Author Archive

In many areas the banks of the Sacramento River are densely covered with a variety of foliage; at places there are huge Sycamores encumbered with wild grapevines.  I looked over  at the dense cover on the other bank;  the air was still and the surface of the water was calm, and except for the occasional squawking of magpies it was silent. As I sat there gazing out across the water as it slowly moved by, I pictured a summer,long ago, working for my grandfather. I was about twelve at the time, and each morning we would drive Twenty miles up the valley to where he farmed along the river. I did some irrigating and hoeing, but mostly I just hung around and explored the river.

At my favorite spot there was a small wooden raft tethered to the shore. I would sit on it and look at the birds and watch the occasional fish jump. At some point I would hear a horn somewhere downriver, and I would become alert with expectation. There was a bend some two hundred feet downstream from me;  so I couldn’t see what was coming,  but soon there would be a large wave pushing around the bend. And then there it was, this huge barge plowing through the river being pushed by a tugboat. It was all very exciting! The calm and the silence were completely disturbed. And then came the wake of the tug upending the raft, and I had to hold on for dear life!  Soon it would  be over, and the powerful calm of the river would be in charge again.

Hidden Surprises

There was a steady hot wind coming down out of the the coastal hills.  As I scanned the hillside nothing was moving save the undulating waves of dried grass.  Earlier I thought that I saw a small deer moving into a brushy area, but now everything was still, not a bird, not a squirrel, nothing.  I began thinking of another similar place when I was walking through buck-brush down a hot canyon, and my canteen was bone dry.  The brush forced force me towards the center of the draw where the walls became steeper and I moved into a deep narrow ravine.  It was shaded with overgrowth and I could feel the temperature drop by several degrees. At that point  I thought that I heard a gurgling noise;  I looked down, and YES  there  was a small stream of water falling into a little pool.  As I reached down to scoop up a handful of the precious stuff  I saw movement beneath the surface.  There were fish!  I saw tiny trout about two inches long swimming about in the cool water.  I am still amazed at what I found hidden down there in the bottom of that canyon on a hot and dry California  summer afternoon.

Snakes Alive!

I was observing a group Yellow-billed Magpies and trying to get a few photos.  So I thought that I would sit down under this large Cottonwood and wait for them to settle down.  As I sat there watching, and listening to the dry cottonwood leaves rustling in the breeze, I must have dozed off and began dreaming of poisonous serpents.  Western Diamondback Rattlesnakes to be exact;  they were all around me, dozens of them.  Everywhere there were snakes;  I looked over at some rocks in the grass and they became a pile of slithering serpents.

I was in an absolute panic;  and then I had a “brilliant” idea!  One at a time I began to take pictures of them, capturing them in digital form on my four gigabyte memory card.  Sure enough, with each shot a rattler would  disappear.  But wait, the electronic  time delay between  photos was taking way too long;  surely they would soon overwhelm me!  Alas, I finally awoke escaping a gruesome fate;  and found, to my shocked surprise, an empty memory card.