Spirit Rockiness

Agh! I liked Spirit Rock a whole lot more before it got "renamed" by New Age yuppies. None of us called it that growing up. Not even my aunts and uncles who played there as children. All that enlightened pretentiousness in the middle of what was once a lovely cow pasture. Still, better that, than a subdivision.

Wait. it IS a subdivision—with 10,000 bodhisattva invaders. No one ever thinks of the flip side of the story. And it's not true that anyone can visit, or hang out there. As far as our personal suffering by our attachments to things attractive—it was more attractive when it was what it was—pure unadorned land.

Clearly I am suffering from a dramatic form of divided mind syndrome (the past vs progress, or time)—not wanting to see any development on The Valley, because once it's gone, you can never get it back. Development is the is a epicenter of of roller coaster emotions. The old narrow gauge railroad bed goes right past it—you can still see the berm if you look for it. 

Once there were rare vernal pools that stretched all along the length of the valley—that's why the railroad track hugged the hills—to avoid the seasonal pools and why Lagunitas was called "little lagunas"). At least the majority of Spirit Rock dwellings are not too visible from the road.

We called it Indian Rock before it was dubbed "Spirit Rock." But the Indians are all gone now. Even then, we were looking back to the past.

Lagunitas Vernal Pools

What I miss this morning: tri-colored blackbirds trilling in the sedges that once grew near vernal pools strung along Sir Francis Drake Blvd. from White's Hill at the Woodacre turn-off to Forest Knolls at Lagunitas School.

The name Lagunitas means "little lagoons." My grandmother said that in the 1920s-40s, the San Geronimo Valley was strewn with myriad pools all the way to the hamlet of Lagunitas. The fog always remembers where the pools once were, and lankers down for a visit.

The few surviving pools were lost in my lifetime, destroyed by well-meaning folks turning those fragile, ephemeral marsh wetlands into drained pasturage for horses and cattle. The County of Marin had grandiose plans to develop the San Geronimo Valley with 5000 more houses, a shopping mall, and in anticipation, they built a ziggurat embankment for a high school at the base of White's Hill at the Flanders ranch, and bulldozed all the marshes on the east side of the road.

All that's left of this pool is the teasel.

The Dixons, converted their ranch over to horse boarding stables, built a jumping course, and wiped out another pool. Someone ran cattle in the vee at the first Woodacre turnoff (the old road), where it joins the straight, new roadbed of Sir Francis Drake. Under their hooves, the last and most pristine vernal pool in the San Geronimo Valley disappeared forever.

Vernal Pools

It was glorious driving up to the wine country this morning. My annual poetry residency at Alexander Valley School in Healdsburg began today. April first foolishness and National Poetry Month.

Mt. Tamalpais, the Sleeping Lady was silhouetted razor sharp against the dawn horizon and I could see all three bay bridges at once. I could almost touch the Golden Gate from the Richmond Bridge.

San Francisco was like Atlantis rising from the sea. The bay was silver and peach, cerulean and gold. Opalescent skin. Even San Quentin took on an otherworld charm. The prisoners on Death Row will never know how they were gift wrapped in a bon-bon box of light.

Sea lions lolled in great numbers on the small patch of land beneath the girders of the bridge and on the shores of Red Rock Island like fat slugs, lazily scratched themselves with an articulated flipper.

Cormorants winged north on urgent business. Three blimpy sea birds, far too fat for ducks, chuffed and slogged up the bay on ridiculously tiny wings. The seabirds followed the span of the bridge as I was driving, so we were a party of four, me in my car and they were flying alongside, dressed in little tuxedos. I think they were tufted puffins blown way off course. I saw them once out at Point Reyes. Sometimes they come inland from the Farrallon Island rookeries on their way north.

The verdant slopes of the coastal ridges were liberally dusted in lupine and poppy; goldenrod and buttercups. The new leaves of the oaks in the meadow were coppery celadon and chartreuse against the apple green grass. Where the soil was disturbed, the grass was pale, as if dewstruck, while the rest of the grass was a rich saturated green.

Off Highway 101, I spotted the remains of a rare vernal pool blossoming at the edge of the Petaluma-Novato dump. Imagine a bright bathtub ring or a necklace of butter & eggs and meadow foam encircling standing clay-lined pools.

As the landfill grows in stature, this part of the marsh is cut off from the Petaluma slough, but silver ribbons of water from Mt. Burdell still meander toward the bay, skirting both the ancient island, and the new artificial mound.

Most of the North Bay counties vernal looks have been drained, plywood palaces built upon these fragile ancient ecosystems, each pool with their own species of frog, newt, shrimp and flower. 

Each successive ring in the the paleolithic vernal pools is another distinct sub-species of flower, so as the water evaporates, each species of flower takes their turn growing. In Merced, and Sonoma, I have seen in vernal pools, successive floral rings of pink, white and yellow, as if it was a hallucination of posies, like a child's drawing.

The rest of the field east of Olompali has been drained. Ditches running straight to the Petaluma slough (I mean River—it took an act of congress to name this ancient waterway a river, once it was the mouthpiece of a mighty paleolithic river, the Rio Grande (the Russian River had two mouths.)

Already the marsh ground is scarred brown with uterine decay. How many centuries have these vernal pools endured? Progress comes in the form of a ditch and I mourn the loss of another ancient pool. Soon there will be none.

By the county dump,
lupine and poppies drape verdant hills
in a riot of indigo and gold.
At the edge of the drained marsh,
saxifrage and meadow foam
hold vigil in the last vernal pool.
Progress is measured
by a ditch marching straight to the bay.

3/30/09

A link to my post on the San Geronimo Valley vernal pools.

Some links on California vernal pools.

California wetlands information system map of vernal pools. Novato and Lagunitas are not on the wetlands map. But Chileno Valley pools are listed.