Delta Blues

(Page 2 of 5)

It was once called a back swamp. As the tide rolled in and out, the delta's wetlands would flood, then dry out, exposing a complex terrain that befuddled early white visitors. In 1846, one of them, Edwin Bryant, described "a terraqueous labyrinth of such intricacy, that unskillful and inexperienced navigators have been lost for many days in it, and some, I have been told, have perished." Others navigated the delta more deftly: grizzlies and elk, sandhill cranes and tundra swans. Giant bulrushes called tules grew in dense clusters, and sycamores overhung the riverbanks.

In the mid-1800s, with a push from Congress, settlers began to "reclaim" the delta for agriculture. They drained the marshes, forming islands like Rindge Tract, then built soil levees (often using Chinese-American labor) to keep them from flooding. By the 1920s the delta looked pretty much the way it does today. The resulting farmland was incredibly fertile, producing crops like sugar beets and pears. The town of Isleton, on the delta's west side, was dubbed the Asparagus Capital of the World. In the 1950s its canneries exported more than 300,000 cases annually. But the organic soil is prone to oxidizing, compacting, and blowing away. As it disappeared, the islands began sinking until many were below sea level -- in some cases as much as 25 feet. This put pressure on the levees, which cracked and were periodically overtopped. Landowners patched the holes and piled on more dirt.

Meanwhile, California grew. The Stockton Deep Water Ship Channel was dredged through the delta in 1933, and incoming vessels introduced alien plants and animals that thrived in the altered ecosystem. And the state's drier regions began eyeing the delta thirstily. In 1951 the federal government finished building its pumping plant near the south delta town of Tracy, giving San Joaquin Valley farmers their first stable supply of irrigation water. The Tracy plant is enormous, its six pumps powered by enough juice to move more than 16 million cubic feet of water per hour. From there the water is lifted into a canal that runs
117 miles into the valley. In 1968 the state built a second facility, this one to serve California's booming south, including Los Angeles and San Diego. Some years, depending on the rainfall, the two stations divert enough water to flood 1,000 football fields more than a mile deep.

Despite all these changes, the delta remained a land in isolation. Marci Coglianese moved from San Francisco to Rio Vista, a town on the delta's western edge, in 1966. "It was like going back into the fifties," she says. "There was a clock face outside City Hall, but it had no hands. That was the perfect metaphor: Rio Vista was the town that time forgot." Even today, as we sit inside a downtown bakery, the town has a certain Route 66 feel. Outside Main Street's Striper Cafe, a neon sign depicts a striped bass peering dolefully at a martini glass.

At first, Coglianese couldn't wait to leave. But over time she fell captive to the subtleties of delta light. "What looked all tan and muddy green was actually a whole spectrum of colors," she says. When Isleton, five miles away, flooded in 1972, "everybody came out to try to save the levee," she recalls. Men slung sandbags. Women cooked for refugees who had crossed the Sacramento River to Rio Vista. "A lot of people had folks living in their backyards in travel trailers or took families into the house," she says. "I had never seen that kind of person-to-person connection." Coglianese not only stayed; she eventually became mayor, serving from 2000 to 2004.

Continued...