Fifty-Eight Faces of California Spring

Colusa

And over there, a rough keyhole punched through

the concrete block in an irrigation channel

running through Pleistocene alluvium. The frizz

of small twigs and early grasses—like pencil

scribble. Here at the San Joaquin Fault Zone. The

soft D-flat gurgle of swirling water.

Sutter

Non-marine sedimentary sand. The mottled road

yields to a glorieta of tire tracks shooting off

across the plain. How many months more before

the packed ground loosens and wind begins to lift

away winter’s scars? Sutter Buttes Fault Zone.

Mendocino

Along the coastal belt, sandstone and Cretaceous

shale. Fallen birch branches sprawl over their

counter-branch reflections on the stream’s

surface. Here near the Mendocino Triple Junction.

Mono

Near the Owens Valley Fault, a frost-crusted slope

of volcanic mudflow. It bottoms out onto

Holocene playa hardly settled enough to underprop

the frequently flooded and patched road. In the

end, the river will have its say.

Del Norte

Smooth contours of white Jurassic limestone

bubble up along a creek bed punctuated by

pyroclastic boulders. Salts, water-stowed into tiny

fissures, crystalize at night, fracturing the rock. A

birch seedling directs its root into the edge of the

fracture. Cascadia Subduction Zone.

Mariposa

Edged against the Melones Fault Zone, fog-

softened yellow poplar trees. The dirt road winds

along Merced River Canyon through Paleozoic

hills. Under the pale-green deergrass, sandstones.

Beneath the blue oaks, schist.

San Francisco

Do we recognize ourselves in what we see? From

beds of infectious marine sand below the

interchange, a few thin, branching shoots go

scrabbling toward an abutment blazed with exotic

graffiti. The San Andreas Fault.

Alameda

Loose lake terrace deposits underlie islands of

sawgrass linked by a zigzag boardwalk. Wild bees

nest in soil along scissures of the Hayward Fault.

Who can say? Are we in or only of this world?

Sacramento

How long will it last, the vestige of the human? A

tranquil shadow-scrim of trees and brush gestures

from the stream’s pearly surface. Loosely

consolidated Pliocene gravel. At high risk for

earthquakes. The San Andreas Fault running the

whole length of the county’s western edge.

Nevada

Adjacent to the Sierra Nevada Fault, a litter of

broken limbs and twigs remain of what had been

forest. As the deep roots die, subterranean water

rises, drawing salt with it. Termites, with fungi in

their guts, are beginning to digest the wood. A soil

expressed from quartzite and sandstone.

Amador

There are tongues of volcanic mudflows to the

north. To the west, the Bear Mountains Fault

Zone. Here, sedimentary beds are run-through

with schist and phyllite. Dead oak leaves catch in

skeins of weeds just starting up through cracks in

the abandoned parking lot.

Solano

In estuarine marsh above Suisun Slough, north of

Grizzly Bay, a torrent furrows its way through

alluvium and Holocene lake deposits close to the

San Andreas Fault Zone. Not tilth, but

waterlogged sod, last year’s grasses. The litter

layer is unhurriedly carried away in runoff. Your

ear catches a musical trickling, percolating.

Santa Clara

East of the serpentine pluton running along Silver

Creek, two massive redwoods grew into each

other and shared a body. Now the afternoon sun

articulates medullary rays between the rings of

that double tree’s amputated base. Along the San

Andreas fault line. Where is there a landscape

without an observer?

Marin

Plugs of volcanic rhyolite jut up from Cretaceous

sandstone north of the visitor center. From the

beach, children drag lengths of bullwhip kelp to a

sandy boardwalk and leave them for the

(imagined) marvel of those to come. The San

Andreas.

Glenn

East of the northwest-trending Coast Range

Thrust Fault, Elk Creek runs wild along striated

bedding planes of shale and sandstone into Stony

Creek. A wide rock beach. Nothing breaks the

water’s surface but an intangible expression of

collateral relations.

Los Angeles

A burnt foundation. Bounding the wet concrete

slab, naked trees push up through syenite and pre-

Cambrian gabbros of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Their root secretions, attracting mites and

springtails, begin to renew the soil. The San

Andreas and a hundred smaller active faults.

Trinity

Near the steeply uplifted and folded southern

Klamath range, metamorphosed sedimentaries are

riven with igneous intrusions. Timber in the

mountains, irrigated crops in the valleys. Two sets

of bike tracks temporarily scar the slope to a

construction site. At the center of each forsaken

footer, a stump of upright rebar. The La Grange

Fault and the North Fork terrane.

Ventura

Broken sea wall, patched road, railroad tracks on a

crushed ballast bed. The sharp-edged stones

interlock under pressure from the ties, stabilizing

the rails. Sand and gravel quarries in Fillmore.

Shales and conglomerates in Ventura. The San

Andreas and over a hundred smaller active faults.

Inyo

An alluvial fan below hillocks of eroding feldspar-

gneiss. Gravel and small rocks cluster in the

interzone between roads streaked with salt and

gypsum. This spot: the lowest point in North

America. What of the world arises from our

minds? Owens Valley Fault Zone.

Merced

Here are interrelations no map can contain.

Beyond a crazed road and oaks swarming the

smectitic riverbank, a sequence of naked hills

extends to the limits of our looking. Ortigalita and

Bear Mountains Fault Zones.

San Benito

Landslides blot away the road. Upper Cretaceous

sandstones, shales, and conglomerates eroding

from the Coast Range. The serpentine-heavy soil

supports Jeffrey pine, incense cedar, and a few

rare species: the San Benito evening primrose

(which will bloom next month) and a millipede

(with more legs than any other). Nearby, the

imperceptibly quivering San Andreas and

Calaveras Faults.

San Luis Obispo

These wave-cut conglomerates, cross-bedded with

shales, embrace granite and quartzite pebbles

beside lenses of erosion-resistant jasper. A stark

littoral zone near the San Andreas, Hosgri, and

Los Osos Fault Zones. The tide going out.

Stanislaus

Susceptible to landslides, the eroding slopes of the

Coast Range expose sedimentary rocks close to the

valley margins. The hills slide slowly down into

faulted crevices where an ephemeral creek runs,

giving rise to quick hallelujahs of grass. Here, near

the Ortigalita Fault, we might ask ourselves: When

did the land stop belonging to the land?

Kern

More than fifty thousand active wells—drilled

four hundred to four thousand feet down through

layers of Pleistocene lignite and sandstones rich

with plant imprints and fossil bird bones—suck up

the oil that migrated from old marine beds into

discrete sand lentils. At the tamped, barren

surface, the dirt fails to hold air or water or

micronutrients. Not even an ant walks over it. The

San Andreas and Garlock Faults.

Yuba

Upwelling magma conveyed gold deposits into

fractures in the folded Sierra Nevada. With

aggressive mining, sedimentation whelmed the

floodplains with gravel, annihilating trees,

altering the river’s course. Now needlegrass, blue

wildrye, and broomsedge undulate in an old

stream bed. Swain Ravine Fault and Big Ben-Wolf

Creek Fault Zone. The road relinquishing itself

one chink at a time.

Placer

Silt plumes into the lake’s shallows where river-

rounded stones of monzonite and Mesozoic

granite hold their breath underwater. Foothills

Fault System. We don’t start a conversation with a

stone. And yet we find ourselves in conversation.

Calaveras

Along strands of the San Andreas Fault Zone,

vortices of dry, minnow-shaped leaves float on

subtle currents in a stream reflecting dark, bare

trees. Paleozoic schist and hornfels mixed with

shale and chert underlie the stream. We say beauty.

We say beauty exists. That beauty exists for us.

Tuolumne

Unsettled earth. Eye to the ground. It’s as though

the rocks self-evacuated from the crumbling wall

and fire pit. Tertiary volcanics east of the

Foothills Fault System. The hill’s grading has

obliterated brush that protected the soil, exposing

weathered, rounded cobbles.

Shasta

Franciscan Complex basalts. Uplifted terraces

punctuated by an incised stream canyon give rise

to this tarn. Which overlooks a secret salmon

spawning ground. Poor soil with low

permeability, clay in the shallow subsurface. Battle

Creek Fault Zone. The grin of a crack in the

megalith.

Lake

The rift starts at Hwy. 29 and runs north across a

plain furry with weeds toward ash-turbid

Thurston Lake. Though within the Konocti Bay

Fault Zone, this fissure, jokingly dubbed “Guy’s

Fault,” follows the trace of a collapsed channel

built to drain Manning Flat. Marine sedimentary

layers of sandstone and limestone wink with local

Lake County “diamonds” that locals call moon

tears.

Fresno

When did concrete enter our lives? Less than

eighty years old, these busted pipelines are being

excavated from a rubbled trench where gray,

alkaline clay overlies lime-silica hardpan. The

Nunez and Ortigalita Faults. In 6,500 BC, traders

in the Levant stored water in buried cisterns.

Cisterns made from concrete.

Monterey

Look closely and you’ll see a measured series of

terrestrial horizons from which the land’s sutures

have been plucked. To till soil is to gut it, to rip

apart its microbial and fungal networks, to lift

away the protective crop residue and lay earth

bare to wind, runoff, and rain damage. Just

adjacent to the San Andreas Fault Zone.

Sierra

How many linked dimensions? Clouds mounding

on the surface of the water merge with pale glacial

detritus at the Foothills Fault System. Why do we

say the landscape is over there if we are always a

part of it?

Napa

There are more than a hundred soil variations in

the alluvial fans emerging from near hillsides onto

the valley floor. Here, a marsh tributary, its dark

surface banded with flotsam and chalky slicks.

The West Napa Fault. Cretaceous and Jurassic

sandstone bedded with limestone.

Alpine

On the creek’s surface, crystals bind to residual ice

that has melted and refrozen. As night

temperatures drop, an expanding glaze begins to

shrink the dark haloes of water. Like skin healing

around a wound. Nearby, on the forest floor, a

black soil of till and colluvium. The Sierra Nevada

Fault Zone.

Plumas

Under any place we stand, the archaic depths of

persistent memory. On this ancient lake bed

strewn with wet dirt, straw and twigs, we come

across the ruined foundation of someone’s house.

An insistence of right angles. Almanor Fault Zone.

El Dorado

Along the western edge of the Bear Mountains

Fault Zone, a snow-packed, glacier-carved lake

with thick trees popping up from lacustrine

sediment around the lake’s apron. But on the

further hill, scraggly pines struggle to thrive on

thin soil beds underlain by rocky granodiorite.

Butte

Strongly metamorphosed white andesite slabs,

pillow lavas, and flow rocks surround the lake’s

houseboats. Cleveland Hill and Sierra Nevada

Faults. A gravelly soil with mixed cobbles.

Contra Costa

It’s gone now, whatever once brought people here

with a need for direction and an exit sign. The

cracked macadam—fenced, blockaded, and

arrowed—erupts with April weeds. As they bury

the fecal pellets of white-tailed deer, dung beetles

scurry across a slope soil derived from exfoliating

shale and sandstone. The Calaveras Fault and the

Mount Diablo Thrust Fault.

San Joaquin

In lowlands north of the Stockton Fault, a wide

valley filled with six-mile sequences of

interbedded clays, silt, sand, and gravel. Little else.

A dissolving rectangular slab of sand, a toss of

pine twigs. Vehicle tracks. Leached sand. But in

the act of looking, your body is there too.

Orange

Poor soil, little ground cover, tufts of sage,

scoured runnels through pebbled Miocene

sandstone. Sediment accumulating in channels. A

lately denuded hillside. The San Andreas and more

than a hundred smaller active faults. Life is

elsewhere.

Santa Barbara

Coastal marine sand and silt drain from the bluffs

of the Santa Ynez. Closer to shore, Miocene shales

are chocked with fossils of mollusks and

clamshells. The ocean here is plagued with fecal

bacteria. With pollutants from runoff and from

underwater oil field seepage fifty meters down.

Santa Maria River and Santa Ynez Faults.

Kings

Desiccated stalks from last year’s sorghum silage

cloak fields of gray-brown alluvium. Bioturbating

worms thread underground channels with acids

that, come June, will stimulate new plant growth.

Four inches below the worms, a layer of chalk

holds moisture for the roots. San Andreas Fault

Zone.

Madera

Tufts of grass knotted in disagreement. And

everything is charged: grass positive and pollen

negative. So while wind whips the grass in circles,

grass sweeps the air for pollen. Undulating hills

overlie basement monzonite. To the southwest,

near the border with Fresno County, the Coalinga

Anticline.

Riverside

Marked by the wide Santa Ana River watershed,

the alluvial soil is coarse-textured and well-

drained, the pH high. Two PVC pipes, glowing

like tusks, curve out from the dull riverbank and

over-cross the mud-colored flailings of exposed

tree roots. San Andreas and San Jacinto Faults.

Tehama

With its linear trajectory, the fence can only

approximate the arroyo’s soft bend. Battle Creek

Fault Zone. Dry-farmed pastureland, a stratified

and acidic silty loam riven with tunnels excavated

by gophers, and with gopher snakes just now

waking and blindly trailing behind them.

Imperial

Gathering its windblown materials from

prehistoric Lake Cahuilla, a little transverse dune

perches at the edge of the largest mass of sand

dunes in California. The Imperial Fault. We comb

the sand with our looking.

Lassen

A snow-brushed, dehydrated lake lined by lava

flow and scant brush adjacent to the Davis Creek

Fault Zone. Local soil, the gravelly residuum of

volcanic rocks. In the near distance, dwarf trees

squiggle up from thin layers of dirt covering a

bone-white strata of insoluble quartzes.

San Bernardino

Like road excrement, upwellings of crumbled tar

and gravel cover the desiccated, skid-marked

blacktop. Overlapping rings of tire rubber,

squiggly fissures. Alluvial deposits and dune

sands. The San Andreas and San Jacinto Faults.

Where I was born.

Siskiyou

The surrounding mountains are rich in pre-

Cenozoic gneisses and hornfels. At a valley stream

confluence, granitic rocks rounded by glaciation

settle themselves into moist, sandy loam. An

orange lichen secretes acids into the grains of its

supporting boulder. Cedar Mountain Fault

System.

Tulare

Splashes of leached salt and alkaline minerals dust

the path of a dry, dendritic creek spooling through

tangles of dead weeds and bracken. The slow-

moving Foothills Fault System. Poorly packed

plutonic granites underlie those hills.

Modoc

At the center of the intermittent flow zone, bunch

grasses lie flat, rinsed with a coffee-brown residue

of nitrogen-rich humus. The Surprise Valley Fault

Zone. A volcanic ash veneer covers lacustrine

deposits of crumbled basalt and andesite. On the

42nd parallel north, this is the northernmost edge

of California where the earth’s rotational speed

roughly equals the speed of sound.

San Diego

Between the Rose Canyon and Elsinore Faults,

directly across from the border wall, bootprints

disturb silty clay interfingered with slope wash

and a radiant spew of coarse granules, the

weathered rind of rocks. Along a north-south axis,

anonymous tracks on the damp ground lead in

both directions.

San Mateo

The inherent overcomes the constructed. Concrete

slabs and galvanized plates yield the rigor of their

authority to tension cracks and sprouting weeds.

An idea of order fractures in slow motion. Flood

plain alluvium from hillside drainage. The San

Andreas and San Gregorio Fault Systems.

Sonoma

On a trace of the San Andreas Fault, who has

assembled these witchy stick teepees? Behind

them, strange, glistering emanations of light play

over the sand. An iconic monolith presides over

two smaller rocks in the inlet—like a black bear

eyeing her cubs. Some of the jasper and blueschist

boulders along the beach have been polished to a

high sheen by the rubbing of Pleistocene

mammoths. Nothing moves but the onshore breeze

crinkling the skin of the water.

Santa Cruz

Marine sands and gravels, twenty to fifty feet

thick. Pretty sea glass on the beach from years of

garbage-dumping at the coastline. A tide pool

draining below cliffs fenestrated with eroded

tunnels. Eerily, the old concrete pier foundation

seems to step away through the fog into

ceaselessly approaching waves. The San Andreas

and Zayante-Vergeles Fault Zones.

Yolo

It’s as though a cloud had transported swarms of

gleaming grunion from California’s southern

beaches onto this swale along Putah Creek. Were

we to pass through that cloud in a plane, we’d look

down and see that the faults and folds across the

valley are aligned northwest in concordance with

the San Andreas. The Putah hauls alluvium to the

Sacramento River. Fallen eucalyptus leaves sprawl

along this narrow path through brushy weeds.

With their hundred thousand teeth, slugs are

chewing down the leaf matter.

Humboldt

Flecked with foam and floating bands of silt, the

tidal sloughs and estuarine channels fill in with

erosional sediment from an upslope degraded by

industrial logging. Once home to the southern

torrent salamander. Mendocino Triple Junction.

Representing nothing, what we’re given to see is

only what presents itself.

Dedicated to Lukas Felzmann.