maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

ee cummings

There is so much to say about this poem and how it applies to the sleepy awakening of interest in the other that comes from our first awareness of nature. Even though we are surrounded by people, I’m fairly sure we begin life uncertain whether or not they are really only aspects of ourselves. This isn’t really so surprising since we start out our existence as a piece of someone else. It takes a while to be sure of boundaries and territories.

From day one though, we know the butterfly in the garden is not ourselves, and the bubble-blowing crab that chases us at the beach is “other”. This is an essential fact of our awakening lives. The natural world is impervious to our cries and resists our powerful language, and this makes it “outside”, “other” and “in relation to”. This means that every hour we spend watching bugs in the grass or birds in their nests or (beavers building dams), we are confronting the murky edges of self, the limits of what we control and influence, and the monumental and heartbreaking awareness of our own “finite-ness”; of our own death.

We do not go on forever. We cannot control everything. We are a piece of the world but not all of it. These are hard lessons that our parents alone cannot possibly teach us.The natural world can.

I was thinking about this last week when I heard of a concept being developed for a summer program centered around the estuaries and tailored for children on the “spectrum” of autism and asperger’s disorder. The idea is to gradually focus the child’s interest in the relationships of living things, and to link that awareness to a greater sense of community. Of course I thought about the way these particular beavers in this particular watershed helped me find so much of my own voice, and made me aware of so much I had never heard or thought. I thought about them being a part of Martinez’ estuary, and soundly confronting the “autistic” view of the council, who seemingly had absolutely no expectation or awareness of the enormous public response their actions would generate.The beavers introduced me to people I would never have met, and I dare say they introduced the council to a host of people they might rather have never met. I’m thinking Alhambra creek has helped treat our autism, but Martinez still has a ways to go.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

Wednesday’s city council meeting was almost of beaver vintage. It was SRO packed full of teachers and parents and city workers. A sea of orange caution t-shirts lined the first three rows of chairs and sat there ungraciously while old ladies stood at the back. In silent pauses you could hear the sound of children playing on the porch while they waited for their parents. Patient-looking women with classroom poise passed around tupperwear containers of chocolate chip cookies.

At that first body count everyone should have known how the meeting would end. A room beyond full of people willing to share cookies is a dangerous thing. The city should have just unfolded its hands and wrote out the check right then. Superindentent Rami Muth (who inherited woes she could not have possibly imagined) stood up and gave an impassioned, level, persuasive speech for the city to unclench its purse strings and help MUSD maintain the important 20-1 teacher ratio for K-3. She spoke so well the room was silent when she left the podium. A few of us clapped like it mattered and the room burst into applause.

The first speaker was an 11 year-old boy whose mom had gotten a pink slip. He bravely took the podium and started to say how important that school had been to him. He promptly burst into tears as only an 11 year old boy can. His mom came to stand with him. He finished his comments through sobs and then took his seat.

Game. Set. Match. At that moment the city should have just handed its atm card to the crowd and said, is this enough? The meeting was over, the brittle back of “withold” had been fractured by the gentle persuasion of “give”. I knew how it was going to end. (To be honest, I may have cynically wondered how that boy felt about beavers because he would be a powerful weapon if carefully used….) Still the city insisted on protocol and the meeting wore on.

I will say our City Manager, from the very get-go, seemed to know which way the wind was blowing. Before the meeting there was a deal in the works for the school to pay back a loan through turning part of one of their playgrounds into the Corp Yard for the city, (ostensibly so the then-vacated area next to the beavers could be used to make another 4 story senior center). The City Manager began by saying that the idea wasn’t possible, because of hazardous materials, etc, and looked at the council as if he had told them this before. It reminded me of the story I heard about his hiring. When asked about handling the beaver issue in Martinez he had apparently shaken his head and said knowingly, “You are never getting rid of those beavers. Better just face it”.

So how many nails is that in the city’s coffin (coffers?) SRO, cookies, crying and City Manager. There were more. The biggest came from the city workers union representative. The orange shirts were there because they objected to the city refusing to open its reserves to pay them, but agreeing to do so for the school district. They felt that the city giving up this money meant further cutting down the road. It reminded me again of the beaver subcommittee when one night their actions of allegedly ripping out the dam was up for discussion. News of the damage had hit the papers and the director was very upset about it.  That night a similar sea of orange lined the back row to show solidarity.

On Wednesday they were a wave that couldn’t read which way the tide was turning. Instead of earning brownie points by gallantly standing up to offer their chairs to little old ladies in the back, (which would have allowed them to stand on strapping young lad display at the wall), they hunched their shoulders and ignored the entire room. Their representative got up and described how he had graduated from larger classrooms and turned out fine. With ear-splitting tone deafness he suggested that parents needed to volunteer in the classroom. (You could literally see the hair stand up on the backs of all the parents and teachers necks.) He pointed out helpfully that grades k-3 were not that important and its not like they were teaching the kids Calculus. I wanted to say sit down!  Stop helping these men! Someone hand that man a cookie so his mouth is full. You are doing your union no favors.

One of our more colorful regulars called it like it was when he got up to accuse the city of playing both ends against the middle. “These guys work hard, they deserve to be compensated.” He argued. “And these teachers have important jobs and they deserve to be protected.” His accusation was hard to question, “You guys do this all the time. You make different sides fight each other. The truth is you can do this all, and you should.”

Even the obligatory public comment that questioned why a city could spent 300,000 on BEAVERS (goodness our beavers are greedy) and not on its children, wasn’t too upsetting. It, like everything, was fairly well articulated and impassioned. The Virginia Hills dismissive man who suggested that the city money should not go to the district where only half of Martinez residents are enrolled was countered by the mayor’s own admission that for years the city has paid for crossing guards in that district and never for MUSD.

It reminded me most of the beaver meeting because the community tipping point had been reached. What I mean by that is that there are regulars at city meetings, like the colorful speaker, and the city is used to lying in front of them. Then there are semi-regulars at some city meetings, of which I have unwillingly become one, and the city would prefer not to lie very much in front of them, (although they will if sheetpile is involved). And then there are those rare meetings full of people who have never been to a meeting before, who believe in their trusting hearts that the council represents their interests. The city HATES to be caught lying in front of them. And when they show up, the outcome is always predictable.

I’m reminded of Abraham Lincoln…

You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

The vote was 4-1 to award the school the loan. Chocolate chip cookies all around!

At last night’s JMA board meeting I saw this entreaty penned with earnest flourish in an original letter by John Muir to a book seller in Texas. He was writing to ask for support against the infamous Hetch Hetchy Dam, a battle that Muir ultimately lost. Apparently this closing remark, “Help us if you can”, was a common request in his persuasive letters to friends and potential friends, alike.

These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.

Source: John Muir, The Yosemite (New York: Century, 1912), 255–257, 260–262. Reprinted in Roderick Nash, The American Environment: Readings in The History of Conservation (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1968).

I was able to see this because last night curator Steve Pauly brought portions of the William and Mayme Kimes Collection, which the John Muir Association purchased ten years ago from these avid collectors and mountaineers. It contains (among other things) every edition of Muir’s books, signed and inscribed volumes, and much of Muir’s personal library. The idea is to eventually have this collection displayed at a visitor’s center at the Muir site, and to make it available for ongoing research into this important American voice.

One set of items in current discussion was Muir’s complete Shakespeare collection. Barbara Mossberg is a founding dean in in the college of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Cal State Monterey Bay. She is interested in how other writers, such as Shakespeare, Emerson, and Thoreau shaped Muir’s thinking and writing at the time. She wants access to the collection to analyze and understand Muir’s pertinent, delicate notes which he penciled into volumes along with underlines and favorite quotations. She believes this could help us understand how seminal writers influenced his work. The question before the board is how to safely allow that access so that Muir’s work can be better understood, and still preserved.

The Shakespeare collection was one of those J.M. Dent-looking pocket libraries with the complete volumes enclosed in two boxes. He pulled Henry V from its place and read Muir’s notes from the back, a reference to the speech “Once more into the breech dear friends”  and my fingers literally itched to see what else Muir might have jotted down, oh say in the Hamlet volume. It was wonderful to be so close to the thinking of a man whose vision continues to give us so much.

As the collection was carefully packed away and Mr. Pauly concluded his presentation, I considered Muir’s epic advocacy. One thing I am learning in my time on the board, is that my romantic notion of him as this beloved farther of our National Parks is missing a hugely salient point.  He was the original “endless pressure, endlessly applied”. Muir was an advocate, a burr, a voice raised and written in fire, a prod, a nudge, a handshake and a branding iron for all those developers who wanted to carve up the land for profit, and all those bad scientists who wanted to keep saying things that weren’t true just because they had been taught them in school.

(In short, Muir was much, much, much more trouble than a woman trying to save beavers.)

The recognition pleases me enormously. I was afraid I was too outspoken to be accepted among the well respected John Muir Association, but it turns out I only barely qualify.

The New York Times Lead story in the Science Section was a series of NIMBY beaver tales. I like to think the Grey Lady slapped the Grey Owl soundly in the face yesterday and invited him into the parking lot for a bit of fist-to-cuffs. Apparently, 30 minutes away from Mike Callahan’s business in Massachusetts, (you know the one cryptically named “Beaver Solutions“) city engineers are beside themselves wondering what to do about the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, beaver problem.

CONCORD, Mass. — The dozens of public works officials, municipal engineers, conservation agents and others who crowded into a meeting room here one recent morning needed help. Property in their towns was flooding, they said. Culverts were clogged. Septic tanks were being overwhelmed.“We have a huge problem,” said David Pavlik, an engineer for the town of Lexington, where dams built by beavers have sent water flooding into the town’s sanitary sewers. “We trapped them,” he said. “We breached their dam. Nothing works. We are looking for long-term solutions.”

Ahhh not just “Beaver solutions”…”Beaver Final Solutions”.  Hmmm I wonder what that might be. Apparently near extermination wasn’t long termy enough. And I assume you wouldn’t suggest moving all the housing and roads into the desert. What else could possibly be a solution that works forever? How about a commitment to solve problems creatively when they arise, to restrict beavers from places you don’t want them to be, and a plan to manage their behavior so that you can tolerate them in other places? How about you stop blowing up dams and thinking its going to change their behavior?

It hasn’t changed YOURS, its unlikely to change THEIRS.

Around the nation, decades of environmental regulation, conservation efforts and changing land use have brought many species, like beavers, so far back from the brink that they are viewed as nuisances. As Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke University, put it, “We are finding they are inconvenient.”

Oh my God, No. Say it isn’t so. Not INCONVENIENT!!!!!!! The precious sacrament convenience of man is one of the seven golden benefits of walking upright, right after having our hands free and getting to have more sex than we have offspring. Don’t tell me its being threatened by the monogamous reproduction of an animal we nearly wiped off the planet 200 years ago. At long last beavers, have you no decency?

Today, Ms. Hajduk said, there are at least 30,000 beavers, all over the state.

Wow, that’s a lot. Maybe this whole environmental movement has gone too far. We obviously brought them back too much. How many did their used to be? 29,000? Oh wait, remember those historical trapping records that showed 60 to 80 beaver per mile of stream? I wonder how many miles of stream Massachusetts has. (Gosh the internet is useful. 4320 miles of stream in the commonwealth of Massachusetts.) Lets just multiply that by the low number of 60…how many beavers would we expect if we were back to that baseline? I mean if we had done an even adequate job of “bringing them back” 259,200. Let’s be generous and just round down to 200,000.

Uh oh. By the most conservative possible calculations, Massachusetts is short 170,000 beavers!

By 8 am yesterday morning I had received this article from three people. By nine I had written the author. And by ten had received an answer back. By 11, ten people had suggested I read it. The sad thing is that this slanderous bit of whining-from-people-who-should-know-better will have also been sent to every member of the city staff and council. Look, they’ll say! It’s in the NY Times! Beavers are harassing other cities not just ours! They’ll pat each other sympathetically on the back and say, I knew they weren’t worth a dam!

Never mind that the Ms Hajduk of the article will be presenting on beavers as PESTS at the next Urban Wildlife Conference in Massachusetts organized by John Hadidian of HSUS. John is a long time friend of the Martinez Beavers, and one speaker he just asked aboard is our own friend Mike Callahan who will be talking about flow devices, which we all know Fish & Game likes to say don’t work (except when they do). The conference is later this month and don’t you wish you could be there?

The article closes with mention of the good beavers can do in the habitat. Which is by far the best part, and the part the author anxiously pointed to when she wrote back.

As she and Dr. Griffin neared the pond, a group of wood ducks, alarmed by their approach, went squawking into the air. It was good to see them, Dr. Griffin said — they are among the species favored by hunters that the state is trying to encourage. She pointed to an osprey sitting on a dead tree. Ospreys were almost wiped out by DDT but are now back in Massachusetts, and this one was taking advantage of beaver-created habitat. Just then, a great blue heron glided to a landing in the pond, another guest of the beavers.

Impoundments like this one absorb water, especially in the spring, when streams swell with rain and snow runoff, Dr. Griffin said. And when the impoundment eventually silts up and the beavers move on, their dam will decay and the pond will drain, leaving unusually rich soil behind.

“These beaver meadows stand out like rich little oases,” Ms. Hajduk said.

Dr. Griffin said she and her colleagues emphasized these advantages in urging people to adopt “tolerance and coexistence as a first line of defense.”

Remember, no matter how much good they do, Massachusetts is still missing 170,000 beavers, so its a drop in the bucket.

We were once them,

and now are their custodians.

They know we are different

and their eyes tell us to keep our promise.

Geoffrey Lehmann: The Animals

This poem leaped at me from the pages of this issue of The New Yorker. I was just quietly minding my own business waiting for a Dr.’s appointment, when the beavers sneaked into my magazine and asked about my promise. Saving beavers is hard work. Sisyphus hard. Sometimes in the complexities of being educator, tour guide, researcher and booking agent, it becomes more difficult to maintain my primary role as custodian. Maybe I’m here writing the web page instead of down at the dam at dawn, or preparing for the next talk instead of sneaking down in the evening.

I remember, back when Skip was installing the leveler, and had taken the dam down by three terrifying feet, we were all in a panic that the beavers would leave. The first night a crowd watched while all (then six) beavers worked on repairing the dam, ripping out tulles and even taking sticks from the lodge. There were panicked phone calls and very upset supporters, and I went to sleep with an ache that I might never see my beloved beaver family again.

That night I dreamed I was standing at the shoreline of the Marina and saw the entire family swimming away in a line. I knew in the dream that they were relocating, that they had given up on this habitat and all our intrusions. In the dream I understood that they would never be our beavers ever again, but I was so grateful that I had seen them one last time. They were all together, no child had been left behind or parent scattered in the confusion. And they were all right, swimming away free and strong…and I could say goodbye.

I don’t know if that dream was my promise or not, but I know it felt like a commitment to see this labyrinthian journey through to its sweet and sad conclusions; to let these animals touch and reshape my life; to let the people who care about them build new pathways for understanding. Nothing looks the same as it did that night 18 months ago, but the beavers are weaving stories and I will keep my promise.

Heidi Perryman  July 26, 2007

One of most the delightful moments at the Wild Birds Unlimited fair was an approach from a retired teacher named Virginia, who stood patiently while I was talking to someone else and silently waited with a furry beaver puppet on her hand. She explained that her (3rd grade?) elementary classroom had been the “busy beavers” and that a parent who hand made puppets had made her the beaver original.

Now I’m a big fan of folkmanis, but this beaver was adorable, and had the slightly scruffy well loved look that told me he had a very active child-cuddled life.

(You’re all familiar I trust with the story of the velveteen rabbit and what it means for a favorite stuffed animal to become “real”? Well this beaver was well on its way…)

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day. “Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Virginia thought that since she wasn’t in the classroom anymore, she would give it to me to use in future child beaver presentations. She had carried it in a plastic baggie all the way to the bird store because she knew Worth A Dam would be there. She was absolutely delighted with the idea that the beaver would continue helping children.

As freely as this gift was offered, I knew it couldn’t be mine. This was a precious totem of her heroic adventures in the classroom battlefield and the light in her eyes told me it reminded her every time she held it why she started teaching in the first place. We agreed that she would keep the puppet, and that she would let me hold it for a while and take a picture with her iphone (of which she spoke so fondly I thought it might also be becoming “real” too…) and she would send me the photo when she could.

The moment I slipped on the puppet I could practically feel the energy and echos of a room full of laughing children. A sudden need to make a beaver voice possessed me, and I knew the first thing out of that beavers mouth would have to be “oh no! mayor rob was trying to kill me!” by the time he got to the sheetpile paneling in their lodge the beaver would have descended into a George Carlin monologue that wasn’t safe for public viewing.

I extracted him unwillingly from my hand, patted the beaver’s head and furry tail and handed him gently back, suggesting she poke some holes in that plastic bag.

Thanks Virginia, for sharing your very special gift with me, and reminding me how our seamstress beavers can thread the needle of community spirit to stich perfect strangers together.

Before the beavers came to Martinez, in all the wide world we had only seen one. A single tail slap when we canoed up this river in Mendocino. (Mybluehouse is my non-beaver account). It was thrilling, and I wished we had seen more, but it had to suffice until beavers moved in downtown.

After our beavers moved in we felt like we were finally getting a glimpse of a treasure that always hid beneath the surface before. Given the distance between Martinez and Mendocino there must be thousands of beavers just waiting to be discovered by someone had the time and energy to locate them. As avid canoe-ers we are fairly familiar with the waterways between here and Big River. Surely we would come across more beavers now that we know what to look for?

Only yesterday I got an email from Brock Dolan talking about “reintroducing” beavers to Russian River. I wrote back with disbelief. What made him think beavers weren’t there already? In a large river beavers won’t build dams, and they would use bank lodges which are harder to spot. He very convincingly told me had explored every mile of the river and all of its forking tributaries, and knew people who lived on it, kayaked it, hiked it every day. He sent a round of emails to people who had done water studies for DFG, or for their own non profits. And everyone agreed. No beavers in Russian River. None at all.

Where are they beavers near the coast? Well we have the ones reported in Sonoma a while back. A colony in Big River in Mendocino. That’s it. That’s the known population density. Remember that Fort Ross, the Russian trading post, grew specifically out of the beaver trade.

However the founding of permanent British and American Settlements on the Pacific Coast , took place as part of the terrestial, rather than maritime,  fur trade. The westward expansion of trading outposts took place with amazing rapidity as the commercial exploitation of beaver and other valued pelts devastated faunal populations from local rivers and creeks.

Historical Archeology: Back From the Edge Martin Hall & Stephan Silliman pg 275

So beavers in every “river, brook and rill” were trapped and skinned and the fur traders were so good at their job, the remaining beaver along the pacific are few and far between.  To think that I personally have seen all the beavers from Martinez to Mendocino is a terrifying thought.

We know we have beavers in the delta. We heard from someone who had two in a creek in Danville. We know they’re in Los Gatos Creek. We know they’re in Sonoma and Sutter Creek. We know there’s a colony in Cordelia. Where are the beavers on Russian River? Willow Creek? Napa River? Gualala River? Where are the beavers in the Albion, the Noyo or Ten Mile River?

“Dead!” I answered, and amiably
“Murdered,” the Hangman corrected me.

California is “hollow” of beavers. Its center echoes with the ring of places they should be but aren’t. No wonder NOAA says that loss of beaver habitat has been the prime assault to Salmon. No wonder we complain of droughts and damage. No wonder people think beavers eat fish, or mistake them for Nutria or muskrats or otters. No wonder a city could go into two years of apoplexy by being forced to deal with this simple social mammal.

It’s a beaver wasteland out there.