by Jeff McMahon
A dead gull bobs in the still water of the Arroyo de la Cruz lagoon. Rings radiate from the white-feathered corpse as it bounces up and down. The dead gull floats in the shape of a question mark, one wing thrown in an arc above its eyeless head, and that's appropriate because it poses a question:
How does a dead gull bob in still water?
This fresh water descended from springs in the Santa Lucia mountains that stack up to the sky in northwest San Luis Obispo County. It snakes through canyons it has plowed, over the last few million years, through those mountains and through the rollicking foothills known now as Hearst Ranch.
When it reaches the sea, it stops and fattens in this still lagoon behind a sand bar that blocks the creek from the ocean. The creek still flows to the sea, but it does so invisibly, silently, filtered through sand it chiseled from the stone Santa Lucias and carried down to the beach.
Hearst Corporation has other destinations for this water. The Hearsts may divert 524 million gallons a year to the sprinklers of a golf-course and to the spigots of 650 hotel rooms. They'll stir some of it into the stock of the clam chowder that will someday be served on Friday evenings at the Hearst San Simeon Resort Cafe.
Hearst secured its water permit in Sacramento on May 29, 1984, in the quiet way it put together most of the pieces of its proposed resort. Hearst holds the rights to 524 million gallons a year, though a recent environmental study found the creek can safely yield only 140 million gallons before withering up.
Hearst has until Dec. 31, 2006 to build its water diversion project, but it is unlikely that will happen so easily. A Hearst may never touch a drop of that water unless he or she sends someone to the stream with a bucket.
Coastal commissioners may dismantle Hearst's water project at the Jan. 15 hearing in San Luis Obispo. Or someone else may do it.
Arroyo de la Cruz sustains life that occurs nowhere elseóthe Arroyo de la Cruz manzanita, for example, and the Arroyo de la Cruz mariposa lily. Hearst may lose its water rights to those lowly shrubs and to the steelhead trout and the red-legged frog.
The weeds and the creatures can't write to the coastal commission, but they have good attorneys. The Environmental Defense Center filed a public trust complaint Dec. 23 that challenges Hearst's water permit. Whether or not the Coastal Commission approves Hearst's resort, the question dangles unanswered: What will Hearst's guests drink?
How does a dead gull bob in still water?
Discussion of the Hearst project has swirled around San Simeon Point and San Simeon Cove, and rightly so. The cove is the sort of curving, moon-reflecting, blue-water place that some spinner of the universe peeled from a fantasy post card and pasted on our coast. The point shields the cove from the wind with rows of creaking, storm-stretched cypress that dapple the sunlight for the elves and selkies who live in the brush with the spirits of dead Indians.
So tender is the point, and so loved, that Hearst moved its resort to the base of the point to avoid the unwinnable fight. Still, the resort's proximity is deadly enough. The point's foot-worn paths will be widened and tended. It's cliff edges will be tamed with railings and marked with "DANGER!" signs. It will be golf-cart accessible and Disney-safe and rated G for General Admission.
A similar fate awaits quieter places lost in the hidden north, places where few feet have tread since the Spanish renamed them: Arroyo de la Cruz, Arroyo Laguna, Arroyo Hondo, Punta Sierra Nevada, San Carpoforo.
Few SLO pokes know their county has a corner named San Carpoforo, I suspect. Fewer still have left a footprint there. San Carpoforo looks as exotic as it sounds. San Carpoforo Creek meets the sea just north of Ragged Point. It is the last kiss of soft hill, slow creek, and calm ocean before Big Sur soars violently up from the surf.
The government has exacted "public access" to these places from Hearst as a condition of the corporation's spoilage of San Simeon. The Hearst plan opens 15 miles of coastline, which will get a public trampling to make up somehow for the public trampling of San Simeon Point.
Yet public access exists today. Visitors slip between barbed wires and steal across private land on uncharted paths cut by the feet of Indians and Spaniards and maintained for centuries by lovers and fishermen. People reach these reaches through big adventure and small peril.
Then they can they can witness sights like a dead sea gull bobbing in the still water of Arroyo de la Cruz lagoon, posing a question. If they circle the gull as best they can from shore, if they glance below it, and if the sunlight's just right, they'll see the question answered:
A southwestern pond turtle as wide as a skillet treads water beneath the gull, streaking its webbed claws through the water, plunging its hooked beak into the underside of the gull's body and pulling away strips of meat.
The state dreams of opening the coast to human feet from Monterey to Estero. They call it "coastal access," and they achieve it through "mitigation." Manicured paths, parking lots, interpretive centers, railings, and "DANGER!" signs will peel open the coast like the lid from a sardine can. The crowds will come and the turtles will go, and then the dead gull will rest as still as death.
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Visitors slip between barbed wires and steal across private land on uncharted paths cut by the feet of Indians and Spaniards and maintained for centuries by lovers and fishermen.
This column won a 1999 Golden Dozen award from the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors and a first place from the California Newspaper Publishers Association.
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