Mountains and Marshes. David Rains Wallace
had a Year of the Bay there. When have we ever had a Year of the Bay? It’s embarrassing.”
“It’s truly awesome just how much has been wrecked,” said Joshua Mills. There wasn’t much to say after that. We finished our sandwiches in the hot sun of a Sausalito deck restaurant and went home.
THE ENDANGERED, ETERNAL BAY
The Bay-watchers’ words had the ring to truth, but, coming from four directions, they caused something of the confusion I’d felt at the Golden Gate. Threats to the Bay are numbingly diverse. I wondered if it might clarify things to consult some kind of human Bay Model, one individual with official authority, scientific knowledge, environmental concern, and practical day-to-day experience on the Bay. It sounded a little like Superman, but I headed to San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge’s new visitor center in Fremont to see what I could find.
I began to think I’d come to the right place when wildlife biologist Tom Harvey listed the things he dealt with on his job. I managed to scribble “water quality, salt ponds, seasonal wetlands, endangered species, diving ducks, colonial nesting birds, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Coast Guard, developers, conservation groups, the Leslie Salt Company, oil spills, wildlife disease epidemics” in my notebook, but others got past me.
“We’re spread kind of thin here,” said Harvey, a thirty-three-year-old with outdoorsy good looks. He’d had the job for five years but has lived near the Bay all his life. “My parents had a house on the estuary at Alameda,” he said, “so the Bay was in the backyard. I remember as a kid being turned on by the richness of life just on a piling or under a rock.”
When I asked him if he thought of the Bay as a living organism, Harvey hesitated, apparently a little surprised by the question. It did sound like deep ecology woo-woo philosophizing in the mundane context of the refuge headquarters’ meeting room, with regulations manuals and memos on the bulletin board, and people in tan uniforms busy at desks next door.
“Yeah, I think I do,” he finally said. “Particularly in the sense of trying to maintain it in a state of health. You have to consider the whole thing to do that.
“I didn’t really start out seeing it that way. My degree is in ornithology, so originally I was just studying birds. When I got this job, there were so many outside influences on the Bay that I had to develop a sense of the whole. We can’t just worry about what’s inside the refuge boundaries or we’ll lose that too, eventually.”
I asked him if he thought the Bay was getting sicker. His response was unhesitating. “Absolutely. I’ve seen it become a less vital place just in my lifetime. The water quality picture is bleak, especially in the South Bay here. There just isn’t enough water coming in to flush out the increasing contaminant levels from all the new development. It isn’t just sewage and factory wastes. A lot of it is grease and oil washing off roads into storm drains.
“We’re still losing habitat that refuge wildlife needs. When it was established in the early 1970s, the planners concentrated on saving the mudflats, salt marshes, and salt ponds because those were considered the sensitive areas, the ones the waterfowl, shorebirds, shellfish, and endangered species needed. Now we’re finding that seasonal marshes inshore from the tidal areas are important too. We used to think the salt marsh harvest mouse [a federally endangered species] was mostly in the tidal marshes, but we’ve discovered that the largest populations are in the seasonal marshes, and the seasonal marshes are going under to development. We’re protecting one part of the Bay and letting another deteriorate. It’s like somebody quitting smoking but taking snuff.”
I knew what Harvey meant by growth pressures. When I’d started going to places like Coyote Hills Regional Park in the early 1970s, much of the South Bay had been in open fields inhabited by ring-necked pheasants and burrowing owls. Driving to my interview with Harvey, I’d passed exactly two open spaces, one with a big Realtor’s sign on it, the other part of the Ardenwood Technology Park, which proclaimed its presence with an outdoor fountain and floral display. The fountain seemed ironic in light of Harvey’s talk of water scarcity, throwing gallons into the air beside a freeway where gridlocked commuters were unlikely to enjoy it.
“The freshwater input from the delta is really critical,” Harvey continued, “particularly down here where the pollution concentrates. If we lose more of that . . . It’s hard not to pessimistic.”
Harvey hesitated again when I asked him if he thought the Bay would survive. It’s the kind of anthropomorphic question that scientists, especially government ones, may not like, but Harvey did his best to answer it.
“There’ll be some kind of bay here. In fact, the Bay will probably grow in the next century because the greenhouse effect is expected to raise ocean levels. It will flood a lot of the present wetlands, so if we don’t save more open space around the Bay now, there may not be any wetlands in the future, just open water next to houses and factories. That will mean even less wildlife. If river inflow keeps decreasing, the Bay will become more of a marine environment—that is, if increased contamination doesn’t cause some truly awesome disaster.
“The threats to the refuge are so diverse that there’s a temptation to get cynical, to say, ‘This place is dying: who cares. I’ll go to Alaska or Oregon.’ But then you go out in the field and see something that reminds you why you keep wading through the paperwork and the meetings. A while ago I was in Richmond looking for California clapper rails [another endangered species]. After three days, I finally found a nest in an area that stank of oil refineries, was covered with landfills and junkyards, and had packs of dogs roaming around. All signs of the high value we’ve placed on wetlands. But then there was this beautiful bird nesting in the middle of this stuff. I was struck by the tenacity. It was sad. But it was a testimonial to something.”
I walked around the visitor center’s nature trail after talking to Harvey. Salt ponds separated the trail from the Bay, and it seemed another irony that we consider them wildlife habitat now, since they replaced natural marshes and were used to produce industrial chemicals. Still, there was wildlife. Black-necked stilts waded daintily in the brine, probing with their slightly upturned bills and complaining raucously as I approached. Swallows skimmed around nests on an old duck-hunting shack. When I stopped to examine some unpleasant-looking blotches in the ponds, I saw that even they were alive, containing thousands of tiny red brine shrimp.
THE WALLED-IN, UNTAMABLE BAY
It was clear from what Tom Harvey had said that the less urbanized North Bay and delta are crucial to the Bay-as-organism, so I headed in that direction one hot, smoggy October day. I’d long wanted to see Suisun Marsh, the largest single estuarine marsh in the continental United States, but somehow never had, despite driving past it many times on I-80. The sprawl around Fairfield hadn’t promised much in the way of open space.
I got a pleasant surprise after negotiating the raw housing tracts and malls around Suisun City. From Peytonia Slough Ecological Reserve at its northern end, Suisun Marsh stretched south toward the Contra Costa hills, with only a solitary barge crane to hint at industrial activity. It was about as close as I’d come to seeing California lowland in a truly wild state, a sweep of tule rushes, cattails, sedges, and wild grasses extending to the horizon. Asters and marsh grindelia added blue, white, and yellow to the marsh plants’ bright green. White-crowned sparrows whistled, marsh wrens chattered, a loggerhead shrike rasped, and an unseen bird, perhaps one of Tom Harvey’s rails, clucked from the tule sedges.
I was even more surprised when a river otter surfaced in the slough. I’d never seen one so close to a town. It stuck its nose in the air and chewed on a small fish like a dog enjoying a succulent bone. When it saw me, it dove and resurfaced behind a clump of rushes, but it wasn’t really alarmed, and I watched it eat two more fish, turning on its back to chew them corncob style. Sweltering in the 90-degree, hydrocarbon-laced air, I envied it.
When I drove southeast to Grizzly Island, I found more open spaces. Early-arriving migratory waterfowl dotted ponds, and the brushy levees and roadsides at the state wildlife area produced many squawking cock pheasants. Two black-shouldered kites, showy white raptors that specialize in marshy, grassy terrain, watched me from a coyote bush, flying away only when I was