Waterlogged: Imitating the Architecture of Nature

The man appeared suddenly, out of the darkness and around the bend. He was standing to the side of the asphalt, near the edge of the floodlights illuminating a barricade of orange traffic barrels and, beyond, a great pile of dirt disappearing into the night. Half of the mountain road was blocked off—was, in fact, no road at all past the barricade and the pile. I drove closer and slowed to a stop. As I did so the man made some unhurried steps toward my car. It was past midnight, late summer, in the northeast corner of California, where the Sierra Nevada peter out and the volcanic Cascade Range begins.

My car windows were down. My radio already off. There had been no other traffic, no other living thing for an hour at least, aside from the oaks giving way to pines. The choking, relentless heat of the Central Valley had loosened its grip as the altitude climbed. I was headed to a meadow called Childs, just outside of Lassen Volcanic National Park. In the meadow was something I wanted to see, a very particular type of dam—a series of dams, in fact. They were beaver dams, but they weren't built by beavers. The technical term for these dams is beaver dam analogs (BDAs), and they were built by biologists, ecologists, and land-management experts. The previous autumn, these BDAs had been placed in a little creek named Gurnsey that winds through Childs Meadow, well before the snows filled the meadow and the spring melt flooded it. Now, I'd been told, it was a different

Illustration by LOLA DUPRE

sort of meadow—a bit marshy in spots, its soil spongy, the land undergoing a dramatic transformation back to a time before we killed off nearly every beaver on the continent. A more waterlogged time.

The man—big, bearded, a florescent-green vest over his flannel—broke into a friendly grin as he neared. "Hope you're not in a hurry," he said. I told him I wasn't. He stepped back a few paces and we let the buzz of the floodlights fill the silence for a minute until a crackle came over the radio clipped to his belt. "Lemme see how long this could be," he said, then walked back to his post at the edge of the light. I could hear him talking with a crew that must have been farther up the mountain, at another stop for traffic heading down. "Maybe fifteen, twenty minutes," he shouted over to me. More time passed under the buzzing lights, my windows down, the man staring up the road at the big pile of dirt and whatever lay beyond. Finally, I cut my engine, and the man returned. "Not a lot of traffic on the mountain this time of night," he said, waiting for me to explain myself, so I told him I was there to see a few beaver dams some folks had built. He looked up into the night sky for a moment, then asked me why they would do that. It was a good question, and I hoped to have an answer for him on the way back if I saw him again. People were building all kinds of crazy things on these mountains, he said. This road, for example—and he gestured toward the looming pile of earth: They were widening it, straightening it, adding more buttresses; and they'd have to do it all over again one day, when the road again started sliding down the mountain. Was it the road sliding down the mountain, or the mountain sliding down upon the road? It was, of course, both.

Just then a car's headlights appeared. A moment later, a truck's, then another truck's, and soon a whole line of vehicles—a dozen or so—rumbled by, and just as suddenly the man began waving me on past the barricade and pile, through the construction zone, up the road, up the mountain, to...