In the 1970s there was a bar in Sebastopol called West of the Laguna which had live music and stand up comics. This was back before our part of California turned into Wine Country and when houses were affordable enough for beginning artists and musicians to live here and where you could go out at night and hear new talent for the price of a beer.

West of the Laguna was a good place to do that, but what intrigued me most were the grainy black and white photos on the walls of real people on the old fashioned Laguna de Santa Rosa. They were leisurely summertime photos of men in straw hats and women in white dresses drifting along in canoes and rowboats. The kind of dreamy scene you see in an impressionist show at an art museum.

It was hard to imagine boaters on the Laguna because for so long this stretch of Sonoma County fresh water has been pretty much in hiding. It’s not just that the boaters went away but that the Laguna became hidden as it was turned into a flood control channel and remodeled by agriculture and business interests.

It’s there in glimpses. Sometime the winter rains will turn a skinny strip of it into a magical lake, or from certain roads you can catch a quick delicious view of glistening water and oak trees. But mostly only cows and private property owners get to visit its natural wonders close-up.

For most of us the Laguna is a bump in the road, the water that’s under the bridge you race across on the way to work. If you’re stuck in commute traffic maybe you get a longer look at the tangle of trees standing hip deep in water. But you seldom see anybody in or on the water itself.

We need our green, wild watery spots where we can go and be still.

This summer I got to do that, thanks to a friend who shared her auction prize from a fund-raiser which was a guided trip of the Laguna by kayak. We paddled one balmy morning for three hours, our kayaks low in the water below the reeds. It was like a scene in the “African Queen,” except there were no leeches and no German warships coming to get us. We saw egrets in their long Katherine Hepburn necks. And osprey, blue heron and otters. Bushes of pink wild roses hugged the banks and a western pond turtle sunned himself on a log.

This is where the owls head when they fly over our roof at twilight. This is where the ducks born in the pond in our neighborhood park will go when their mother duck tells them to fly off.

But save for a few trails that provide only limited looks, the Laguna is still a drive-by for most people. And that’s too bad because we need our green, wild, watery spots where we can go and be still.

Whether there are more paths and launching docks in this waterway’s future will be up to the Laguna stewards and government. But when and if the Laugna comes out of hiding, I’ll be there. In my kayak and my white dress.

Listen to Laguna Time Out on KRCB’s Another Voice.

Tags: Juicy_Tomatoes, Laguna_de_Santa_Rosa, Susan_Swartz, Wine_Country

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Environment, Healthy Living, Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.