Ainsley Kelly
I am trying to pull up all the shoots of grass, one at a time, over many acres, the cows lowing for rain, the road winding past lakes, past general stores that don't sell firewood and won't make change, past the dried up reservoirs from Marin to Sonoma.
I am trying to weed the hills: iris, bunchgrass, blue-eyed grass, yellow California poppy. Not typically thought of as beautiful or in need of protection, scrub-chaparral is seen as an eyesore or fire hazard, and a "clear the brush" attitude reduces habitat.
At first glance, open pastures and rolling fencelines are punctuated by windbreaks, stockponds, feedlots around the ranch core.
There, the scrub brush. There, the homes of old growth redwood. There the blue barns—aluminum and steel.
In fact, the visitor driving through these hills has happened along one of the earliest and largest examples of industrial-scale dairying in the state of California.
I am neither early nor large, yet I'm trying to scoop up all of California in handfuls, tugging at the dry yellow grass, breaking off the points, the roots broken below the surface.
Or slowly digging round each root with nails broken, hands scraped, finally extracting the poor strands, shaking out the dust from the withered roots while smoke drifts from the nearest brushfire, followed by hack and hum of helicopters, and the cows low for rain.
I ignore the hulking shoulders of black Angus, Holsteins hot with sun unprotected by the coastal fog, ignore the hides hot to blazing, ignore the thumping of tule elk tearing up fences, wrecking irrigation equipment.
Unknown to the early ranchers, the expansive coastal prairie was most likely the byproduct of burning, weeding, pruning and harvesting for at least two millennia by Coast Miwok and their antecedents.
I'm burning, dry straws piercing my knees and the skin along my shins. I'm on my knees in the bunchgrass, smoke drifting forty miles from the nearest brushfire. Tearing up oatgrass, meadow barley, California brome, Pacific reed grass, Italian wild rye, farmer's foxtail, rattail fescue, purple velvet grass, Harding grass.
One type is called Persist Orchard Grass. It's an experiment. The orchardgrass you've been waiting for: and it's gonna be around for a LONG time.
Drought resistant, hay yield, persist = profit. I persist. I yank it up in fistfuls. I must rupture what I stand on from this body of earth.
During Prohibition, whiskey and rum smuggling at Home Ranch on Limantour Estero replaced dairy operations as their sole source of income. In 1941, the fields went fallow. Internment. Relocation. Mounting erosion.
There are thousands of acres of grassland between Napa and Petaluma, between Petaluma and Point Reyes, but the birds are disappearing: Savannah sparrow, western meadowlark, white-tailed kite, grasshopper sparrow, loggerhead shrike, horned lark, varied thrush Brewer's blackbird, lark bunting.
Too many times, and the scars will stop healing, stop mending as they should. What do you do when the warning comes too late?
A hunched dot along the ridgeline, I bend down toward the roots and pull.
"Ranching History at Point Reyes." National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, https://www.nps.gov/pore/learn/historyculture/people_ranching.htm.
Gardali, Tom, and Leo Salas. "Upland Habitats." The State of the Birds 2011 San Francisco Bay, PRBO Conservation Science and the San Francisco Bay Joint Venture, http://data.prbo.org/sfstateofthebirds/index.php?page=habitats-upland.