| western watershed romance |
| about | episodes | musings | voyeur room |
The San Francisco Estuary
Watershed epitomizes variety. The land - from the craggy, alpine
summits laden with snow and chiseled rock and sapphire ice, swooned in
icicle clouds, viewed only by genuflecting, warped, dwarf junipers
averting their gaze from the imperial, empyreal spires, to lush,
verdant mixed-coniferous forests cradling endless botanical treasures,
then down into rolling oak savannahs and rectangular farm fields and
the impenetrable veil of tule marshes. The waterways - cobalt,
crystalline little cirque lakes in the arctic austerity of the alpine
world, to blue ribbons of rivers rolling to little hydropower
reservoirs and giant water-supply reservoirs, then out to sea, rolling
through muddy bays and muddy, meandering tidal sloughs. The fishes, of
course, from the little leopard-spotted rainbows and chocolatey
brookies that inhabit the high-elevation lakes, to the elegant
pikeminnow and the gilded-emerald suckers that mesh with the cool-water
rivers of the mid-elevations, all the way down to big, burly bat rays
that fan the muds in the salt marshes of South Bay. And of course the
people - brown dudes and chicks with roots winding back to Alta California and
Mexico and other countries further south working their asses off in the
farm fields under the unrelenting summertime sun, Asian cats fishing
gracefully for roughfish, possible descendants of the Chinamen who
built so much infrastructure in California, the Ailanthus marking
their trails and travails, the bruthas next door to me who warmly offer
their golden Hennessey and can gab and jab with the best of 'em, and
white folks stemming from all tendrils of Eurasia, many red-necked
Bubbas working hard alongside the hard-working Hispanics in the food
fields. Such variety of life united by this watershed.
You'd think a journal entitled San Francisco Estuary and
Watershed Science would, likewise, feature articles
spanning the wide array of life and land and water. Instead, were it
called Smelt and Domesticated Salmon of the Delta, few of its articles
would be inconsistent with such a title.
"San Francisco Estuary and
Watershed..." - kind of misleading, really.
"Science" - having knowledge,
to know. Time rolls on imperturbably, and the watershed also continues
to evolve, with ever-greater numbers of plants, of people and other
animals, in part because of continual species introductions. Yet so
much "watershed science" is focused on one small area of the watershed
(the Delta), on one species functionally extinct (delta smelt), and on
one domesticated species (king salmon) - and increasingly domesticated
- that reflects not Nature's forces of flow and season and growth and
senescence but merely the maladroit hand of man. One's an anachronism,
the other's of a self-delusional stagnation. I fear that the rate of
the watershed's growth, its evolution, is not only faster than that of
our knowledge, but our knowledge - at this point, it's redundant,
irrelevant, a regression to a rigid little bubble of a time and
place that no longer exists.
"...Science" - kind of misleading, really.