Places in California Where Water Enters the Ocean

The River she is flowing, flowing and growing.

The river she is flowing down to the sea.

Mother Earth carry me, your child I will always be.

Mother Earth carry me, back to the sea!

                  A Native American Song by Sun Bear

A watershed is an area or entire region where water changes direction and flows downhill.  The coast is the edge, the point of arrival.  The sea receives all of the gifts and poisons of the mountains and cities without discrimination.  There is a sense of surrender that occurs at places where the ocean absorbs its waters.  It can be the heavy surrender of a big river, like the Russian or Klamath in winter, or the delicate surrender of a nameless creek reduced to a light trickle in the summer heat.  Much water enters the ocean unseen from sources underground at the lips of the waves.  Moreover, the meeting place of river and sea can change more than a hundred feet in a matter of months.  Fresh water submits effortlessly, winding with the tow of gravity in chorus with the subtly changing geography of the beach.

I first began photographing places where water enters the ocean in November 1999.  It soon became clear that I had to greet the project with the same sense of surrender.  A bodysurfer cannot control a wave, but must rather swim into it, and abandon himself while skillfully joining its swell to participate with its power.  Likewise, a land and seascape photographer must endeavor to participate with a place, listen to its salty secrets, respect its rhythms, and explore its sparkle.  Yet the beach these days is not all sand and seaweed.  I had to address the presence of the beer can.  Should I include or exclude it within the camera's frame?  I decided to be fair.  I would not seek out the beer cans, yet neither would I ignore them.  I decided to show what was there, namely, a coast simultaneously pure and polluted, wild and domesticated, violent and lazy.

Seagulls like to live where rivers meet the sea.  They find abundant food and life there.  Probably for the same reasons, Native Americans had often established villages near a river's end.  Also, families enjoy walking to the mouth of creeks.  There is almost a magnetic attraction to such places.  The joining of two ecosystems creates a third, and within this ambiguous zone life thrives.  It is probably because of this that the meeting of river and sea has frequently been likened to the amorous coming together of man and woman in poetry and popular song.  There is an emptying of essence from one person into another, and within that union a third life is born.  The metaphor of a river entering the ocean is a common and ancient one.  It appears in many spiritual traditions and has endured to modernity.  The metaphor simultaneously addresses both impermanence and rebirth.  A contemporary example can be found in Hiroyuki Itsuki's wonderful book Tariki (translated by Joseph Robert, Kodansha, Tokyo, 2001)."When our voyage as a single drop of water comes to its end, we return to the sea.  Embraced by the Mother Sea, we are one with all the other drops, until the light and the warmth of the sun embraces us and carries us into the sky.  And then we fall to earth again. It is a childlike metaphor, I know; yet, I feel as if I can actually see it."

The zones where water enters the ocean have been severely tested in recent times.  Nowhere is this more apparent than at Orange County's Aliso Creek, and further north in central California at the mouth of the Pajora River, and in northern California at the mouth of the once mighty Eel River.  Storm drain runoff from inland is a serious problem anywhere it happens.  It is undeniable that the pollution of the beaches is a direct result of densely packed population and irresponsible industry upstream.  Yet, it can also manifest in less visible ways, even in places as pristine as Big Sur, arguably one of the most beautiful places on the planet.  An encounter with weeds sprayed with toxic pesticides, finding its way in diluted form to swimmers a short distance to the west, can be a real wake up call, questioning the good intentions of nature management.  Yet, surfers and swimmers all too often avoid the warning signage.  Who can blame them?  The ocean calls to us all, and we all have a part to play in what goes, and what doesn't go in it.

 The meeting of river and sea is often a healing place. When left to itself, it speaks of life in balance to whoever cares to listen.  That being said, the reality is that there is only one major river in California alleged to be undamed.  The Smith River winds through the mountains and coastal plain free of all control and glides into the Pacific without flotsam and jetsam just below the Oregon border.  The Smith River contrasts starkly with the ailing Los Angeles River, now mostly concrete, much of it underground.  Its current route to the sea bears little semblance to earlier times.  Not all of its residents are aware that Los Angeles even has a river.  When people can no longer go to the sea for psychic recovery and physical recreation, but instead must lobby to heal the rivers and creeks that enter it, the message is clear -life is out of balance.  Our culture is poised on the edge of a watershed of another sort, a turning point, an opportunity to responsibly participate with our place, and surrender like a river to the regenerative power of the sea.