Coming Unglued

Putah Creek, the nearest thing I have to a home watercourse, can sometimes be rather more than a creek. With headwaters in the hills north of Napa--the Las Vegas of grapes--the creek emerges from the Coast Range and flows down into the Sacramento Valley not far from where I live, in Davis, California. The foothills from which it flows are covered by oak woodland, where blue oak and gray pine, sometimes called ghost pine, join to make up one of the characteristic landscapes of California. The hills are mostly undeveloped, and covered nearly everywhere, between the trees, by grasses that are green as I write this, but will very soon be brown like the wheat in a Van Gogh painting. It can all be lovely--depending on my mood. Putah Creek is named, supposedly, for a native village that existed here when the first Spanish colonists arrived.

I haven't been over there in a while, but after the heavy rainfall over the New Year holiday, the creek became a river. At the end of last summer, in its narrow reaches, one could jump across it; after the rainfall, it was as wide as a football field is long. It was, happily, less scary and impressive when I visited it last, before the cold weather set in.

It was almost a trickle, except for a stretch near town where the water makes a short jump, dropping about two feet, then spreading to make a wide pool that extends some distance downstream. Up in the hills the creek may move with some energy, but here on the dead-flat valley floor, it just kind of mosies along. The creek is lined by dense vegetation, willow and oak and eucalyptus nearly everywhere so thick that a person on foot literally cannot push through it. There are a few breaks, and I headed for the first of these, at the spot where the little waterfall livened things up. I was here to fish for largemouth bass, a nonnative species that does rather well here; the largest bass I have ever caught or even seen was one I caught here at the waterfall late last autumn. Fish cluster here in quantities, and hide among obstacles just below the fall. A few salmon would pass through in future weeks.

I fished here with some success, then moved downstream from one break in the vegetation to the next, catching and releasing as I went (I haven't kept a fish in years. I like them in an anthropomorphic way, as friends, and talk to them sometimes, although I glance over my shoulder first). I scared up a drake mallard and a few egrets; neither are rare here. Nor are the red-tailed hawks that spun overhead, or the vultures that are as much a part of the Sacramento Valley landscape and sky-scape as anything. I came upon the little clearing that I think of as the beaver bistro. In a space about the size of a suburban front lawn, a gang of ruthless beavers had sawed down and chewed up every tree. Mountain lions have been known to pass through here, if very rarely; they do so because they've taken a wrong turn up in the hills. Bears wouldn't be impossible, and I once saw, to my utter astonishment, a fox.

I had finally decided that I like it here, at Putah Creek, and maybe even like this part of the state. I came here more or less by accident, simply because the University of California was here, and had hated everything except the university for a very long time. That had been tough to deal with, because I had ended my years working in Yellowstone National Park not long before, and it felt strange to be totally alienated from my physical surroundings, not the normal emotion in Yellowstone. Further, everyone around me was caught up in an intellectual movement called bioregionalism, the proponents of which try to know all they can about the natural region in which they live, usually defining the region by river drainage. One of our landscape architecture professors, Rob Thayer, explains how it works: "Do you know where you are? How much do you know about the region where you live? In today's global economy, with electronic communication and mass consumer culture, it is easy to lose sight of our surroundings. Knowing and identifying with one's watershed offers a new glimpse of how to be a community citizen of the natural world. Much as we might like to, it is impossible to take care of the entire earth all at once. We have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is likely to be in our home bioregion, or 'life-place'--the unique assemblage of geology, landform, watershed, climate, and communities of plants, animals and humans." Putah Creek, among other things, had me feeling like I might at last be fitting in.

Until I hung the spinnerbait on a submerged log and decided to go wading after it. The last time I had done this was in the Gardner River in Yellowstone, a few months earlier. The Gardner is a fair-sized watercourse; it roars down a canyon lined by sagebrush to join the Yellowstone River near the north entrance to the park. On bare legs, the water in the Gardner is fiery cold, breathtakingly cold, although you get used to it fast.

I stepped into Putah Creek. The water was kind of warm, like the water for the ramen noodles I used to make when I was a graduate student (when I was in a hurry, which was always, I used warm tap water). I hit bottom, and through the soles of my water shoes felt not Montana gravel, but Sacramento Valley mud. It felt like ramen noodles, and a plume of brown engulfed my leg, swirling like cream dumped hastily into coffee. It did not smell like coffee. The odor was more like the sum of all swamps. And then I began to sink, and not very slowly.

Oh, this was a mistake.

With my knee still awkwardly propped on the bank, I hoisted myself upward, or tried to. The mud held me, would not let go until I had pulled hard enough to loosen the shoe. It finally gave, and I kind of slurped upward--and immediately got tangled in a mass of fishing line someone had dumped here, about a hundred yards of the stuff. I managed to avoid the hook, but my mood was gone.

Because this was not exactly the first of the garbage I had seen. I walked back toward the car, my arms scratched by exotic star thistles, one of the worst exotic weeds available, and in plentiful supply here. I stopped at the waterfall, which actually makes its drop over a concrete wall that houses, I believe, a fuel pipeline. The obstacles that the fish like to hide among are actually old tires and a dead refrigerator that someone tossed off a nearby, graffiti-covered highway bridge. There's even a whole tractor engine further downstream. And I wouldn't keep those fish under any circumstances, because a recent study showed that they're full of mercury. That's what this part of California is like, too.

It all depends, of course, on how you look at it--but I believe I've been trying too hard to think good thoughts. I cannot help but feel stuck this time of year, every year (and bioregionalism has not to my knowledge developed a way to deal with the problem). But summer is not so far off that I can't feel its presence, and summer means trips to Yosemite and Yellowstone.

When I first moved here, I thought I was turning my back on Yellowstone for good. I thought I would just have to make do with Putah Creek, that settling down and getting a "real job" meant just such sacrifices. Instead, I have found myself spending more time in Yellowstone than I do at that creek. Somehow, settling down--all the way down, into marriage, and kids--made it possible to escape. Getting stuck turned out to be liberating.

In future blog entries, starting next time, I want to explore how that happened. The time of year has nearly arrived to say goodbye to the Sacramento Valley for a while, for more than just a weekend. It's time to start thinking about the high mountains.

And by the way, the name "Putah" is also more or less identical to the Spanish word for "prostitute." A popular local theory states that there was a bordello along its shores, during the Spanish colonial period. History is not necessarily G-rated, any more than the California countryside is necessarily lovely.