Inflatable burning water tanks

There is so much I want to write about here that it’s hard to know where to start. An overview seems appropriate. So, let’s start with an overview from 4,000 feet. I got to go for a small plane ride a couple days ago with a local pilot. First time in over twenty years I’d been in anything but a jet and first time I’d seen Southern Humboldtistan from the air.

We took off from Garberville airport in late morning, flew west up Briceland Road, circled around Briceland, headed out over Whitethorn and Whale Gulch to the sea, flew part way up Black Sands Beach then up and over the King Range, over the Mattole, Duty Ridge, Elk Ridge and Salmon Creek. We flew into the Eel River Valley over Meyers Flat, crossed over into the Middle Fork drainage for a bit, back into the South Fork then swung downstream high above Miranda, Phillipsville and eventually over Garberville. One last loop above Benbow and around the hill to come back in to Garberville airport from the south and we were back.

There were three things that struck me right off about seeing this place from high up—besides that it was quite pretty. The first was the sheer number of people living in the hills around here. Sometimes on a winter night, when everyone has lights on at 5pm (powered by their independent energy systems) and you’re standing on a high ridge, you can get some sense of the hill population. Still, I had no idea until I was able to look straight down. There are a lot of people in them thar hills.

And everyone of us is taking water from Redwood Creek or Salmon Creek or the Eel River or the Mattole or whatever watershed we live in. Whether it’s from a spring, a well or pumped directly from the creek, it’s not going into the river. Seeing the number of homesteads from a few thousand feet, it’s easy to see why the creeks around here dry up in summer. It’s not logging or grazing or dams or export of water to L.A. It’s homesteaders. We all know this, but it’s hard to grok the cumulative impact of “my little spring diversion” until you see all of them at once. I had a similar epiphany flying into Seattle in a jet at rush hour last winter. In every direction, on every road for as far as the eye could see (which is quite far from that altitude) there were car lights. Little global warming machines, by the hundreds of thousands, each spewing exhaust.

There are a damn lot of us, but it takes seeing it all at once to really get perspective on the impacts.

The next major revelation was the embarrassing number of what I refer to as “Inflatable Homesteads™.” I’ve always thought that someone could make a business out of marketing the whole package: small beat-up trailer; 30’x40’ greenhouse and enough soil to fill 5 trenches 30’ long; 500’ of curtilage fence; a pre-filled-out Proposition 215 doctor’s recommendation; 20 plants; a dead car and some other props to make it seem like someone lives there. Just add water.

Lots and lots of water, all coming out of the creek. What I didn’t see enough of was water storage tanks. We do not live in a desert and there is absolutely no water shortage. We get enough winter rains here (60” to 200” depending on the watershed) that we could have rice paddies and swimming pools if we wanted to. All we have to do is store water during the winter rainy season. I’d like to think that people who are putting up all the Inflatable Homesteads™ would also include enough water tanks to get them through the summer without sucking the creeks dry. Not like they can’t afford it. (We’ll revisit this subject in more detail some other time.)

Lastly, I was amazed at the lack of fire-kill in the forest from the famous Canoe and Honeydew Fires of a few years ago. Despite the number of total acres burned, very few trees died. I had pictured vast swaths of dead trees, but the reality was that most of the fire burned through the understory, leaving the largest trees standing. Here and there, patches of completely dead trees stand weathered and gray above the green of the new brush and young trees below. But these are isolated patches, the textbook “mosaic” pattern that fire usually leaves in its wake.

Along some ridge tops, the fire restored meadowland that had become grown over since the end of Native American burning and the beginning of systematic fire suppression in the last century. When Douglas firs grow in a dense forest, they usually have few if any lower limbs. The dearth of sunlight provides no incentive for the plant to put sunlight-catching leaves way down there. But out at the meadow’s edge, the trees have branches to the ground. When a fire moves through the grass, those branches provide a ready “ladder” for the fire to move up high in the tree and burn hot enough to kill it. Once the trees on the forest’s edge die, the meadow plants recolonize the newly opened ground. Meadows, fire and the edge of the forest are in a dynamic, feedback-heavy relationship. Not “balance,” but a somewhat predictable cycle of constant change.

I haven’t read or heard anything about any studies being done (I’m sure they have been), but my guess is that once all the hoopla over Sudden Oak Death dies down, we’ll come to see that the result is likewise not total devastation, but a wild-fire-like mosaic of living and dead trees. Most likely, some tanoaks (the species most susceptible to the fungus) will survive and eventually a resistance will develop through natural selection. Of course, I’m hoping my big, lovely live oaks don’t succumb once the fungus makes its way up the creek to my place, but I’m not near as worried as I was a couple years ago when the hype was raging like wildfire.

Speaking of touching down on solid ground, did anyone else feel the earthquake the other night? I was up writing and felt three of them. First time in a while and it was a bit disconcerting. Since the last shake, I’ve acquired some electronic devices that I had to think about. Before going to bed, I thought it would be a good idea to put the computer, printer and so on in safe places where they wouldn’t fall to the floor if a big shake happened during the night. I’ve always liked living where even the ground under your feet won’t hold still.

The neighbors seem to have stopped chopping up cars, so maybe I can get to sleep.