This Land Is Your Land (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine August 2002

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Destinations: Northern California: The New Park
This Land Is Your Land (Cont.)


	Spare those trees: second-growth forests line the far bank of the Big River. (Kurt Markus)

The haul road soon enters the woods, and I get only a few views of the river until the road runs right into it. This is the 8.3-mile mark that denotes the head of the Big River's tidal range; to this point, ocean tides create its current. I ford the cool, shallow river and proceed on foot, again on an old logging road, about a mile into the deep woods that line 61-acre Big River Laguna, a marshy backwater where the mood shifts from scenic beauty to dark intrigue, with redwoods poking through the forest like gothic steeples. I scare up two wood ducks from their lily-pad refuge, bullfrogs start tuning for the evening, and fresh piles of bear scat hint at looming megafauna. I reach a grove of tall redwoods backlit by angled shafts of late light. This is the Fritz Wonder Plot, some of the tallest second-growth redwoods in the preserve—up to 300 feet—and to me, its beating heart. No, these aren't thousand-year-old antiquarians—every acre of this forest has been logged—but now these 140-year-old trees will have their chance. The solitude is seductive; I have to pedal back in the last light and a brisk offshore headwind.

The next day I return along the same 8.3 miles of river, the easily navigable stretch, this time paddling a handcrafted redwood outrigger canoe with Rick Hemmings, who runs Catch a Canoe & Bicycles Too!, a rental shop on the grounds of the Stanford Inn,



	(Map by Laszlo Kubinyi)

a 41-room B&B and my home base for a few days. The design of the custom 19-foot outrigger is brilliant—pontoons make it ultrastable, while the hull is light, sleek, and fast. The boats have been a Big River tradition for more than a decade. (Though the land surrounding the Big River was private and thus off-limits to visitors, California rivers are public property.) We glide with the tide along calm stretches through the eelgrass flats, and Rick shows me relics of logging days. An old flatboat is now scarcely an outline in the muck. Erstwhile dams are just orphan chunks of piling.

Paddling the Class I Big River estuary isn't so much high adventure as a serene meditation—unless you time the tide wrong and try to return against it and a headwind. You can't. We paddle unambitiously, a harbor seal escorting us most of the way. Rick and I stare up into the woods that begin to crowd the riverbanks, and Rick tells me about legendary singing fish that lured the curious here back around the turn of the 20th century. "No one knows what they really were, but people could hear them late at night," he says. What did they sound like? "Uh, you know...a shrill, fishy sound." Oh.

Our timing is perfect for the paddle back. The headwind's going off at 25 knots, but the reflux of the tide and a smidgen of elbow grease win out. We coast into the dock. Tonight I'll return to my room in the Stanford Inn, above the river, and sleep with the window open, listening for the mysterious music of fish once again floating above the Big River.

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