People of the Lake

Mount Konocti and ridges northeast of the lake as seen from from the ranch.



The sacred mountain by the sacred lake with coots and mallards as seen from Lakeport. The Lakeport mallards are, in some cases, hybrids with domestic pekin ducks. But nobody interbreeds with a coot.



The beds of tule reeds that form the margin between Clear Lake and Big Valley are the nursery zone for fish and birds including Western Grebes. Vastly reduced in acreage, this critical habitat sustains the Clear Lake sports fishery. It is easily
compromised by the rollicking wakes of speed boats, which swamp grebe nests. Flashy and strident, yellow-headed black birds also breed here. They are more commonly associated with such Southerly areas as Lake Chapala in Mexico and with inland marshes.









The Lake Pomo people had an intimate connection with the tules, using them to make, among other essentials, their shelters, clothing, and canoes.

Western Culture

The present moment appears vividly in light and color. Rain clouds, rainbows and solar rays streak the sky.





But, for dwellers in Lake County, just offstage of this spectacle of land and sky are barely suppressed memories. Some of
the evidence, removed from the scenes of the crimes, is now housed at the Lake County Museum in Lakeport. There, in
display cases, are relics barely a hundred years old of a highly evolved artistic culture. There are photographs of the final days of life in that Pomo world. And there are photographs of the orgy of plundering, which followed.







The photographer of Indian cultures, Edward Curtis, made the image of the Pomo canoeist. That picture and others
give off an almost mystical feeling. After looking deeply at the photographs of the people, the masterful baskets, traps for woodpeckers and fish, arrowheads and other artifacts, I walked into an adjoining room at the museum. Here were the artifacts, utterly lacking in soul, and just plain ungainly, of the mechanized industrial age brought into the landscape by European-American usurpers.

But it was the photographs of the destroyers of the animals that gave off a charnel house grimness, which reminded me strongly of photographs of white Americans gathered beneath the branch of a tree from which dangled the body of a black or Mexican or Indian man they had just lynched.











The paradise that was this continent was free for the taking. And taken it was, in very short order. These Lake County photographs are so banal and so ubiquitous in every community across the land, that they arouse almost no response other than curiosity at their quaintness. But they are a record of human rapaciousness coupled with a human inability to see beyond the present moment.



The museum displays the final remains of the very last elk slaughtered in the county. That was just a hundred years ago. Now, thanks to restoration and reintroduction, the once nearly extinct tule elk roams the county again. The Grizzly bear and the wolf
were wiped out within a very few years of the arrival of the Americans.

Somehow the mountain lion persists and often shows up in the local paper. Maybe the sentiment of the editors is not so different from that of the men who chose to be photographed as witnesses to all that killing. There is a sense of wanting to be recorded at the awesome and rare moment in which one's existence comes into contact with the uncanny reality of a great animal... even if that moment marks the end of the animal.

Water Season

After February storms Kelsey Creek was in spate this week. The first of the migrating hitch had been reported in the lower reaches. I pushed off in the canoe downstream from Kelseyville into the labyrinthine channels divided by willow and cottonwood islands. Pairs of mallards, canada geese, wood ducks, and great blue herons flushed. Ospreys, great egrets, and common mergansers were also present. Otters like the family of three my bother, Brian, photographed a couple of months ago at Las Gallinas ponds in Marin County are likely pursuing the hitch up the creek.





The gates of the water retention structure are closed. Water is spilling powerfully over the top. Hitch have no chance of mounting it. The structure was built in answer to the loss of the creek's natural ability to recharge the aquifer annually through its deep bed of gravel. When gravel mining operations over decades stripped out this natural sponge down to the relatively impervious layer of underlying clay the aquifer suffered. Water surged quickly down the length of the creek to the lake.
The structure is designed to allow water to linger in place long enough to begin to work its way into the aquifer. It is a clear illustration of the way one unthinking abuse of a natural system has unanticipated ongoing negative consequences, in this case the severe diminishment of our native spawning runs of fish as well as the destruction of the creek's innate recharging qualities.



Winter light in Lake County as seen in the orchards can make one wish to be a plein air painter.





Luis took a moving shot at the sky from his car, with results resembling those of Thomas Moran or Albert Bierstadt.



Lake County has some spectacular vernal pools, the biggest of which is Boggs Lake not far from Bottle Rock Road at Harrington Flat. For most of the year Boggs Lake is a tule marsh with limited areas of surface water. But in winter it resembles an ocular lens reflecting the skies. It mirrors the surrounding hillside forests of Douglas fir, Ponderosa pine, black oak and madrone.
Although within the town limits of Kelseyville, Boggs Lake is in the mountains at 3,000' as opposed to Big Valley's 1,400' elevation. The difference in elevation makes for a radically different vegetation from that of the valley floor.



Like many once pristine parts of our county, Boggs Lake was slated to become yet another trailer park. Citizens mobilized and got the Nature Conservancy interested in protecting this incredible place. Now the Lake County Land Trust is involved in a
transition to take over management of the Boggs Lake Preserve.

For three weeks every November the sky at dusk over the tule marshes of Boggs Lake is the arena for spectacular displays. Hundreds of thousands of starlings swarm and gyrate in maneuvers designed to elude predation by hawks. The concentration of life force amplified by the sound of a million beating wings is a thrill to experience. After massing, splitting off and reconstituting itself in every imaginable shape, the flock finally settles down to roost for the night in the relatively secure tules.
My friend, Andrew, who lives in a log cabin overlooking Boggs Lake, took these shots of the starlings and a pursuing hawk or falcon.





Now, in the season of abundant water, many thousands of Western toads and Pacific tree frogs make an equally impressive racket as they clamor for mates. Andrew loves to demonstrate an amphibian phenomenon he discovered. Andrew has a few strategically placed spotlights on his wooded property aimed to illuminate tree trunks. When, well into the night, the frog chorus is at its most tumultuous, Andrew simply flips off the light switch and marvels as the entire frog army of Boggs Lake goes almost completely silent before gradually starting up again.

Sights in Winter

On January 1 the stock tank was dry. On February 13 it held 22 inches of recent rain water. The creek is flowing strongly past the ranch in two channels.



By mid-February Big Valley is already in vernal mode. The calls of the first restless toads can be heard. The ospreys are back from Mexico and on their nest. Tree swallows cavort boisterously while bluebirds cavort with shy decorum. The horses still wear their winter coats



A vulture was evidently hit by a car in front of the ranch fence. It was likely one of our resident group of five.



The damp allows fungi and mosses to thrive on fallen oak limbs. Signs of disintegration and regeneration are everywhere.







As a pellet from a barn owl dissolved in the rains a rodent skull was revealed.



The narcissus bloom is at its peak.

Fog of Winter

The year ended with dense fog. I was on the roof of the ranch house clearing off leaves and gazing over the shrouded pear orchards. The fog was heavy with bird sound as hundreds of robins congregated to feed on the unharvested vineyards.



Squirrel nests built during the past seasons were now visible in uppermost oak branches.





At mid day the fog suddenly burned off, unveiling the mountain.



A young red-tailed hawk collided with a fence. Our five neighborhood vultures congregated at a the remnants of a roadside burrito. These scenes of winter were not unexpected. The fabric of Big Valley is made of such threads at the nadir of the year.





The beef cattle at JB and Brian's ranch seemed to feel they would exist eternally in their sylvan pasture.