The Riffle
A domestic altercation last night, a bunch of angry texts from the driver of a car with whom I shared a fender bender last Friday, a discovery of the non-function of our solar electric battery, and troublesome noises from the inverter during yesterday’s 107 degree heat wave, the dogs poops continuing black, the news–all these troubled what sleep I could find and had me up at 4:00 am.
Still unsettled after returning from the dog beach, I bike to the Creek. I sit on a stump and dictate into the phone.
Gurgle and birdsong. Vegetation fresh and green on both banks. A place of merciful miracles, long into the dry season in the middle of the city. Nature’s regeneration and purification of a place formerly ravaged and abused.
These living waters arise from the aquifer, pressed by the sediment above into the channel first excavated 15 feet in the 1930’s to drain the fields, climb from down here in wells, flow through irrigation pipes and sprinklers onto crops, then percolate back down to join seeps from from the water table.
Dug and realigned repeatedly by heavy machinery, the channel has greened itself and generated aquatic and terrestrial wildlife.
The most recent chapter unfolded during the last three years as volunteers and students converted the channel from a littered encampment into a trail-lined park. Across from where I sit now, stands a 150 foot Shamel Ash creating a microbiome for shrubs, sedges, willows, grasses, horsetails and also for weeds like Burdock and oxtongue that need cutting by a gardener who observes and responds.
A sanctuary I repair to from the subdivision where I live across the road, either out of desire or, like today, out of need.
I stand to flex my achy joints, and a monarch flutters onto the willow shoot in front of me.
A Black Phoebe flies overhead across the creek. A flock of house finches twitter in harmony with the Riffle’s tumbling water.