I’ll never forget the first time I came here…

I was twenty years old driving up Highway 99 looking for a place rumored to have wind.

It’s gone now but the old bridge I crossed at Terminus was my first indication I was entering someplace special. I could smell the earth and water and the corn was already waist high. The palm trees at Perry’s Resort were rustling and the pears had clearly formed in their orchards beyond. I had no idea what was in store for me back then nor did I fully understand just how much my life was about to change. Somehow I never wanted to leave yet I’d only just arrived. And I had no idea I was touching just a small fraction of a vast, beautiful, yet complicated area. What was this place and why was I so drawn to it?

At first it was all just about the wind. Windsurfing was still a relatively new sport back then and if you were hooked as bad as I was, you would have thought you’d died and gone to heaven. I quickly realized if you got here early enough you could get in a couple hours before most people were even up for breakfast. And if you had the weekend off and could manage to sleep on the side of the levee for a few hours, you could easily claim a couple more in the afternoon and evening. Occasionally we even sailed late at night whenever the moon was bright enough. Those were incredibly beautiful days for me and times I’ll never forget.

By the time I was twenty-one I had moved to the East Bay but was spending my summer weekends on the river and sleeping in a 2nd floor apartment in one of the old buildings in downtown Isleton – a building now slated for demolition.

That’s about the time I began to realize what was really happening to me. I was discovering people and places that were still relatively untouched by what I was experiencing during the week back in the East Bay. One late summer night, exhausted, sun-burned, and still wearing the shorts I’d sailed in earlier that morning, I climbed up to the roof with a few friends and a few beers to savor yet another summer Saturday Delta night. It was t-shirt weather, the crickets were deafening, and at almost exactly 11 pm, two littlebarefoot boys strolled over the levee and down the street all by themselves and their new RadioFlyer. It was obvious by the way they moved this wasn’t an unusual thing for two little Isleton boys to do and I promised myself right then and there that if I ever had kids, I would want them to learn such simple pleasures. I also remember wondering just how long such a sense of place could remain unspoiled. I worried if it would still exist by the time my kids arrived.

That was over twenty years ago and of course a lot has happened out here since then. Obviously it wasn’t just me that wanted to move here. But take a look around and drive through some of the new neighborhoods. Where are you? If you didn’t know better, could you distinguish what you saw from anything else you’d expect to see anywhere up and down the developed I-5/99 corridor? Who have we become and where are we headed? What is happening to this area we all fell in love with?

For everyone’s sake throughout the Delta, I hope we can always remember why we came here in the first place