On a dank, late-December morning in San Francisco's Excelsior District, neighborhood residents awoke to a glum new normal. Overnight, unknown miscreants had filched the community Christmas tree.
It takes a special combination of pettiness and nastiness to really punch a community in the gut. Stealing something valuable makes sense; stealing something steeped largely in sentimental value is senseless. Spitefully vandalizing a community Christmas isn't hard to comprehend. Making the concerted effort to carry it off is.
On top of those incongruities was the galling realization the neighborhood had been victimized by some of the city's most impractical thieves.
Enlisting multiple accomplices, acquiring a plus-sized automobile or truck, and hauling off a heavy, unwieldy object worth, perhaps, $80 just isn't a good use of time — straight or criminal. Even without the risk, a simple cost-benefit analysis indicates you'd be better served toiling at the most menial job. Hell, if you've already amassed a few buddies, a truck, and would be happy to earn a minuscule payout, you might as well put together a crappy band and play a crappy gig.
It's hard to think of an object that holds its value more tenuously than a Christmas tree (other than, perhaps, a convertible or laptop. Or newspaper chain). And, starting Jan. 2, these thieves' depreciating treasure will likely be trash. City residents will begin placing their spent Christmas trees on the roadside for collection along with all the other detritus of 2014. Last year, San Franciscans discarded more than 1 million pounds of Christmas trees. These were ground up into chips and shipped to Tracy, where they'll be incinerated as "biomass" to provide energy (a process studies have shown to actually emit more carbon dioxide than the burning of coal, incidentally).
So, these were the things Excelsior District residents were pondering on that rainy morning earlier this month, watching the empty spot on Mission Street and Ocean Avenue, where the Christmas tree used to be, grow wetter and wetter.
Dead trees, it turns out, do not age well. Nor do their derivatives. Take newspapers, for instance.
Your humble narrator, not long ago, inadvertently rolled over an edition of the same paper you now hold in your hand while cycling to work. It was strewed in the middle of the road and splayed open to one of his own articles — one revealing dodgy and perhaps even criminal behavior by well-placed city apparatchiks. Who would, of course, go wholly and totally unpunished.
As a fictional occurrence in a manufactured life, this would feel like forced symbolism. And yet it happened.
A onetime SF Weekly editor once noted that, in this city, you can catch public officials with their entire arms in the cookie jar. And no ill will befall them. That's how San Francisco rolls. It's hard to think past the here and now in this city; accomplishing the quotidian tasks of everyday life is struggle enough. Much like Christmas trees, we kick our yesterdays to the curb where they're whisked out of sight and out of mind and incinerated while no one's looking.
In the past, however, when our yesterdays were lit ablaze, it was not out of sight and out of mind. City residents actually had to deal with the consequences.
Anyone who's ever been awakened by a discarded Christmas tree being set alight on his or her block will be surprised to learn that it's not the light or the car alarms or the shouting that jolts you out of bed. It's the heat. Even 40 yards away, it feels like someone is blowing a hair dryer in your face. But only for a few moments; a tree is immolated with terrifying speed. Mounds of trees lugged to Ocean Beach resembled Viking funeral pyres. When immolated within the city, firefighters mistook the resultant explosions for large apartment buildings going up in smoke. "When those stacks of trees six, eight, or 10 high go up, it looks like a whole house is burning down" former San Francisco Fire Department Deputy Chief Pat Gardner told us a few years back.
This, thankfully, isn't happening here anymore. Our trees are efficiently collected and spirited away to Tracy, where they'll emit noxious vapors in a more controlled and beneficial manner. As such, San Franciscans have been inured from having to give much thought about the past for the foreseeable future. Igniting trees in the street was hardly a smart or worthwhile thing to do. But it was, at least, an acknowledgment of this city's transitory nature. Perhaps even a celebration of it.
News of the Excelsior District's disappearing Christmas tree left Pete Whitcomb, owner of the eponymous Pissed Off Pete's tavern, feeling exactly as you'd think he would.
Along with Sean Ingram, the owner of the nearby Dark Horse Inn, he matter-of-factly underwrote the purchase of a new tree, draped it with dollar-store ornaments, and plopped it down on Mission and Ocean. And then he moved on: "We bought it, I put a picture on Facebook, I said 'it's back' and let other folks deal with it, you know?"
Back in sight, out of mind.
The steep cost of the tree surprised Whitcomb. And, in a few short days, that short-term investment will be spent as the new tree along with the old one and thousands of others are unceremoniously kicked to the curb.
But that — that's the future.
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