Delta Dreaming

An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on River and Estuary

It’s one of those places that though nearby — fifteen miles to the south-southeast will put you in the middle of a slough — we never get to. The Delta, formed by the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, consists of thousands of miles of sloughs, levees, submerged islands, channels, and river reaches, a maze of waterways and islands. We’re not aquatic sorts however, and its possibilities for boating and fishing don’t lure us. Levees, toe drains, and creeks block entry for those who travel by road.

If I cycle south from here as far as I can go, the road making jogs to the east occasionally, I reach Liberty Island, and can’t cross the slough on my bike. It’s a land of marshes, pastures, and always a stiff breeze. Beating upwind is never much fun on bicycle, and since the wind usually heads either north or south here, I am not wont to head that far.

I think we have made the east-to-west drive through the Delta once, starting off on Interstate 5, driving past the fields where the sandhill cranes spend the winter, and into the Delta proper. It’s rich agricultural land (I’ve been working recently with the digital state soils map and the Delta shows up as the area with the highest organic matter content), much of it lower than sea level and hence dependent on levees to stay dry. A map of the Delta shows a watery hole in the land pattern at Franks Tract, where the levee failed in 1937 and again in 1938 to flood the area permanently. Our exit from that trek across the Delta was at Rio Vista in Solano County, practically due south from where we live but a circuitous route from our house.

There’s a quirky book about the Delta which I recommend entitled Sturgeon Tales: Stories of the Delta by Charlie Soderquist, a great benefactor of UC Davis who unfortunately died recently. A talking sturgeon by the name of Sally features prominently in the stories, as well as a fleet of ghost ships. The book is beautifully illustrated with a set of watercolors that well capture the lazy verdure of the region.

Arboretum In Line And Wash

Inspired by our circumambulation last weekend, I’ve been having fun doing some ink sketches with watercolor. At left is a sketch I did this afternoon of the gazebo at the Arboretum on campus. Nearby is a tree where black-crowned night-herons roost; they were keeping me company with their frequent squonkings.

Tuleyome Tour

This is the eighth year running that David Robertson and Rob Thayer, founding members of the Putah-Cache Bioregion Project and professors at UC Davis, have taken folks on a 225-mile circumambulation by bus of the Putah and Cache Creek watersheds. Today we finally went on this trip, starting at the headquarters of the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area just east of Davis early in the morning and returning after sunset.

Our route took us in a clockwise direction up the Putah Creek drainage, crossing over the watershed boundary to the north in Lake County, and returning following the Cache Creek drainage (approximately the same route of the Davis Double Century epic cycling event held each May). Water and people were the themes of the trip—we stopped at lakes, dams, creekside preserves, and historic settlements by the wayside. We sang several chants along the way invoking the spirits of the creeks, and carried out a couple of water rituals, one of them being carrying cups full of water across the Solano Diversion Dam (half of Putah Creek’s water flows south at that point to supply Solano County with drinking and irrigation water).

The high point of the trip literally and figuratively was passing by the headwaters of Putah Creek on Cobb Mountain in Lake County. At right is a photo of where we stopped here. The vegetation is much, much different from where we live: it is a montane forest with ponderosa pines, Douglas firs, black oaks, and white alders along the stream. Despite having lived here five years, neither of us had been to Lake County before, a surprisingly isolated place. It is one of the only counties in the United States to have never had a rail line in it, and economically the county has never quite taken off, going through a series of booms and busts. This decade the growth sector is wineries. The last boom centered on geothermal energy. (It’s a volcanic area, the Clear Lake Volcanics perhaps being 600,000 years old. The most impressive volcanic cone in the area is Mt. Konocti, though some believe it is hollow and inhabited inside.)

I did lots of sketching at stops and from the bus, and was able, a bit to my surprise, to add some watercolor to my sketches while travelling in the bus. At top shows my sketch of a hillside dotted with blue oaks in the Cache Creek drainage.

Pica kept a bird list for the day. Highlights were seeing both golden and bald eagles, a peregrine falcon, and white pelicans at Clear Lake.

Tuleyome is the name the Lake Miwok gave to themselves and their homeland. It means “deep home place”, a place not too far from where at the Guenoc Winery we had lunch today.

Postscript by Pica: Since we had this watershed be a significant part of our wedding ceremony last August, it was particularly important to me to see its headwaters, scrambling down the bank with my now-repaired Achilles to put my hands in this very cold water…

Warm Pine Needles

July in the Gredos mountains, west of Madrid . . . June in Idyllwild . . . May in South Carolina . . . August in the Landes near Bordeaux.

When pine needles have been sitting on the ground, piled up for a while, and get warmed by the sun of the late afternoon, and that languid time and scent is punctuated by occasional languid birdcall, when the breeze rustles the tall pines overhead, then is the best time, the best place, for a nap.

For the Ecotone Wiki’s joint post on Smell and Place.

Earthworm Perfume

An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on smell and place.

There is such a thing—honest. Amy Stewart, author of an excellent new book on earthworms and their achievements, writes in her book tour blog about discovering this fragrance:

Finally I pulled off the cap and sprayed it into the air. It hit me, instantly familiar. Worms. No doubt about it. It was the smell of dirt and rotten leaves and compost piles, and also the faint scent of skin, worm skin. I dont know how else to describe it. It was just vaguely—invertebrate.

The creator of this scent is Christopher Brosius, co-founder of a company called Demeter Fragrances, whose line of fragrances include many evocative of place. One, called Holy Water, comes from the smell of an old Norman church in England. Others in their list include bamboo, funeral home, New Zealand (by special request for the premiere of The Two Towers), and the most popular one of all, dirt.

As for Earthworm, Brosius says that the scent is “surprisingly popular…It sells at smaller upscale shops with a very sophisticated clientele.”

California Quarter Redux

I wrote an article for Faultline last year on the design and choosing of the new California quarter dollar, featuring a gold miner, the sierra, a poppy, a bear, and the words “a golden moment,” the apparent choice of the voting California public. It seemed like a done deal, mishmash that it was.

But we had a different governor then. Schwarzenegger has decided that a better choice for the California quarter is Garret Burke’s design featuring naturalist John Muir and the Yosemite Half Dome, along with a California condor (apparently at the Governor’s last-minute request).

You know what? Despite the fact I’ve been proved a liar, and despite the fact that the wishes of those Californians who chose to spend their time on internet votes for designs such as these have been blatantly disregarded, John Muir is an excellent figurehead to have on a coin for this state. I’m also thrilled the condor is there (though it hasn’t yet staged an “amazing comeback” as Schwarzenegger says; it will be many more years and millions more dollars before such a statement can be made, if ever). I gleefully sense rumblings of pissed-offness among California republicans. They voted for him to represent THEM, not the environment or (heaven forbid!) gay marriage. May he continue to confound their senses, and, I might add, mine.

A Five-Eagle Day

Today we went on a wildflower excursion to Bear Valley in Colusa County (one of several dozen Bear Valleys in California), travelling through scenic country which though relatively nearby we’ve never visited before. Our first stop was Granzella’s, a prominent deli and restaurant in the Sacramento Valley town of Williams—we had to pick up a jar of their famous olives. And then we went westwards into the Coast Ranges, stopping at a geologically-oriented geocache at the very point where the rocks of the Great Valley Sequence at the east side of the Coast Range first become exposed.

Taking the narrow and practically-deserted over the ridges to the north end of Bear Valley, we saw somewhere between four and six golden eagles! A pair near the south end of the road, another pair (one of the birds immature) near the top of the ridge, and another couple of eagle sightings closer to Bear Valley.

Bear Valley is a fairly remote stretch of rangeland, all privately owned though much of it protected under a conservation easement, that has some of the most spectacular wildflower displays in Northern California. According to the California Wildflower Hotsheet (a wonderful little page with status reports on California bloom displays), it seems we were a little early for the peak in Bear Valley, but there’s still quite a lot up there already. At right is a photo of an owls’ clover, with lots of yellow asters in the background.

The Rain Gauge Tipped Over

We had rain today, which after the heat of last week and resultant pollen explosion has been a wonderful thing. Unfortunately we don’t know how much—the rain gauge was on its side.

It will probably rain again tomorrow. We have the day off: the University of California has declared its former “Spring Holiday” is now to be known as “Cesar Chvez Day” in honor of the farmworkers leader. Wonderful to get a day to play when most other people don’t.

We were planning a trip to Bear Valley, one of the best places in Northern California to see wildflowers. If it’s raining, though, we may alter our plans and work on taxes. I’d rather go back to the periodontist for a root planing, but it has to be done.

The very hot weather followed by this quite cool, wet air probably will result in some interesting plant phenomena this year.

Call Of The North

It’s good to see that the useful arts and sciences of Northern California are having an positive impact on the most northerly of states, Alaska. First, a story in the Davis Enterprise tells how a Davis veterinarian, Celia Valverde, recently volunteered at the Iditarod sled dog race in Alaska, helping to examine the dogs as they came through the checkpoints. She worked for two weeks, travelling from checkpoint to checkpoint by bush plane, and returning in a plane with two pilots, three vets, and 38 dogs.

Second, the news site MacSlash links to a story in the Anchorage Daily News about the mushers in the Iditarod listening to iPods and other music players on the trail to lighten their spirits and boost their energy. As for the question what track do the dogs prefer, one MacSlash commentator says it’s obviously “Who Let The Dogs Out?”

At left we see Tassy, who belongs to Pica’s brother and his wife. Despite living in Juneau, Alaska, she has no interest in competing in the Iditarod.

Turkeys On The Creek

Pica saw four male wild turkeys on the levee by Putah Creek near our house this afternoon. For several years now turkeys have been reported by the creek a couple miles west of here, but we had no idea they were nearby. At right is a photo which Pica took today of two of them.

This past week has been warm, suggesting that summer is going to come early, and the Putah Creek lake of several weeks ago has totally disappeared. But this morning a marine layer came in, bringing dew and fog.