Anderson Valley's Jewel

How about creating a nature and history preserve
in the heart of burgeoning Anderson Valley?
How about building a community park for ourselves and the kids?

I

I know of a plot of land about smack dab in the middle of Anderson Valley that is good for nothing. The land is good for neither sheep, cattle, horses, apples, grapes or anything else. Judging by its small size and the large amount of roiling whitewater that gushes from its mouth after a mid-winter, gully-washing rainstorm, the watershed has to be the steepest, shortest and narrowest in Anderson Valley that gives off so much water.

The half-dozen side canyons made by ephemeral creeks join together in a deep cleavage that faces nearly due south, and nobody is ever going to get rich by harvesting the redwoods growing up there. Given the canyon’s orientation, steepness, rockiness and the thinness of its soils, I doubt you’ll even find any redwoods, at least not enough of them to make up a truckload. The entire watershed seems to be the remains of an ancient lava flow, or the remnants of an old rock “intrusion,” and whatever soils you’ll find up there are like the fuzz on a peach. Dig a post hole about anywhere up there and your shovel will be clanking against rock, and that’s another reason why, immediately after a rainstorm, the canyon mouth fills with so much water. Raindrops bounce off the rocks, pour downward and gather together in their headlong rush to find their level.

Yet rain, plus runoff, plus the passage of geologic time eats through rock and the canyon is carved deep, its heart all but inaccessible, even on foot. Surveying the land from across the valley, it seems possible that most of the original rock has already been washed away, pulverized and sent as sediments into Anderson Creek and, from there, to the ocean and — who knows? — from there in order to eventually settle on the north bank of San Pablo Bay.

Among the hardwoods grows a scattering of Doug fir, including a fairly substantial grove of them standing on the shady side of a flat-topped peak near the canyon’s uppermost rim. But mostly the land is covered with hardwoods and small, irregular grassy openings. The relative lack of conifers has more to do with the thinness of the soils than with the canyon’s steepness and orientation, I think, for the land is wet and lush all year round.

That the watershed should be lush makes sense when you take into account the lay of the land. By way of illustration, face the middle of the sun’s daily arc and hold up your palms to it. All day long both of your palms will be in sun and you will feel its warmth. But bring your hands together so they make a “V” and about half the time one palm or the other will be in shade. And shade means water retention and moist soils, even thin ones, are fertile soils. So it is that in the deepest parts of the canyon mosses, lichen and heather cover the scattered boulders, rock outcrops, tree trunks and the sloping dirt. Ferns are plentiful and so are, come spring, native wild flowers of all kinds. Also, in the openings, grow some native grasses that have been pushed out of other parts of Anderson Valley. California wheatgrass, wild rye and rattlesnake grass are just three of the types I have noticed.

In one place, tucked into a shady nook, their roots growing in the fissures in a jumble of large, moss-covered boulders, grows a pure stand of buckeye trees. Their low-sweeping limbs are interwoven and skeletal during winter, but bursting in spring with glossy green leaves and fat spikes of white flowers. In the thick shade made by the flowering buckeyes, low down among the rocks and growing in cisterns of mountain and life-grown soil, stands a garden of mixed ferns: sword and chain ferns, deer and ladies. And the ferns, with their up-raised arms and facing leaves, tower above even more green things, maiden hair and sorrel, small bunch grasses with tiny flowers, clovers and mosses. Except for brown jags of sheer rock, hanging white flowers and flickering spots of blue sky in the canopy, the entire amphitheater is painted in shades of dappled green.

The flat-topped peak near the rim with the fir trees, seen from inside the canyon, looks like a towering, rough pyramid. From up there, on the grassy shoulder, you can see up and down the length and breadth of Anderson Valley. At your feet, meandering through the cultivated bottomlands within its wide, tree-lined banks, you see Anderson Creek. Looking downstream you see Philo with its scattering of shaggy, outlaw redwoods pointing like spikes and, beyond, the Deep End and, against the sky, the mountains overlooking the river mouth and the wide North Pacific. Turning your gaze upstream, you see Boonville sprawling across the valley’s uplands and, peaking here and there over the main valley’s south wall and lining the horizon, you see the headwaters.

Atop the summit in a windstorm and hunkered down in the windbreak made by the waving grove of tall firs, the swinging foliage above you becomes a symphony of sky-born life dancing and jamming with the wind. So loud and full and expansive is the sound that it drowns out the whining grumbles of the trucks that occasionally crawl up or down the penciled-in highway far below. Close your eyes, listen carefully and lose yourself in the timeless forest song.

Stay on the summit until sundown and the wind will die and the trees will stand perfectly still against the deepening sky. After the day’s vanishing sun has kissed the pointed baby-tops of the fir trees goodnight, buzzards will come home to roost. When one-by-one they alight on stout limbs in the upper canopy above you, you will hear their talons striking and clamping down on the scaly bark. It is a sound like no other. Unless, of course, it is being made by a hawk or an eagle.

Once during the dry season my eldest son and I made it to the top of the waterfall. Located at what could be called the watershed’s bellybutton, the waterfall is flanked by cliffs and we had reached the top by going around and then climbing down to it. About four feet wide and carved by water into a polished rock smile, the lip of the waterfall is shaded by a gnarly old oak tree, its moss and fern-covered main trunk stretched overhead like a ridge beam.

The ceiling gives the lip of the waterfall a window-like appearance, and peering through it, the twenty or thirty-foot vertical drop hidden beyond the steep rock chute dropping away at your feet, you may as well be peering through a gunsight, or even a gun barrel, since all you see is forested canyonsides descending like steps below, above and around you. Surrounded by what could be the rims of a crater, with dry, boulder-strewn cascades above you and the deadfall below, your view is not just confined but confining. Having only one way in and out, and with all that is hanging on the sheer walls above you, you feel like you don’t belong there and you shouldn’t linger.

Another time, approaching up the creek just after a winter storm and out to get a picture of the waterfall in full bloom, my son and I almost reached our goal. But we were halted by the toes of sheer canyon walls that squeezed the cascading torrent into an ascending trough eighteen inches wide and bending out of view. The cliffs were impossible to free climb and to head up the creek we’d need a rope and grapple. And even then, for fear of getting gashed by waterborne, tumbling rocks, or knocked backward by the force of the current, we wouldn’t want to attempt it. Not during high water, anyway.

Bouncing off the walls we heard the waterfall’s thunderous, pounding roar. We felt the waterfall’s billowing wind racing down the slot and we got misted by its floating, rainbow spray. Still, without laying eyes on it, we were forced to turn back. We headed down stream a bit and then we climbed up the forested wall of a westward-leading side canyon, using trees and roots as hand and foot holds. We had hoped to get a picture of the waterfall from atop the razorback, but it was still invisible from up there, hidden like a coin squeezed between two palms. Surveying the approaches from our high perch, we realized that the only way we’d ever get to stand below the pool and to look up at the full height of the fall was if we climbed down a 100-foot-long rope anchored to a tree above the cliff on the other side of the abyss.

Continuing up the spine of the razorback, we got high enough to traverse the head of the next side canyon. We climbed a tall, slippery, grassy wall and arrived atop a knuckle of open land, which put us about as far up the main canyon as we’d been when we’d gotten turned around. The waterfall was hidden somewhere very near in the defile below us, but, even without discussing the pros and cons, we’d given up on seeing it. Some things in nature are meant to remain hidden and secret and, sometimes, curiosity kills the cat.

Resolved to one day cup my hands and wet my face with water scooped from the pool at the base of the waterfall, yet knowing this wasn’t the day, I turned my attention to a huge rock cliff standing across the canyon and just a bit above us. Showing 40-foot-tall vertical cliffs and a face 100-foot-wide, it looked like a giant brown molar tooth with a crack down the middle. It was flat-topped and, from where we were standing, we could see it was an outcrop, and not a butte, because from the uphill side there was a bridge of land that seemed to connect almost to its summit. Maybe, using the land bridge, we’d be able to get atop the rock. Sitting on the edge of a cliff is always fun, and from up there the view was bound to be something.

I suppose some people don’t like high points, though I suspect they are few and far between. Even in the flatlands of the Great Plains, out where the tall stuff is corn and the short stuff is soybeans, people, especially kids, love getting up on high. Whether it’s the bell tower of a church, the roof of the high school, the top of the town’s water tank or the catwalks tacked to the sides of grain elevators, kids want to get up there.

Not just people but all kinds of critters are drawn to high ground. Mammals, birds and even reptiles like hunkering down in places with a view. So when we reached the top of the land bridge and looked up at the 15-foot-tall wall of rock, it wasn’t surprising that animals had made a perfect switchback trail leading to the top. And up there on the jumbled summit, here and there in sheltered pockets of soil, we saw where animals had scratched out beds to sleep on. Also, perched up on the points of boulders and catching some afternoon rays, stood rock lizards.

We stepped to the downhill-facing edge of the cliff and we were met by a stiff wind. In the canyon we had felt only whispering creek winds, and on the knuckle of land we had felt a slight ocean breeze. But up here atop the cliff, the wind was warm and it was blowing up from the mouth of the canyon. It was a wind homemade by the local climate and topography working together like two hands palm-to-palm. Standing on the rock pinnacle suspended above the cavernous heart of the canyon—the waterfall was straight below us but still invisible—and facing the flat valley floor, we were in the wind’s bull’s-eye. It was a baby wind newborn each day with the arc of the sun, and it was stirring in its cradle.

I realized then that this little no-good, no-name watershed with its own little no-name wind is someplace very special. As a slice of untamed and untamable Anderson Valley, it is priceless.

Regarding the view to be had from atop the cliff, Lookout Mountain appears so close that, were you able to reach across the valley and to pluck one of the radio towers off its crown, you could clean your teeth with it.

I’m not one for taking off on solo hikes, especially ones off the trail and over rugged terrain. I live on a ranch and I do occasionally like getting alone, and within a couple of hundred yards of our porch I have a half dozen places where I go. On a hot summer afternoon, I might go and sit on a shady sandbar beside Anderson Creek. Or I might go and sit in the deep shade made by the tall redwoods lining the cool water of the nearby pond. If it’s winter and the day has begun with ice frosting the grass, I know where to catch the best of the morning rays. I have a place for bird watching and another one for watching the sunset. Yet, from any of those places, were I ever to break a bone, get snake-bit, or sliced, or gouged in some way, I could crawl home if I had to. And, naturally, there’s no way I’m getting lost.

Experiencing solitude is integral to living the good life, and much of the stone craziness of modern society is rooted in the lack of it. For too many modern people, getting off alone means sealing themselves within four walls and listening to lawn mowers, leaf blowers, barking dogs, wailing sirens and patrolling helicopters. Still, at least in the way we commonly regard it, solitude ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. The human world is filled with conflicts, both real and imagined, our minds reflect our world and so, when we get off alone, we bring our conflicts with us. It is proper that we should each have the equivalent of a Worry Log or a Thinking Rock, and some of our best decisions come after pondering long and hard and without distractions. But solitude is much more than muttering to ourselves, weighing pros and cons, strategizing or problem solving. In the fullest sense, solitude is recreation as in re-creation. It is not something to be milked, in other words, but something to get out of the way of.

Notice a grandpa oak tree with muscular arms and silver skin, a nest of hatchling woodpeckers, a doe with ears perked, a hawk perched and watching, an otter bodysurfing the creek, birds singing, calling and whistling, a gust of wind feathering the trees, drifting pinto clouds—where is the conflict? What is the problem? To experience the timeless passing of time—to see the world that goes on with or without you—that’s real solitude.

Experiencing solitude means trusting your imagination to take you where you should go. For example, up on the rock tooth in the special watershed, standing atop the cliff and feeling the canyon’s baby breath, my son and I knew we were not the first. Bear, elk, cougars, sheep, Ki-oaks, cattle, deer, bobcats, fox—for as long as the rock has stood it has been known. Regarding the number of human footprints left behind, how many could we count while going back through the centuries and millennia? How many hunters on the look out? How many groups of women gathering or picnicking, pairs of young lovers, loners, bands of boys on ritual missions, horsemen, hikers and runaways have stood on this spot? Without stretching logic, our imagination allows us to re-create; to know in our bones what is true and what is not. Standing right there atop the cliff, my son and I could have howled like wolves at the tops of our lungs and we wouldn’t have been the first ones.

In the end, solitude amounts to getting kissed by earth’s beauty. Yet, having been kissed, you know the feeling doesn’t belong to you, or, to the extent it does, then it is fleeting and insubstantial. Once fully realized, solitude must be shared, shown-off and celebrated. America has produced a rich tradition of solitary individuals wishing to re-connect with nature’s truths: Audubon, Thoreau, John Wesley Powell, Walt Whitman, John Muir and Edward Abbey to name just a few. And it’s telling that they all felt compelled to share their joys and to spread the good news. As with all of life’s great, wondrous gifts, solitude must be shared to be made whole.

From across the way I saw that the waterfall was blooming. For the first time in long wet days, huge splotches of blue sky were changing shapes above flat-bottomed balls of rain clouds sliding across the ceiling of the valley. The waterfall was emerging into full sun, with luck it would remain mostly in the sun for a few hours, and I wanted to get my picture. Just a month off crutches and still somewhat hobbled by a bum wheel, and having no time to be rounding up a partner, I decided to seize the moment. At the time I was assembling my book of stories with pictures to match, so I guess you could say I was driven by ambition, that ordinarily not being one of my vices. Still I knew a picture of the waterfall would fit perfectly with a particular story I was working on. And if I was going to include a picture of the waterfall in my book, then I wanted it flowering and in full sun and, well, there it was.

Determined to get a picture of the waterfall blooming and in full sun, and anxious to take advantage of a break in the weather, I equipped myself with my LPCs (Leather Personnel Carriers), camera, extra lenses and film. Hoping to make good time and wishing to favor my bum wheel, I started up the gentle ground along the watershed’s western edge. I’d never been up in there before and so, as an added benefit, I’d get to see some things I’d never seen.

The going was easy, the ascent gentle, and here and there I saw relics left by people. In the main canyon all I’d seen of civilization was a derelict wire cross fence and, scattered in with the rest of the creek’s flotsam, the weathered remains of half-buried redwood split-pickets. But up here I saw a two-tracked road leading through the grass and heading for the ridge top. Undoubtedly an ancient animal track, then a livestock trail, then a wagon road, now, judging by the signs, it’s occasionally used by four-wheelers on their way to nowhere. Since in the watershed there is no longer any kind of livestock, I figured the tracks had been left by hunters too lazy to walk. Yet even for hunting the land is no good since any wounded animal is going to dive off into the defile and, even if it’s considerate enough to die before crossing, still you wouldn’t want to have to be hauling its carcass back up out of there.

I came to a sheltered grassy bench and, traversing it, here and there in the groves of oaks growing on good ground, I saw a few old tree stumps. The view up the hill was open and, near the skyline, I saw the eroding remains of a punched-in Cat trail.

Soon I came into view of another giant rock outcrop, a miniature version of the towering brown molar tooth across the canyon. The outcrop was nestled into the trees and standing on its own little sub-ridge of land. Dappled with tall oaks and low-slung buckeyes, edged with a garden of sharp-cornered boulders shed from its cliff-face, sheltered from the prevailing wind, facing the mid-day sun and holding lots of comfortable sitting spots, I knew the outcrop must have had a name. Over the millennia, it was a sure bet it had had plenty of names.

“Picnic rock,” popped to mind.

Continuing upward, I fought off the urge to burn my film on everyday beauties. Around here redwoods get most of the attention, but, in terms of beauty, oak forests can hold their own, I think. Redwoods are a very ancient species and they grow according to the tried and true. But California’s native oaks, comparatively speaking, are just young’uns, and you can tell by the reckless ways they grow, each individual seemingly an experiment in physics. Like, how far can I lean over without falling? How far can I stretch out a limb sideways before it breaks of its own weight? How many of us can squeeze into the phone booth made by a notch in the rocks?

Walking through the redwoods can seem like moving through a hall of pillars. Moving through the oaks is more like working your way through the curled threads of a tapestry.

Near the uphill edge of the bench I accidentally stepped on a redwood split-picket fence. Laying perfectly flat and covered by grass, it was all but invisible. Still held together by one wire hand-woven to another, it had rotted under the ground and had fallen over who knows how long ago. When did split-picket pasture fences go out of style around here? Judging by the clear-grained quality of the rotting material and the expertise with which it had been assembled, I guessed the fence could be an “original,” built about 150 years ago by the first pioneer family to lay claim to this piece of the valley. Having myself built all kinds of pasture fences, and having made during the course of my career a fair amount of redwood split stock: posts, rails, pickets, palens, etc., I couldn’t help but envy the folks who had built this stretch, surrounded as they were with such quiet splendor. Building fence requires a fair amount of heave-ho, it doesn’t pay worth a damn, but sometimes it comes with a luxurious office.

The sky overhead was clouding over. Searching westward, I saw that the blue sky was gone behind a wall of dark grey clouds. The wind was picking up, but it wasn’t just because I was getting higher on the mountain. It wasn’t an ocean wind, either, or even the canyon’s wind, but a wind made by air displaced by water. One’s eyes, nose, ears and skin are the only truly accurate weather forecasters there are, and I knew rain was coming and I started hurrying.

After traversing the heads of the remaining three side canyons in my way, I arrived atop a tall finger of land sheltered under a canopy of oaks. The place was taller and lower down the canyon than the razorback my son and I had once scrambled up while vainly searching for a picture, and the waterfall broke into view. Only the upper half of the fall was visible, and the sun was behind a thin sheet of white cloud, but immediately I shot a few pictures. Surrounded by deadfalls on three sides, I knew I couldn’t get any closer. Besides, if I tried to climb down, the view of the fall would only get smaller, the same if I climbed higher. So sitting here—exactly here—and peering through the window in the foliage and peeking between the shoulders of the cliffs and seeing the upper half of the waterfall is as good as it gets and is all that is offered.

The postage stamp of soft, nearly flat ground was very comfortable for sitting, and sit I did, waiting either for a beam of sunshine to illuminate the waterfall or for the rain to arrive. And the longer I sat there, the more I realized how special this spot is; how it might even be the most special spot in the entire watershed. No matter what the era, location or culture, people are drawn to waterfalls. And to catch a good glimpse of this one—probably the most majestic waterfall in all of Anderson Valley—you must be sitting here and no place else.

The wind started swirling, the now nearly black underbellies of the clouds stretched over me and rain started falling. Giving up on my sunbeam, I stashed my camera in a plastic shopping bag and picked up to go. As I was leaving, laying flat in the duff under a sprawling red madrone, I saw the burnt remains of another split-picket fence. Taking a closer look, I saw that it had been a corner back before the overhanging trees had grown so big. Long ago, I surmised, it had been built to keep livestock from falling into the canyon. Nearby, stacked in a neat pile, were more redwood pickets, untouched by fire and still whole. I guessed the pickets had been brought aboard a wagon and then hand-carried here and cached, or maybe they were hauled aboard pack animals. However it was the pickets had arrived, they’d never been used and that made me wonder why that was. Considering the poorness of the graze, the maple leaf outline of the defile and the amount of work involved, I figured it had been decided it wasn’t worth it to rebuild the burnt-down fence. Not worth it unless some day the rancher found the time to get around to it, something he never did.

Looking back to where I’d been sitting, a big grin stretched across my face. I’ve sat down in the dirt to eat lunch in one thousand places in Anderson Valley, I know a fine lunch spot when I see one, and immediately I’d recognized this one as perfect. Now, having seen the nearby pickets, I knew that if I sifted through the dirt under the trees I’d find, not just Indian sign, but also the nearly rusted-away tops of tin cans.

The headwaters of the special watershed have carved a grassy bowl. It is a bowl shaped like a palm-up human hand with its fingers curled. The rivulets and gathering streams are lined with oaks, and the palm is angled so that any water hitting it pours down its wrinkles before gathering in its lifeline, becoming sky-born in a waterfall and splashing free.

Standing in the center of the bowl and searching the surrounding slopes, you could be in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, or in Tibet, for that matter. Water works its magic according to certain set rules, and all headwaters resemble each other in geologic form. Sources of water are places of change, and the water “shed” leaves its signature on the land in myriad but predictable ways.

By far the largest bowl in Anderson Valley is made by the nearly circular mountain ridge edging the twin headwaters of Rancheria Creek. Known as The Donut, the water shed from thousands of acres all gathers in one spot. A place called—you guessed it—the Hole of the Donut.

But this little no-name bowl, like the entire watershed, is special partly because of its compactness. Standing on its uppermost rim, etched at your feet, you see the watershed’s beginnings and, far below, you see its end. The Navarro River Watershed is in fact hundreds of watersheds fit together like the pieces of a puzzle, and without little no-name feeder creeks like this one, there could be no river. The same as, in the leaves of plants, there can be no stems without veins.

In the 1870’s John Wesley Powell, who later became the head of the US Geological Survey, came up with a radical idea. During his explorations of the American Southwest, he had reached the conclusion that the real estate Boosters back in Washington had gotten things backward. In a land of little water, Powell reasoned, water management, and not land management, would be the key to building a sustainable future. History is littered with the ruins of civilizations that outgrew their supplies of freshwater, and if in the arid and semi-arid regions of the American West people were to avoid suffering the same fate (again), each watershed would have to be seen as a resource and administered for the common good. It was a message that flew into the face of the fervent Boosterism that reigned—then as now—and it caused an outrage. Powell’s very detailed proposals were at first ridiculed, then ignored and quickly forgotten.

Yet the notion of a watershed as a unique entity was hardly new. Creeks and ridges are natural boundaries and they have always served as such. It is our superimposition of a hypothetical aerial grid over the landscape that is new, arbitrary and, in the mountains, nonsensical. Last year in Mendocino County I don’t know how many millions of dollars were spent by landowners wishing to put their thumbs on their property lines, or how many more millions were spent settling boundary disputes. But when it comes to finding the limits of a watershed, any child could do that and no child would ever argue about it.

It terms of area, I doubt if this special watershed is much larger than sixty or eighty acres. But what is an acre, anyway? Set two acres side-by-side in the flatlands and their square footage will be identical. But in the mountains the amount of land that goes with an acre is wildly variable. The steeper the ground, the more of it that will fit inside of the grid and, if the ground is also wrinkled, even more land will be added. Which points to an irony: in the mountains, for commercial purposes, you want your acres as small as you can get them. Yet, for recreational purposes, you want your acres large. And the acres inside of this little plot of land are large, very large.

The other day I asked a friend if, while growing up in Anderson Valley, he’d thought his free-holding way of life would go on forever. The same age as I but having family roots reaching deep into these hills, he replied, “Yabetcha.” It wasn’t until he was a grown man, he explained, that the big spreads started going belly-up and subdividing. But back when he was growing up, shee-it, he thought he had it made.

Hearing him say that made me feel good. I was in my early twenties when I arrived here and took up logging, and it had seemed to me that there were plenty of trees and that they were plenty big. Yet the old-timers in the woods knew the boom was bust and they saw themselves as a dying breed. Then I myself, having always been a traveler, either a misfit or a citizen of the world, depending upon how you look at it, had always experienced human life as being filled with impermanence, and my own life as a whirlwind; a little twister that goes poof in the night. It wasn’t until I stumbled upon this mountain valley that I ever started feeling both being and belonging.

And so, back in the 1970’s, while I was setting down stakes in the homesteader economy, my friend was pulling his up while adapting to the new wave. Yet still he’d gotten a chance to camp here; to sleep under the stars before the coming of lights. Right here in this valley he’d gotten to experience having things the way he wanted them, in other words, the way that just seemed natural to him, and I was glad of that.

The waterfall in the bellybutton of the canyon is born after the start of a rain. A tiny, pioneering trickle; a translucent bowling ball clearing the way; water infiltrating, spreading out, building up and breaking through to the sky and jack-hammering the rocks below. Just as suddenly, after the rain stops, the reverse happens.

Like us, the stars, or subatomic particles, the waterfall flickers in and out of existence.

And that, I think, is the main reason why, no matter what our religious doctrines, our spirits are drawn to waterfalls. Like all else in nature, but much more dramatically so, waterfalls are mirrors.

My wife and I raised two sons in Anderson Valley. The eldest left years ago to go off to college and he has no intention of returning here to live. Our youngest, who is still living with us at the moment, wants to leave and, once gone, I doubt if he’ll ever come back either.

The fact is — it’s been going on for more than a generation — nearly all of Anderson Valley’s native sons and daughters know they have no future here. Even if wages were not so low, job opportunities are few and rising land values have put home purchases, and often rents, out of reach. What could be called rural gentrification is the flipside of the bankruptcy of traditional ways of life. Just as in the city, economic renewal often means poor people removal. When nearly all of the large livestock operations go belly up, it eliminates the need for ranchers and ranch hands. When the local fisheries are in a state of near collapse, it eliminates the need for fishermen. The same as, when the over-cut forestlands are sub-divided and taken out of production, it eliminates the need for loggers and mill workers.

So the father-to-son, mother-to-daughter relationships that existed during the 120 years of the homesteader economy, and during countless centuries, and cultures, before then, have been transformed. The children of Anderson Valley are now expected to grow up and go someplace else far away to make their livings, and so they do and we all accept it as a fact of life.

But does that mean that the ties that bind the generations have been broken? I don’t think so. The natural beauty of Anderson Valley is just that, and even the newest and most citified of the newcomers appreciate it. And those fortunate enough to have grown up and out of here never really leave. They return again and again, drawn back to their roots. Just recently I met an ancient Great Basin buckaroo who, while he’s never lived in Anderson Valley, has kin here. He’s been visiting the valley since he was a boy and he has always loved it. And whether it’s at the Boonville Hotel, or in one of the valley’s inns, or inside The Lodge, it’s not at all uncommon to meet returning natives who graduated from the Boonville high school ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. Home is where the heart is, after all, especially when home is a place like this.

Some of the happiest farmers I’ve ever met or worked for include some of Anderson Valley’s mom and pop vineyard owners, and virtually everybody involved in the new “hospitality business” are, well, hospitable. Truth be told, nearly all of the newcomers are a lot more hospitable than some of the cantankerous old sheep ranchers who used to live around here. And us now having locally produced gourmet and organic foods, sparkling wines, premium wines, thriving arts and crafts, homegrown entertainment—I can think of worse fates to befall a community. By almost any measure, we have it awfully good around here. Those of us who can afford to live here, to be “stakeholders” of one sort or another, could do a whole lot worse.

Still I find it somewhat remarkable that, in the midst of so much change and economic development, nobody has thought to create a park for the kids. Like, how many real estate transactions have taken place over the past thirty years? How many thousands of acres have changed hands time and again? How many people have come and gone? How many scores of millions of dollars of private money have been invested in Anderson Valley? How many more scores of millions of dollars of public money?

That’s a lot of questions; they beg the answers, and the answers boil down to a lack of foresight. Nobody in government was watching out for the long-term interests of the commons, and community-minded individuals and organizations already had their hands full trying to provide other goods and services, whether fire protection, emergency medical care, food banks, elder care, youth services, affordable housing, scholarships or whatever.

Yet, it’s worth remembering, some private lands have passed into the commons in the names of conservation and recreation: The Navarro River State Park, Yorkville’s Peregrine falcon preserve, the Galraith Ranch conservation area, to name three. A lot of restoration work has also been accomplished over the years, both in the forestlands and in the riparian areas. So it’s not like we as a community have been standing still, or that we lack the vision or the means.

So I propose we set aside this no-good little postage stamp of land, this unique watershed, as a nature preserve. Not as a wilderness area, or even as a state or county park, but as a community park; a bit of Anderson Valley that will be set aside not just for the native plants and animals, but for common recreational use and for the use future generations. A nature preserve is a place for conservation and restoration, hiking and picnicking, research and discovery. So why not make this one watershed among hundreds accessible yet kept essentially as it is, unique, gorgeous and wild?

Local youths and local organizations could be involved in the creation and maintenance of the park in a number of ways. I see the finished product as a place folks could be proud of. I see a two-mile-long loop trail, hand-built with local labor, leading past the canyon’s major sights with picnic tables tucked in here and there. A boardwalk could even be built so that visitors could stand below the pool at the base of the waterfall.

I want a place where my sons will bring their own children, to show them and to remember. A place where, after I’m dead and gone, my sons as old men will return to see Anderson Valley as it used to be back when they were growing up, Indian sign, pioneer relics and all.

So that’s what I’m after. The first step was to produce this six part series of articles, this love letter to a small place (I will be posting them on my 4mules website), and I know the next steps to take. Occasionally in the coming months in these pages I’ll be publishing progress reports, but I don’t intend to have to craft a post-mortem. Every day in America community parks are being created by communities in the community interest, there are lots of funds available, and I see no reason why we can’t do the same thing here.