Erik Verduzco

Now a park museum, the House of Happy Walls was a brick-and-stone dwelling erected by Charmian London three years after her husband’s death by kidney failure in 1916. It was one of the first sites open to the public in 1960.

Three times a month, Lou Leal, 77, shows visitors to Jack London State Historic Park something more than the familiar hills and hiking trails —he leads them on a literary journey.

As a volunteer docent for the past 15 years, Leal guides tours of the iconic stone ruins of Jack London’s dream home, known as Wolf House, and the cottage museum, a painstaking restoration of the space in which the American author wrote and lived the last years of his life. He has also made exhibits chronicling the famed writer’s life, rewritten the docent guide and generally made himself in charge of upkeep, calling for park rangers to fix the museum’s leaky roof and maintain the park’s many hiking trails.

“I’ve been willing to stick my neck out in order to do things right so the public has a decent experience,” he said.

But Leal’s work might be for naught.

Jack London Park is slated for closure in 2012 —and with it, the Bay Area stands to lose a crucial chapter of its history.

The park, a cultural magnet that drew around 300,000 visitors last year, is one of five in Sonoma County without funding in the 2012 state budget. As of July, it already is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

If no alternate money is found,  the scenes and artifacts Leal interprets for visitors will be in immediate danger of being lost to the ages.

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The future of the park now rests upon Assembly Bill 42, authored by Assemblyman Jared Huffman, to allow the parks department to enter into partnerships with nonprofits to take over maintenance and oversight of the parks.  The bill was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown on Oct. 5.

The Valley of the Moon Natural History Association, of which Leal is vice president, is one of those nonprofits. The Sonoma association will present a proposal to the Parks Department in early November, hoping to convince Director Ruth Coleman that Valley of the Moon can raise the funds and manpower to take over Jack London next July when parks are slated to close.

However, the association has no definite figures yet, and the funds raised so far "are really a drop in the bucket compared to what operational costs will present themselves,” said Greg Hayes, a London scholar and president of the association. The Parks Department has estimated the annual operational costs of the park at $267,000.

If Hayes’ organization does not succeed, the future for Jack London is bleak.  For one thing, the ruins of Wolf House, which London hoped would stand “act of God permitting, for a thousand years,” would begin to erode and deteriorate. Without oversight from park rangers, the imposing rock skeleton would also be defenseless to vandals, who used to pocket pieces of the walls as souvenirs and spray-paint their names onto the interior before the parks department took over in 1959, according to Diablo District Parks Superintendent Stephen Bachman.

And the cottage museum, which was completed in 2005, would be dismantled. All the historic objects on display—the glossy typewriter on which London clacked out his novels including “Valley of the Moon”, his Dictophone machine, Charmian London’s 1905 baby grand piano—would have to be inventoried, carefully packaged and placed in storage in Sacramento.

“That’ll be incredibly expensive,” said Hayes. “It’s undoubtedly cheaper to keep the park open than to close it.”

Yet Ms. Coleman, whose job it is to close the Parks Department’s budget gap, disagrees. While she said she has heard and sympathized with the concerns of residents over this particular park, she said it was simply not worth keeping open in the 2012 budget.

“It’s a big, expensive park,” she said. “There’s money to be saved.”

The park memorializes the author’s deep roots in the Bay Area. Born in San Francisco in 1876, London spent his childhood on the Oakland waterfront. He is the namesake of the popular Jack London Square in Oakland, where he departed with Charmian for his ill-fated sea voyage on their schooner, the Snark, before returning to develop his beloved ranch.

Bruce Pearson, a wildlife photographer who visited the park from Cambridge, England, in August, said experiencing the author’s 1,400-acre legacy reignited the feeling of admiration he felt when he first read “The Call of the Wild.”

“His whole political attitude and that duality of wanting to be in the wild, yet wanting a better society,” said Pearson, 60, leaning over a display of London’s novels. “He’s a great man. I want to go home now and read more about him.”

According to Leal, the park’s greatest gift is that visitors don’t just learn about Jack London; they feel his presence. On weekends, they can peruse his books, peer into his starkly furnished bedroom and hear the tinkling of Charmian’s piano played by volunteers in the House of Happy Walls.

The park “is like a living museum,” Leal said. “It’s a part of me now.” When asked about what he would do if that part were to close, Leal seemed taken aback. “I guess I haven’t started to think in that way yet,” he said.