River in Ruin: The Story of the Carmel River

Prologue

xvii On a summer evening between semesters at college, my friends and I gathered at Undertow Beach near the lagoon where the Carmel River enters Carmel Bay. The evening was nippy, a high fog hovered overhead, so in a tight protected valley of sand carved out long ago by an old cable-driven dredge we built a little campfire of driftwood and drank rank red wine. Above and behind us loomed the shrouded gray wooden shed of the abandoned sand plant where, when it was in operation, the dredge returned its load of sand from just offshore to be dumped down a chute into a waiting truck below. The old squatter who used to live in a shack hidden by bushes next to the sand plant was gone. Perhaps evicted, even his shack was gone. So we were bothering no one, intruding only on the night, the waves crashing in front of us and the limits of our adventure. One of us thought we should see if we could get the dredge running. Like little boys angrily breaking sticks, there is a surfacing of bravado and desire for momentary violence that wine conjures in young men. Illuminated by a burning rag, the girls watched us start up the engine of the dredge. Then we randomly shifted long, iron levers back and forth and drove the dredge and its jerking cables out onto the sea floor and back again, snuffing out the fire in the little valley of sand like a puff of breath on a match. And then we were through. Spent. Disinterested. The campfire gone out and the valley of sand cleanly dredged, we left. The next day, after sleeping in late, I learned that the old, dilapidated sand plant had burned down. It didn’t take long for prologue xviii Prologue the sheriff to find a lost identification card belonging to one of us, and the whole story came out. Heroically shielding the girls who had been there, as was expected in those days, we took full blame and all financial responsibility. We would divide the damages between us; whatever they were. But not all of us had the money, and the choices we were offered were few. We could find ways to work and repay the rich owner of the old sand plant or we could join the army. Two of us joined up. Many years later at an official class reunion, I announced facetiously that our high school class, Carmel High of 1953, had been given an environmental beautification award for burning down the old sand plant. Everyone cheered and applauded. Now at that site at the mouth of the Carmel River, near its lagoon, there is a California state beach. It is called Carmel River State Beach. Where the sand plant once stood is a bank of public rest rooms. We still call it Undertow Beach, but we don’t go there often. In retrospect, life on the Carmel River was an idyllic time, a romantic time, as summers of our youth so often are when we reflect back on those unencumbered years. Idealistically, those of us who relied on the river trusted that it would be there forever. We were intimately familiar with the river, but sadly, with that intimacy eventually came a community neglect. At the time, it was something we failed to see, even in the irony of rewarding ourselves a fictitious environmental beautification award. In its natural state and near its birthing grounds, the Carmel River is a playful thing. It begins rather unnoticed as a damp spot on a hot day before it travels any distance and picks up the meager contributions of two anonymous tributaries at its headwaters . The little tributaries surrender their scarce waters to the young river and they quickly lose all physical identity. This is the genesis of the Carmel River. The first tributary flows from springs in the Ventana Wilderness at Divide Camp, just off the Pine Ridge Trail and west of the Church Creek Divide, which marks the ridge dividing Prologue xix the watershed of the Arroyo Seco to the south from the Carmel River watershed to the north. The second unnamed tributary begins as a vague seepage before pooling and is important to hikers and horseback riders because it runs year-round. It is a good, reliable watering hole before the now-formed Carmel River and its accompanying foot trail drop...