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| The Delta as Wilderness | |||
| Rasa Gustaitis | < | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | | ||
A great horned owl pair--I don’t know if it’s the same individuals or their offspring--have been in the same place for 24 years. Beaver, river otters. They have territories, home addresses. By coming out regularly, you anticipate: Is so and so home today? To me it’s amazing that they’re there almost all the time. A lot of different people, too, living below sea level on Bethel Island. Many ethnicities. There’s the Shima Tract--Shima was known as the potato king of the Delta. That was in the 1920s and ‘30s, during the time Asians couldn’t own lands. After that trip with you, I was thinking that everyone who has anything to do with decisions about the Delta needs to come out on the water. In that first year, when I was working on the boat and it wasn’t ready and I was dying to go out on the water, I took several trips bicycling around some of the islands around Walnut Grove and felt like I was on top of the curve, I really knew the area. But when I got there with the boat, it was a totally different place. I knew nothing about this place, and it was a big shock to me. The experience on the water is totally different. It’s a different time frame, a different mind frame--a drifting, floating state of mind, as well as of water. It’s easy to feel lost. I think that’s what people experience. The land disappears. It comes in second. The islands define that space, putting edges on it, not necessarily making sense of it but making it like a labyrinth. They do what clouds do to the sky. A clear sky is not nearly as dramatic as when you have those puffballs up there. In the Delta everything is connected with water. We’re 70 percent water. Life is water. This is a place to acknowledge our dependence on water. We get a lot of southern California people who start talking about our water, their water. What I try to get across is it’s our water. L.A. is tremendously ahead of the curve in using local water, while the State of California just keeps pumping out groundwater. There are solutions, and L.A. is on to some of them. The Delta, with its flows and counterflows, is a place that allows us to go to other places in the mind and another sense of time than we normally experience--to go outside our boundaries. So it’s refreshing to get out there without any intent and purpose, to drift and discover. Teilhard de Chardin said: “We are the universe observing itself.” We need to go to places beyond what we imagine to experience the fullness and richness of the universe. For me it all starts with water. Around the water molecule evolves life. It all starts with a drop. On May 22, as swans and snow geese were nesting on frozen tundra, Captain Ronn Patterson set out for the north. |
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