Mountains and Marshes. David Rains Wallace
and the Peytonia Reserve that implied some doubts about the future health of marsh and delta. Although by no means pristine (much of Suisun Marsh was drained and farmed in the 1920s and ’30s), the marsh around Peytonia Reserve is natural, maintained by the interaction of river flows and tidal action that has regulated Bay wetlands for millennia. What I saw of Grizzly Island, on the other hand, is heavily managed for agriculture or to produce game and fish for sport consumption. Rather than allowing wetlands to operate according to a natural water regimen, managers flood or drain the land to optimize crop or game production. The state wildlife area is plowed and bulldozed into squares that might as well be farm fields, except that they aren’t (I hope) laced with pesticides.
There’s nothing wrong with managing duck habitat, especially at a time when waterfowl populations are dwindling alarmingly, but increased emphasis on artificial management showed its ominous side as I talked to people concerned about the future. Under current policies, only diked marshes managed by hunting clubs or the state are assured of dependable freshwater supplies. As more water is diverted from the delta, saltwater creeps into the natural, open marshes. Brackish marshes of rushes and brass buttons turn into salt marshes of pickleweed and cordgrass, habitats less favorable to many wildlife species. Eventually, such places may become so salty as to be almost sterilized.
The state Department of Water Resources proposes various engineering solutions to salt intrusion, such as the massive dam and floodgates it is building near the mouth of Montezuma Slough, Suisun Marsh’s main source of Sacramento River water. The gates are supposed to let freshwater into the marsh and keep saltwater out. But an environmentalist I talked to, Bay Institute founder Bill Davoren, likened such engineering solutions to putting Band-Aids on a failing kidney. Like kidneys, brackish marshes filter pollutants and toxins out of water that ends up in faucets as well as in wildlife habitat. If the 85,500-acre “kidney” of Suisun Marsh should fail, it’s hard to imagine a dialysis that could replace its filtering function in any permanent way.
After leaving Grizzly Island, I went to the Sacramento River at Rio Vista, heading east on Route 12 over miles of parched rangeland that seemed as unlike Suisun Marsh as the Kansas Plains. The river looked like a lot of water by the time I reached it. But appearances can be deceptive. In the drought year of 1931, delta water got so salty that residents couldn’t drink it or irrigate with it. River flow had become so low that saltwater had moved upstream to replace it. Freshwater flow acts as a barrier to saltwater intrusion, the only one that has proven effective.
Driving along the Sacramento’s levee was more comfortable than crossing the Golden Gate in an inflatable boat. Yet, even walled behind levees, the river had a slightly disturbing grandeur that recalled the Gate’s powerful tidal surge. This has to do with the fact that the river’s surface is higher than the fields and orchards bordering it. Peaty delta soils subside when drained for agriculture, while sedimentation raises the levee-contained riverbed’s level above the surrounding land. Engineers say the river is “tamed,” but “caged” might be a better adjective. If it gets out of the levees, it won’t be tame.
River and Golden Gate both had an incalculable look, perhaps because they are the Bay’s main links with the biosphere. The rivers link it to the mountains; the Gate to the ocean. Looking into the Sacramento’s swift flow, I didn’t feel that I understood much of what was going on down there, for all the paper and talk I’d waded through. I didn’t know as much as the big chinook salmon that were cruising off the Gate. They’d know from the river’s taste or smell when the Sacramento was right for them to swim up to spawn, and some would manage it despite everything civilization has put in their way: gill nets, salt intrusion, aqueduct pumping stations, dams, log jams, silted spawning streams. A lot fewer manage it now than even a few years ago, but somehow some still do. My facts and figures seemed thin compared to their knowledge.
Sometimes it seems that our ignorance makes a mockery of even our well-meaning attempts to protect the Bay. Its life can be frustratingly indifferent to our concern, as with Tom Harvey’s clapper rail nesting in a landfill instead of the refuges we’ve made for it. But people keep trying, driven by that “something” Harvey mentioned. It might be a clapper rail or a salmon run or a day’s sailing inside the Gate, but I think it amounts in the end to a recognition that the Bay’s health reflects our own, that we can’t draw a line between living integrity and mere exploitable matter without sooner or later finding ourselves on the wrong side of the line.
—Image magazine, San Francisco Examiner, December 6, 1987
One of my adolescent fantasies was of a desert island, a small one with just a cliff and a beach. I’d live in a cave in the cliff and comb the beach. I had it on Sunday nights, before I had to go back for another week of junior high school, thus its appeal. This became less urgent as I got older, but I still liked the idea. When I came to California, I thought about such a place. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island is supposed to be based on the California coast.
Living around San Francisco Bay, I developed a mild fixation on the Farallones, a 221-acre island cluster twenty-seven miles off the Golden Gate. I’d see them on clear days as I hiked a ridge at Point Reyes, sugarloaf shapes jutting from an otherwise empty ocean, and feel a faint frustration at their distance. They’re an extension of the mainland, granite ridges dragged north from California’s Transverse Ranges by tectonic plates, but the cold, windy Pacific cuts them off.
I first came to California to visit a friend who had a salmon fishing boat, at Bodega Bay. When I arrived the boat was broken, and all I ever got to do was help him unsuccessfully try to fix it. The farthest out I got was on a rowboat on Tomales Bay, east of Point Reyes. The Farallones just hovered out there. Tectonic plates might have dragged them north to the Aleutians—as they eventually will—so far as I was concerned.
I finally got to visit the Farallones years later when an Oceanic Society guide who was taking a writing course I taught at UC–Berkeley Extension gave me a free ride on a whale-watching trip there. The trip was not much like my solitary beachcombing fantasy. Few experiences are less solitary than a whale-watching cruise, and we didn’t set foot on the islands, a national wildlife refuge reserved for breeding marine life. Yet those desert islands proved more fantastic—in the sense of diverse, surprising, curious, lively—than the fantasy one.
A half hour outside the Golden Gate, somebody said, “Look at the jellyfish.” I glanced over the rail, expecting to see some of the little moon jellies and blue sailors that often wash ashore. A few drifted here and there, but below them floated an almost solid mass of golden brown, furry-textured disks, each as large as a child. They were close enough to the surface to see in detail but deep enough to appear shadowy and mysterious, and they extended in all directions—a mermaid’s meadow of giant, pelagic chrysanthemums.
My student, Mike Ezekiel, said they were lion’s mane jellyfish, each furry disk a colony of tiny coelenterates that strain microscopic plants and animals from the water with structures like miniscule poison darts on trailing filaments. I’d heard a lot about how fertile California’s offshore waters are because of nutrient upwellings from deep currents, but I’d never seen such graphic evidence of it. The big jellyfish had to be floating in a plankton soup to be so abundant.
Many things we passed were new to me, although I’d been living a few miles from them for years. I didn’t recall seeing the shy little harbor porpoises that showed dorsal fins for an instant as they surfaced to breathe. I’d seen a lot of penguin-like common murres on shoreline rocks, but I was unfamiliar with the pigeon guillemots that flew out of the boat’s way, the little Cassin’s auklets that dove out of its way, and the tufted puffins (named for the peroxide blond wings they seem to be wearing) that floated past. I’d seen red-necked phalaropes, but I hadn’t seen those delicate shorebirds sitting on the deep-sea swells like gulls. Ezekiel said phalaropes like to follow blue whales and eat the shrimplike krill the whales feed on. They’d seen blues—the biggest animals that have ever lived—around the islands the day before.
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