She Knew the Route

Juneau has what looks like pink eye, one eye half-shut. I didn’t sleep much, worried she’d lose her vision.

The appointment is at nine thirty, so we drive over to Moraga Commons Park and walk the old loop.

We used to live a quarter mile from here. This was our standard walk.

I found the dirt path by accident soon after we moved into the new house in May 2018. It runs behind the disc golf course and connects to the Lafayette-Moraga Regional Trail.

We had come to Moraga after break-ins in our Oakland/Berkeley hills home. My wife wanted somewhere safe. I loved the sprawling house above the Claremont Hotel — Mediterranean, spacious, a view of the Bay — but nothing about it was optimized. I let it go and built a better one. Maya got the large public high school she wanted, with football games and more boys.

I selected the lot when it was empty. Best view, hilltop. I took every green package the builder offered and added more solar, plus an Italian-influenced backyard with a fountain and a trellised dining table for ten overlooking a pear grove. I drove out almost daily to watch the construction as if I were the superintendent.

Below the development was a new meadow — a walking path, grass to chase Juneau, modern sculptures including one of a man holding a trout. As a fly fisherman, I took it as an omen. Later I learned the coyotes loved that field too, and were often an obstacle to our morning walk.

Across the street at Moraga Commons, Maya went to volleyball camp when she was fourteen. We went to summer concerts as a family, on a blanket on the grass, the three of us and the dog.

Through COVID I walked the loop in a mask, past other people in masks, everyone stepping wide. People were frightened that spring, and the park was almost the only place I saw them. Someone had written messages about love and peace on the sidewalk and painted colorful rocks. I photographed them. No masks now. We survived.

I walked the loop while Maya went through high school and took her first job at a local restaurant. I walked it alone when I had COVID and was quarantined. I walked it in every season for five years.

That was a different life.

My wife left in January of Maya’s senior year at Campolindo. Juneau and I kept walking the loop.

Same walk. Different house to come back to.

We sold the house in August 2023, when Maya left for college. Most of the furniture went too, for a fraction of what it had cost. What remained didn’t fit into the two-bedroom I rented across from Target in Walnut Creek. My large paintings, backpacking and fishing gear, and endless files went into storage.

Three days ago I was in New York. Museums, subways, crowds, a rented bike along the Hudson. After five days there, the density was intoxicating.

This morning I’m on a flat dirt path in Moraga and slightly out of breath.

I don’t bike here anymore. I used to ride a forty-mile Death Ride training loop through these hills — three and a half hours, finishing through the meadow and up the steep hill home.

This morning I had thirty minutes. We did the whole loop anyway.

There’s a calm here I’d forgotten. Almost nobody out. A hawk over the golf course.

I was thinking the pavement was the only thing that hadn’t changed.

Then we came down to the meadow and Juneau took the main path. Left at the end, without hesitating. Then the same turn up the hill toward our old house.

She hasn’t walked here in three years. Her body still has the route.

The house was the thing we optimized. Every green upgrade, every option: LED everywhere, extra insulation, solar to the max. All of it countable.

I never certified this one. I’d done it two houses back, on a small home that scored the highest LEED Platinum rating in the world. We wanted more room. I still wish I hadn’t sold it.

The meadow was a requirement — open space the developer had to leave in exchange for permission to build. It began as a condition of approval. Then someone put in a walking path, and grass, and a bronze man holding a trout.

I helped build the systems to score the building — the walls, the glass, the panels, the meters. They did exactly what we designed them to do, better than we imagined.

They can’t count a nine-year-old dog taking the left turn without hesitating.

We finished the loop. I let her take us the whole way.

She’s nine now. When I took her to Petco to be groomed, they marked her down as a senior. I argued with them. They said anything over seven is a senior.

But I still call her puppy.

Maya’s a senior now too, at USC. She’s home with me for two more weeks.

It’s nine twenty. Time to get in the car.

Pink eye today.

David Gottfried’s book Regen360: An Operating System for a Regenerative Earth is out October 20.