My lead guide in this difficult transition has been Ann Marie. We met as fellow members of the White Heron Sangha, a meditation group I’d belonged to for ten years where I’d regularly given “dharma talks” requiring reading and writing preparation that provided some continuity with my previous professional activity.  A fellow Cal Poly faculty retiree and environmental educator, she’d served as Secretary for the Board at City Farm SLO and then stepped down to free time for her growing responsibilities in a national organization devoted to Nature Journaling around the time I shifted involvement with the Farm to the Creek Project.

One day she came as a guest presenter to the twice-weekly Pacific Beach Continuation High School Ecology class I was co-teaching at the Creek with Deannie, the official science instructor.  Anne-Marie brought along little pen, paper and water color kits for each student:

and within the 40 minutes available, got most of them to produce a creditable page recording their observations at the site–to their own and their teachers’ amazement.

Greater amazement was elicited by examples from her journals she laid out on the picnic table.

I was entranced with the lushly colored sketches, the calligraphy, the varying page layouts, the scientific precision of their visual and verbal descriptions, and even more by the immediacy of the moment captured in their quick strokes, complementing their recording of location, time, date, season and weather.  Hesitantly I asked if I could photograph some of those pages for more time to absorb their rich feast of information. When the class ended I invited her to walk the trails I’d constructed over the last year with the help of College Corps student volunteers.

A few weeks later she returned for another workshop with students. She was carrying binoculars and said she’d like to do some of her own journaling along the creek. I was thrilled to find another person intrigued enough by my pet spot hidden in a canyon just below the shopping center and car dealerships on the opposite bank to want to linger there.  An hour later she emerged from the bush and said she was thinking of returning periodically on Friday mornings for more.

On one of those Fridays she showed me the pages she’d created so far. They included new names for familiar places, drawings of birds and plants I’d seen and not seen, stories of fleeting animal dramas and slow vegetational changes revealed through fresh eyes.

These were signs I’d been waiting for.  The original grant proposal for the Creek Project included installation of informational guideposts to engage visitors with natural and historical features of the site. But the institutional formality of earlier samples to me had the opposite effect. These journal pages’ combination of artistry, information and immediacy could open hidden treasures of the place to newcomers.

Once again, I hesitantly asked if she would consent to such a use and received a wary affirmative response.  The originals would have to be scanned professionally, reproduced on weather-resistant boards, and mounted on t-posts. With the help of our supportive printer at UPS, the hardware expert at Miner’s and my grandson apprentice, they took their place.

song

This is the initial entry here about the Prefumo Creek Restoration and Enhancement Project, my main activity for the past three years.

As the second and largely solitary portion of the project nears completion, my attention is turning from weed-whacking, chainsawing and mulch-moving to making it accessible to more people, rebuilding lapsed institutional support for its further expansion, telling its story and studying its lessons.

That study led me yesterday to a Google search about the bizarre growth habits of its dominant occupant, the Arroyo Willow. Buried deep in the list of uninformative links, I discovered a marvellous scientific paper published in September 2024: THE ROLE OF PARTIAL LIMB BREAKS IN THE GROWTH AND PERSISTENCE OF ARROYO WILLOW (SALIX LASIOLEPIS),

Its subject has intrigued me ever since I started cutting a pathway through the thicket of willows along the creek bank to open views of the incised channel 15 feet below.  The heavy trunks of the oldest trees crawl up from the stream bed and grow horizontally along the ground conveniently providing trail borders and benches before pivoting upward into leafy crowns.

The paper author’s onomatopoeic term for such trees seemed perfect: “decumbent sprawlers.” It captured the combination of weighted immobility and reptilian motion that I sensed passing them on my daily walks.  He provided an ecological explanation for their animated shape as the final stage of the tree’s growth. Young willows spring up single and erect to compete for light as do other pioneer species. Those which are shaded die out, while the survivors sprout multiple trunks from their bases, turning from trees into shrubs. Their rapid accumulation of biomass leads to breakage of limbs and trunks that cant be supported under the stress of weight and wind.  Such breaks would leave other species liable to infection, weakening and mortality. But willows can tolerate open wounds indefinitely, and their broken limbs continue to grow and heal even if thinly attached. They re-root when touching the ground, where they continue growing horizontally and mature as sprawlers that sprout decumbent vertical shoots which thrive in the light opened by the breaks.

Upon returning to the creek the next morning, I came upon a large branch that must have broken the night before, while I was reading the article.  Instead of an ugly marker of weakness and injury that needed to be cleared, I saw it now as the tree’s extension of territory and length of life.

I’d been led to the paper listening to the first chapter of Landmarks, a 2017 book written and narrated by Robert MacFarlane, mountaineer, naturalist, Cambridge English professor, and splendid stylist, while while walking with the dog at Pismo Beach. His thesis about the interrelation of language, literature and appreciation of nature is a variant of the one guiding the Cal Poly class I taught from 1998 until retirement in 2014, “Ecolit, Reading and Writing the Landscape,” its syllabus headed by a quote from Thoreau

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him …whose words were so true, and fresh, and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library.

Grieving for the new Oxford Junior Dictionary’s culling of words like acorn, fern, otter and pasture, which named particulars of the natural world, and their replacement with terms like attachment, chatroom, and voicemail– supposedly of more relevance to modern children–MacFarlane includes glossaries of traditional local words for landscape features, plants, and animals whose loss accompanies the loss of the features they name under the pressure of industrial/commercial development. Naming, he observes, is the prerequisite for knowing, a point confirmed by my subsequent discovery of “sprawler.”

In addition to preserving dying vocabulary, MacFarlane practices literary criticism in appreciation of obscure books of nature writing, like The Living Mountain, a volume of essays by Nan Shepherd produced in the course of her wanderings through the Cangorns, a range on the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, which he has explored since early childhood visiting his grandfather there.

Facing an abyss of unstructured time at this interval of the Prefumo project, MacFarlane encourages me to relate to the Creek in a different way, to make the difficult transition from physical activity back to my earlier academic engagement with reading and writing the landscape.