There was a big storm that hit the Bay Area the other day. It reminded me of the monsoon rains I had to regularly deal with while working in the slums of South Asia last year. Sewers overflowed in San Francisco. Roads turned into murky rivers. Trees were knocked down. When I got home from work, I saw that the tree in front of my neighbor’s home in the East Bay had toppled over onto his lawn. Not surprisingly, my gut reaction to all of this was to think about work. 

 My Fellowship with this year’s batch of San Francisco City Hall Fellows is in the Department of Public Works, which takes care of everything from potholes and sewer repair to graffiti abatement and the maintenance of publicly-owned trees. That means when a storm like the one that hit the other day decides to roll around, the department has got its work cut out. Residents, businesses and visitors call in to report everything that is going wrong. And all of them expect a response within seconds. 

In my neighbor’s case, I was pretty certain it would take some time before anything happened. This tree had not fallen on a major thoroughfare. It was not blocking traffic. And it wasn’t a safety hazard. But I was wrong: it’s been less than two weeks since the storm, and the tree is gone. 

More striking for me, however, is the fact that this tree had been up since before anyone on the block moved in. My city planted it. My city also planted the hundreds of other trees around the neighborhood. That means that for all the years my family has lived on our street, the city has maintained every one of the trees. Not once had I given that any thought. But the day the storm hit, it was all I could think about. 

Even though I once covered city government as a reporter for my campus newspaper at UC Berkeley, I never fully grasped how much our cities do for us. Trees along a street, for example, seem like such a simple thing at first glance. But when I stop to think about it, I realize the natural touch, the colors of fall, the fresh air and the scent of home that all the trees bring to my neighborhood would not exist were it not for my city. Being at the Department of Public Works has enabled me to appreciate the plethora of services a municipality provides in a way I would never have imagined. And that, in and of itself, has already made this year’s Fellowship experience a truly worthwhile one for me.