Sonoma Creek falls out of Sugarloaf State Park, wanders across the Valley floor and slides down the narrow canyon framing Warm Springs Road, past the first house I owned anywhere. The backyard of that house looked down on the creek, through a picket fence of California Bay Laurel trees that, over the years, one-by-one, succumbed to the hungry water that chewed on the banks during every winter storm.
The force of the flow excited and alarmed me. At various times of high water, I have kayaked the entire creek from Kenwood to tidewater at Millerick Road. It’s not something I would recommend unless you’re an experienced whitewater kayaker, but besides the thrills and the bucolic solitude – there is a remarkably separate wild and wonderful world hidden along that waterway – you can witness the work of a natural force that is constantly resisting constraint. It doesn’t want to be boxed in, and historically, much of the path the creek followed was wider, with large, shallow pools, marshes, small lakes, enough water for rowboats in the summer, enough space to spread out.
It is the fate of most rivers and streams boxed in by agriculture, by infrastructure, by armored banks and leveed walls, that they speed up and dig down. I’ve witnessed this on rivers all over the country and around the world. And I’ve witnessed it in my geologically-short tenure as an inhabitant of the Sonoma Creek watershed.
I moved from that first house to another one downstream, but up the canyon of the tributary Calabazas Creek, and over the course of eight years I watched Calabazas chew up a good hundred feet of stream bank right below my house with periodic ferocity in a bed that frequently went dry in summer.
My current house is not on the creek, but about 100 yards away, close enough that on the right flow, I can throw a boat into the water under the old steel Arnold Drive bridge and surf my way down to a little beach a five-minute carry from my backyard fence. And it is maybe 200 yards downstream from that beach, right at the end of Burbank Drive, across the fence from the Sonoma Developmental Center, that an almost new house is on the verge, as this photo reveals, of actually falling into the creek. A particularly ironic fate since the house originally in that space was destroyed during the 2017 Nuns Canyon firestorm.
All of which is meant to illustrate an object lesson – moving water wants to move. It is dynamic, persistent and almost unstoppable. If you’ve ever been to the Grand Canyon, you know this.
Why then would reasonable, sane, educated and presumably intelligent people decide to locate scores of homes along both banks of Sonoma Creek? That’s what the SDC proposal now being redeveloped by Permit Sonoma – the Sonoma County planning department – will do.
Granted, state regulations require a minimum setback of 100 feet from stream banks. But 100 feet in a riparian corridor with the size and the fluvial importance of Sonoma Creek is not a safe or sensible distance. Not for the health of the creek and the creatures dependent on it. And not for the residents of homes that close to it.
Two words we ask Sonoma County planners and Supervisors to learn: fluvial geomorphology. Learn it and study it in the bed of Sonoma Creek. And then decide that placing any houses within the gravitational pull of that waterway is just stupid. Unless you just don’t care about the creek, or about the houses you want to put there.
Photo by David Bolling
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