“Walter,” she said. “Dude is the man, our number one favorite winter regular, we all love him in here. He volunteers at the museum — in fact, he’s taking care of the garden, today.”
We found Walter, mid-60s, full-bearded, raffishly good-looking still, intent in his work in pruning one of a double row of tall, thorny rose bushes that lined the pathway to the museum. I doubted he was one to let something as unimportant as a rainy day dampen his enthusiasm for the outdoor life. I felt an instant urge to hang out and chill, to watch him at his slow, careful work selecting which branch and where to apply the rose clipper for maximum effect for next spring’s bloom.
Walter’s laid-back, easygoing vibe was evident in his winter dress sense of surf shorts, hoodie, woolen socks and Birkenstock sandals.
He took the veggie wrap from my hands with a crooked smile, a deep pair of crow’s feet crinkling at the sides of his eyes.
“Why thank you. Good gal to send you over with a bite to eat just as I was starting to feel a tad peckish,” he said. “Creature of habit, me — and that one, well she is nothing short of the best darn natural bookseller in town.”
The museum, Walter went on to explain, was his refuge during the rainy months. “On account of my spending most of my daytime hours here from the start of the holiday season, all the way through early spring as a general rule,” he said. “The rest of the year,” Walter continued, “you’ll find me back at my own place up in Garberville.”
We sat on the stone steps of the museum beside Walter as he ate, explaining at length, between mouthfuls, how he’d taught environmental science in high school for nigh on 30 years. “Til tragedy struck a few years back,” he said, all matter-of-fact, like he’d come to terms with it. “My sweet gal, my bride, my Connie, love of my life, best school librarian in the west.” They’d worked together at the same school for years, he said. “She passed on less than a month after taking early retirement. Never saw it coming. Heart attack.”
Walter’s parents are still alive and as well as is expected for their age, puttering around Willits, their hometown, the pair of them, each well into their eighth decade. They live alone, without his help for the warmer months of the year, comfortably rattling around the same old house that Walter was born and raised in, a block away from the museum.
“It’s ever since Connie passed I’ve been making my way down from the mountains for the winter months,” Walter said, his face crumpled a little and I could see he was watery eyed under his tough veneer. “My number one priority nowadays is taking care of my folks through the rainy season, that and helping out here at the museum when they need it most. I put this little booklet on the town’s history together last winter in memory of my gal.”
The cloud of sadness I’d detected lifted and his upbeat demeanor returned as soon as he stepped back to inspect his morning’s work.
“Local lore was our thing, you see, Connie and me,” he said. “She loved the history as much as she loved me. Man, I miss that gal.”
He shook his head and changed the subject, asking what it was that brought us through these parts in his words: “During this godforsaken time of year.” I was drawn to confide in him and I blurted out the truth of the matter, my whole increasingly practiced mini-version of the messed up story of our reason for being on the road.
Our new friend barely flinched as he finished chewing on a mouthful of veggie wrap. He looked me in the eye. “Honey, there are all sorts of folk up there in the more hidden tracts of the redwoods. Best you two hurry along, find out where it is your gals are holing up.”
Marcus shot me a look that Walter immediately intercepted. This talk was starting to unnerve me. I felt my lower lip tremble.
“Matter of fact,” Walter jumped right in, “if you’ve room for the company and you don’t mind it, I’ll take advantage of the ride and head on up there with the two of you.”
He said he was due a check-in on his place in Garberville. “My neighbor, Lori, she knows everyone. Lori’s your best bet, connection-wise — she’ll point you in the right direction, help get you started in the tracking down of your niece and her young buddy.”
Walter said Lori was a member of a group looking out for vulnerable kids such as Mia and Jazmin. “They do their best in talking the younger ones into turning back home. Keep track as much as they’re able of those that do insist on hanging on in hopes of finding work.”
Fifteen minutes later, on the porch of his parents’ weathered, ramshackle, two-story Victorian home, Walter said a quick goodbye to his frail looking folk. The sky, though dry for a spell, weighed heavy with low hanging clouds.
“I’ll be back real soon,” he told them. “You take good care of each other, now, you promise me? Stay out of trouble!” The frail old pair appeared to be okay with his departure as they waved goodbye from their walkers, side by side. A set of antiquated porch furniture poked out from a tarp cover, as old, spindly and fragile as its owners.
“Never do know if I’m saying goodbye for the last time, at their age,” Walter confessed. “I’m no spring chicken myself,” he said. “It’s bittersweet when the ol’ folks battle on this long.”
Our spontaneous traveling companion tossed a well-worn canvas bag into the back of the truck and hopped on up to the back seat with the air of a spritely young guy. “Travel light,” he said. “That’s my motto.”
A nonplussed Little Honey Momma was more inclined to lounge on the back seat now she had a friendly and willing traveling companion to curl and warm herself against and in as comfortable a position as she was able to muster, given her condition. I turned to see Walter place his hand in the small of her back as she snuggled into her pile of towels. She closed her eyes and slept, her breathing deep and contented.
I wished I were as easily settled as we drove over the tree-lined border of Mendocino and into Humboldt County with the storm swollen Eel River, 40 feet deep in parts, snaking beneath us.
~ “Who was it who named it the Eel River, anyway?” Marcus asked, as we three peered down at the rushing water. Walter grinned, boyishly. Of course he would know how it came by its name. He seemed to know everything, including the fact there never was any such thing as an eel in these waters. It didn’t take me long to figure Walter is a man who likes to hear the sound of his own voice, waxing lyrical with his encyclopedic knowledge of the region.
“This swirling waterway was only lightly used by the sparsest of tribes until the 1880s rolled around and shook things up,” he pontificated, setting the scene for more.
I closed my eyes and listened to the cadence of his melodic diatribe. He described the first outside explorers in the area making their historic trade of a cast iron frying pan for a native fisherman’s haul of bloodsucking, snakelike sea creatures fished from the remote waterway.
“On account that they were half starved,” Walter explained, “the boneless bodies of the Pacific lamprey looked a good deal more like eels than anything else that came to mind and so they decided that is what they were eating.”
According to Walter, our newfound personal guide to the natural world, the hideous looking sea lamprey, a strangely popular dish in the Netherlands and France is: “A highly unattractive, overrated delicacy, if you ask me.” He made a face. “Tastes more like stewed beef than fish.”
The Eel River ran with formidable force that February afternoon. Walter told us how the average flow of the waterway in a wet winter season is more than 100 times greater than in the warmer summer months. I shuddered at the thought of how Bobby had zero chance against the fast flowing water of the neighboring Russian River.
The pitch and rhythm of Walter’s voice drew me further in. I was learning how to dip in and out of his elaborate storytelling technique, honing in on the main elements of his bountiful stash of potentially useful information.
I opened the window to a welcome breeze carrying the aroma of damp earth, wet rock, and thick, fibrous bark.
Walter prattled on. “You’d be hard pushed to
believe, considering the inhospitable nature of the place at this time of year, yet come the month of August, a swell of youngsters such as your niece and her pal converge from all corners of the world. Thousands of them milling around, pitching a sea of tents along the Eel in hopes of being hired on as trimmers.”
It was hard to picture the river not raging.
“Truth is, locals such as myself, no offense to your gals — we consider ourselves fully justified in growing increasingly peeved by these large throngs of ukulele-playing, alpaca poncho-wearing pricks who converge on what is basically an escalating human circus up here,” Walter said.
“Tell us how you really feel, Walter! Sounds like a freak show for sure,” I said, picturing Mia and Jazmin in the midst of such a crowd.
“Aside from the fact there are way too many folk thrashing the place, shitting on the riverbank, urinating in the water and wrecking the ecosystem with their birth control and opioid piss — they are draining our community nonprofits. Safety issues are out of control.”
Marcus shook his head. I guess he’s been on both sides of this fence with his troubled past. Walter continued: “Never more dangerous out here than it is today, life is cheap since the lunatics took over the asylum. Welcome to the Wild West of transnational criminal activity.” He took a deep breath. “Narcotics, money laundering, weapons, trafficked humans, it’s all here, right under our noses, hidden in plain sight under a canopy of guerilla grows.”
“Jesus,” I said, wondering for the umpteenth time what corner of hell my niece had gotten herself into.
Walter claimed it was the criminal cartel growers that caused the most mayhem, those from south and central America: “And, as we’re hearing of more frequently, now, Eastern European gangs that range in size and level of sophistication.”
He was tracing the line of the river in the steam of the passenger window as I’d turned to look at him. Walter rapidly digressed into topography and how the Eel carries the highest suspended sediment load of any U.S. river its size. I followed his gaze as he pointed out landslide after landslide along the narrowed, two lane highway.
“The water, see —awash with rocks and soil and trees.”
For thousands of years, Walter explained, it was the Eel River that supported the region’s ancient and abundant forests as well as one of the world’s largest salmon/steelhead trout runs.
“After the white man arrived, logging, grazing, rail and road construction combined to make a drastic impact on the health of the wild watershed and its increasingly fragile ecology.” He described a series of dams built in the river’s headwaters in the early 1900s, designed to provide water for the newcomers, the settlers of Mendocino and Sonoma Counties.
“It was these dams and diversions that slowly started on a long course of killing the river. It was so much so that native salmon and steelhead neared extinction.” Walter cleared his throat and outlined the environmental crisis in more detail: “Think of it like an overdraft. When use of groundwater grossly exceeds the natural recharge, a river dries up. It’s simple math — understanding efficient use of water is critical; it’s the only way for all of us, now and in the future. Drought or no drought.”
Marcus had kept quiet to this point, driving steadily uphill. “It’s all gone to shit,” he said, breaking his silence and shaking his head a second time as he reached for my hand. I wasn’t sure if he was specifically referring to the state of the waterway, the underbelly of criminal activity in the region, or what had happened to Bobby.
Walter reached forward and rested the palm of his large hand on Marcus’ right shoulder.
“I hear you, man,” he said and, after a brief pause, “In other news, looking at the bigger picture, all of this here rain we’ve had this winter, it’s a blessing of sorts. The salmon and steelhead populations, wouldn’t you know it, they are slowly making a comeback? There’s been a huge push to create awareness of the issue over the past few years and it appears to be working.”
His profile looked like he may have stepped straight out of a 49ers mining prospectus. A head of untamed, silvery, shoulder-length hair and beard flecked with a suitable sprinkling of gold framed his weathered face inset with a pair of piercing blue eyes the color of the sky in the Sierras on a clear spring morning. I asked him if any of the tribes who lived along this waterway were still in existence.
“The natives in these parts were deeply wronged, segregated into reservations a good deal farther away from the Eel,” he replied.
I caught myself wondering if Walter’s late wife had dozed off to his well-meant, long-winded stories, or had she hung on to his every word? I peered out into the damp, dark corridors of trees, at least some of which I’d wager a guess, date back 2,000 years or more. The tribes Walter talked of had been driven like cattle, in all weather, corralled like animals.
“What sickens me most is when I think of the old people, the very young and the sick, those who never made it to the reservations, the ones who perished along the way,” he said. This wild and primal place bears its past with a stoic silence. Several large redwoods visible on my side of the highway bore charred bark, sign of a past forest fire.
“Over time,” Walter added, “those who did survive made their peace with one another, as best as they were able, intermarrying, their descendants forming a new tribe and, over the years, a common lifestyle evolved.”
He talked of a sacred ritual known as the Feather Dances of the former river tribes. “A hopeful teaming up with a bunch of friends of the river takes place most years,” he claimed. “It’s said that these dances, gatherings of folk from all walks of life, have been a big part in bringing back the fish.”
I stuck my hand out of the window, palms up to feel the misty drizzle of the late afternoon. The rush of the river, its furious swell would be fit to burst by springtime, when snowpack melt into the highest levels of the waterway. If the redwoods are the heart and soul of the forest, the river is the blood, a roaring terror in the rainy season, a swift, strong, force of life in the warmer months. High above the waterway, the sky had turned a dusky tone of watery lilac.
We three looked down at the swell of the river as it hungrily consumed the native plant life along its lower bank, whole bodies of grass, tree branches and rocks sweeping beneath us in its wake.
The Eel River basin empties into the Pacific at the northern end of the San Andreas Fault, the precarious juncture of the three tectonic plates Bobby and Marcus had talked of two days earlier.
I scanned a large information board ahead on the side of the highway — redwood roots, according to the signage, reach down to twelve feet underground in a maze of substructure burrowing deep into the earth of this seismic epicenter. “Something else I may as well ask you Walter,” I posed, “is, should we find ourselves in the forest when the big one hits, what the hell do we do? Where do we run? And how is it so many of these giants have withstood past centuries of quakes?” I could only assume that any tree around long enough to grow to almost four hundred feet tall must have its list of natural disasters pretty much dialed in.
“I mean if the ground swells violently in the redwood forest, is there a warning pulse?” I asked.
“They say that the wildlife acts real strange, but it’s never been proven. It’s like waiting for the shoe to drop knowing full well that we’re sure to get one big, honking shaker sooner or later,” Walter explained.
“As with any earthquake zone wherever you are in the world, best step away from tall objects, trees or no trees, seek open space, drop and take shelter. What I do know is that if the movement along the fault is vertical, it’s possible the sea floor displacement could trigger a tsunami. In that case, best act fast and make a move to higher ground.”
Marcus pressed on, uphill, as Walter deftly segued on to the next subject on our list of natural disasters — landslides. The guy just never stopped talking. “Scientists refer to the soil you see around here as blue goo,” he continued. “On account of the soil being blue
-gray in color with a tendency to slip.”
We had passed a number of small slides of damp green hillside cordoned off with bright orange traffic cones. I shrunk back into my seat, chilled by the prospect of even a slight chance of a big slide suddenly dumping down on us, burying us alive — truck and all. Nothing now seemed too fantastical after what had happened to Bobby.
If any substantial portion of the hillside slipped, covering us in mud, there was no one to come to our rescue. We were, for sure, among the only fools on the road that late in the day as the storm clouds continued to build.
Marcus eased the truck into a parking space in a scenic roadside rest stop, a spectacular, ozone encapsulated location for a pee break, lush, green canyon on one side, river on the other and creepily remote. Had I been driving this route alone, there’s no way I’d have chosen to make a solo pit stop in such a lonely place. At least the eerie atmosphere did not deter Little Honey Momma from going about her business.
The four of us clambered down a soggy, slippery riverbank to the rocky shore, Marcus proving adept at coping with all-weather terrain. Walter was equally comfortable out there in the wild.
Yellow banana slugs slid around in startling numbers, a convention of them, reveling in the wet conditions. The largest specimen I spotted was a crazy full ten inches long. I tried my best to step around so as not to squash these strange, shiny, insanely colored creatures of the woods.
Who knew, the banana slug is mostly made up of water? Walter did, naturally.
“These slugs are amazing,” he marveled, “Did you know they power themselves entirely by their own slime gliding along the roughest terrain, the healthiest of them living for as long as seven years? And, what’s more, have a guess at how they find each other.” I rolled my eyes, shook my head.
“Do tell.”
“Darn it if they don’t leave behind a lubricant chemical track. Even better, banana slugs leave no permanent or even semi-permanent trace — they actually eat one another’s slime.”
Big Green Country Page 25