| western watershed romance |
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A whirlwind tour of the Delta, a story about how
humanity shapes the land, how the land shapes humanity, and how
humanity straitjackets humanity. Hit five spots: the giant South Delta
pumps, Bethany Reservoir, then to the Big Break nature center, then to
Isleton, ol' Isleton, to partake of some in-Delta grub, and finally a
plaintive sunset drive through the North Delta, a sunset drive aching
to pull you out of the boxed-in vehicle and into the wind-lashed land,
to feel that cool, ocean-born air willowing and waving, to see the
shimmering gilded sunrays slipping behind the ancient Coast Range
without the diluting, distorting effect of the pockmarked windshield.
The giant intake canal at the State Water Project's giant pumping
plant, a canal and pumping plant conjured and built by people with a
vision of perfection, of an ideal, of a society, a Great Society that
fomented in the '50s under Eisenhower and attained its paradoxical apex
during Johnson's administration in the 1960s, when the old Texan
strived for a lofty, unattainable Utopia free of poverty and racism on
the homeland while waging the most barbaric of wars in a distant
country, a war considered most successful when dead bloated bodies
stacked highest. The pumps were born when America's ruling class was
infatuated and enthralled by the nation's technological prowess, so
enthralled that they forgot the foundation on which America was built,
they buried what came before and came before successfully, they yearned
to replace the seemingly backwards, unruly, unrefined Wild and Indians
with the right-angled order and stamp of the technology that ushered in
the end of World War II with two giant blasts. That replacement's
error, of course, the Vietnam War exhibited beautifully, where an
under-equipped, out-gunned people intimately familiar with their own
land defeated the biggest, baddest nation in the world. The Vietnamese
nationalists - nimble, flexible, maneuverable, assimilating seamlessly
into the landscape, they outflanked and outran and outfoxed the
overloaded, obvious, cacophonous, sluggish, poor American soldiers and
their arrogant, implacable generals. And the giant intake channel of
the pumping plant, the right-angled, tamed, crude Eisenhower-era ideal
of a perfect river, giant and recessed between hacked hills overlooked
by waving golden poppies in a soft springtime sun, massive pump house
likewise sunk into a human-carved pit in the mountains, staid,
entrenched, emplaced, immovable and ever so vulnerable to a far more
formidable, flexible, perseverant foe: the waiting ocean.
Bethany Reservoir, the first reservoir in the manmade network receiving
the gravity-defying Delta water. Riprap-faced dam backed by an earthen
inverted pyramid, America's Giza-like temple garishly announcing her
technological prowess, waterweed vacuumed from the Delta deposited on
the shoreline, and a deep, seemingly abyssal blue, impenetrable. Close
to the bank, it looked just like much of the Delta, only scarred,
scarred and stained by dead bloated bodies of striped bass, the best
substitute for the extinct thicktail chub and extirpated Sacramento
perch, a species requiring a good river, a good estuary, and a good
ocean to persist and flourish, and a species reviled - because they
cull the weakest of the weak, fucking domesticated salmon - by the
Endangered Species Act and by bourgeois, stiff-minded
environmentalists. Dead on the banks, very likely from the senseless
predator-removal program forced onto the watershed by the National
Marine Fisheries Service, another ever-wise federal agency, which
infects the poor people carrying out the task with a hateful eye
towards their quarry, resulting in shitty fish-handling and subsequent
high mortality when our best signal of successful tidal restoration -
given acceptance of our warming climate - is dumped unceremoniously
into little Bethany Reservoir. Gooks of the Delta. What a fucking waste
of money, manpower, and energy, so senseless, removing one of our
beleaguered estuary's beacons of health: wild-spawned predators adapted
to the dam-free, diversion-free watershed. What a fucking narrow
viewpoint pushing this abject stupidity. What a horrible waste of the
ecosystem's production, removing big, beautiful, bountiful striped bass
and depriving the estuary and the estuary's people and the pulse of the
estuary's fucking health of their fecundity by either killing 'em
outright due to mishandling or just dumping 'em into Bethany. The dead
bodies floating belly up in the little reservoir, they are the
indictment of our mismanagement of the estuary, they're the indictment
of our misbehavior toward Wild life, highlighting our insensitivity and
crude understanding, our ignorance, of basic ecology, our appalling
inability to see the interconnectedness and gradations and nuances
among Wild life, native and non-native, and humanity, an echo of the
static, black-and-white minds that put pen to paper and birthed the
Endangered Species Act.
Big Break. A laser-leveled parking lot, trimmed
and tamed blue oaks and coast live-oaks framing the linear asphalt
parking spaces, concrete and gravel paths funneling visitors to the
shiny, right-angled building housing human representations of the Delta
in Magritte-like formats while smaller dirt trails snaked off into
waving grasslands, grasslands frothing with wild grasses and vetch and
embracing water-fern-coated ponds mingling with tules and thatches of
willows veiling hidden worlds held close to their trunks. Our students
and employees dutifully followed the concrete path right to the door of
the right-angled shiny building, and, when found that the building was
locked, nevertheless peered intently and excitedly at the exhibits
inside, their backs facing the real thing. It was instinctive,
inherent, ingrained. Slowly, some of us ambled down to the real thing,
the actual Delta, today's Delta, where clear water framed by chattering
avuncular cottonwoods and laughing child-like tules rolled and roiled
under the exhalation of an ocean-born breeze. An Asian fisherman, cane
pole in hand, no reel, standing quiet and still like a heron, plucked
one sunfish after another with ease and grace from the lapping water,
gracefully sinuous, filling his bucket with effortlessly given Delta
gifts. It seemed so natural to him, this actualizing of an ancient
rite. I've little doubt, given the skill and sophistication Asians and
Eastern Europeans and Hispanics display with turning what to Americans
is inedible fish into a well-hewed dinner, that the graceful man
would've been just as content with hitch and splittail. I could see
him, however, cast a distrustful, frustrated eye on biologists and
engineers cutting into his fishing spot for native fishes, rendering
the water unfishable for a fat chunk of time, only to have the clear
water and sunfishes return, sunfishes he could have had the entire time
the engineers and biologists - us
- were mucking things up in a fruitless endeavor. A heavy-handed,
insensitive approach framed and informed by black-and-white minds
beaten by Vietnam, a failure the black-and-white minds couldn't accept,
contrasted by the stately man, cane pole in hand.
Empty, aching bellies wafted us from Big Break to ol' Isleton, that old
town on the river, that flood-beaten town, that tough town, where,
nevertheless, the river always flows by and sometimes into, where the
wind always funnels that ocean teleconnection, where old fields of
generations of farms still receive the harrow and plow, where echoes of
humanity that birthed the state of California remain palpable. Los
Angeles and the Bay Area and Sacramento, over-developed urban worlds,
they dominate what was, at California's American birth, a rural land:
orange groves ruled where concrete now smothers in the shadows of the
Transverse Range, expansive grasslands fed Spanish cattle in the Bay
Area, and here, in the hub of the Central Valley, groves and farms
bloomed as the Gold Rush's precious mineral metal grain subsided,
Indians and Chinamen working their asses off to provide the vital rail
and trail and river connections to transmit the fruits of the lands. In
Sacramento's extension, Davis, the kids born in the womb of the modern
technocracy, it don't matter if they're black or white or Hispanic or
Chinese - they seem so homogenous, and why not when they all spend most
of their time staring at a tiny right-angled LCD screen, all
interacting with the same few programs spawned by Apple, by Google, the
Facebook-YouTube-Instagram-Twitter slivers of warped electronic
frivolity, their minds reflections of the same GUIs, their fingers all
trained to swipe the same way? I see them frequently nearly walking
into trees or crashing their bikes, headphones stemming from their
smart-phones deeply entrenched in their ears, emplaced, totally closed
off from the waiting world wailing outside. And it's pervasive, a scene
recurring in LA and San Francisco and Sacramento, a Huxleyian/Orwellian
eternal recurrence. But in Isleton, where the trees wave and the old
schoolhouse sits shivering in fear of the raging floodwaters so
frequently threatening to whisk all away, people can't just dissolve
into the simplified, fractured facsimile beaming hypnotically from
their little screens but have to pay attention to that sensuous world
that always threatens under a glassy calm just over the levee. The
people - they're unique, they have identity, and, as frequently seen in
rural areas where each person's value goes up in inverse proportion to
the population size, they display a heartfelt warmth that is just not
often seen anymore in our urbanized, strip-mall, corporation-dominated
technocracies. The lovely black couple at the authentic barbeque joint,
with generational tendrils wedded to the soggy, swampy world that wind
back to the Mississippi yet find resonance and belonging in our Delta,
much like the largemouth bass and redear sunfish that also find the
Delta a familiar, comfortable home, they spoke to us as if neighbors,
kin, as if inviting us into their home. The old grizzled local white
people in the beer joint a few buildings down, weathered skin formed
and creased by the blows of lives lived hard under raging river waters
bashing levees and blasting Delta winds tottering trembling eucalyptus
and cottonwood trees, they said more, with more honesty, to each other
and us, outsiders, than I think you could garner anywhere in Davis,
where you'll see endless restaurant tables stocked with a half-dozen
people all staring at their smart-phones, only acknowledging the real
humans a mere few feet away with languid nods and a few stilted words
not far removed from the reduced language of their texting hands, a
reduced language prophesied by Orwell. I don't recall once seeing any
of those Isleton cats staring hypnotically into their smart-phones -
they were too busy looking at each other. A vanishing art, recalling
Harmonica's line in Once Upon a Time in West when referring to an individual, a man, a woman: "An ancient race." A vanishing race.
We didn't leave the beer joint 'til the sun had nearly sunk behind the
Coast Range, casting soft violet light on little Isleton. In our bevy
of cars, a brilliant, streaking light splashing through streaking
springtime clouds and gilt-tinting the sine-curve sway of rhythmic
wheat, we wound our way along crumpled rural roads of the North Delta,
needing to swerve a few times to avoid heat-soaking gopher and
California king snakes basking on the simmering asphalt. Red-winged
Blackbirds and Great-horned Owls and egrets and herons and Mallards
blew up from myriad tule-fringed canals, and I wondered what swam
beneath their surfaces. Expansive fields, some with wheat, some
orchards, the total seemingly more diverse than the farmland outside
the Delta's perimeter, flowed on and on, monolithic, striking in their
magnitude. Striking, too, in their abyss, the level of the fields so
far below that of the walled-in sloughs, Miner and Steamboat, pointing
to an undeniable future of a deep, open-water world, and a warm one,
where maybe, just maybe, young stripers and shad and hitch and
blackfish may have a chance if the redear can keep the damn Corbicula
at bay - redear may be our best ally in the fight against the clams in
fresh water. I thought, too, about the maligned common carp, how
loathed they are in the Midwest, where they root out aquatic weeds and
muddy up the water, foreign features to Wisconsin lakes but certainly
ancestral traits of the Delta. Carp, too, they're an ally, but few in
this watershed probably perceive 'em as such. Takes a shift in
perspective, of seeing life not in sterile notions contrived out of
place, out of time, but of seeing life in place to have such an
appreciation, but I can see how difficult it can be for us
to see life in place when we're so frequently not in that place in so
many ways. And I'm losing faith that the black-and-white-mind clothing
we wear has any potential to allow that evolution, an evolution we need
to assimilate with, to engage with, to accept and to nurture the
evolution of our Wild world.
Wasn't 'til dark that I reached my little
yellow house, my little yellow house with its little patch of wild
weeds blowing up in my backyard and threatening to envelope my
well-attended birdfeeder. Tired, I fell onto my bed, the rustling weeds
outside my backyard rustling like the wheat and the tules of the Delta,
and I imagined a thicktail bass staring quizzically into a vastly
different future world while suffocating under the weight of actions by
well-intentioned marionettes orchestrated by black-and-white minds
stained and never reconciled with Vietnam.