Creek Running North

The creek was high tonight, nearly filling the Corps of Engineers channel down to the bay. A mated pair of mallards paced Becky and me, the four of us flying north together.

The new berm road is now covered in heavy bluerock gravel, smothering the burrows beneath, with deep ruts where the heavy equipment broke through or mired. Not bad for running in its current condition, though that will change when the blacktop gets poured. The road is better than twelve feet wide, hideously overengineered for a trail. A mockingbird regarded me, flitting from one survey stake to the next and then looking back, as if to scold me for not having yanked them when I had the chance. I could have pulled them, wasted a day of some worker’s careful geometry, tossed them into the bay to wash up on the riprap in Benicia.

It would have been, at best, a momentary delay.

The sun is setting almost due north, it seems. We stopped and watched it slip behind Lachryma Montis, the Sonoma hills eating it edge by edge, until it became a pale line, held for a second, and winked out. I shook the spots from my eyes and ran some more. Frog song filled Fernandez Park, drowned out the screaming little league parents in the ballfield. The hill seemed not nearly as steep as last time.

A few years ago, camping by myself on the long, anonymous plains between the Painted Desert and Winslow AZ, I watched the sky.

It was night, after a long day of driving in a month of long days of driving, and I was tired and a little lonely. I was reading a book I’d started in Oklahoma the day before. I was disappointed that the rattlesnake museum in Albuquerque had been closed that morning.

I was caught between the desire to prolong the trip and to head home. To head south to Tucson, or back into New Mexico to visit Ellen in Luna, or down to Organ Pipe, or Big Bend, or who knows where — or to speed across the Mojave and San Joaquin and home.

I chose the latter the next morning. But that night, I honed my indecision into a fine ache, watching the pale yellow lights of Winslow low on the horizon.

A raven flew past, alighted on a sagebrush, croaked merrily — and then flew on, wobbling low over the plain. And the feeling rose so fast it caught in my throat.

Envy. I wanted to be that raven, wholly of that place and yet still above it, able to wrest a living from the lizards and bird eggs and garbage dumps, then glide off to the trees of the Mogollon Rim as the whim struck. The emotion surprised me: it was so vehement. I stood for half an hour trying the get my wind back.

It’s mainly crows here — not so many ravens — but the raucous caw and wedge-shaped tail, once encountered, can still bring that catch to my throat.

Walked the creek this morning with Matthew Bettelheim. The fog hung in late, until about two pm. Matthew found a bit of egg shell along the path, picked it up. “Someone met their early end here.”

The mockingbirds have only recently started to scale down their yearly Homeland Security campaign. It was fairly intense this spring: I don’t think I saw one crow in the entire month of April that wasn’t being harassed by a mocker. One morning, looking out the front window with my view of the sky blocked by our roof, I saw the shadow of a crow making its way up the street. I waited. Three seconds later appeared the shadow of the pursuing mocker.

They even chased the Steller’s jays this year, a risky undertaking. Crows and jays are enthusiastic predators of eggs and nestlings, so the all-out assault against corvids makes some sense.

Like other Homeland Security programs I could mention, this campaign is testament to the eventual perseverance of the determined and stupid. With occasional innocent victims, as in the case of Zeke, who gets strafed by a mocker now and then despite never having raided a nest in his life.

Near creekmouth, freshly bladed dirt: construction for the Bay Trail. The bulldozers have been at work. The path atop the levee, two days ago honeycombed with burrows of ground squirrels and pocket mice and the gopher snakes that ate them, has been scraped flat.

Someone managed to dig himself out of his burrow afterward; a spatter cone of excavated soil surrounds a new entrance. Like people in the Mississippi flood zone, I suspect the occupant is determined to rebuild rather than relocate. I hope I’m wrong. The paving crew will be there soon. The clean dirt path that was was evidently not developed enough for the East Bay Regional Park District. A ribbon of asphalt will soon cap the berm where I met the gopher snake two weeks ago. Sleeping ground squirrels may awake to find themselves entombed beneath what might as well be a street.

I think of the gentle poetry of the vacated snake skin I saw the other day, curled around a stem of red dock, and see a black stripe of sun-baked tar in its place. This week? Next week? Soon, and inevitably. I find myself wondering whether EBRPD did a census of the wildlife in the area, or gauged the harm of what will certainly leach out of the tar into the saltmarsh beyond.

Which, I am forced to admit, would be a fraction of what one Santa Fe tanker car sweats on an average day, and there are dozens of them parked there now. And the sewage treatment plant sends organic aromatics into the airshed on a constant basis, and the soil beneath the RV storage lot astride the creek no doubt oozes with transmission oil. This ain’t wilderness, and the paved trail will probably make little long-term difference to anything except the animals it kills directly on Paving Day.

Still, I find myself wanting to fly into a mocker rage, to harass the graders and the tar trucks until they leave, to entomb some other place in black boiled petroleum sludge.

There are times when you find something, and the way it came to be there makes itself plain at once in your mind.

Yesterday morning, walking the dog, I found a severed lizard tail laying at the curb.

The lizard to which the tail had been attached was a western fence lizard, common around here. The tail was six inches long, about a quarter wide at the blunt end, cafe con leche brown with little rust red spots running its length. The severed end was drawn in and puckered, flecks of dried blood dotting the wound. It lay neatly parallel to the curb, as if placed there deliberately.

The neighborhood is full of cats. Some are feral, and more are “owned,” put outside each day by people who would probably complain if Zeke crapped on their lawns, but who blithely allow their cats to dig, and defecate, and spray urine in our garden beds, and sidewalks, and in other places where the first rain will flush the Toxocaria-laden waste into the Bay.

With thirty or so determined, subsidized carnivores in each few blocks, the small animals in the neighborhood take a beating. I’ve seen few lizards around here with intact tails. A pounce, a painful tear, and the tail thrashes wildly, and if all goes well the cat is distracted from the other half, which can then make a calculated escape.

I spent a moment hoping the lizard had truly escaped, and then dug in my pocket for a plastic bag. (I carry them whenever Zeke and I go out. Unlike the cat owners in the neighborhood, I clean up after my pet.)

I dropped the tail into the bag, carried it home, laid it on the soil in the zinc pot that holds my Pachycereus pringlei, Mexican cardon cactus. It’s a fierce plant, like a saguaro on steroids. Maybe the extra nitrogen will help it grow, I thought, and then, some windy day, it can fall over on a cat. The revenge of the tail.

Off to work and then back home. Faultline’s web host suffered a nameserver failure for a couple hours, so I went running instead of writing about reptile parts. Along the Railroad Avenue levee, a four-foot snakeskin lay tangled in the grass. It was a good shed, a clean shed, skin sloughing off all in one piece the way it’s supposed to.

Sometimes you find something, and the way it came to be there makes itself plain at once in your mind: I saw a bright snake seeing the seasonal wetland through newly clear eyes, trading a bit of tissue for a less-encumbered few weeks along the creek.

Tonight the mouth of the creek was wreathed in gray. The far shore was obscured, and the sky glowed that grayish pink that seems peculiar to the Bay Area on summer evenings.

As we ran down toward the bay, a kestrel kited — hovered more or less in place — over the pickleweed marsh across the tracks. Barn swallows swooped luxuriously through the buggy air.

Wallace Stegner wrote once that he didn’t feel a place was truly a capital P “Place” until people arrived there, inhabited it. Being a thoughtful, considerate fellow, — how I wish he were still around — he apologized in advance for his anthropocentrism, but went ahead and felt that way just the same.

I wonder. In the Mojave, a desert woodrat will occupy the same 25-foot radius patch of land its whole life, often in a dwelling built by hundreds of successive generations of her ancestors. A few years back, wildlife biologists decided that California salamander distribution in the wild could be at least partly explained by plate tectonics: you might say the salamanders were so loyal to a place that they only moved when it did.

Certainly “place” as we conceive of it is a human concept — that’s a tautology. But the human nervous systems that invented the concept share millions of years of ancestry — and millions of years of subsequent joint tenancy — with other beings with varying degrees of polar central nervous systems, other degrees of sentience. We may flatter ourselves to think this human concept is anything more than an essential territorial template hard-wired into the vertebrate brain, a veneer of German compound words and Kentucky poetry lacquered thereon.

The kestrel must have some concept equivalent to that of “place.” Else why does he kite over the same part of the marsh each time I see him?