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Friday Slide Show: Eagle's Point Heart Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

28 January 2022

Yesterday morning we drove over to the Legion of Honor and parked alongside the fifth hole of Lincoln Park Golf Course. We walked down the hill and cut between the fourth and third holes to a short roadway closed to traffic that led to the Coastal Trail.

We were on a mission. And that mission was to return to Eagle Point, the lookout along Lands End where in 2007 we had visited the stone labyrinth with our nephew and his fiancee.

That day he wandered the whole course of the labyrinth only to find a shopping list left at the center.

It was a harbinger of things to come. The couple now have two girls and endless shopping lists.

The Labyrinth. How it looked in 2007.

The labyrinth, created by Eduardo Aguilera in 2004 and maintained by Colleen Yerge until the fall of 2021, is no more. Vandals repeatedly removed the rocks from the scenic spot and Yerge got tired of undoing their damage. One clown, unclear on the concept, even turned it into a maze.

Aguilera had warned her. "I told her, 'Don't be surprised that sooner or later someone is going to destroy it,'" Aguilera said. "'Try not to take it to heart, because it's public art.'"

In 2011 someone's love of public art induced them to toss all the rocks over the cliff. It took two days for Yerge and some friends to rebuild it. After which she would continue to repair it now and then until finally giving up on it late last year.

It never ceases to amaze us that there are people who, incapable of creating anything others enjoy, set out to destroy what everyone else appreciates.

For a few months at the end of 2021 the site remained vacant. But earlier this month, Thomas Lew and Christian Tabing-Dalit returned after a New Year's Day visit on a mission of their own.

They had intended to rebuild the labyrinth but there was no way they could get that done in an afternoon. They gathered rocks from Mile Rock Beach and hauled them up to the site, 10 at a time in each of their backpacks, before they realized how easy Sisyphus had it.

But they were not defeated by the enormity of the task.

Instead, with the rocks they had been able to bring to the site, they decided to form a simple outline. At the end of four hours, they had created a heart.

Within a few days the site had become the setting for several marriage proposals. It seems people were hiking to the site hoping to see the labyrinth and were instead pleasantly surprised, even delighted, to find the heart.

"We just wanted to contribute something that everyone would enjoy," Lew explained.

Hot to Get There. The route we took is in yellow.

So off we went yesterday morning. We hiked down the steep steps from the trail and back up to Eagle's Point and again down to the site where we were alone with the heart when a fisherman left. It was a glorious morning. And it had been so long since we'd been out of our own neighborhood that we felt like we had traveled to the other side of the world.

But there was the Golden Gate Bridge and Mile Rock and pelicans flying along the coast looking for lunch. We spied the occasional fisherman on the rocks and lots of couples hiking along the trail, though nobody followed us to the heart.

It was still there. Intact. A small victory for anyone who prefers to create something for others to enjoy.


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