Into the Valley
As I drove back on Shasta Dam Boulevard toward I-5, I was able to survey the Sacramento River Valley from a slight elevation. Although I couldn’t see the river from here, the spectacle of that broad, flat valley that extends as far as the eye can see--and a few hundred miles farther--made me feel as if I were smack in the middle of a giant relief map of California. The Central Valley, that great depression cradled by mountains, is what so much of the state seems to look in toward, to flow into.

Not all that long ago, it was a place defined by oak-studded grasslands and great tracts of wetlands--as much as five million acres--that invited ducks, geese, and swans to alight and rest on their long journey from and to wintering and summering grounds. Now, some 95 percent of those wetlands are gone, and the river has been tamed of its natural tendency to flood. The lands of the Central Valley have been tamed as well, to feed not birds but us humans. It is very much a cultural landscape, with little sign of the wild past. As I continued into the valley, I forgot about the tumbling river in its Mt. Shasta-shadowed gorge, and started thinking about food.

No, I wasn’t hungry. But all of a sudden I was surrounded on all sides by food--or the promise of food, anyway. For today, what gives order and definition to the Central Valley is not the exuberance of nature, but the well-ordered industry of agriculture. In the Sacramento Valley, primary crops include rice, wheat, nuts (almonds and walnuts), olives, tomatoes, prunes, and apricots. (The valley controls more than two-thirds of the worldwide prune market, and together with the San Joaquin Valley it produces 80 percent of the world’s almonds.) As I wove my way back and forth between I-5 and Highway 99 from Redding south toward Sacramento, everywhere I turned there were gnarled trees, marching in perfectly ordered lines and grids.

Farther south, rice fields became the norm; during much of the year, these fields are full of water, yielding rice of over a dozen types. Rice is one of the few crops that grows well in the clayey soils of the Sacramento River Valley. It’s a summertime crop, though, and requires irrigation, so each year the 500,000 or so acres of rice fields in the Central Valley are flooded. Following the autumn harvest, past practice was to burn the rice stubble to eliminate disease. The resulting haze and associated health concerns led in the early 1990s to California’s Rice Straw Burning Phase-Down Law; instead of burning, farmers began increasingly to flood their fields during the fallow months. At the same time, the late environmental writer Marc Reisner--who once called California’s rice industry “a monsoon crop in a desert state”--cofounded the Ricelands Habitat Partnership, a coalition of rice farmers, conservationists, and waterfowl protection groups, to reform rice-growing practices to create more wetlands habitat for wildlife. Now each winter more than 350,000 acres of rice fields are flooded, and while they are not a true substitute for the natural wetlands that have been drained in the Central Valley, they do provide some significant feeding and resting benefits for migrating waterfowl.

Burning is still allowed, but today it applies to only 15-25 percent of the acreage that 20 years ago was routinely put to the torch. South of the town of Willows, just off I-5, I watched some flames lick their way through a small field near a giant grain silo. Behind me I’d left 10,000 acres of pond-studded marshland/upland, the main unit of the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) Complex. Another 25,000 acres are distributed through almost 30 units of the complex, most of them along the Sacramento River.

To my uneducated eye, the large ponds with small grass- and reed-covered islands at the Sacramento NWR, with great egrets skirting the edges and various species of duck dabbling free, looked pretty “natural.” So did the two stretches of river I visited at the Pine Creek and Llano Seco units of the refuge. I was surprised to learn, therefore, that these units rely on managed water just as much as the rice farmers do, with draining, discing, and even burning, as well as managed planting and irrigation, aiding in the creation of habitats beneficial to birds, and carefully monitored water flows (thanks in part to Shasta Dam and the Red Bluff Diversion Dam) now also helping in the recovery of salmon stocks.