Renewing Our Energies

Image: The place where solitude lives: King Range National Conservation Area, California. Photo by Brian Richter

In September I had the opportunity to visit the mouth of the Mattole River in northern California, which marks the northern boundary of the magnificent King Range National Conservation Area near Petrolia. Within the NCA you’re able to walk the longest, wildest remaining stretch of California’s coast: beautiful black sand beaches, tidal pools, vertical sea cliffs, crashing surf, barking sea lions, and, most importantly, soul-satisfying solitude.

To get there requires traveling for a couple of hours down a long, winding, steep and rutted mountainous road. But when you finally arrive at the beach, any remnant travel stress quickly fades with the misty clouds of moisture evaporating from the sea.

The Mattole River does not reach the ocean during the summer months. Each year, as winter rains and high river flows dwindle to a trickling stream, the powerful and persistent push of ocean waves at the river mouth piles sand high up onto the beach, blocking and sealing off the river’s passage. The naturally impounded river becomes a quiescent pool in summer. Only the massive driftwood logs piled along the river’s banks presage the magical transformation that in winter will turn this now-placid river into a roiling, turbid, force of nature.

Clambering over massive redwood and fir driftwood logs, you marvel at how the river can overcome the four-foot-high sand dam that has accumulated there and regain its exodus to the sea. I imagine it takes a few early rains to begin raising the pooled river, higher and higher, and then finally a bigger storm roars in off the Pacific Ocean and unleashes a liberating flood on the watershed. River regeneration. Year after year. Energy cycling.

When the river finally breaks free, thousands of coho and Chinook salmon that have been patiently waiting just offshore are able to reoccupy their native stream, bursting upriver under the guidance of ancestral orientation systems that still elude our comprehension.

The salmon were almost lost from this river by the 1970’s. Destructive timber harvesting had unleashed mountains of sediment that spilled into and choked the river, smothering the deep green pools that harbor salmon. In his impassioned and beautifully written book Totem Salmon, Freeman House chronicles the story of a small community of local residents that in the early 1980s began restoring the fish populations, literally one fish at a time. They would carefully capture a few salmon in their makeshift pens, gingerly milking eggs from females and milt (semen) from the males. Mix and pray for offspring. They banded under the banner of the Mattole Restoration Council, and over the past 36 years their ranks grew and their work expanded to the entirety of the Mattole’s watershed.

The MRC is today one of North America’s oldest community-led watershed restoration organizations. Key to their success has been their emphasis on youth education and training. By so doing they pass knowledge of fish and watersheds from generation to generation, re-generating their own energies and passion for the river.

We can all draw inspiration from the Mattole Restoration Council and the hundreds of other local watershed groups working tirelessly to protect their home rivers. The rivers need our help now as never before due to regulatory rollbacks and increased development pressure. This is our call to action.

To contribute to the Mattole Restoration Council click here.

To advance the work of river conservation organizations across the country through River Network click here.

“What I came to say was,
teach the children about the cycles.
The life cycles. All other cycles.
That’s what it’s all about, and it’s all forgot.”

“For/From Lew”, a poem by Gary Snyder