Nathanson Creek Ramble

Nathanson Creek initiates in the hills up there somewhere north of us, slips past Peter and Maggie’s vineyards, gurgles alongside Gehricke Road for a mile or two so you can hear it chuckling just down there as you amble along, enters the town of Sonoma at its northeast corner hard by Sebastiani Winery’s tasting room, and then meanders past the tidy homes and gardens and yards of the East Side. Years ago I stood on the bridge where Nathanson Creek passes beneath Second Street East and watched a salmon the size of my leg as he concluded his tortuous journey from the Pacific Ocean, all battered and torn, with skin and flesh hanging off of him. He discovered the depression at the bottom of the creek, directly below my gaze, where his sweetheart had deposited a clutch of roe, swam circles around it while releasing a cloud of sperm, fluttered, and died. The current carried his lifeless carcass around the bend and away.

A sad and glorious sight.

After diving under MacArthur Street, the Creek divides Sonoma Valley High School from its athletic fields, flows through Nathanson Creek Park, and leaves the town proper at Napa Road, thereupon entering the block where we live and running smack through the middle of it for a mile before reaching the bridge at Watmaugh Road.

All of this aquatic action happens between, roughly, November, when our rains start, and June, when our rains cease. As spring turns to summer the flow stops, the water retreats into pools, and eventually the good earth sponges it away altogether.

The creek deposits mysterious objects for you to drag home. On her first transit with me, Jane discovered a gleaming metal ball and gave it a home among her seashell collection. Last year we discovered a bone resembling the face of a goblin. Friends who actually know a thing or two about the local fauna identified it as a deer pelvis, oh well, so we hung it on the side of the pump house for the spiders to use as web foundation.

Eventually you begin to hear the trucks rumbling along Napa Road, and then you make a last turn and there is the Napa Road bridge. On our first water stomp, decades ago, we discovered several Tom Sawyers under it catching crawdads with hot dog morsels tied to strings. All of the chutes here are high and steep so the last one up gets to push out the others by the butt, then grab the end of a walking stick to emerge and surprise the drivers whizzing past. “Where in the heck did that bunch emerge from?”

Yeah OK it ain’t Kenya or the Maya Riviera or Skiathos but for some odd reason we have dialed back our travel planning this year. I look forward to our annual Nathanson Creek Ramble in any year, but this year it’s the best we got.