And the Rains Finally Came

I walked outside on Thursday morning and it hit me. The air smelled so so good! The high humidity just before it started raining was making the trees exhale the most delicious flavor.

We hadn't smelled moist air like that in weeks. Since around Thanksgiving, aside from a quarter of an inch of rain in December, it had been cold and dry. On Tuesday morning I ran up the hill on the north side of the valley and looked down from a grassy slope thawing in the morning sun--down into the frosty foggy white valley bottom, as if looking into a pool of iced-over water. The golf course was as white as if a dusting of snow had fallen. The air in the valley bottom was thick with white fog and wispy smoke and when combined with the white ground, was a view unlike any I had ever seen. It contrasted sharply with the green trees and sunny thawed slopes above the inversion layer.

The morning that the rain finally came,
it didn't just smell good because it was wet. It was also above freezing--the first morning that hadn't dropped into the 20s in almost two weeks.

The rain started off slow. It rained all day and all night, and the next day. It was the next afternoon when things really started happening, after about an inch had fallen. San Geronimo Creek had been flowing at about 1/2 of a cubic foot per second all of January. On January 19th, at noon it had reached 2.3 cfs. It was 15 cfs by 4pm, and 23 cfs by 5pm. Then: 0.45, 0.35, 0.25, 0.55, 0.55, 0.25 - these were roughly the inches of rain each hour between 5pm and 11pm. Six hours in a row of more than a quarter inch per hour rainfall! The rain started tapering off at 10pm but the creek peaked at 407 cfs at 11pm at the Lagunitas gauge.

Early in the dark morning hours, the sound of the rain had subsided to occasional drips from the trees, while the sound of the rushing creek dominated the night in back of the house. It sounded like someone had left the water running. The creek didn't get nearly this high during the November storms.

In the front of the house, there was another sound. As I carried my not-quite-sleepy-enough son through the living room, as I often do on nighttime walks through the house to try to get him back to sleep, I heard what sounded like crickets in front. Hundreds, maybe thousands of crickets. When I put our son down, my half-asleep wife was awake enough and wise enough to tell me they were frogs. I went to the front door, opened it, and was greeted by the jubilant chorus of the Pacific Tree Frogs filling the night, welcoming all the water. I should have known they were frogs. We hear them here all the time--especially at night, but very often there is the occasional frog calling during the day along a road or trail. But during the last couple of weeks they had gone relatively silent. Now they sounded quite pleased.

The next morning, the frogs were quiet, but the creek was not. It was still flowing at about 50 cfs. I saw a small grey fish jumping upstream at Roy's Pools. On a walk we saw a rainbow, and promptly got rained and hailed on. It later turned into a gorgeous, blustery, sunny day.

After watching the valiant Silver Salmon jump up The Inkwells,
we walked toward the dam and saw numerous spawning fish
in Lagunitas Creek. Photo by Erika Obedzinski.

Later in the afternoon, we went to the Leo Cronin Fish Viewing Area at the confluence of San Geronimo and Lagunitas Creeks. Coho Salmon must jump through The Inkwells--a series of pools and waterfalls--in order to ascend San Geronimo Creek. By this time the flow was down to 25 cfs, and the determined fish were making it up the first and second fall into the small roiling pool below the third fall. We did not see any make it past the third fall, where they would enter a larger pool and then have a series of more gradual cascades to ascend to the languid creek. Bystanders were loudly cheering the fish jumping up the first fall.

It is interesting moving to a new area, where you know who people are but they don't know you. In Mono County, the first few years felt like that until I eventually became one of the people known by the newcomers before I would know them. At The Inkwells, it seemed like a crowd of random people until my wife (who grew up here) pointed out that it was mostly locals--including Jean, who runs the San Geronimo Valley Planning Group; Todd, who runs the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network; and Steve, a Marin County Supervisor who was there with my wife's middle school teacher.

This morning it began raining again, and it has rained all day. My wife was singing and playing Kate Wolf on the piano, and I decided to read about this much-loved singer-songwriter who has a plaque dedicated to her at the San Geronimo Valley Community Center. Apparently the year she spent here--with a studio in Forest Knolls, taking massage classes at the community center and volunteering there, as well as working for the Point Reyes Light newspaper--was the "first time she felt really a part of the community," according to Utah Phillips. And she is now another local who I feel like I know and admire, but who didn't know me. Historical figures like Kate Wolf and John Muir are a part of my community, and a part of the landscape we all share, even though they are long gone. But their music and words and thoughts and ideas are not gone, and we share them with each other just like we share those of the currently living community members.

As the rain falls louder and harder, the creek is rising again, providing a conduit for the salmon that are desperately swimming upstream to spawn the next generation--a generation that as it dies spawns another generation, and on and on and on. I hope our human community will never be impoverished by their absence. But if the salmon and the frogs are going to make it, we are all going to need to go out of our way to help them. Community members help each other out. A little inconvenience, and perhaps even the loss of a few dollars in property values, will be well worth the long-term benefits of retaining these endangered members of our community.

What is the legacy you wish to leave?