Common Ground: The Waters of March

March 2006 | Editor’s Note

The Waters of March

I live between two creeks — Codornices and Lincoln — that flow, within blocks of each other, down from the Berkeley hills to San Francisco Bay. You can hear Codornices purl into a roar if you follow it west through half a dozen parks and schools, feeding backyards and ball fields, the Berkeley Rose Garden, and Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard. It echoes in culverts and storm drains and burrows under train tracks before diving under Interstate 80 to merge into marshlands by the racetrack at Golden Gate Fields.

These creeks are veins in the watershed that sustains this place I inhabit. In my mind, I erase the asphalt arteries and concrete paths that grid our gardens and neighborhood nests. I imagine what it looked like here two centuries ago when all the land from Albany and Berkeley in the north to Oakland and San Leandro in the south was part of the 45,000-acre Rancho San Antonio. Yes, there was a “there, there” then. It belonged to the sons of a soldier named Luis Maria Peralta who, at sixteen, traveled from Sonora, Mexico in a colonial expedition for the Spanish crown. No migra or border patrol kept him out. And his reward for military service and campaigns against the natives of Alta California was a royal land grant for a rancho in contra costa, or the east side of the Bay, making Peralta this watershed’s first landowner.

He never lived here. Peralta preferred San José. So he divided the hills, arroyos, and rich alluvial flats of Rancho San Antonio among his four sons. They, in turn, built their adobe homes alongside creeks, there to manage ranches and livestock, which, at their peak, numbered 8,000 head of cattle and 2,000 horses. The creeks that marked each brother’s land — Codornices, San Leandro, Peralta and Temescal — ran aplenty with trout, steelhead, and salmon. Huchuin Ohlone and other natives had fished and hunted along the banks for thousands of years before the Spaniards came and decimated their populations with disease and religion. Within a few decades, their numbers dwindled from 300,000 to 30,000.

Temescal creek (named for the healing sweat lodges created by Aztec, Miztec and Ohlone) now fed abundant gardens, milpas, and orchards cultivated by the Peralta family along its banks. They marked the creek’s passage from the Oakland hills to present-day Emeryville with its malls and Watergate towers. Today, most of Temescal’s rippling waterway has been paved over, but I can hear the trains whistle above it, a ghost roar, and imagine the ancient encinal or oak grove that once covered downtown Oakland. I picture the bear, elk, deer, and quail these Californio rancheros hunted while selling cattle hides and tallow to Boston merchants and whalers. Peralta’s sons stocked these harpoon hunters with the fresh fruit and vegetables that kept the sailors scurvy-free. Did Melville, our epic water-bard and hunter of Pacific Grail, feast on fruits from Rancho San Antonio? Did its bounty feed his sea-mates, his Queequeq, Starbuck, and Stubb?

After winning independence from Spain in 1822, Mexico honored Peralta’s land grant. But the pristine waters, fertile soils, and sparsely settled grasslands of Peralta’s “Pacific Eden” (as it was called back then) did not escape the gringo rush to Manifest Destiny. Gold and statehood brought loggers who decimated their redwood groves; squatters and miners who took their lands and water rights; and lawyers who robbed them with a pen, reducing their Rancho to 700-acres (even after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Peralta title claim in 1856).

Today, standing by a small bridge, I listen to Codornices Creek as it navigates around vines and debris in a cracked culvert. It swerves through awkward concrete elbows into strait-laced troughs, and I want to follow its way. It tells me: Know Your Water. That is the least I can do to honor this place where I was conceived and to which I returned to live and write. And there is something reassuring in the knowledge of this water’s flow through time: However hidden and elusive and exploited, it remains — long after the visitors leave.

There are many water songs to hear — Charley Patton’s High Water Risin’, Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Aguas de Marzo (Waters of March) — but the deep song is in the stream outside your door. Learn to listen to water, its timbre, pitch, and roll. It will change you. It will move you. It can make you whole. It’s the coolest jazz you’ll ever hear. Who knows the rippling of rivers, wrote Thoreau, will not utterly despair of anything. We are sustained by rivers, and the care of rivers, as the environmentalist Tanaka Shozo taught, is the Way of Heaven: “The care of rivers is not a question of rivers, but of the human heart.”

River craft. River work. Finding the heart of nature in water. Learning our place in the watershed. So much of our future depends on the care of water. This issue of Common Ground features some water workers: In our cover story, Moira Bartel celebrates River of Words, a Berkeley nonprofit that brings watershed knowledge to school children around the world. The creation of Pamela Michael and poet Robert Hass, River of Words inspires children to create art and poetry around the theme of rivers and watersheds. And in a companion piece, Carolyn Crane evokes the beauty of the Yuba Watershed while recounting the struggle to protect this vital resource. Andrea Blum reports on a recent Eco-Farm conference in Monterey and Darren Richardson walks us through the joys of barefoot hiking.

Envoi

This issue is my last as editor of Common Ground. I am moving on to write a book of water tales of my own — about people who are changing how we understand and manage water. I am deeply grateful for my time here and the opportunity to build this publication’s content and community of readers. My aim has been to bring some editorial gravitas to the magazine and provide a voice for the Bay Area’s progressive nonprofits, its seekers and activists, and all those engaged in bridging the worlds of spirit, environment, and social justice. They are inheritors of the Pacific Eden we inhabit and guardians of the watershed that sustains us.

I am also grateful that my partners-in-editorial-crime at CG, Deirdre Nemmers and Gar Smith, will carry on our vision. Deirdre’s brilliance as Art Director and Production Manager has kept this ship afloat through weather fair and foul. She has been a teacher and true friend. So has Gar, a former editor of Earth Island Journal, Free Speech Movement alum and lifelong activist. There is no one I would rather see at the editorial helm. (Not the least of his qualifications is his work helping to restore Codornices Creek to daylight.)

Whatever CG has accomplished over these past two years could not have happened without an amazing cast of writers and artists who have offered their talents, hearts and minds to bring us inspiring stories, images and reportage. So, too, all my colleagues here in San Anselmo whose friendship and commitment have kept us fixed on True North. They have also kept me honest and sane. Their love and work have made us shine.

— Carl Nagin

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