Tramping through the creek to count salmon

The salmon have returned to spawn in the Lagunitas Creek watershed, and a small steadfast group of volunteers is putting on their waders to count fish.

The National Park Service runs a countywide salmon surveying program that is based at the Point Reyes National Seashore (PRNS), which depends on both employees and volunteers to keep track of the salmon’s status.

“I clear out my winter schedule so there’s nothing conflicting when I get the call to come count spawners,” said Peter Van der Naillen, a retired lawyer who has attended nearly every fish count in the park for the last seven years. “Salmon don’t have a calendar. We can’t say, ‘Gee, I’d rather not go on Wednesday.’ If that’s the day when conditions are right, that’s the day we go out.”

Throughout spawning season, park staff and volunteers slip, slide, and sometimes slog through waste-deep water in order to monitor the salmon. Many volunteers return year after year, Reichmuth said, including Van der Naillen and 11-year-old NoahLani Litwinsella of Berkeley, who has been doing salmon surveys with his mother Julie since he was six.

The Lagunitas watershed is the southernmost stable population of endangered coho in the state: up to 1,300 of the fish return each year. Of those spawners, between 80 and 180 return to Olema Creek. Steelhead, and occasionally Chinook, also inhabit the watershed.

Last Friday, park volunteers got the first call to duty of the season.

“After receiving over an inch of rain in West Marin, we should now have coho in lower Olema and Pine Gulch Creek,” National Park Service fisheries biologist Michael Reichmuth wrote in an email. He asked people to sign up for surveys on Monday and Tuesday.

On Tuesday morning, five volunteers and four staff members met at the Point Reyes Seashore headquarters to survey lower Olema Creek. The group was divided into teams of two or three, given chest waders and measuring rods, and shuttled to four different access points.

I joined Reichmuth and PRNS Association fisheries technician Sarah Carlisle on the team assigned to the lowest “reach,” or stretch of the stream.

Tires crunched down the gravel road leading to the Olema Marsh, echoing away into silence. We were alone, over a mile from the nearest house.

“Once you’re in, you’re in,” Reichmuth said. “You just have to hope someone left a car at the other end, like they were supposed to.”

We spent the next three hours making our way up nearly two miles of the channel, beginning a few hundred yards above Olema Creek’s confluence with Lagunitas Creek. Alder trunks crisscrossed the stream like low bridges, and debris dams of slippery logs, old fence posts, and leaves lurked invisibly beneath the surface.

Our task was to identify redds, or nest sites built by the females, as well as to spot as many coho as we could find – all while remaining upright.

Redds are hard to spot without experience. The subtle depressions in the gravel are made where the large fish use their tail to flip stones and sand downstream. For me, steep edges running parallel to the bank were the best suggestion of a redd. Sometimes the freshly exposed rocks were paler, and easier to see.

With their experience, Reichmuth and Carlisle identified redds quickly. “You kind of get your fishy sense,” Reichmuth said. “After a while, you figure out where they like to be.”

We used our measuring rods to poke among the roots and leaves beneath overhanging banks trying to spook out fish that might be hiding there. The measuring rods were also useful for balance, as chilly water clamped the rubber-lined waders against our legs.

The creek widened as we proceeded upstream, changing from a tangled corridor of narrow alders to older, broader trunks growing like cathedral columns from more gradual banks. Glimpses of oak-studded hillsides and, occasionally, traffic on Highway One were visible beyond the creek corridor. It was a very different view of the world - which is, in part, what attracts volunteers to return time and again.

“It’s just a real special place to be,” said Van der Naillen.

Birders lure out warblers with onomatopoeic calls

“Pssh, pssh, psshhht!”

A birdlike whistling came from a soft faced, gray haired man who stood by an innocuous thicket of stinging nettles along the Five Brooks trail on the Point Reyes National Seashore. He was attempting to lure out a yellow-rumped warbler, and giving me birding advice at the same time.

Birds are curious, Rigdon Currie explained in an undertone. Often they respond to an unfamiliar sound such as his “pishing,” or to a predator’s call. A semi-retired venture capitalist, Currie is a board member of the Point Reyes Bird Observatory (PRBO), and an expert birder. Last week he and his friend Will Wilson took me on a mock bird-a-thon, a daylong tally of species that requires a birder to use all their wiles.

“You have to be very careful about how you use sound. You can pull a bird off of its nest in the springtime,” said Wilson, a slim and quiet man whose easy smile breaks through a whitening beard. He has been birding for only 14 years, compared to Currie’s 48, but both men keep “life lists” of all the birds they have seen, and are well acquainted with West Marin’s tremendous avian diversity.

I had been negotiating with PRBO for almost a month in an effort to join a team of birders participating in the organizations 30th annual bird-a-thon fundraiser. Each team selects a 24-hour period between September 1 and October 15, during which they identify as many species as they can, raising a per species donation from sponsors.

Last year, almost 90 birders spotted a total of 200 different bird species, raising $113,000 for the organization said Anne Joly, spokeswoman for PRBO. This year’s numbers are still trickling in, she said, but are expected to be roughly the same.
Currie and Wilson had already done their bird-a-thon but said they were happy to show me the ropes. Within half an hour, I was grateful that scheduling hadn’t worked out for the real deal. In the informal setting I was able to take notes, listen, and learn as they guided me through some of their favorite birding spots in Point Reyes.

“If this were a real bird-a-thon, we would never stop moving,” Currie told me while we watched a drifting wood duck on Five Brooks pond. “People take the whole process very seriously,” said Joly. “They plan out everywhere they go according to the weather, the tides, the time of day.”

In our slower paced setting, Wilson trained his high powered telescope on what they described as “one of the most beautiful and noteworthy birds in North America.” Currie wanted to be sure that I, the novice, got a chance to appreciate the wood duck’s remarkable palette of plumage.

Minutes later, Wilson and Currie stopped to peruse a tangle of fir trees where they had heard chickadees raising a ruckus. On the bird-a-thon, up to 15 percent of the identifications are made just from listening.

Point Reyes is a destination for birders from all over the world, in part because the point itself acts like a funnel, drawing in vagrant migratory birds who may be tired or off-course in its path over the ocean.

There is a “bird box,” or public voicemail, where people report unusual bird sightings. People like Wilson, Currie said, will come screaming out to the point from his home in San Francisco to see a new bird. Wilson corroborated this with a somewhat pleased “yep.”

After finding what waterfowl and songbirds we could at the pond, we moved on to the Duxbury Reef overlook, where Wilson and Currie set up their scopes on the precipitous cliff edge, peering below at the partially exposed tidal flats.

The overlook is good for spotting rocky shorebirds, they told me, and in the right weather you can see birds out at sea. With their help, I saw some turkey vultures feeding on a seal carcass, and a brown pelican flapping regally past. A black turnstone rummaged quickly among the exposed rocks, overturning piles of seaweed with its long bill. Willits and Western gulls wandered the shore at a more sedate pace.

“Willits are tall, gray, dull-looking birds,” Currie said. “But when they fly their wings are striking, pure black and white. It’s an amazing metamorphosis.”

Our next stop was the series of hummingbird feeders in the unassuming paved yard behind the museum in Bolinas, operated by gallery owner Keith Hansen.

“He’s had over 200 birds in this little space,” Wilson said. “This year, he’s seen some extraordinarily rare hummingbirds.” Though we sat on the bench facing the feeders for some minutes, all we saw was a busy assemblage of fairly common Anna’s hummingbirds, whose delicate neck feathers go from a flat black to a vibrant red depending on the angle of light.

As we pulled away from the museum, my guides were distracted by a great blue heron on the mudflats and we got out of the car. I was more intrigued by the tall sand-colored marbled godwits, especially after Wilson told me their long, straight bill is flexible. “They can actually move the tip and grab things like lips can. It’s the strangest thing,” he said.

Several greater yellow legs, one heron, one killdeer and a black phoebe later, we were back in the car and on our way to Pine Gulch, our final stop. This forested stream outlet feeds into the salt marsh on the northern edge of the Bolinas Lagoon.

It struck me how these men know the birds in their favorite places almost like friends. They greeted a falcon sitting on a lone fence post like a regular at their favorite bar – pleasant to see but not surprising, since it is so often there. Later, they gossiped about the happenings of the two kingfishers at Five Brooks, and the acorn woodpecker at the visitor’s center.

“Naming them isn’t so important,” Wilson told me in his understated way, “except the name is the window to the story.”

Lawson’s permit and dune debate at low boil

Ongoing controversy surrounds the Lawson’s Landing RV campground, which has operated without a permit for four decades. Nestled in the dunes at the mouth of Tomales Bay, Lawson’s is prized by environmentalists for its unique habitat, and by campers for its low-cost waterfront access. Efforts to reconcile those two conflicting values took a small step forward last week, when the period for public comment closed on the property’s final EIR.

Lawson’s Landing is the site of a rare kind of sand dune that supports many fragile forms of life, as well as one of the largest RV campgrounds on the California coast.

Campers shore up the gaps between densely-packed RVs with plywood and tarps, undeterred by the nearly ceaseless wind that blows in off the water. In the temporary enclaves of stillness they build bonfires, gather their chairs, and talk. Fishermen dot the wooden pier and teenagers bundled in hooded sweatshirts and oversized jeans pop wheelies on the maze of rutted dirt roads.

History
For over half a century, the campground has attracted visitors seeking to beat the summer heat, many from the Central Valley. For $25 per night, they can rent a small chunk of waterfront property. For many, Lawson’s Landing vacations are a family tradition.

Since it was founded in 1957, the campground has existed in a gray area of legality. Three generations of owners have periodically attempted to get operating permits. Although some environmentalists suggest that the delay may have been a stalling tactic, the owners say that their efforts have been confounded by a slow response from the county, changing laws, and challenges from environmentalists calling for additional oversight.

The owners’ approach to the process has changed drastically over the years. “My grandfather heard we needed a master plan and he thought he could sit down at the kitchen table and write one,” said Willy Vogler, who co-owns Lawson’s Landing. Since then, they have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on environmental consultants, scientific assessments, and a team of lawyers.

“The long history of camping and the uncertain permit history have resulted in a lot of questions and concerns that we’re still working out,” said Ben Berto, the principal planner for Marin County. “A variety of actors have weighed in, which has slowed things up.”

While the legal permitting process languished until the current EIR was started in 2000, the campground has stabilized into a haphazard yet beloved destination for thousands of visitors each year.

There are roughly 1,000 campsites on the 900-acre property– though Vogler says that the yearly average hovers around 300. There are also 233 year-round residents, who rent trailers for $350 per month in an area where one-bedroom apartments are four times that cost. The cozy maze of aging trailers along the waterfront is a step out of time. Several members of the extended Lawson/Vogler family can often be found chatting with regulars in the tackle shop.

“Part of our draw is the dunes – if we trashed them, this wouldn’t be someplace that people would want to go,” Vogler said. “We want to continue to provide visitors with a low-cost recreational facility, and also do what we can to save the dunes. This rare coastal jewel still exists, even with trailers here.”

Environmental concerns
On Monday, the Environmental Action Committee (EAC) hosted an event called “Honor Thy Dunes,” aimed at maintaining public involvement with the Lawson’s Landing project. The poet Robert Haas and the ecologist Peter Baye were guest speakers. Willy Vogler and Mike Lawson were in attendance.

The EAC’s main concern is that the EIR, and the final master plan, contain ample environmental protections for the dunes. “The Lawson’s aren’t villains,” said Catherine Caufield, the dune campaign manager for the EAC, during the meeting. “We are not trying to close down the campground, or stop visitor use there in any way.”

Specific concerns include the placement of a sewage treatment system that is necessary to replace the small and aging septic systems. “Right now what they have is a bunch of illegal, substandard, unpermitted septic systems that don’t really have leachfields,” Caufield said. “They have to put in a proper septic system – which they know, and they want to do.”

It is also important to protect and restore the dune wetland system, parts of which are currently used as campsites, Caufield said. The EAC also wants to guarantee that the sand quarry, now closed, can’t be re-opened some time in the future. Removal of the invasive European beachgrass, which is stabilizing the mobile dunes, is also an important issue. Over 50 percent of the dunes have been lost since 1954, Caufield said.

In addition to what Caufield says are unnecessary delays, she said that the county is being vague about details of the plan for the campground, such as where camping will be located or how many campers there are going to be. “The project requires close scrutiny, but this is difficult because we don’t know exactly what it is going to be.”

Ecology
The Tomales Dunes is the only remaining example of desert-like mobile dunes between San Luis Obispo and Oregon, Baye said.
The rare dunes have large, unvegetated expanses that gradually shift landward with the movements of the wind, in what Baye describes as “migrating dune waves.” Behind them, the dunes leave depressions, or “slacks,” that turn into wetlands.

Rivers fed by springs twist ephemerally through the area, slicing through the sandy hills, feeding the wetlands. After a few years or a few months they change course or disappear. “There are many plant assemblages in the slacks, and they vary from year to year,” Baye said. “Ponds, freshwater marshes, and seasonal wetlands switch positions.”

The complexity of the system supports a diversity of life, including 14 rare or endangered species such as the snowy plover, the woolly-headed spine flower and the pacific sand bear scarab beetle. “The site is an environmental treasure,” said Berto. “There’s a lot of value out there today, thanks in part to the good stewardship of the Lawsons.”

In many areas, the mobile dunes have been stabilized and converted into a fixed landscape by European beachgrass, which was deliberately planted a century ago in an attempt to protect property. “Native species are present, even abundant, in the inner dunes, but they are mere traces in the active foredunes behind the beach,” Baye said.

Looking ahead
Though some attendees of the Honor Thy Dunes event murmured about eminent domain or the possibility of buying the Lawson’s Landing property, working together to agree on a plan for the property is now a top priority for most stakeholders.

If all goes smoothly, both the planning commission and the board of supervisors will approve the final EIR in January, Berto said. At that point, the master plan will enter the merit review phase, during which all aspects of the project – including those not covered in the EIR – will be assessed.

The details of the master plan, such as placement of the sewage treatment system, where the campsites will be located on a site-by-site basis, and where the bathrooms are will be reviewed in the final stage of that process. “If and when they get those approvals, and the coastal commission signs off on their permit, then the applicants could begin their project,” Berto said. In theory, this could be completed as soon as one year from now.

“We’re hoping that we can work with the EAC and the community to come to a compromise that will benefit both the dune environment and affordable access to coastal recreation,” Vogler said. “Starting another EIR from scratch is not going to speed the process along.” He added that though the current EIR is out of date, he thinks that it can be modified in a way that will work for all involved.

Caufield emphasized her interest in moving beyond the past. “My attitude is, ‘lets go forward, and get it right now, and get it right soon,’” she said. “We believe that recreation can coexist with preservation, but Lawson’s Landing won’t be the largest RV campground on the California coast.” Vogler concurred that once the permit is approved, their operations will be scaled back.

“We’re not exactly sure what size we can drop to and still be able to afford expenses like the wastewater plant,” Vogler said. “We’re optimistic, but nobody’s sleeping real well. This isn’t just a business: its where we live, it’s our family, it’s our friends who are coming out here. Losing it would be earth shattering.”

This summer’s visible increase in brown-leaved or defoliated trees in West Marin has led to a resurgence of concern about sudden oak death.

“We’ve been getting a lot of calls from people who are worried,” said Steven Swain, the horticultural advisor for the UC Extension office in Marin. “This is a bad year to be an oak tree.”

There are two main problems plaguing local oaks. The primary, and most concerning, is the ongoing spread of sudden oak death. The second is an outbreak of the oak worm, a defoliator that appears cyclically every five to seven years. Oak trees are adapted to resist the oak worm, and though the trees appear to be in dire condition they should be healthy next year.

“Oak worm is more of a cosmetic issue,” Swain said. “Although it might push a few stressed oaks over the edge.” Worm damage can be distinguished from sudden oak death by the lack of intact, dead leaves.

The expansion of sudden oak death is a much more significant concern. Though Marin is one of the areas where the disease was first discovered in 1995, there are many areas that have remained uninfected until recently. “It skips over spots, and then in later years those stands may have high mortality,” said Mike Swezy, the natural resource manager for the Marin Municipal Water District. The distribution maps that were developed in 2006 are already out of date, Swain said.

The rate at which the disease spreads is based on weather conditions. The current spread was caused by a warm, rainy spring in 2005 that nurtured the spread of the disease, killing a larger number of trees for the last two years.

“What we’re seeing is an ecological disaster in slow motion,” said Swezy. “At this point, there’s not much good news out there.”

Biology
Sudden oak death was first noticed when tanoak, which are not true oaks, began dying off in the mid-1990s said Katie Palmieri, spokeswoman for the California oak mortality task force. In the late 1990s the disease was also found to be killing coast live oak, canyon oak, black oak and Shreve’s oak.

Phytophthora ramorum, one of a group of organisms called water molds that are not true fungi, was finally identified as the cause of the die off in 2000. It is not native to North America or Germany – the two places where it has been found. Scientists’ think it may be from south central or Southeast Asia, since that is where many of the organisms that it attacks best, such as tanoak and rhododendron, are from.

Phytophthora actually causes two separate diseases, Palmieri said. The first is sudden oak death, which is widely known and usually kills the plants that it infects. The second disease is ramorum blight, which generally is not fatal to host plants but causes leaves and twigs to die back while using them to reproduce and spread. Since the plants carrying ramorum blight are used to build up spore levels, they are a driving force in dispersal of the pathogen.

Spots emerge on the leaves of infected plants, producing spores that spread on wind driven rains, as well as and on people’s shoes or tires. California bay laurel is the most virile of those hosts, though redwoods, rhododendron and many other species catch it also.

Tanoak is the only plant known to be able to catch both ramorum blight and sudden oak death. “It has the least natural resistance,” Palmieri said. “ It gives itself the infection by raining spores down on its own trunk.”

Most oaks are expected to have reasonable resistance to sudden oak death, through there will be local die-offs. “Oaks are promiscuous, and they easily hybridize and cross between species,” Swain said. This promiscuity gives them extra genetic variability and hence resources to survive diseases.

Conversely, tanoak has no species that it can hybridize with, and Swain is concerned it could eventually go extinct. “We just have to wait and see. Chestnut blight in the Appalachians took about 40 years or longer to work its way through the entire population – it was the dominant canopy tree of the eastern seaboard, and its gone now.”

Tanoak is one of the few trees that lives among redwoods, and many species, such as squirrels and deer, depend on its large, fleshy nut for protein. The tree is also an important part of the cultural heritage of local Native Americans, Palmieri said.

Prognosis
Patchy tree loss from sudden oak death is inevitable, which leaves many landowners wondering what practical steps they can take to protect their property. One recommended step is the treatment of oaks and tanoaks with nutrient supplements such as azomite or agri-fos, though the second is the only one endorsed by officials such as the UC cooperative extension.

The supplements can be applied externally or injected, and are only effective on trees that are still healthy. Because the process is time consuming and expensive, it’s not a large-scale solution but may save individual trees to which people have aesthetic, emotional or cultural attachments.

A second small-scale solution is the removal of selected bay trees that are close to individual healthy oaks that landowners hope to save. This is a solution that experts suggest reluctantly. Bays are an important part of the local ecology, more so because they produce large nuts and are resistant to sudden oak death. There is also a risk of creating large unwanted clearings if the bays are removed and the oaks die anyway, which is a strong possibility.

The only other option for preventing spread of the disease is good hygiene. Everyone, hikers especially, should clean their boots and their tires or risk transporting the spores.
Ranchers, and others who are managing large properties, should consider planting sudden oak death resistant trees in their understory to diminish the possibility of weed invasion and erosion if the oak canopy is killed off. Management of dead trees can help prevent fire hazard. The best solution is to fall the trees and remove their branches so they can’t act as ladder fuel, carrying flames from the ground level into the forest canopy.

The picture, however, isn’t as bleak as it may seem. The organism isn’t expected to spread far inland since it appears to favor moderate temperatures and moist areas, especially the coastal fog belt. And whatever happens, the rate of change is slow.
“There are probably thousands of trees that have been hit by the oak moth in West Marin,” Swains said, “The number of trees that are dying from sudden oak death are comparatively few, probably on a scale of tens or twenties.”

Interview with Jane Hirshfield

Poet Jane Hirshfield, a longtime resident of Marin, vividly overlays the depth of human emotion on a landscape of delicate observations. Her poems range from the spiritual to the political, exhibiting what reviewers have described as “a succinct wisdom”. Published in The Nation as a college student, Hirshfield spent eight years studying Zen before returning to a life of poetry. She now has published six books of poetry, one book of essays and three books of translations from Japanese. She has received several of the highest achievements in American poetry, including National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundation fellowships. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review and many other publications. Hirshfield participated in the River of Words benefit at Toby’s Feed Barn on Friday, October 5, along with Robert Haas, Linda Pastan and Joyce Kouffman. Light reporter Jacoba Charles interviewed Hirshfield in her home last week.


Light: Where do you fit into a literary tradition?

Hirshfield: I actually wish that we didn’t all put ourselves on labeled shelves as much as we do. One of the troubles with being identified as a “Zen poet” is that people who have strange ideas about Zen will put them onto my poems, which my work never mentions at all.

Light: And yet many people call you a Californian poet.

Hirshfield: Well, of course Gary Snyder is a Californian poet, and of course Robertson Jeffers, who happened to have been born in Pennsylvania. Also Czeslaw Milosz who lived here for 40 years in exile from Poland and even Bertolt Brecht, who was in exile in Hollywood during the second world war, but probably not Robert Frost, who happened to be born in San Francisco.

To me, that is who a California poet is. Some were born here, some came here, some were here very briefly but wrote great poems about it. Very few of us are native stock, native plants. This landscape and this culture are wildly hybrid - and that’s what makes them open and alive. I really want a bouillabaisse community, the phrase “mongrel vigor”. My garden has a lot of California natives in it, but I want the non-natives who belong here too.

You could also put me in a lineage of environmental poets; the natural world suffuses my poetry. I want the company of other creatures beyond the human world or the human point of view. I think that’s what poetry does: if you have an image of Mount Tam in a poem, or a bobcat in a poem, you can’t name those things without taking a little bit of their life and welcoming it into yours. You become part of one another in that moment of making a metaphor, making an image, describing a morning.

Light: How has the practice of Buddhism helped you on your path?

Hirshfield: My way of moving through the world, and through my life, is much more of a listening than a dictation. It’s waiting to see what might reveal itself and trying to keep the ego out of the way rather than let it dominate.

There's a great deal of danger in idealizing Zen practice. It’s not about annihilation of the individual into some vague bliss state or great acceptance. You know suffering is inevitable and yet certain kinds of suffering are not acceptable; the suffering in Burma today is not acceptable, and that’s why the Buddhist monks came out of their monasteries and put themselves in harms way. They were saying, “If you believe in compassion toward all being, this is not right.”

So that is something which comes out of the willingness to actually take a stand and have a position but to do so not in service of the personal ego. And for that we need practice – one just has to keep trying. There’s no such thing as permanent success.

I’m working now on a lecture about a Japanese haiku poet, Basho, who says that a poem is only alive as long as it’s on the writing desk. As soon as the ink has dried it's just another piece of paper.

Light: Do you have a regular writing practice?

Hirshfield: No, I’m the bad work-ethic poet (laughs). It sometimes feels that every other poet in America is writing a poem every day now. But if I don’t have anything that needs saying through me, I write so horribly, as Emily Dickenson said, “it would embarrass my dog.” My dog’s been dead for some years now, and she would still be embarrassed.

Light: Do you make up for that in other ways?

There was a very good piece I once heard, which said, “it might not be possible to write every day, but its possible to do something every day that sustains the life of poetry.” That might be reading a poem, it might be noticing something, it might be meditating, it might be having a slightly more honest and deep connection with whoever you’re talking to than one could have had; it might be turning toward the difficult.

Its almost as if I have two different lives. There’s the life that the poetry comes from, which is at home: quiet, extraordinarily introverted, extraordinarily private and solitary. Then there’s the life which that has, very ironically, brought me to, which is standing in front of 100 or 600 or 3000 people, saying the poems and being available. It’s very strange to me how the life of poetry demanded that I learn to balance my basic nature.

Light: How has that challenge of public speaking and being on the road has informed your poetry?

Hirshfield: Anything that expands the life has to expand the poems. With me it’s not necessarily direct and immediate. For example, in May I was invited to join a very small group of American writers on an amazing trip to Syria, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, Greece and Turkey. We met with university students and a very odd assortment of other people including the grand mufti of Syria and also the baklava king of Istanbul.

It was a remarkable thing to be permitted to do and I know it’s changed me, but it’s not like I came home and started writing poems directly about the experience.

In six years maybe some crushed pistachios will show up in a poem, and that will go back to this trip.

Light: What struck you most about that trip?

Hirshfield: When you travel on the highway between Aleppo and Damascus and you go by a highway sign for Baghdad. Just as if it were, you know, Sacramento between San Francisco and LA.

I saw that sign and I wanted to weep because it might as well have been labeled “this way to hell” - and it looked so ordinary. It looked so normal. It’s just a highway turnoff, like any other in our civilized world. It was a really powerful experience.

Light: Where do you fit in with the general culture of America?

Hirshfield: I don’t think anyone becomes a poet because they fit comfortably into mainstream American consumerist society. I think people are drawn to poetry because they are skeptical and they want something more.

I almost hate saying that because it assumes that there is anybody who is really comfortable and happy with a K-mart life. Who is that person? I don’t know that person, I’m not sure that they exist. Everybody has a child who’s died, or….tragedy is absolutely egalitarian. It visits every life and I don’t think that anybody escapes without feeling that it has asked them for more wisdom than they have, for more capacity for feeling than they have, and what do you do? You struggle.

One of my poems ends with the line, “the world asks of us only the strength that we have, and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it.”

Fishermen face more red tape

Two weeks ago, the first Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) went into effect along the central coast of California. The sanctuaries, an unprecedented step toward protecting the ocean’s ecosystems, will be established along the state’s 1,100-mile coastline in the next four years. Planning has already begun for the north central region, which spans the coast from Santa Cruz to Fort Bragg.

With dramatic changes to the marine landscape imminent, local fishermen in Bolinas and Bodega Bay have begun to worry about the impact MPAs will have on their future.

“If they put a sanctuary where you’re fishing all the time, then you’re out of business,” said Harold Ames, a tan and vigorous local who has been fishing out of Bodega Bay for nearly all of his 79 years. Jeremy Dierks, a Bolinas fisherman, echoed the sentiment.

“I’m all for protecting areas and protecting species, but it has to be done right,” Dierks said.

Many of the local fishermen feel that their way of life is already threatened. In the Bodega Harbor, sailboats’ single masts and speedboats’ sleek fiberglass hulls bob amid the more rugged company of commercial vessels.

“Bodega Bay used to be a much more booming port,” said Tom Moore, a biologist with the Department of Fish and Game who has been stationed in the bay for nearly two decades. In 1988, 3.5 million tons of Chinook salmon were brought ashore. Last year, only 440,000 tons were landed.

“In the early 90s there were 13 big trawlers in here delivering millions of pounds every month,” Moore said. “Now we see small or medium sized trawlers every few months.”

Despite inevitable year-to-year fluctuations, a similar decline can be seen in the landing figures for Tomales Bay and Bolinas. The main commercial catches in the bay today are crab, salmon and albacore. Other fisheries, such as rockfish and urchins, have been severely curtailed.

Moore says that the change comes from a confluence of increased regulations and costs to fishermen and the relatively stable market price of fish.

The MPAs will add another layer of complexity, and some fishermen worry that the overlapping laws will restrict them from fishing entirely.

“It seems like the right hand is not talking to the left hand,” Dierks said. He describes the Farrallone islands, which are almost certainly going to be established as an MPA, as the only place left where it is still legal for him to catch rockfish. There are few enough locals doing certain types of fishing that Dierks hopes that the plan can include an exemption for them.

“If they take both islands for an MPA, that could be the end of the story for us.” Dierks said. “We already have a law that says you can’t fish in less than 60 feet or more than 180, which basically forces us into one teeny area around the island. If we lose that, there’s nowhere left.”

Moore said that these fears are not unwarranted. “Based on the MPAs that already went in, the fishermen probably should be worried,” he said. “Fishermen need to stay involved: you have all these different stakeholders in there fighting for access.”

Not all areas that are included in an MPA will be completely closed to fishing. Of the 29 MPAs that were established in the central coast area, 15 are conservation areas that allow some commercial and recreational fishing. All fishing is prohibited in 13, and one allows recreational fishing only.

“The idea is that there will be such an abundance of fish that they’ll spill over into the areas outside of them,” said Chamois Andersen, spokeswoman for the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative, the agency that is in charge of designing the sanctuaries. “But that takes time, so there’s going to be some short term impacts to the fishermen.” She added that the fishermen do have a seat at the table.

The north central coast sanctuaries are expected to be up and running by the end of 2008, said Andersen. The Department of Fish and Game will select a final plan from several options, which are currently being developed by a group of 23 regional stakeholders under the supervision of a scientific advisory committee.

The stakeholders include Josh Churchman, a commercial fisherman from Bolinas, Don Neubacher, the superintendent of the Point Reyes National Seashore and Fred Smith, director of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin.

“California is the first state in the nation to develop parks in state waters,” Andersen said. “There are already a bunch of marine parks, but they have never been managed under one system. This is making them more cohesive and more connected along the coast.”

What the Marine Protected Areas will actually mean to fishermen, and to the health of our oceans, is still unknown.