. Fennell had in his pocket a tide book and where they stood was low tide. They puzzled for a bit longer before realizing they might have been had. Rampeau cried out “Le bâtard!” meaning the bastard of course before he led the now angry and blood thirsty mob which was slowly growing. They were picking up people who had purchased full acres only to find that they had claim on a tenth of one where it abuts the shore. The lucky ones who managed to buy nearest the survey marker weren’t being satisfied either. The tall bearded had brought a soils engineer with him to see the viability of building a huge estate here to retire and that very little of it was usable. It got to the point eventually where everyone was marching to the ferry dock and the poor Higgins was mobbed. Every single investor was tearing at his clothing demanding the meaning of “this cruel, tasteless joke” as one called it. Higgins only having been hired the day before to help the surveyor take care of helping the new settlers suddenly had the new job of being led by the mob, back to the surveyor’s office and gaining an explanation.

The ferry ride back into San Francisco was an uncomfortable one for Theobald as every possible pair of hands clutched onto him to prevent him from escaping. When they landed, he was marched in vigilante style down Market Street. San Francisco, only being six years out of statehood still had a taste for vigilante justice. The moment a crowd forms, it kinda snowballs. It kept growing until it clogged up the entirety of Market Street before it reached the surveyor’s office at Stockton. For the surveyor, he was enjoying a nice bit of lunch, some cold pheasant (it was really just chicken according to the Chinese cook) and a small glass of Madera which he bought with a portion of the proceeds from the sale of Fernside Island. On the couch opposite him laid the most fantastic beauty you could imagine. Her name was Lilly Montrose, the surveyor’s mistress. She wore hints of clothing if you could even call it that, but the material was so see through, it was hard to discern whether or not she had a fine layer of body hair or that it was exotic French underwear. He was throwing hunks of chicken at her, deliberately missing and forcing her to squeam around so he could see more of her.

He threw a piece of breast at her when all at once, there came a resounding crash as a thousand pebbles peppered the front of the building. They broke through the window and the two of them ran for cover. From outside came an incoherent chant. Since only a small portion of the people in the mob below were the actual investors and the rest were part of the snowball, they couldn’t come up with a single coherent chant. Just a resounding noise that rattled the windows everywhere. When the hail of rocks stopped, he could hear a banging below. The surveyor pushed his head through the ruined window to see below that the mob had managed to upset several vendor carts and were now hammering on the front door of his office with a bench. Very quickly, the hail of rocks began again and he only managed to duck inside before the volley began. He quickly draped Lilly in a steamer rug and pushed her out of the window on the other side of the room onto the roof of Lehman’s Mercantile not far below. She managed to escape that day. The surveyor not so much. When the door burst open, they caught him trying to slip out the window to follow Lilly but they grabbed ahold of him and crowd surfed him down. Ruffians with no connection to the mob ran into the office grabbing anything that looked valuable. The chicken was gone in a flash.

Downstairs, the surveyor was tied to a rail and he and Theobald were marched down Stockton towards the Hall of Justice at Portsmouth square. While they were beside one another, they managed to exchange a few words. “What’s happened?” “I don’t know” and “What did we do?” were the only things they could hear each other say. Finally, the march led them to the front of the Hall of Justice where a line of Billy Clubbed policemen stood in a line in front of the entrance so as to not let the mob in. The rails were passed forward over the crowd with the bewildered surveyor and Theobald Higgins and very quickly untied and jostled into the front.

Their faces were bloodied, bleeding and puffy. Theobald sported a blackened eye and the red tell tale burn of someone gripping him by the throat. The surveyor had his lip split, hair askew and his shirt torn from him. He spat a little bit of blood onto the sidewalk and just as he had done that, the chief of police had materialized through the line of blue trench coats. His red bulbous nose sniffed at the air, catching the metallic smell of blood before looking at the two bedraggled men standing before him. He merely gestured at the line of policemen to take them into the prison and in a loud, clear voice he told everyone to disperse which they did.

Well eventually, the state had to send down an ombudsman to figure out all the details of what had happened and the surveyor (who had been found to not have a current license let alone a state license) lost his practice and it was reported he was between begging and laboring in the San Francisco sewers as a cleaner. Theobald was a little bit more fortunate. As he had nothing to do with the survey error, but since he technically did have surveyor’s license, the state hired him to do a proper measurement of the island and this time he made sure to do it right. As compensation, he was given one and a half acres at the southern end of Fernside Island where his ancestors are still today.

Island Home Companion - The News from Fernside Island

ZW: Well it’s been a quiet year in Fernside Island, my home town, out there edge of the San Francisco Bay. As this is our inaugural show, I’ll have to fill you in here with a few details about it. Fernside Island is the third island of Alameda, California. Those of you from the Bay Area know about the main island of Alameda, but few tend to know about Bay Farm Island and even fewer know about Fernside. You see, there was an incident, it happened about 1948 I believe, when the State transportation toll authority commissioned a report on the potential of building a second crossing over the San Francisco Bay. The first option would have been building the exact same bridge right next to itself, to help relieve congestion. But it still meant clogging up the same areas of the city, so the Toll Authority considered clogging up another part of the city.
And that crossing would have would have gone through Alameda. Possibly through Bay Farm and very likely through Fernside. And as we all know, the government is usually kindly there to inconvenience us, to ruffle our feathers and then all of a sudden, before you know it, it does nothing and you’re left in the dark wondering if your house was suddenly going to turn into a bridge pier overnight. When the toll authority stopped contemplating malicious plans to turn our front gardens into a work site, they forgot about Fernside and incidentally, so did Alameda. But in any case, we here in Fernside island are usually left to our own devices. We have an unobstructed view of San Francisco from our homes, the sea grass tends to make up our lawns as opposed to crab grass and we usually do most of our business on bikes.
An engineer by the name of Ralph Mastick living on the northern tip of the island had found one day sometime back in the late 1950s that when he was about to jump into his car and drive over to the car ferry dock that it was nowhere to be found. Instead, in his front drive, there was a depression of sorts. Somewhat car shaped, about six or seven feet deep and at bottom of course, was his brand new Buick. Now most normal people would file an insurance claim against the car but no, most Fernsiders (as we call ourselves) tend to be a blend of genius, eccentric and down-right stupid. You see, what Mastick decided to do instead of what normal people do was dig a ramp down into the depression so that he could drive the car out. At first, he tried a forty five degree angle and this he decided was simply too steep for a seventeen foot car to drive out of so he took it a step further and did the calculations and found he would need a fifteen degree angle. Now, some of you who are clever know that the ramp would be somewhere around ten feet long. Now for an engineer, that would have been sufficient, but Ralph see, decided he’d take it a step further and dig a thirty foot long ramp, effectively making it a nice gentle one and four incline.
So he set to work, his mind completely focused on getting his Buick out forgetting that digging in the middle of the street required permission from his neighbors and of course the city, but being the methodical man that he is figured that he could do it over a weekend before his neighbor, one Marion Little would be back from staying with her sisters in Sacramento. Well, when there seems to be any sort of digging to be done, it seems to attract men to the hole. Sort of like flies to a pie absently minded left out to cool and forgotten until two days later. Well, if we keep going with the metaphor, in two days time, you find that you haven’t got any pie to eat, just a pie tin and what basically are the remnants of hard work with no reward. Well Ralph tried and when he started to dig, he found that suddenly, he was surrounded by the men in town, all watching him, smoking cigarettes and telling dirty jokes. Now Ralph isn’t one to be left out of any sort of male bonding experience and it quickly turned into a barbecue when Ted Ferguson down the street brought over his brand new charcoal grill and the pit became a sort of hideout. Just deep enough to not be visible from a distance so if wives looked down the street from the intersection, they’d see a strange curl of smoke, wisping up, smelling strangely of hot dogs and
hamburgers. Late into the evening, Ted’s wife Lucille looked out the front room window to see where Ted had disappeared to the entire day and could only see that column of smoke coming from the darkness. She couldn’t be bothered to try to figure out what it was, so she figured he must have been down at the Beachcomber bar and hotel.
Most of us tend to find that one day of fun usually turns into two and before you know it, while the ramp was finished in the first few hours and the car driven out and parked at the end of the cul-de-sac, but those boys found that they enjoyed their fortress. As many of us know from our years of childhood, we tend not to continue maturing well into our late twenties. But it seems that these guys here in particular wouldn’t reach their mature vintage sometime until 1973.
Well, Sunday evening rolled around, and by this time, a wind started to pick up and to explain a little about the street that Ralph lived on, he lived at the end, his nearest neighbor was Marion whose house was about thirty feet away and at the end is Ted’s house. On the other side, it abuts the sea wall and the beach below. So they had all gone to bed and what they didn’t know, since Ralph was a mechanical engineer and not a soils engineer was that the sea wall only went down four feet. Well, suddenly, the sea gave way and pushed its way into the seven foot deep pit. Well, an exceptional high tide usually scares most Fernsiders and that was what happened to have occurred so suddenly, this forty five foot hole with a gentle thirty foot ramp became a forty five foot hole with no gentle ramp and about five feet of water. It sort of sucked out the material that made up the ramp. Well, while they dug, they contented themselves to throw the dirt over the sea wall, thinking that they’d just pull it up later and fill in the hole.
On Monday morning, Marion had left Sacramento at seven AM in the highest of spirits after seeing her sisters Edith and Alice who had decided to host a Tupperware party while she was visiting and Marion made the trip in good time driving herself in her little Nash Metropolitan full of Tupperware with the lids on everything. Her car ferry had docked at ten a.m. and Ralph was still asleep, nursing a hangover fueled by greasy burgers and in his dreams, he dreamt about his car, and the subjects of dirty joke concerning a show girl and a nun, were sitting in the back seat. Well, Marion made the short drive to the northern end of the island to go home when she passed by Ralph’s Buick at the entrance of the cul-de-sac and she looked at it. Puzzled as to why it would be sixty feet away from Ralph’s front door when suddenly, she had to stomp on her brakes to avoid driving down into what looked half of an Olympic sized lap pool.
The street was gone, but the sidewalks were still there and so were their houses, but where the road should have been it looked all caved in, full of water and she could barely make out at the far end, what looked like Ted Ferguson’s brand new charcoal barbeque floating, slowly bumping against the sides of this pool. Now, a Nash Metropolitan doesn’t weigh too much, but when loaded with Tupperware all bristling with Edith and Alice’s country style cooking, it starts to add up and Marion, not exactly a sprig herself found that the earth began to shake and she looked to her left and right and caught Ted’s eye who just happened to be looking out his kitchen window with a cup of coffee when all of a sudden, the earth disappeared below her car and it dropped, it dropped into pit and suddenly, the forty five foot hole became a fifty five foot hole.
The look on Ted’s face could say it all, one moment, he watched the Sea Foam green car waiting at the edge of the pit and suddenly, there was nothing save for the white hard top of the car and an audible screech. Quickly bursting through the back door, he ran up to pit thinking there still was a ramp, but there wasn’t one to be seen. The amount of earth that the car had managed to subside, pushed a
considerable amount of water to the far end towards Ralph’s house and the tidal wave hammered against the earth, pulling a lot of it back with it and suddenly, you could feel the anticipation when suddenly, Ralph’s detached garage decided to take up diving and crashed into the water. Now, in turn, the garage not please with being uprooted from its decades of solid footing sent a wave back. By now, Ted was in the hole helping Marion out and the water was rushing towards them. Their screams were eerie when the wave pushed them over and when they came out again, they were caked in mud.
By this time, Ralph was disturbed from his sleep and ran out of his kitchen door to see what was causing all the noise. Ralph’s kitchen door opens straight into his drive way. Bearing in mind, if his garage was gone, pretty much his driveway would be too. When he caught sight of the Grand Canal that had formed itself overnight, he didn’t think to look down where he was walking. Well, very quickly, two people sopping wet turned into three.
They quickly had gotten out, and all three of them were fortunate that whoever built their houses had known that a deep pile footing would be best. So while the road was gone, their houses were fine. Now, something on this scale obviously won’t go unnoticed in town and pretty soon, the children of the islanders enjoyed having this new swimming pool and the word got around until the city realized it had to do something about this.
Now, since the Mayor of Alameda didn’t want to have much to do with the folk on Fernside so naturally, the community came up with a little body of councilors to help resolve issues. Don’t get me wrong, Alameda still throws money at us, they just don’t like having an extra seven hundred people to deal with. But anyhow, the councilors had this huge problem on their hands and their first priority was getting Marion Little’s car out of the hole. Unfortunately, if the weight of one car could barely be handled by the ground, it certainly couldn’t hold up a crane for that matter. So these councilors (one of who was Ralph by the way) came up with the idea to extend the ramp. Just like Ralph had done in the first place.
Well, they got her car out okay, but it was absolutely ruined, luckily all the heavy country foods in their little plastic containers had survived so Marion wasn’t too broken up the day they managed to get the Nash out. Her insurance covered the car so she could afford a Cadillac if she really wanted, but she realized that she might need a speed boat more than a car.
The city councilors had set aside enough money to dig up the ramp to get Marion’s car out, but they somehow had forgotten to put a little more aside to fill up the hole that was left behind. They probably put Ralph in charge of that part, but anyways, the hole kept growing in size until they lost three streets and gained three canals in their place. Very quickly, people got rid of their cars on the island, bought up golf carts or scooters or what have you weighing under a ton. So what we once called the Silver Coast we’ve renamed Little Venice. We don’t mind, so much as long as the people up there do. They’re just like us except they use boats more and the fact that they started building buildings to look more like Venetian buildings helps bring a crowd every so often to put a little bit of tourism money in our pocket.
So that’s the news from Fernside Island where the women are clever, the men not so much and the children are equal opportunity dreamers.