from Physics for the Heart
Dale Pendell:
San Tomas Creek
I had got used
to walking,
afternoons
sometimes,
when the joggers were back
at their desks,
along
San Tomas
Creek, as a break
from chairs,
computers, and
fluorescent light.
The creek
is controlled,
mostly cemented,
but for a block or two still running
on a sandy bed,
provided
an island habitat for a few
species of plants,
animals, and birds.
In the middle
of a hundred
square miles of
concrete
and asphalt, I took some pleasure
in monkey flowers,
alder and willow,
coyote brush, and adventive
weeds:
rushes and
horsetails, veronica,
water primrose.
A few species new
to me I collected,
and hung the pressed
specimens in my office. I began to learn
birding: ducks
with the seasons,
egrets, black phoebes, kestrel.
A burrowing owl lived there
in a den, killdeer in the shallows,
while a young
red-tailed hawk soared,
leisurely, overhead.
For some weeks
was too busy
to get out, and when did,
was struck by the quiet:
no ground squirrels
scurried off
at my approach, not a single killdeer
peeped, nothing
moved. It was stilled.
Then I saw:
every leaf and branch of foliage
of the grasses,
shrubs, and trees
was browned and crisping,
and I thought,
"sprayed!"
Above the banks,
in a lone vacant acre
between an Intel
building and some other
high technology building, next to
the building where
I work, next to miles
of the same, I gazed at the remnants
of an old orchard
and thought, how,
in one generation, 25,000 hectares
of the best bottom
land in the world is lost
for an age.
We build robots
and a landscape to
suit them.
Jokingly, I
used to tell botanical friends
that part of my
work was a study
of the ecology of San Tomas de Aquino Creek.
A foreman from the
Water District
and a busload of boys
from the
with rakes and chainsaws in three days.
This is my report.