Living Lightly
By
LILLIAN VALLEE
16. Keeper of the
Backwater
Come with me this winter morning to share a small adventure. Rouse your sluggish body before daybreak, haul it into the nearest vehicle, and head north on Highway 99 until you reach the Cosumnes River. Leave the rushing traffic by easing onto a side road. Unlock the gate, drag the green canoe into the pond, put on your life jacket, and grab a paddle. You can still hear the white noise of the freeway, but the sight of the trestle bridge and drowsy barn owl under it, the blurred fringe of cattails and bulrushes, begins to obliterate your everyday world. As the canoe parts the shallow water, you forget the bone-piercing cold and fog and concentrate on getting the craft through the dense waterweed. Veiled valley oaks move in and out of the mist, in and out of a deep silence broken only by bittern or crane. Except by canoe, this place is inaccessible. You have crossed the border into the Commonwealth of Beavers.
Suddenly you hear rushing water. You have to stifle a little flutter of panic because you have fallen out of too many canoes to ignore that sound. Then you see it: a beaver lodge constructed of tree branches, tules, and lots of mud, flanked by two small dams. The dams are artfully constructed to slow down but also to release a certain amount of water, until the level is right. Tinker with the dam and the beaver’s keen ears will note the difference and the animal will come to fix the irregularity, a fact noted by trappers who set their traps in the breaches. You register sections of dead or dying oak woodland as a result of the beaver’s expansion of the pond, which does not just capture water but also intensifies the nutrient load.
Beaver ponds are marvels of biological productivity and diversity: they create what is sometimes described as “boundary complexity,” that is, they increase the edge between waterways and dry land which results in a denser food web and varied ecological niches. In beaver-made wetlands you will find broad communities of microorganisms feeding on the impurities in the water, thereby cleaning it. In their turn, the bacteria, fungi and plankton make the backwater a cafeteria for countless insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds, fish and mammals. Walking the tussocky understory of small islands of oak, sedge and soaproot, you see evidence of great feasting: acorn parts, crayfish remains, coyote scat, feathers and bones, the spent shells of poachers. Thousands of spider webs in beaded necklaces help the oaks draw moisture from the air, and lichens and mosses on tree trunks dazzle with outrageous color combinations: burgundy, lime green, apricot. Shelf fungi are a rich, buttery yellow while mushrooms hiding in the sedges have bright mustard yellow caps.
There were once about two hundred million beavers in North America, and now they number from seven to twelve million, mainly in the Great Lakes and Mississippi areas. These large rodents, a keystone species with a genius for obstruction and impoundment of water, were responsible for the pristine water and species diversity of wetland environments exploited by Europeans during the era of the lucrative fur trade. In her stunning book, Water: A Natural History, Alice Outwater describes a time when Castor canadensis, the North American beaver, lived from the Arctic tundra to the deserts of northern Mexico. There could be “as many as three hundred dams per square mile, each with its own ring of wetlands.” Unfortunately for beavers and wetlands, waterproof beaver felt could be shaped into Wellingtons, D’Orsays, Continentals or something called “The Paris Beau,” cocked and top hats used by royalty, the upper crust, military officers, and clerics throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The market demand for beaver hats, collars, capes and coats appeared insatiable.
Outwater argues for a return of beavers to public lands as part of reconstructing a (dismantled) natural water system that cleaned itself because it consisted of complex pathways for water to travel through the landscape. The stringent discharge controls we have imposed “have not been enough to restore the nation’s waterways,” she writes; “for each day water spends in pipes, it spends perhaps a decade in the natural world.” Yet, in many contemporary settings, the return of beavers is as problematic as their absence.
With the exception of human developers, no one can redesign a landscape in shorter time than a beaver. They are busy because they fell trees and move things; build dams, lodges, food caches; make trails or “runs,” slides, canals; and even dredge channels in pond bottoms for times of drought. Those like Canadian Audrey Tournay who have worked with injured or orphaned beavers and have become parental surrogates tell amazing stories about these playful vegetarians with profound family loyalties. Outwater offers this charming description:
“Good natured, gentle, and clean, [a beaver] makes a friendly pet that follows its owner around much like a dog, scrambling up onto a lap to be rubbed on the belly whenever it’s invited. Beavers were commonly kept as pets around Indian encampments, but they do have a fatal flaw in a modern household: they never stop building. When kept indoors, they will cut down the legs of tables and chairs and build little dams between pieces of furniture. Left on their own, they will rearrange waterways.”
In Tournay’s house-sanctuary beavers would gnaw arches in her doors and build dams in her bathroom with whatever material was available; she describes how, in one night, “Swampy digested large portions of the Holy Bible; the I Hate to Cook book and The Complete Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson.” Often the power struggles are not as benign. Orchard saplings can be decimated by a small community of beavers, and refuge managers in charge of waterworks mimicking a natural wetland system can be driven to distraction by persistent beavers stopping up refuge inlets and weirs. In one story, beavers reintroduced to a high elevation forest drag picnic tables to plug a nearby stream. Forest Service employees, refusing to believe beavers can pull something so heavy, blame vandals. They change their minds when the new (and chained) picnic table legs are gnawed off above the chains and hauled to the same spot. The replacement tables are concrete.
Those who have spent many hours planting trees also have to admit some dismay when those same trees, healthy cottonwoods, for instance, are downed by hungry beavers caching a favorite food. Beavers “condition” young branches in water until they become gelatinous, creating a kind of cottonwood candy. As you paddle out of beaver territory, however, turkey vultures, in the tips of tall dead oaks, open their wings to collect the first warm rays of sun breaking through the fog and remind you that nothing is wasted in the backwater and no labor there is ever in vain.
Sources: Dietland Muller-Schwarze and Lixing Sun, The Beaver: Natural History of a Wetlands Engineer; Alice Outwater, Water; and Audrey Tournay, Beaver Tales.
Lillian Vallee is a Professor of Literature and Language Arts at Modesto Junior College.
City gardens help feed all Californians: eat
locally
By MYRTLE OSNER
Dire
predictions of our ability to feed ourselves printed in the San Francisco Chronicle’s
alerted me to spring gardening.
It takes 1.2
acres of land to feed the average American, according to Cornell University
Prof. David Pimentel. The population of California is quickly overtaking our
ability to feed ourselves, much less the world, to which we now ship literally
mountains of rice.
Accompanied by
a picture of houses abutting a field, the article may alert Bay Area residents,
but we don’t have to go farther than the outskirts of Modesto to see this.
Plans to expand Salida to the river are an example of the continuing threat to
valuable, productive farmland. In 50 years, says the article, we’ll be down to
half an acre per person given the rate of predicted growth.
Although we all
ought to be fighting to preserve farmlands, we can all use our own gardens to
produce food. We really don’t need the big lawns that are water hogs. Few
people sit out on their front lawn any more. The shortage of water is real: the
fight going on between the Modesto Irrigation District and the City of Modesto
over who gets first dibs on the water illustrates this.
Dedicate at
least a small part of your yard to a plot for vegetables or a pot or two on your
patio. There is nothing so satisfying as a homegrown tomato; the ones in the
store are picked green. You need a sunny, well-cultivated, deeply-dug spot. Buy a six-pack of plants from the nursery
and give some away if that’s more than you need.
Your tomato
garden will be successful if you do two things: Buy the six-pack in early March.
Transplant each little seedling to a bigger pot (I use 6 inch size) and put it
in a protected place, such as under the patio overhang. Water it daily. Two
weeks later, or when the weather has warmed up, dig a deep hole (about 12
inches) and plant your tomato down to the top two or three pairs of leaves,
stripping off the lower leaves that will be underground when you get it planted.
Water thoroughly. You may have to stake your tomatoes, mine get five feet tall
by the end of summer. Established tomatoes only need deep watering once a week.
Other foods
that are easy to grow in summer: String beans, all kinds of squash and peppers,
pumpkins, eggplant, and chard. Homegrown potatoes are excellent, but require
very loose soil (I make my potato bed out of the compost I’ve been turning all
winter.) Their flavor is much better than what is available in grocery stores,
and nurseries offer several varieties. Potatoes should go in by St. Patrick’s
Day.
If you have
cats, cover the new seeds with mesh to keep them from digging in that nice soft
dirt. Herbs such as parsley, basil, oregano, and many others are annuals. If you
have a space you want to fill with a big shrub, try rosemary or sage instead of
some shrub you can’t eat.
Right now, my
favorite in the garden is Miner’s lettuce, Claytonia
(Montia) perfoliata, a wild green that undoubtedly contributed to a
miner’s health with its abundance of vitamins. It is very attractive but
should to be pulled up after it gets too mature to eat. Looks like a ground
cover and acts like one too. Come and see mine and by the time March rolls
around, there will probably be millions of seeds to share. Once Miner’s
lettuce gets started, you’ll have it forever
If you don’t
want to garden, patronize the local farmers’ markets when it starts up.
Stockton has year-round market; Modesto’s run from May through November. So,
try your best to eat locally.
ACTION: For more information on long-range food supplies, see
the San Francisco Chronicle, February 12,
2005 F-7 and
World
Watch Magazine, September/October 2004.
