Wallace - California;San Francisco Bay Area;San Francisco Bay Area (Calif.);San Francisco;Région de la baie

Copyright 2015 David Rains Wallace

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available

Cover design by Kelly Winton

Interior design by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

Illustrations by Lucy Conklin

Map David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com

Counterpoint Press

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-673-5

Table of Contents

contents

It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the most variety that is most examined.

GILBERT WHITE

The Natural History of Selborne

Like other large bodies of water, San Francisco Bay takes on every color at some time, from black at midnight to white at noon. To me, the most characteristic one is a milky bluish green that I see on summer evenings when I cross the Richmond Bridge going east. There is a sense of celestial depth about it, paradoxical as that might be. It seems very alive after the baked brown of the inland hills.

It is the color of serpentine, which is appropriate. Serpentine is a common rock around the Bay Area, but a strange one. It comes from earths mantle, a hot layer of heavy metals many miles beneath the surface, and it reaches the sunlight only after millions of years of geological processes that would be cataclysmic if they werent so slow.

Huge plates that form the planets crust collide and slide against each other, dragging slabs of the underlying mantle along. When one plate rides over another in the tectonic process called subduction, mantle material scrapes onto earths surface, forming an igneous rock called peridotite, which weathers to red or black. But some mantle material mixes with water during subduction, forming a metamorphic rock that weathers a slick, milky bluish green at the surface. It is called serpentine because its color and texture seem snakelike.

Some serpentine further metamorphoses into jade, a semiprecious stone thought to have magical properties. Serpentine has its own magical property. Because of its heavy metal chemistry, its soil resists the weedy exotic vegetation that has preempted much of the Bay Area, allowing many beautiful native plants and the animals that depend on them to survive. For plants that have been evolving here for millions of years to persist on rock that has been forming for an estimated 200 million years seems to embody the evolutionary nature of this place. And for that rock to be associated with the serpent, the creature thatmore than mostconnects with the depths of earth and time, seems to embody the Bay Areas mythic nature. Its easy to imagine some sinuous ridgetop of slick blue-green rock as a coil of a snake, so big and old that its movements are too slow for human perceptiona World Serpent.

The Golden Gate is a misnomer in geological terms. The only natural gold I know of in the Bay Area is the residue of Mother Lode mining scraps that rivers have washed into the Bay. Its really the Serpentine Gate.

Of course, the Chamber of Commerce wouldnt like calling it that. Prejudice against serpents and anything associated them has been endemic to Western civilization since Genesis. Prejudice persists even in these green times. The illustrator of my book The Klamath Knot made a wonderful jacket design of a World Serpent coiled around the Klamath Mountains. But market research at Sierra Club Books rejected it for a less inspiring one of an anthropomorphic myth, the giant Bigfoot.

The prejudice is recent. Most cultures, including Western ones, have revered snakes because of their associations with depths and origins. The ancient Greek oracles and Eleusinian mysteries centered on snakes. The greatest prophetess, the Delphic oracle, was the Pythoness. Many learned volumes have been written about snake mythology. But the most interesting way into snake lore is through the snakes themselves, preferably the local ones.

The Bay Area isnt the snake capital of the world. It doesnt, for one thing, have green snakes, the color that people archetypically associate with them. (Children usually color snakes green.) The local rattlesnakes scientific name used to be Crotalus viridis, the green rattler, and although there are greenish rattlers in the West, Bay Area ones Ive seen are brownish or reddish. The only remotely green snake here is the racer, which can be olive drab when its not plain brown.

Archetypes arent everything, however, and the Bay Area may be the snake capital of the West Coast. Species from all over converge on our convenient location and salubrious climate, about equally divided among ones with northern, eastern, and southern affinities. Roughly two dozen species live here, although its hard to be sure because snakes are such cryptic, supple creatures. Legless crawlers may seem primitive, but fossils show that snakes are the most recently evolved of major vertebrate groups, appearing about 100 million years ago, after mammals and birds. Evolution often diversifies by simplifying: snakes have traded legs for a versatile niche in the interstices of things. And they can be hard to find there. In five decades of hiking around the Bay Area, I havent seen all the species thought to live here.

Only one species is really commonplace, like deer or quail. That is the gopher snake, the medium-sized tan-and-brown-mottled species that stretches lazily across paths even in the Berkeley Hills. It is an easygoing snake when mature, although little ones can be bratty, striking and vibrating their tails at passersby. I suppose one reason gopher snakes are so common and good-natured is that they are well fed: they eat an abundant variety of small mammals, including gophers.