Creek Running North

We didn’t plan to move to Pinole.

We liked the town fine, but hadn’t really thought about living here, one way or the other, until January 2002 when our landlord in Richmond decided to sell the house we’d been living in.

We looked at at least 50 houses in the next two months, from San Leandro to Pinole, about a thirty-mile swath of the East Bay. Our budget was under 300K. People from outside the Bay Area may need to be reminded that here this is, essentially, starter home, VA and repo territory.

We saw houses in marginal neighborhoods next to liquor stores, houses whose back walls were arm’s length from freeway soundwalls, rent-controlled houses with “problem” tenants who had trashed the place and threatened to refuse to move, houses with funky, illegal add-ons whose walls ran five degrees off plumb, houses atop active landslides and houses beneath them. One house in the Richmond hills, possessed of an unbelievably spectacular view of the Bay and with several thousand square feet of sunny yard, was directly astride the Hayward Fault.

We also saw a few small, modest, lovely cottage-style homes, freshly remodeled and painted, with $45,000 termite reports or broad, ominous stripes of fresh mortar on their foundations. These all had multiple offers.

And then there was our house. Our realtor said she’d taken a few prospective buyers in as far as ten feet from the door, where they’d wrinkle their noses and say “no” and leave.

The two-bedroom house had been home to a couple, their three sons, and a big dog. They moved out, leaving much of their possessions behind, closed the place up and used it as storage for a couple years. The house smelled: of dog, of mildew, of decomposing carpet back and mouse urine and whatever it was in the cast iron pan left in the oven, now an unidentifiable greasy slick. And the refrigerator, which I cleaned by dismantling and hauling it outdoors to the hose. One bedroom was painted dark gray with black trim. Plaster was peeling from the kitchen ceiling. Windows on the southeast and southwest corners were rotting out, streams of Argentine ants emerging froom the holes made by our home inspector’s screwdriver.

But that was it. Three weeks worth of cleaning (and patching plaster and painting and stripping out wall to wall and linoleum and sanding and urethaning the hardwood floors, after bleaching out the worst of the dog stains) and we could move in.

After that, just a couple weeks of construction took care of the rotten windows. A weekend with a jackhammer solved the crooked sidewalk and ugly patio issue. We still lack a sound roof. The retaining wall out front will crumble in the next quake. This summer will be spent putting my writing office in the 10 by 30 shed out back, currently surrounded by weeds and piles of soil from the patio paving project.

I still wonder at the unwillingness of those who refused to buy the house. Compared to a cracked foundation on a hillside, no problem our house offered was even remotely difficult to contend with. Given a choice between the pretty houses that were structurally rotten, and the basically sound house that needed a deep cleaning, every homebuyer in the East Bay last winter went for the beguiling, potentially expensive flash. Our little house sat unbought for six months at the peak of the market, waiting for us to find it.

We looked at all those other houses from a sense of due diligence. This was the one we wanted from the start. We gained title when we signed the purchase agreement, but we didn’t own the place until the floorboards were slicked with our sweat. I wonder if the people with the cultured marble bathrooms and the landslides up above feel as much at home in the houses they bought.

Adobe Road, according to some maps of Pinole, is a through road connecting two points on Pinole Valley Road, about three miles uphill from our house. Those maps lie. Turn onto Adobe, as we did this afternoon on a ride to celebrate our new bicycle helmets, and the road goes uphill and shortly turns into a parking lot, which turns into a paved path, which turns into a dirt path, which turns into a narrow single-track through the tall grass, which then meets up again with Pinole Valley Road at the far end.

There, on a bluff just above the creek, the path is enclosed in a grove of California buckeyes, all of which were blooming today. I stopped, closed my eyes, and inhaled their subtle, sweet perfume.

And then back down the road; past the library, where the Friends of the Pinole Creek Watershed had just put in a few native plants in a patch under a redwood; beneath Interstate 80, where eighteen wheelers and Camaros sped past on their way to such fabled metropoli as Dixon, California and Ogden, Utah; past the Senior Center and the recreational vehicle storage lot and the East Bay Municipal Utility District Pinole Creek Sewage Treatment Plant on the bay shore we rode, to the new housing development across the creek on the former site of the largest dynamite factory on the West Coast.

There, we were rousted from our innocent exploration by an obsequious security guard, who patiently and apologetically explained that the unfinished homes were private property and dangerous besides and we really should not be clambering around in their upper floors.

The new homes aren’t particularly obnoxious. It’s a human-scaled development, more or less: houses at about 1700 square feet, I’m guessing. Close-packed lots, plans for walkable retail and a commuter train station, actual thought put into the design of houses and neighborhood. You get your pick of three styles: Italianate, Colonial, or Craftsman.  It’s what you might call an “appropriate” development, nicely complementing the historic company town just down the hill and sensitive to the landscape and yet.

And yet.

There’s something there that makes me think of those upscale Arts and Crafts Style Furnishings catalogs, where you can buy a reproduction Roycroft hammered copper ashtray for the equivalent of two weeks’ work at minimum wage. The Craftsman houses start in the “low 400,000s.” What was once a reaction against ostentation, ornamentation, and conspicuous consumption becomes a lifestyle statement for the affluent. Price a handmade Shaker chair sometime. We’re so rich, we can AFFORD to own nothing.

Beneath the houses, Miocene shellfish sleep. If you break open the rocks displaced when the new foundations were poured, you’ll find scallops and clams dead thirteen million years. This spring, my brother found half a maple seed, laid down on shallowly submerged mud in some Tertiary ancestor of San Pablo Bay, doomed by fluke of wind to alight where it would never germinate. The mustard seed on the rock.

We head back up the creek. Right downtown an old horse property holds on from its days along US Route 40, the major transcontinental artery now mainly referred to around here as San Pablo Avenue. A carefully-lettered sign graces the gate: “Warning, Privet Property.” The horses have donated abundant nitrogen to a creekside buckeye, which holds its leaves much later into the summer than its cousins in the hills. Tonight, I can smell its flowers from across the creek.

Seems like everyone’s read The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire, but a century from now, I think, people will judge A Fool’s Progress and Black Sun Ed Abbey’s best works. I finished my first re-reading of Fool’s Progress — a dark, slightly fictionalized autobiography — last night.  Closed the book, drained the last finger of my bedside shot of single malt, doused the light.

Our bedroom window faces onto our neighbor’s driveway. Parked there is an old Chevy pickup, green and white, plastic saguaro impaled on the aerial. Ferris hasn’t started it up once in the year we’ve lived here, but his wife Naomi blanched when I asked a few months back if he’d sell it. I lay in bed listening to the metallic clicks of the truck as it cooled in the night breeze. I dozed.

And then some other clicks started.

Struggling toward consciousness. I remembered walking a much younger Zeke in Oakland eleven years ago, finding a mother opossum with her litter in Glen Echo Creek. Their frantic clicks, struggling to summon the nerve to cross the narrow road, sounded just like that. Sort of. We have raccoons in our neighborhood — which is why I no longer have koi — but I hadn’t yet seen possums here.

And I still haven’t. Sticking my head out the window, I was surprised to see the driveway devoid of marsupials, the clicking growing louder and louder. A malfunctioning car? A teenager with an annoying noisemaker? The shades of the dead Ohlone who once ate the acorns from our backyard oak?

And then a white blur from an unanticipated direction, and the mystery was solved. Barn owl. Swooping up and down the driveway, it clicked frenetically as if echolocating insects. I went back to bed and watched the owl through the window as it passed each time. It was joined by another. A breeze ruffled the blanket.

Almost fifteen years ago, I learned not to wake Becky for anything short of the house burning down. Once woken, she doesn’t go back to sleep. We were in the Greenwater Valley east of Badwater, and at midnight the stars seemed close enough to singe the peak of the tent, and I decided she needed to see it. She warned me, sleepily, and I persisted. Mistake.

But she loves the neighborhood owls: she spent many hours last summer watching them fly in and out of the palm where they nested. I threw caution to the breeze and nudged her. “Owls,” I said. “Clicking.” “Mm-hmm,” she said, and went back to sleep. I turned the reading light on, grabbed a biography of Lincoln, poured another shot of Lagavulin, and read until Abbey’s bottomless, pancreatic sorrow echoed a bit less in my heart.

As Zeke and I headed down toward the creek this morning, we were greeted by a woodpecker’s drumming. I imagine it was a Nuttall’s. When we first moved in to the neighborhood a year ago, a Nuttall’s was one of the first neighbors to introduce itself, clinging boldly to the trunk of a jacaranda tree on the corner, staying at about cat eye level.

I go through a bit of a mental disconnect when I see a Nuttall’s woodpecker. I’m used to seeing their close kin, the ladderbacks, when I camp in the Mojave, and I wonder for a moment if I’m not actually in Ivanpah rather than Pinole.

Not this morning, though. All I heard was the drumming. My sense of geographical integrity was safe, for the moment.

For an urbanizing former suburb — not a bad description of the whole county, come to think of it — our block hosts a lot of bird diversity. A list of birds seen from our yard in the last year would include, just off the top of my head, the everpresent crows, jays of scrub and Steller’s variety, an occasional raven, mockingbirds to harass the crows and jays, bushtits and housefunches and towhees, turkey vultures and red tails and sharp-shinned hawks, the white-tailed kites that nest in the pines across the way, the barn owl in the palm at the Karate dojo, doves and song- and golden-crowned sparrows, rufous-sided and California towhees, western tanagers and orioles and warblers (don’t ask me which ones), Say’s phoebe, one kingfisher, and the exotics: house sparrows and starlings and if you count birding by ear, chickens and a peacock or two. Not that I’ve kept track.

Part of the reason is the trees. From here to the Bay, along the ridgeline of which our hill is a minor component, runs a thick belt of trees, most of them natives. Coast live oak and California buckeye predominate, with a sizable minority of black walnut. Down the hill a piece, there’s an as-yet-undeveloped lot that grows jungly thick, with marah vine and poison oak climbing up into the oak and buckeye canopy. It reminds me of the sticky-humid woods in Upstate New York, which formed my chief childhood image of the wild. I gaze into the tangle of vine and lose track of myself… until the dog pulls on his leash, anxious to get to the next bit of vertical squirrel habitat.

At 7:00 pm, there were dark, cold clouds over Pinole. As I passed the creek mouth, two Amtrak trains hurtled by — one eastbound, one west. Behind the trains, the dodder parasitizing the saltmarsh pickleweed glowed brilliant orange: one spot of light illuminated Sonoma on the far Bay shore.

At thirty-five per, it takes the passenger trains not more than half a minute to cross into and out of our little drainage, on their way to Sacramento or Reno or who knows how much farther east. Thirty seconds and they’re gone, this creek not more than a potentially tempting blur past the tinted glass.