The Gold Coast

8

The bones of whales lie scattered in the hills.

For millions of years it was a shallow ocean. Water creatures lived in forests of seaweed, and when the creatures and the forests died their bodies settled to the bottom and turned to mud, then stone. We stand on them.

Overhead the sun coursed, hundreds of millions of times. Underneath tectonic plates floated on the mantle, bumped together: pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to find their proper places, always failing.

Where two pieces rubbed edges, the earth twisted, folded, buckled over. That happened here five million years ago. Mountains reared up, spewing lava and ash. Rain washed dirt into the shallow sea, filling it. Eventually it came to look like what we know: a chain of sandstone mountains, a broad coastal plain, a big estuary, an endless sandy beach.

And so a hundred thousand years ago, on a continent free of human beings, this land became home to fantastic creatures. The Imperial mammoth, fifteen feet tall at the shoulder; the American mastodon, almost that tall; giant camels and giant bison; an early horse; ground sloths eighteen feet high; tapirs; bears, lions, saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves; a vulture with a twelve-foot wingspan. Their skeletons too can be found in the hills, and the bluffs above the estuary.

But time passed, and species died. It rained less and less. The plain was crossed by one river, our Santa Ana River, which was older even than the mountains, cutting through them as they rose. This river fell out of the mountains to the estuary of our Newport Bay.

Around this big salt marsh grew the salt-tolerant plants, arrowgrass, pickleweed, sea lavender, salt grass. Upstream, along the fresh river, trees grew: cottonwood, willow, sycamore, elderberry, toyon, mulefat; and up in the hills, white alder and maple. Out on the plains grew perennial bunchgrasses, needlegrass, and wildflowers; also sagebrush and mustard; and up in the hills, chaparral and manzanita. In low spots on the plain there were freshwater marshes, home to cattails, sedges, duckweed, and water hemlock; and there were vernal pools, drying every spring to become flower-filled meadows. The foothills and the slopes of the mountains were covered by live oak forests, the oaks protecting grassy understories, and mixing with walnut, coffee-berry, redberry, and bush lupines; and above them, higher on the mountains, were knobcone pines and Tecate cypress. All these plants grew wildly, constrained only by their genes, their neighbors, the weather.… Evolving to fill every niche in conditions, they grew and died and grew.

Offshore, among the myriad fish, our cousins lived: whales, dolphins, porpoises, sea lions, sea otters, seals. Around the marshes, in the reeds, our brothers lived: coyotes, weasels, raccoons, badgers, rats. On the plains our sisters lived: deer, elk, foxes, wildcats, jackrabbits, mice. In the hills our parents lived: mountain lions, grizzly bears, black bears, gray wolves, bighorn sheep.… There were a hundred and fifty different species of mammals living here, once upon a time; and snakes, lizards, insects, spiders—all of them were here.

This warm dry basin, between the sea and sky, was—and not so long ago!—crawling with life. Teeming with all manner of life, saturated with the vigor of a complete ecology. Animals everywhere—in the grasslands, and the tidal marshes, and the sagebrush flats, and the oak forests of the foothills—animals everywhere. Animals everywhere! Animals everywhere. Animals… everywhere.

And the birds! In the skies there were birds of every kind. Gulls, pelicans, cranes, herons, egrets, ducks, geese, swans, starlings, pheasants, partridge, quail, finches, grouse, blackbirds, roadrunners, jays, swallows, doves, larks, falcons, hawks, eagles, and condors, the biggest birds in the world. Birds beyond counting, birds such that even as late as the 1920s, a man in Orange County could say this: “They came by the thousands, I am a little reluctant about saying how many, but I can only say we measured them by acres and not by numbers. In the fall of the year the ground would be white with wild geese.”

I can only say we measured them by acres and not by numbers.

The ground white with wild geese.