As I was moving boxes of old papers, I stumbled upon some writing fragments in a copybook dating back to a time before I became a writer. As I added the nascent scraps, written in a naive, childish hand (though I was 22), to my blog, and as I transcribed my notes, I also uncovered writing fragments with little pockets of memory attached.
As I followed a wild hunch, I discovered that I was indirectly related by marriage to my Native American studies teacher, Mary Taylor, who was Coast Miwok. Then, I discovered a link that also led to the Warm Springs dam project (1974-1984), thanks to the internet. The aha! I always wondered how I became involved with the rescuing of native Pomo basket sedges.
Mary Taylor was a Bodega Bay Smith of Captain Stephen Smith infamy—who at 57, married a 16-year old Peruvian, Manuela Torres, in order to claim the Rancho Bodega land grant, but Smith also had a Coast Miwok "wife," Tsupu. The story goes, there were others.
Their son, Bill Smith had 12 children with Rosalie Charles after his first Miwok wife, Walla Walla, died. The Smith clan was a massive clan, with whom I would later be related to by marriage, when Bill Smith's youngest son, Young Eagle Smith, married my widowed aunt, Mary Azalie Howard Reilly (her husband Myles was my uncle) at St. Eugene's Church in Santa Rosa.
I remember talking to Mary Taylor at the wedding reception in Santa Rosa. And I was puzzled as to why she was at our family wedding. Thanks to the internet which most definitely wasn't around in 1975, I was able to place her as Young's older sister. Wow! So my wild hunch wasn’t off.
There was quite a local all star Pomo and Coast Miwok line-up on the left side of the church. Not only were all of Bill Smith's surviving children and families in attendance, but also the famous Kashaya Pomo shaman-healer and basketmaker Essie Parrish, and also Lake County's Long Valley Cache Creek Pomo / Patwin shaman-basketmaker, Mabel McKay. It was a good, if, strange party, the Irish on one side of the room and the Indians on the other, all of us overcome by bashfulness—with me flitting back and forth like a hummingbird.
Unfortunately that marriage alliance ended when Young, an inveterate gambler, gambled away the title to Mary Azalie's home in Santa Rosa. A divorce soon followed, despite Mary Azalie's being a devout Catholic. She moved to the Orchard mobile home park and never remarried. Any memorabilia she had was destroyed when the 2017 Tubbs Fire raged through the mobile home park. Everything erased. She asked us for copies of photos of Myles, not Young.
Through Mary Taylor, I think I must’ve met Essie Parrish and Mabel McKay. But I could’ve met them earlier during the warm Springs Dry Creek dam protest demonstrations. Or at one of the many on-site workdays where we dug up and moved hundreds of rare sedge plants from an ancestral Pomo village site to safety as massive bulldozers constructed the Warm Springs dam for what was to become Lake Sonoma.
In those days, there was no stopping the relentless Army Corps of Engineers. The region was designated as a flood control project in 1962. Construction began in 1967 but was halted in 1974 due to safety concerns. That was when we all went into overdrive trying to stave off the dam project and to save the valley from flooding.
I’m sure most folks in the canyon were forced off their land by eminent domain. The historic Skaggs Springs resort, demolished. Not only historic sites, including archaeologically significant Pomo villages, and petroglyphs, many natural features, including thermal springs were also drowned. Of course, the completed Warm Springs dam didn't control the floods but it did drown many significant native archaeological villages.
From 1974 to 1984, before the filling of Lake Sonoma behind Warm Springs Dam, the area was intensively studied by a team of archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, architectural historians, ethnobotanists, historians, and Native American traditional scholars. Before Warm Springs Dam: A History of the Lake Sonoma Area, Sonoma County, California
We dug up the rare sedge plants from the wide gravel creek bed, and bundled them into buckets and gunnysacks to be transported to another site. Essie and Mabel presiding over the gathering of the sedges. After the hard labor, we shared a communal meal, while a Kashia Pomo elder (Bun Lucas?) led the men and boys in constructing a soaking pool out of river rocks where we all soaked the mud off in a rather tepid warm spring until the stars wheeled across the sky.
The construction of this lake destroyed 122 areas associated with the history of human use. This included ten house-pits, five hunting blinds, two chert quarries, and eleven locations with petroglyphs. In addition, there were eight known gathering spaces where, for more than a hundred years, special plants were collected by Pomo people for traditional use.[4] Some Pomo people resisted the creation of the lake, assisting Archaeologists at Sonoma State University in writing about the prehistory and history of Warm Springs Dam, Lake Sonoma, and the Dry Creek Valley. —Wiki
Some backstory. My SSU teacher, Mary and her ex-husband Tom Taylor bought the derelict Potter Schoolhouse in Bodega in 1966 for $10,500. Alfred Hitchcock rented it for The Birds in 1961, thus saving it from demolition for its virgin redwood planks. The place was falling apart, the roof was gone, owls, not seagulls, nested in it, and it sat empty for years when Mary and Tom rescued the haunted schoolhouse from another bout of demolition.
After extensive renovation, they moved in upstairs, and turned one classroom into a cafe and another classroom into the Bodega Bay Art Gallery (Rancho Bodega Historical Society.) They staged plays there and turned the schoolhouse into a real community hall, not realizing it would also become a Hollywood icon, with people making pilgrimages to its doors for a tour. A resident ghost kept things lively.
I must've visited Mary at the schoolhouse as we were invited to a Bodega Bay watercolor exhibit and opening at the gallery on 12/5/1975, as I remember seeing the slate chalkboards and the chalk trays still on the walls. I remember the dive bar next door with Skip presiding at The Casino Bar & Grill, had the absolute best burgers in West County.
When our writing class ended, Mary said, Write your creation myth. Write poems as theater, as marriage, of love, of joy, of death. Poetry is prayer, she said. Don’t look back. But by looking back into the past, is how I got this story. Time is like a line trapped in a möbius strip. Just don’t play the opening theme song of The Birds, please.
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