California Delta Part 1: Paradise Cut (+Books! and Memes!)

Today I’m going to take you on a visit to one of my favorite places in the world–and the setting for my novel-in-progress, Delta Dawn–the California Delta. Well, I’m going to take you to one tiny piece of it, Paradise Cut outside my hometown of Tracy, California. We’ll also talk books, and I have the usual batch of meme-y hilarity. But first: Welcome to the Weekend Coffee Share, hosted by Natalie the Explorer and the What’s On Your Bookshelf Challenge, hosted by Sue, Donna, Jo and Deb. Grab a treat, have a seat, and let’s get to it.

When most non-Californians think of the state, they think of Hollywood, San Francisco, Silicon Valley–movie stars and billionaires. Some think of Big Sur and Yosemite–ocean and mountains and world-class scenery. But there’s a huge part of the state–my part of the state–where most of those things don’t apply. I grew up on the southern edge of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, also known as the California Delta. There we have rivers and farmland and migratory birds and bumpy levee roads paved with gravel that take you to hidden fishing spots (well, OK, we also have Bay Area and Silicon Valley workers looking for affordable housing, but we aren’t going to talk about them.)

The California Delta

The Delta sits at the western edge of the Central Valley where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers come together. It’s a triangular tangle of rivers and sloughs and levees that captures water from the Sierras and eventually drains into San Francisco Bay. Here’s a map/diagram:

And here’s an aerial view:

From this picture you can see that the Delta is made up of a bunch of islands, and those islands are made up of farmland. This part of California has some of the most fertile farmland in the country. As is often the case in California, the needs of farmers, developers, and the environment are in conflict, and no one knows quite how to best manage the Delta. That’s well beyond the scope of a) my knowledge, and b) this post. But if you want to learn more–and the Delta is a fascinating place–you can start with this Wikipedia article and/or a wonderful photo essay from KCET called Understanding California’s Bay Delta in 63 Photos.

Paradise Cut

OK, enough backstory. You’d think I, a fiction writer, would know better than to start a post with an infodump, but here we are.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of weekends fishing the rivers and sloughs outside Tracy and Stockton, mostly with my mom. Our favorite place was an area just outside town that we knew as Twin Bridges and the geography folks know as Paradise Cut. I drove out there for the first time in probably 20 years, on a cold, blustery January morning a couple of weeks ago. I was the only one out there. Californians don’t like cold.

This is the second bridge. The cool old-style iron bridges are gone, replaced with boring overpasses.

The floating plants are water hyacinths, an invasive plant that clogs up Delta waterways but looks gorgeous when blooming.

Same bridge, this time from the west side:

That little clearing under the bridge was one of our favorite fishing spots. Sad to see all the litter.

The photo above shows the levee road, which Mom and I walked many times to get to another of our favorite fishing spots, right where the river turns at the top of the photo. I walked partway down, but the bank was too muddy and the weather too cold for extensive exploration. You may have seen news stories about all the rain and flooding in California. The morning I took these pictures was a break between storms, the one day on my entire trip it didn’t rain.

Note the farmland to the right of the levee. In much of the Delta, the farmland sits below the water level, but that’s not the case here. And speaking of the water level, it’s quite high in these pics and probably even higher now, because my home state has been pummeled by one storm after another for weeks.

This area is the basis for one of the settings in my novel-in-progress, Delta Dawn. It’s set in the fictional town of Lange, California, which is based on my hometown, and one of the main characters has a houseboat docked way down the fictionalized version of this levee road.

A few more river pics:

Your intrepid (and cold and windblown) blogger:

And finally, a picture from October 2007 of another river in the area, so you can see how much prettier the Delta looks when it isn’t winter:

Next week I’ll show you another Delta area near this one and share some weird facts about the region–including ghost boats. You don’t want to miss the ghost boats! But now it’s time for:

Books!

As I mentioned at the beginning, this post is part of the What’s On Your Bookshelf monthly link-up. Here’s what I’ve read since my last WOYB post.

Memes!

Since it’s What’s On Your Bookshelf Week, we’ll keep that theme going.

If I owned all the books I wanted to read and stacked them up, the pile would probably reach the moon.

I also have this problem:

And this one:

There needs to be a word for this sort of reader anxiety spiral: OMG there are so many books, I don’t know where to start, maybe this other one would be better, oh crap now I’ve started 5 different books I need to finish them I feel like I have homework… [gives up and scrolls Reddit for 5 hours].

Or is that just me?

Speaking of my book-related issues:

Which leads to this:

Or you know, putting my damn phone down before 11 PM. Sigh.

I lost the trust of my books decades ago.

And finally, my chuckle of the week:

I wish my spam were that cute.

So… whatcha reading?