Into The Sunset: Glimpses Of An Ancient Valley

Once upon a time, there was a valley.  A level plain between two great mountain ranges, this valley was dotted with shimmering wetlands and carpeted with grasses and wildflowers that swayed in the breeze.  Oh, those wildflowers!  Those wildflowers were the stuff of legend, pure poetry in living form.  Wild rivers flowed across this valley, swelling with snow melt each spring, their meandering courses and sprawling floodplains charted by dark ribbons of vegetation: tangled thickets of wild blackberries and roses, silvery clouds of willows and verdant bowers of wild grapevines hanging from a canopy of majestic oaks.  In those days, the Great Central Valley of California was a beautiful sight to behold indeed.

As John Muir described in Treasures of the Yosemite (1890),

"One shining morning, at the head of the Pacheco Pass, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most divinely beautiful and sublime I have ever beheld.  There at my feet lay the great central plain of California, level as a lake thirty or forty miles wide, four hundred long, one rich furred bed of golden Compositae."

While the valley described by Muir has long since vanished beneath the plow, suggestions of its former glory remain in secluded pockets up and down its great length.  Most of the population of the central valley is clustered along the busy Highway 99 corridor, where town after town blur together in a dismal network of dirty gray commercial, industrial, and residential structures, enclosed by a patchwork of outlying farms and dairies.  Litter lines the highway and country roads alike; water is scarce, and air pollution is high, to say nothing of poverty and crime.

I may disparage the valley only because I grew up here and live here still; if outsiders speak against my corner of California, I will rise to defend it!  (Like a brother who may pick on his sister, yet suffers no other to do likewise.)  And I defend it because of what it once was, because of the beauty and life it once possessed, because of the value it still holds, because of what my naturalist eyes see when I look at the remnants of this natural landscape.  No, all is not lost.

A sunset drive east or west of Highway 99 reveals hidden pockets of wild California, where the clock has nearly stopped and hints of the Valley's former wild beauty may yet be found.

I say sunset because this magical time, this golden hour, bathes the landscape in a whole new light, transforming a bleak canvas into a rich tapestry of sun and shadow, alive with layer upon layer of texture.  Dry, brown grasses and weeds mellow into shades of gold and amber in the last light of day, transforming the land.  The harsh light of midday is not kind to the landscape, revealing all its blemishes in glaring color: the rank, brown weeds, garbage dumped along the side of the road, noisy traffic on the thoroughfare, a brown haze of pollution.  But coming darkness softens the human influences on the landscape as roads, buildings, power lines, fences, litter all begin to fade into the shadows.  As the highways and buildings recede into the dusk, the contours of the distant river are thrown into relief, outlined by a billowing beltway of dark trees. 

Prominent now are the natural elements, the ancient elements, the mountains, the clouds, the setting sun, the still surface of the water, the gently swaying reeds.  Now we begin to feel, feel the wind, the last rays of sun, the cool mist rising from the water, the power of an ancient landscape.

A v-shaped flock of geese fly in front of the sunset, while a Northern Harrier courses slowly, deliberately across the wetland, following invisible aerial pathways first traced by the ancient ancestors of these birds many millennia ago.  A Red-winged Blackbird gives a quiet, half-song in the lingering light of day as a covey of quail call softly to one another in the distance, gathering together before nightfall.  A white egret drifts silently past on smooth, elegant wing beats, while below in the shallow water under the protection of tule reeds a family of Common Gallinule forage and preen.  It is an ancient scene of tranquility that has played out across this valley for many thousands of years, each day, each season, slipping quietly into another in the endless cycle of sunrise and sunset.

But why wax poetic over an admittedly mundane and altogether ordinary patch of marsh and weeds along a pot hole-riddled back road?  Why does it matter what the valley used to look like?  It's so easy for me to discount the valley, my home, as just a place to drive through in passing, somewhere to escape from, a region of little worth and even less natural beauty.  (Drive from Sacramento to Bakersfield on Highway 99 and tell me I'm wrong.)  But seeing the valley bathed in soft golden light on a quiet late summer evening reminds me that this place is special and does have a valuable role in the natural world.  Abundant wildlife still clings to life on this fragmented plain, and during the winter months, wetlands up and down the length of the valley are flooded with millions of waterfowl.  Situated along the Pacific Flyway, an ancient migratory pathway, the valley is critical overwintering habitat for a staggering number and variety of birds that have been depending on this place for the last couple of million years.

So, it's important to remember - to remind myself - that despite the often less-than-picturesque nature of the Central Valley, it is indeed a place of immeasurable worth in the grand picture of the natural world.

While many thousands of beautiful acres of wetland and grassland are in fact preserved in California in the shape of national wildlife refuges and monuments, as well as privately owned preserves and reserves, this particular little patch of wetland is tucked into the countryside between Highway 99 and the San Joaquin River, 10 miles or so west of town, at a bend in a little road leading to nowhere in particular.  Not terribly impressive in the light of day.  But at sunset... at sunset, it is a magical place, a secret treasure in the heart of an altered valley.

Out here, peering into the sunset is a little like peeking through a magical portal into the past, catching just a fleeting glimpse of this beautiful Valley as it once was.